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Egypt Calls for Bandwidth Rationing
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has called upon its citizens to ration their internet usage. This comes after two of its three undersea fiber optic links were recently severed. The cut cables have caused communication difficulties for millions of people throughout the Middle East. Ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur was quoted as saying, 'People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do.'"
The cables in the mideast have all been cut on purpose. When they were first laid out, we did not have as good interception equipment as is now available. However, going down and installing equipment capable of intercepting, duplicating, and analyzing their traffic without increasing latency in the slightest would require an unexplained interruption in service while it was being installed. While the lines are being repaired, further up in a difficult-to-reach location or hub, the NSA is now installing this equipment. Afterwards, they can copy all data sent through the cable without raising any eyebrows. There will be no proof.
Like read Slashdot :).
One would think that those businesses affected who depend on their network connection would see its value and have the appropriate SLA. Otherwise they should fall under the rest who need to fight over the limited data cause by a lack of investment of inferstructure. I have no sympathy, if line failure means a reduced capacity, that isn't a backup.
God talking heads piss me off some times. Get a clue.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
I think it is pathetic to say that big business internet usage is more important than that of a home user. I for one work from home and my internet usage is closely tied to my pay. So to me it is definitely more important that corporate office people sending chain emails.
I do admit that the curbing of music downloading for personal use may be helpful... but there are musicians who require this for their income as well.
No way I would drop my usage at all.
Who's that guy to say what's more important to do? Porn and fansubs are more important than business to me, and I'm a citizen as good as and equal in rights to any businessmen. That idiot would like to hear about the series of tubes.
I was about to say 13256278887989457651018865901401704640, but it appears this number is private property.
If they start telling everyone there is a shortage then they will start hording, soon they'll have old ladys with 323 gigs of Murder She Wrote and Matlock.
It seems that Internet is now making its way up with water food and shelter for human necessities :P
... next thing they do is giving away "bandwidth-stamps".
I am sorry sir, your bandwidth-card is full ; you will have to wait until next month to renew your bandwidth.
Here you go ma'm, one bandwidth stamp for 100 MB worth of data.
Sir, you are hereby under arrest for trying to fraud with bandwidth-cards, you sir are a "bandwidth pirate", a "megabyte thief", a "bit ripper" !
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
They'll just have to share ;-)
If they don't keep a stored reserve for emergencies like this, they deserve to be frustrated. With HDDs so cheap these days, there's no excuse for not having a few gigs of porn.
Though I've never looked for an Egyptian site before, my curiousity may have added a little to the problem:
The server at www.egypt.gov.eg is taking too long to respond.
Here's the oft repeated story again, instead of trying to improve infrastructure and services (like backup lines for instance) the consumers are the ones left holding the bag. In fact they're already using the word 'rationing'. Why is it that almost always its the consumers who bear the burden of whatever boo boo's made by the service providers ? ..
On the other hand though the statement is worded unsurprisingly inept, i guess the sentiment here might be to take stock of the usage and avoiding unnecessary bandwidth hogging for a while. Though what's unnecessary should be left to the consumers to define for themselves.
A simple request for 'help' and 'understanding' would have been more useful without generating all the negative publicity that I'm sure this will generate.
shucks
nf
That's accordin to google labs, porn is for UK, New Zealand and Australia where getting sex isn't a problem while sofisticated porn is difficult to see http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 - Sex is clearly what Egiptians are looking for http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
...they'll be asking road users to give way to trucks and business executives on the roads.
Thier concern over how this could impact thier commerce is understandable, but this is not the answer.
Aziz Bandwidth!
When I was in dial-up tech support in the late 90s, we would occasionally get customers who were furious because "my business depends on the internet". Of course we couldn't tell customers what we really thought, so we would all stand outside on break, and be like "your business ha-hah, depends on ha-ha, the INTERNET???". "Well then, you should not have depended on a single provider, if it was really that critical".
It's one thing for some idiot pre-bubble day trader who fancied himself a "business man" to not understand that. In this case, it's a whole region. OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe they're where we were in the 90s. It seems like the whole network would go dark every few weeks or so back then. In the call center they would put up a big sign that said something like "MAE East is down". I haven't seen anything like that for a while. Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Cut cable causes communication catastrophe! Dismal disaster dooms denizens!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
I can't remember who told me this but apparently they were in Egypt and asked the hotel people where they could go to rent a car and look around for a bit in the evening and they were told no way to you do that because big trucks drive around at night and nobody makes them use lights.
Closer to home (for me) I was in Tasmania, which is the most redneck state in Australia. They have signs on logging roads saying that this is a public road but if you get hit by a logging truck then the onus is on you.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This might be a more useful comparison. This plot of porn and sex, ranked by sex, shows the countries that are most affected.
And yes, Egypt ranks first, followed by India.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn%2C+sex&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=all&sort=1
Wednesday - MI5 issues report complaining they don't have the tools to intercept internet telephony
Thursday - BOTH Middle-Eastern internet trunk routes that pass near the large British naval base in Cyprus suddenly go dark for a conveniently precise period of one week
Oh, we're subtle, I'll give you that.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
The NSA being a simplification. I believe an Int-Er-Na-tional Conspiracy is at work. But I can't be sure..
What a huge undertaking. Thank god I'm not on that project. Good work if you can get it, I guess. A boondoggle.
Even with all that rationing, they will probably get better service and speed then most Comcast users ;)
Ah, this is exactly the kind of situation that demonstrate how the network neutrality dogma is hurting. To have a per packet fair policy is just fine when existing infrastructure can wistand the load.
Now with the wonderfull IP / TCP whatever protocol, not beeing able to diffenciate traffic per user and per session end to end in the network lead the following situation: When the capacity is reduced (such incidents, maintenance, etc) or if traffic increases (chrismas, special events, etc.) where everybody get hurt instead of nicely rejecting the overflow and let the other users enjoy the network use.
I am a long time advocate of the demise of the so called "stupid network" in favor of an more advanced IP usage (V6? V7? V9?). where we could finally manage the bandwidth and the session per user end to end in the network. This would remove the need of "deep packet inspection" to do fair traffic shaping and reassure the privacy concerns. For ISPs, such an "intelligent IP network" would enable a sound capacity management.
Note that I do not caution any of the unfair tricks of US ISP that tend to favor their own content.
Emmanuel
I find this one even more interesting... sure reinforces a few concepts I've heard over the years... http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+sheep&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=1
Downloading music and movies is your business, hmm?
Friday - I'm in love.
Ah, but you see, that's how the Zionist Space Lizards operate! That's why the 9/11 "truth" retards can, with a straight face, claim that the Project for a New American Century published a report containing their plans for global domination, as well as their intention to carry out the 9/11 attacks. Because, as we all know, the NWO always publish all their evil plans on the internet before they actually carry them out.
the day any of the world has common sense is the same day we don't read/hear about starvation and bombing.
until keep living under the delusion that somewhere else is better than some other place
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why should those citizens who can often barely afford subscribing to the Internet, or have no means of reaching a better connection, compromise for businesses that can afford backup links? (Satellite anyone?)
Reminds of how kings in the old lived: by having the poor suffer.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Afaict they probablly can't do that at least not quickly because most ISP contracts are structured such that service levels are not gauranteed but price rises require a certain ammount of warning.
we are talking temporary disruption here not a permanent reduction in capacity.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
By definition, having a redundant backup system means inefficient use of systems. When there's an infinite demand, such as there is with bandwidth, this means there's no point in having backup links at the same high capacity. Instead, what you do is guarantee some minimum access and a good coping/recovery strategy. Seems that the good strategy is the part missing in this case.
Tuvalu was probably slashdotted a long time ago.
the thing is the really heavy downloaders tend to use automated downloading applications. If things slow down the automated apps don't care they just keep going slowly.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
That argument will absolutely certainly be brought by the US telcos (especially AT&T) now demanding to set up gear that violates Network Neutrality, and that polices Internet content for "piracy". They'll claim it's only for an emergency like this one, when they must filter content to prioritize essential traffic.
And then they'll find those emergencies happen all the time, so they can demand more subsidies to expand bandwidth. It's a neverending downward spiral with these corporate welfare monopolists.
--
make install -not war
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. True in politics, and bandwidth allocation. ISPs cannot be trusted to police Internet traffic.
As long as I'm logged in it looks pretty much identical, all messages displayed as nested, they way it should be :)
(If I'm not I only get an annoying 25 messages and I have to keep clicking more before I can start reading else it's an imcomplete discussion, is that what the parent is referring to?)
What I really like about this plot is the fact that there's a spike around the holiday season EVERY SINGLE YEAR. :-)
It's nice to know I'm not the only one getting hornier around that period
"can't run, can't hide...oh well, return 0"
For now, I think you have to hand deliver any key you want to use. Not exactly convenient, but look at the lengths our enemies (i.e., our governments) will go to install men in the middle. We must be willing to go to lengths as well.
There's a sheep joke in there somewhere.
OK, so effectively raise the price by lowering service level to non-business customers. Just odd that they'd ask home users to avoid using lots of bandwidth whcn that can be arranged using a technical solution.
(WTF is up with the mod as flamebait? whatever...)
Of course that's a wacky conspiracy theory. But what about terrorism? Now that a 3rd one has been cut, it does look less possible that it's just chance.
The
I think one thing that's being missed is the internet in Egypt isn't exactly speedy to begin with. Even small downloaders would be used to starting a download and leaving it for a long time.
the real reason, in Egypt, people just wanna look at porn, but they are mostly uneducated Arab, only doesn't know English well, uses "sex" keyword, once they discover that "porn" is better keyword (it is?) they will use it instead
"Steve Jobs invented the world" -- Bill W. GATES
I thought patch Tuesday was bad. A week without the World of Warcraft could lead to some severe withdrawl issues. I know one mom who's kids suffer greatly when the servers are down. This is a humanitarian issue here!
I can get use a phone instead of email or video conferencing. I can drive into the office instead of using a VPN. I could get my news from the cable folks. I can only play WoW over the internet.
It's not up to the carriers or anyone else to decide who's internet usage is more important. Excluding online retailers, most 'business functions' on the internet are for convienece anyway, not necessity.
Push the button, Max!
An Egyptian colleague today informaed me that home-users in Egypt have lost their connections and businesses are the only ones with connectivity, but at low speeds.
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
If there's a man in the middle, I send you my public key. They intercept, store and replace with their own. The other end uses the MITM's key to encrypt, and the MITM can easily read it. They then re-encrypt with your stored key and no one's the wiser.
Public key isn't safe when there's a man in the middle!
Well you said "tapped", you didn't say "filtered". Public key encryption still helps in this regard, because you can publically broadcast your key in as many ways as possible. You can put it on a web page, call everybody you know on the phone, print advertisements in newspapers, etc. The man in the middle would have to be in the middle everywhere. You can also build up a "web of trust".