
Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere) - steveklabnik
http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/1/28/urgent-egypt-has-shut-off-the-internet.html
======
csomar
In Tunisia, it's not Internet that made the revolution success, but SMS.
First, everyone has a mobile phone (even the poor). Second, you receive the
message and read it instantly wherever you are. (You should guess it, few
people here have smart phones). Third, there is more commitment that you go to
the street.

For those interested in the Tunisian revolution:
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12302232>

I think that's quite an achievement. Because the Ministry of Interior is the
hand of terror of the ancient regime and there should be no other armed
forces.

The turning point didn't happen in 14 January when Ben Ali escaped, but is
beginning today, when the government is losing its' power.

I'm, now, waiting for the election and I'm going to support my nominee may be
by designing his website, through Facebook and some other influence.

If change has really come, and a new president was elected, I'm going to write
a detailed report about the revolution. You can trust this one, because it has
the truth. It's from someone that lived in this revolution, that knows the ins
and outs of the country.

Most of the articles and reports that you'll find here and there are full of
bullshit.

~~~
tfh
I think the internet (and specially facebook) had a big role too. Facebook
videos were crucial to show that the people were not giving up specially when
the television was silent about the whole thing.

BTW who's your nominee?

~~~
csomar
I still not decided. I want someone secular, capitalist and liberal. Someone
with a good history and background in economics and politics.

He'll get some good promotion, as I'll be dedicating all my summer for pushing
his campaign forward :)

~~~
tfh
_> I still not decided. I want someone secular, capitalist and liberal._

Good luck with finding someone like that. Contact me if you want some help.

~~~
csomar
So I assume you are following the Tunisian scene or living here?

* message could not be sent, are you sure your email is correct.

------
Zak
I read this, and become more concerned about bills to give the US President an
Internet kill-switch. They say it's to protect against cyber-warfare, but
something makes me think it's just as likely to be applied to civil unrest,
and civil unrest doesn't usually happen unless there's something pretty wrong
with the government.

~~~
jerf
Well, good news, it doesn't matter. If the situation has deteriorated to that
point, the government will just do it anyhow.

I don't support the bill anyhow, because I'm not really a "let's just give one
central authority all the power because why not?" kind of guy, but honestly,
there's not much point worrying about that particular kind of misuse of that
particular power. Standard martial law concepts would probably be enough to
take the necessary actions to shut down whatever networks you like; pointing
guns at network admins can be pretty effective. You're actually not being
_cynical enough_.

~~~
Zak
Passing a law like that means they'll put in the infrastructure to actually do
it. If things deteriorate significantly in the US, it is likely that
attempting to gain the ability to shut down the internet would directly
trigger some sort of civil unrest while now it only triggers angry blog posts.

~~~
jerf
I am at a loss as to what this additional infrastructure really permits that
having lots of armored men with guns does not. Armored men with guns are a
flexible bunch, they can do lots of things. The marginal distinction to the
person in power between pressing a button and ordering other people to go shut
the net down is pretty minimal; it's not like without this switch, the
President is going to actually have go out and point guns at the network
admins himself, Independence Day-style.

My real worry, and the real reason this shouldn't be done, is that it
shouldn't be made so easy that some clever hackers can do it, or gets
accidentally triggered for some reason. But ye olde "shoot the place up" can
take down the internet pretty effectively. "Stray backhoes" have done a decent
job a couple of times within my experience as it is; the hard part is keeping
the net running, not shutting it down.

~~~
awakeasleep
I see this argument get a lot of play.

These sorts of things are important because ease dictates more of what happens
in life than posibility. Make it easier to turn off the net, there is more
chance of it happening, and it'll take less resources from the controlling
party to do it.

Like you said, 'they' could already turn off the internet. So why bother with
the effort to make a killswitch? Because the resources it'd take to kill the
internet manually matter.

~~~~~~~

An similar argument might be, "If someone can always find a flaw in crypto
implementations, why bother with cryptography?" or "You can walk anywhere a
car can go, what's the point of having a car?"

~~~
bad_user

         Because the resources it'd take to kill the internet manually matter
    

They only need to turn off one big ISP or 2 before the others are going to
shut down themselves. Look at what happened with Wikileaks.

    
    
         If someone can always find a flaw in crypto implementations, 
         why bother with cryptography?
    

That's a pretty big IF, because it depends on finding flaws, and there is no
recipe for that and you're also not certain if you're going to find any,
regardless of the time/resources invested.

Also, crypto algorithms are public, peer reviewed and usually you're going to
find out if a flaw exists sooner or later. And because there isn't any
available method to make brute force attacks any easier or feasible if the key
is large.

I am pretty sure the government can shut down the Internet, but I can bet they
aren't able to decrypt my communications if I won't allow it ;-)

~~~
awakeasleep
What did you think of my point:

 _'They' could already turn off the internet. So why bother with the effort to
make a killswitch? Because the resources it'd take to kill the internet
manually matter._

I think of that in terms of 1) simple manpower, 2) cooperation, and 3)
perception.

~~~
bad_user
It's a valid point.

------
martinkallstrom
This is the infowar at close range. Contrary to the gut reaction of most
commenting on the unfolding of events in Egypt, the reason for the regime to
shut down communications has little to do with stopping information to reach
the outside world. It is information getting into the country that is of real
danger to them, such as the AP video of a man getting shot today. They are
shutting down the Internet (As confirmed by CNN. According to random people on
Twitter...) because a video like that can be like pouring gasoline on a fire.

~~~
nkassis
Except now they pissed off all 20 million (the guardian has a nice chart at
the end of their article that states this) internet users. We will have to see
but I think tomorrow's planed move will just have gotten bigger because of
this move.

~~~
mey
I wonder how many places of employment in Egypt require a internet connection
to function. I wonder how many of these people now have absolutely nothing to
do for work or entertainment tomorrow, who may not have joined the protest,
now will be...

~~~
marshray
Really, this one is going to go down in history as one of the most boneheaded
moves ever by decision makers out of touch with the basic realities of modern
life.

------
newhouseb
I'm always a little skeptical of these reports (having spent time in China and
having had the internet not go down when everyone claimed there was going to
be TianAnMen 2 or something) so I tried to do a little digging and the
following egyptian websites are completely blacked from outside of Egypt out
as of 4PM PST:

<http://www.cbe.org.eg/>

<http://www.toyotaegypt.com.eg/>

<http://www.egypo.gov.eg/>

<http://icdlegypt.gov.eg/>

<http://www.tpegypt.gov.eg/>

<http://www.egypt.gov.eg/>

<http://www.sis.gov.eg/>

I was just googling "egypt eg" and so some of these are government sites but
others are commercial sites.

With respect to access in a hotel - in a lot of these countries that have any
sort of censorship, hotel's will have a separate line out of the country via
fiber or maybe even satellite. That could be what is going on here too.

~~~
zipdog
I had the same experience with hotels, internet in China: much better access
from internet in a hotel than others were saying.

------
jacquesm
Any government currently in power will have an item in its playbook titled
'shut down public internet access', right next to a folder labeled 'island
mode' and 'totally dark'.

Some will be upfront about it, some will be more circumspect but media control
has long been one of the central points in crowd control and just like
newspapers, radio and TV stations are with some regularity taken over by the
government (Italy is a special case here I guess...) when it is in distress
you can expect the internet as a major mass communications medium to be viewed
much the same way.

~~~
seancron
Which makes me wonder, is there a way to make an ad-hoc, decentralized
internet that a government could not shut down?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes. They're called mesh networks, and I think you've just described why they
will never take off.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking>

~~~
seancron
Interesting. Are there any pieces of software that can transform ordinary
laptops/phones into mesh networks?

A quick search shows B.A.T.M.A.N. (<http://www.open-mesh.org/>), but it looks
a little tricky to setup. Are there any simple ways for non-technical users to
run a mesh network node? A "click to install and run" solution would be ideal,
but I'd be interested in hearing about other people's experiences with mesh
networks.

~~~
jacquesm
Open wrt support mesh networking iirc.

There is also this:

<http://www.wing-project.org/>

And a bunch of others.

~~~
nantes
IIRC, OpenMesh actually sits on top of OpenWRT.

------
dy
What's interesting to me is that we're in a constant war between the
technologies used by governments to control their people and the technologies
used by people to uproot their governments. There's a post below about mesh
networking, I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to
broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks
without a central kill switch.

One thing I fear is that eventually we'll reach a point where a dictatorship
will establish itself and be so cruel and effective that it'll represent a
permanent power which will dictate until it's own will to govern expires.
North Korea seems like a close enough approximation but with the weapons and
technology of the modern world it doesn't take that much creativity for a
psychopath to imagine a world where that can occur.

Perhaps it's time I re-read Cryptonomicon.

~~~
jacquesm
> I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast
> network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a
> central kill switch.

Cell phones have actually lost power, not gained power over the last two
decades. Likely they'll lose more power still as the push to increase battery
life continues and coverage increases.

~~~
mnutt
That's true, but it all comes down to the use cases. With the awful AT&T
coverage and carriers actively refusing to provide more bandwidth, wouldn't it
be nice to have a phone that had WiMax?

Power constraints are very real right now, but with growing bandwidth needs
and none of the other variables changing very quickly, it's at least a
possibility that someone could figure out how to put something like WiMax into
a phone.

~~~
davidw
> Power constraints are very real right now

Because batteries don't scale according to Moore's law.

------
zppx
Apparently a large number of autonomous systems are not announcing their
prefixes[1], so there's no route for some Egyptian networks.

There's also a small thread on NANOG mailing list in which a user acknowledges
the fact that he cannot access a server in Cairo[2].

[1]: <http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450> (by @atoonk on twitter)

[2]:
[http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031315...](http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031315.html)

EDIT: formating

EDIT2: grammar, I think everything is passable now

------
joshzayin
Does anyone have a mirror of the site? It's unexpectedly dropping the
connection for me.

~~~
deno
It's been #1 top story on Reddit for some time. There's rorr.im mirror[1] and
some old version without images in CoralCDN[2].

Perhaps most up-to-date and reliable alternative at the moment is actually
their Twitter feed:

<http://twitter.com/arabist>

__

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151054>

[2] [http://www.arabist.net.nyud.net/blog/2011/1/28/urgent-
egypt-...](http://www.arabist.net.nyud.net/blog/2011/1/28/urgent-egypt-has-
shut-off-the-internet.html)

------
dmpatierno

       Update: It's not everywhere. A foreign journalist at the Semiramis 
       Intercontinental hotel says he has internet access.

~~~
csomar
It doesn't need to be everywhere, because protests happens like waves. So they
cut the Internet (and probably SMS) for a particular region, so that
information can't spread to other locations of Egypt.

~~~
kmfrk
And even better if some people don't notice the regional outage.

------
dbabalik
A mirror of the original post (rorr.im): <http://bit.ly/fCDyP4>

------
steni
Sees like somebody IS actually trying to establish HAM radio contact:
[http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/ro.k4uJ80-xNWBHj8bQ-
Nvlh/la...](http://piratepad.net/ep/pad/view/ro.k4uJ80-xNWBHj8bQ-Nvlh/latest)

------
guelo
Also phones, SMS and Blackberry,
[http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/1/28/phones-disrupted-
sms-a...](http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/1/28/phones-disrupted-sms-and-
blackberry.html)

------
motters
Shutting off the large majority of the internet is a dumb move, because all
those people who weren't especially interested in politics and who were just
doing their own thing are suddenly politicised and angry at the government for
cutting them off without (from their point of view) any justification. It's
pretty much a recipe for a riot.

Communication is so central to modern life (especially for businesses) that
When people are cut off from their communications they get very angry very
rapidly.

------
kingkawn
link is dead as of at least 01/28/11, 12:45 AM (EST)

~~~
leppie
Dang, just missed it! Anyone got a cached copy?

~~~
gregsadetsky
Unfortunately, no. However these two articles (taken from Techmeme) are very
interesting as they are basing their observations on the number of affected
BGP routes:

[http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-
interne...](http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-
internet.shtml)

List of all affected networks -- seems like a very few are still holding up
(Noor's name comes up again and again... for now)
<http://bgpmon.net/blog/?p=450>

------
mbpr
Renesys' network sensors showed that Egypt's four primary Internet providers —
Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr — and all went dark at
12:34 a.m.

[http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5heO3VMhFHp...](http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5heO3VMhFHp69i1rXVD9ZBd6bU2ow)

Frightening.

------
moomba
Looks like Egypt shut off arabist.net for me. Kind of strange that the site is
down now.

~~~
bennysaurus
Nope they're just swamped by traffic. Check their Twitter for info:
<http://twitter.com/#!/arabist>

------
chrisbolt
For more technical details, see [http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-
leaves-the-interne...](http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-
internet.shtml)

~~~
leppie
The link to the Egypt SE is also not connecting now. Scares me to what might
be happening there.

------
ayoub
Here is a new site by the arabist for updates on what's happening in Egypt
<http://tallestpine.squarespace.com/>

------
adolph
I wonder if bit.ly will go down when this happens in Libya?

------
nadvornix
It's time to implement RFC 1149. :-)

~~~
koenigdavidmj
Actually, they did. <http://www.blug.linux.no/rfc1149/writeup.html>

------
f6ghi
They should use staffcollege.com since fb,twitter and likes have already been
blocked

------
hoag
Just a friendly heads-up that everyone should help spread the word for people
in Egypt (and anywhere else with blocked/censored Internet) to download and
start using AnchorFree's Hotspot Shield as soon as possible. I've even started
using it here in the States for maximum online security.

~~~
bennysaurus
No ISP connectivity isn't blocked/censored internet, the ISP links are down
completely. There isn't a possible way to get through something that isn't
even connected. Ham radio is funnily enough a better solution.

~~~
madmaze
I guess we should all figure out how to broadcast over ham radio again =)

