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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.'"
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?
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" !
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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.
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
Aziz Bandwidth!
There's no need to do that with these cables. They have at end somewhere, right? So what the NSA/bad guys do is to tap the ends of the wires. The ISP sometimes helps.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This isn't a private company, it's the entire country's connection to the rest of the world. As in, the government. And there are redundancies, that's why they can still connect. Two of the three main cables (each over a mile apart) failed simultanously.
That's pretty much what they did. They said there was limited bandwidth, and asked people not to download music and movies because it would eat up bandwidth that might be needed for contining business purposes.
If you read all his comments, it is quite polite and understanding of individuals' rights. You might not think it was polite because it was translated from Arabic. Egypt is a different country than the United States. Many other countries speak languages besides English.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
All it's asking is that people try and refrain from heavy downloading (music, movies, etc) for a little while until the lines are fixed. They're not asking people to give up the internet entirely. It would be pretty stupid of them to have a large portion of their economy collapse just so people could torrent.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
That would leave proof, and that would totally ruin the fun of coming up with some elaborate baseless conspiracy theory. What good is a conspiracy theory if there's a way to disprove it that doesn't require a submarine?
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Not every country can afford the redundancy mate. It's called being poor.
Are you seriously saying a Chinese mini-sub didn't kidnap an Australian prime minister?
Harold Holt would be turning in his grave.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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
If that is how you feel, you should be encrypting sensitive information. There is never a guarantee that someone isn't looking at information you send in the clear over the Internet.
Good luck with that.
A year ago some cables running south of Taiwan were cut by an earthquake. In Hong Kong the immediate effect was to slow down access. But a few hours later, they had reconfigured it so that domestic users, like myself, working at home, got ZERO connectivity, as they gave almost all the capacity to their business clients. I couldn't even check my email, on Yahoo, for a week. And you know that businesses were just sending the same bloated powerpoint files and videos to each other.
IMHO, they should give a minimum connectivity to everyone so you can use email, the most vital of all services. But when they have their big customers screaming at them about how slow their service is, they'll cheerfully cut off home users completely, knowing most have no alternative.
Friday - I'm in love.