Slashdot Mirror
Sysadmins Restore Iraqi ISP
Hen3ry writes "Brian McWilliams of Wired News reports on the dedicated staff of Iraq's State Company for Internet Services, or SCIS, and how they built, maintained, and rebuilt Internet access before, during, and after the war. Ba'ath Party loyalists still run SCIS but their dedicated employees continue to press on. Fascinating stuff about how one sysadmin managed to keep the country online up until a US missle struck the roof of the Ministry of Information building."
Why'd they do that? Saddam will only wind up beheading the sysadmins who did it when he gets back from Wal-Mart, picking up this week's armament.
Mom says my
"the ISP has not been restored, and its owners are committing suicide on the walls of Baghdad. I will take you there to show you. In ONE HOUR."
More recent intelligence suggests that the explosion was actually the resulted of an SCIS server reacting violently to being /.'d. US military experts are now considering trying to harness the power of slashdot to use as a weapon against terrorists.
Fascinating stuff about how one sysadmin managed to keep the country online up until a US missle struck the roof of the Ministry of Information building.
The RIAA must have found out they were pirating music...
(come on, it was either that or a Bill Gates finding out about a Linux server)
I read the article and it said they did go around the UN embargo to get the equipment, but my question is who sold them the gear?
I'm not trying to troll or anything, I'm really interested in this paradox.
There were embargos put on Iraq following the war from the UN.
Everyone violates the embargos.
US goes around the UN.
Everyone bitches about the US.
No one bitches about the people who broke the UN embargo and thumbed thier noses at International Law.
As soon as they're available, I suspect that a lot of people will want to register numeric .iq domains. 180.IQ will probably be the first to go.
Uh... if you actually read the article, this wasn't sanctioned or supported by the U.S. government, who is attempting to get law and order in Baghdad. These were just a couple of sysadmins who worked for the Hussein government who have been working (sucessfully) to get the state-run ISP back online.
am i the only one reading between the lines here?
"To keep the service running, SCIS engineers fended off denial-of-service attacks, domain hijackings and other foreign hacker intrusions, not to mention regular investigations from suspicious Iraqi government officials. "
then later
"According to Harif, the delay in bringing the Uruklink website back online is due to security concerns. While the site's content has been ready for weeks, he said technicians needed extra time to harden the underlying server software against electronic attacks."
Didn't they probably have more trouble due to internet attacks before the fall rather than after? Also doesnt this quote seem odd, if you were explaining launching internet service you wouldnt say everything was ready to go to be turned on, except that you are still working on a big part of it.
It seems to me the article is saying that someone else like the US government is delaying the return to service based on their monitoring equipment being installed. Or am i just being paranoid? Oh well, i supose thats what they call victor's rights.
It would appear that the sysadmins literally poured blood, sweat, and tears into keeping the ISP up and running under Hussein. Not to mention going way above the "call of duty" to make certain that something of the equipment survived missle attacks, fires, and looting.
The real point here is that contact with the outside world is an extremely valuable commodity to these people, and something that we in the Western nations take horribly for granted. Think of Iraqi expatriates in other parts of the globe who don't know if relatives are alive or dead. Or, in the interest of balancing out FoxNews' reporting, a hypothetical Iraqi blogger can now give the outside world a better picture of what's going on in the country. I think that this is a positive step towards rebuilding. Yes, it's an odd, sideways step, given the other needs. But when you consider just how much emotional investment the sysadmins had in this project, their priorities are entirely understandable.
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
Not so much electronic connectivity, but good old human communication. Iraq needs a free press among other things as well.
So they would be free to download pr0n. God bless America