Slashdot Mirror
Egypt Goes Dark As Last ISP Pulls Plug
CWmike writes "Egypt is now off the grid. Four days after the Egyptian government ordered Internet service providers to disconnect from the Internet, the country's last working Internet company has abruptly vanished from cyberspace. Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange and other businesses, became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m. Cairo time (Eastern European Time), according to Earl Zmijewski, general manager with Internet monitoring company Renesys. 'It looks like they're completely lights-out now,' he told IDG News' Robert McMillan. Thought to handle only about 8 percent of the country's Internet connections, Noor had served as a critical lifeline to Egypt since the government had ordered service cut early Friday morning. Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating, even as larger ISPs such as Vodafone and Telecom Egypt voluntarily cut their Egyptian networks off from the rest of the world."
To help with this, engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow have rolled out a "speak-to-tweet" service, which lets people dial in to an international phone number, leave a voice mail, and have the audio file made available online via an automated Twitter update.
Mubarak: your house of cards is falling down! Who's next...? Down with the dictators!
The internet in Egypt is still easier to read than slashdot 3.0.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Wow, Egypt's "Presidente" should an hero right the fuck now.
The people have spoken, and he's sitting there, firing his cabinet, cutting of all ties to the outside world and has now officially brought whatever international market trade still existed to a standstill.
All so he can cling to whatever notion of power he thinks he still has. The UN should be let in, and allowed to safe-guard the places of government while a democratic election is quickly assembled. There's too much risk at this point of the military just up and saying "fuck it" and having a junta.
This isn't about bandwidth. It's about preventing the populace from getting information. It's about keeping the populace from organizing. Its about control.
Yeah. The point is that now a critical avenue by which the world at large could see those problems from a non-State-Approved point of view has been cut off.
The enemies of Democracy are
The protesters are using the Internet to organize. They're protesting to fix those "bigger problems" like a lack of free speech, corruption in government, and police brutality. Preserving their Internet access is preserving their ability to fight for what they want. I believe that's important.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Egypt's got bigger problems than their Internet access right about now. I'm glad the Slashdot community is so concerned about their bandwidth and all... but really...
Except this government action is not independent from those "bigger problems" you allude to. They want to keep the protesters from being able to communicate; and they want to keep a lid on news getting out to the wider world as much as possible.
I expect things are about to get very brutal in Egypt - at least if you're a protester (or are an unfortunate "civilian" who ends up on the general area of a protest).
#DeleteChrome
Well, that would be the "news for nerds" part of it.
In reality, though, the internet shutoff is a key part of the ongoing struggle. Call it a catalyst, a symbol of the regime, whatever - the point is that internet-based communications were pivotal in jump-starting starting this whole thing (back to Tunisia), and serve as a stark sign for whom the international community should rally alongside (hint: it's not the one turning off the media). There's more to the revolution than twitter, but it's more of a revolution when communication happens freely.
I live in constant fear of the Coming of the Red Spiders.
It's a really clever idea to have a speech-to-tweet service setup, since its circumventing the block, but I don't think it's all that practical for several reasons:
1. Does it transcribe Arabic?
2. If you can't get online in Egypt, how will Egyptian people follow the twitter feeds? Broadcasting to the outside world is important, but what's somewhat more important to the Egyptians right now is reaching each other, since they're trying to coordinate a massive million-person protest in Cairo and can't do it via word-of-mouth alone.
Time for Egyptians to stand up and fight back, and many already are.
The world is how you make it
The Egyptian military and connections (retired senior officers) are undoubtably wired into the US Military/Intelligence Community internets. My understanding is that civilian landlines will also be closed, probably more difficult but possible since the Egyptian Military has been permitted to re-enter the Sinai by Israel. This situation and many others have been gamed long ago but as once said there are unknowns that are unknown. IMHO, so far, Egypt is still following the program.
Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating
Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange
A couple people in government trying to get their money out while they can?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
But the audio files are posted and some people are listening to them and hand-transcribing interesting ones, including Arabic ones and retweeting them with the same hash tag.
They cannot be read inside the country, but it still works for getting messages out.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
That third link provided analysis as to how the government shut down most of the internet:
...a government that licenses a mobile authority can threaten violence to individual cell towers or backhaul networks, or to employees working for the carrier. Future license renewals can also be threatened for non-compliance, analysts noted.
I'm going to suggest that maybe Noor figured Mubarak was weak enough to defy. Maybe they figured his security forces were too busy trying to control the country to shut Noor down, and there wasn't much risk of being denied a license renewal because there wasn't much risk of Mubarak being in power a month from now. It appears to have at least partially worked: they lasted longer than anyone else... though I guess that assumes the forced shutdown involved turning off the power and not, say, destroying their equipment and/or executing their employees.
A more cynical take would be that it's good PR for if the revolution succeeded. "We were the only ones supporting the revolution. Customers: you really want to stay with Vodafone after they left you when you needed them the most? New government, you really want to let them back in? We helped you, now how about an exclusive license to operate in, say, everywhere?"
When people with machine guns come and tell you "turn off your internet or we will kill you, your family, and just bulldoze the building" - I'd say about 99.999999% of people would comply without blinking. Your "protest" of the engineers would be nothing more than a philosophical circle jerk.
this isn't about getting information. It's about keeping army's hands busy with porn ... they loose porn, they eventually get off the barracks and pacify people.
People are less likely to hem and haw with a couple of AK-47s pointed at them. Most people would just flip the switch.
This just reeks of desperation. The financial markets aren't so important but without communications Egypt is essentially isolated. Let's hope it doesn't take too long for the regime to finally crumble.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
Now we can take their IPv4 addresses back and postpone the depletion.
http://www.apnic.net/publications/news/2011/delegation
They just allocated the last two /8s to APNIC, the remaining five /8s will be delegated to each one of the five regional registries. Goodbye IPv4! Nice to meet you and your brother called NAT.
Ironically, Noor means light in Arabic.
Your Ad here
This is the Patriot Act with AT&T and others acting in collusion with the gov't, if it happens in the USA.
All solutions I've heard so far require people calling international numbers. But do we know whether people have access to international numbers? And how are they going to learn about this service? And their whole problem is that they cannot coordinate their activities, being able to send tweets but not read them will not help much...
Yeah, I can set up a dialup for Egyptian revolutionaries at my home. I can even post to twitter (ok, I have to make an account first, I'm not a twit myself) what they want to say if they call me at home. But even if they knew my number, it wouldn't really help them much.
A slashdotter proposed we all start calling numbers at random in Egypt. While that is silly for many reasons (most obvious is the language issue), it is close to what I could consider a viable solution to the communication problem, provided inbound international calls are possible.
So, instead of the people in Egypt using the internet to organize, they should use their family members abroad as proxies for organizing. You call your cousin in X place, he tells you about the planned activities and instead of trying to contact their inhabitants in X place, you contact their relatives in Queens...
Anyway, just an idea, I do hope Mubarak relents soon and all this is not required.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
You're not a corporation. I'm guessing Telecom Egypt's board members all gave little speeches about how they wanted to uphold the rights of their customers, but they had obligations to their employees to make sure they weren't punished, and an obligation to the shareholders not to put their equipment and future business at risk, and besides there are other internet providers to choose from, and they aren't actually preventing from people speaking so it's not really violating their free speech, and the terms of service had either explicit or implicit terms about how in times of mass protest, the service could be suspended.
And then they unanimously voted to shut down for a few days, while they all went on holiday to a more stable country to look at real estate. Just in case.
There was probably a bit of disagreement over whether or not they should and could stop paying their employees (aside from the security guards) during the shutdown.
If they can make international calls and they have computers then why don't they just dial up some ISP or a BBS in some other country?
Egypt's problem is multidimensional. The Internet is our dimension.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The protesters are using the Internet to organize. They're protesting to fix those "bigger problems" like a lack of free speech, corruption in government, and police brutality. Preserving their Internet access is preserving their ability to fight for what they want. I believe that's important.
Problem: their issues aren't ones you listed. The reasons for protests are:
1. Unemployment and poverty.
2. Government's policy towards Israel.
Everything else is secondary at best. The main reason why US and EU (Western Europe before that) supported Mubarak rather openly for about 30 years was because he is a very safe choice for a leader. He reigns in all anti-western majority-supported policies, defends the all-important Suez channel and as one of US diplomats put it "it's generally a lot easier to call the guy who's a dictator and tell him to do what we want done then a democratically elected one".
Problem for West now is that we have to pay lip-service to democracy movements in dictatorial regimes at least due to attitudes at home, and that hamstrings any open support for Mubarak. So now, we apparently supplied a West-backed "democratic" leader in El-Baradei (a very small player in Egypt's internal politics until now), who will be eventually marketed and installed as Egypt's leader so that policies that interest West such as Israel and Suez don't change.
As for unemployment, that's going to get worse at least in short term with capital running from country as fast as it can. Unless they elect someone like Chavez who just chokes the capital's influence down in favor of poor masses, but West learned that lesson in Venezuela all too well - any potential leaders who threaten capital's ability to buy whatever policies needed will most likely be buried asap.
He's taking the only road. If he ordered a brutal crackdown now, the military (many of which are American-influenced and better-educated than the police forces) would probably refuse, like Tunisia.
Don't think he wouldn't do it if he thought he could get away with it.
Mubarak is hoping for one of two things. Either the protest loses momentum and goes away (yeah right), or it goes out of control and he can convince the military leaders that martial law and massive crackdowns is the only way out. Until then, he will do whatever he thinks is necessary to hold on.
When Egypt goes dark it is best to evacuate your firstborn out of the country! Really, the population of Earth is at such a size that we should be witnessing the rise of more geniuses than we have seen throughout the whole of human history. This should be a time of peacefully working out our past karma and past prejudices and preparing the way for a new generation of spirited helpers and builders. We are one Earth population, any country filled with people in pain is our own pain.
but now we know only a tiny facts now, they cant organizes as easy, less hope, more fear, cant find family members as easy etc.
it is a important issue; and now that less video is going out ~0 chance that the public in other stronger counterys will demand that some corrupt idiot wont be put in power by them
warning pointless sig
He could have ordered a more brutal crackdown, but he knows that's what caused the Shah of Iran to lose
Not sure I buy that, since in a more recent example the "brutal crackdown" model worked really well for Ahmadinejad, sad to say.
I'm in agreement with other posters that Mubarak simply doesn't have "brutal crackdown" as an option because the army would not obey it and he would then lose their support (which is also why I don't think he has ordered anything like this).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When people with machine guns come and tell you "turn off your internet or we will kill you, your family, and just bulldoze the building" - I'd say about 99.999999% of people would comply without blinking. Your "protest" of the engineers would be nothing more than a philosophical circle jerk.
The tricky thing is you're 100.0000000% wrong.
Nothing causes people to rally to a cause, violently, like a martyr.
Risk of death? Sure.
"nothing more than a philosophical circle jerk"? Hardly.
I can see you're between the ages of 13 and 30, and are a typical internet cynic. May I suggest reading a history book? Or perhaps, turning on the news and watching what is happening, right now, in Egypt? Do you really think Americans, a well-armed populace to put it lightly, could not do the same if so moved to action?
Thanks for nothing Google. What about hosting a Wikileaks mirror or allowing donations to Wikileaks via Google Checkout?
It's so easy to be a revolutionary when you are thousands of miles away from any danger. Twitter is full of Internet revolutionaries sipping coffee at a Starbucks in San Francisco.
We should send them our porn.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
If they even ask. They are just as liable to blow up your building on the spot and not worry about 'asking'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
they loose porn, they eventually get off the barracks and pacify people.
To "loose porn" would be to remove the staples from your playboy magazine. You should have said "they lose porn".
Everybody seems to have a problem with those two words.
Ip's are used but in fair condition.
So all of a sudden these ISPs are losing millions of dollars because they are not allowed to operate in Egypt. Is the Egyptian government going to be compensating them for this direct expense?
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Maybe now the US will have some... slight qualms... about implementing policies that are provably used by totalitarian governments to crush communications during times of unrest. Go ahead, try to pass it into law. I dare you.
While related, apparently one of the largest problems facing Egypt is that unfortunately for the Egyptian people much of the food is imported.... and purchased with dollar-denominated funds when purchased on the international markets.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, due to loose spending of the U.S. Dollar and essentially "running the printing presses" (mainly sending credits to various banks in America buying up "toxic assets" to be owned directly by The Fed) has been devaluing the dollar sending the price of this food up so wheat in particular is about double the price as it was about a year ago or more.
To really make things ugly here, American farmers have been switching from wheat to other crops, most especially corn which is increasingly being used to make ethanol and other synthetic materials including plastic substitutes that used to be made with petroleum. Since corn isn't even being used for food in these situations, that in turn drives up the price of other grains like wheat when it still is grown by those few remaining farmers who still plant that grain. Thanks to U.S. federal ethanol subsidies, poor people in Egypt have to pay even more for a loaf of bread (made from wheat usually) and are in effect taking the brunt end of the problems caused by the housing collapse in America.
Wheat farmers in other countries are also seeing the dollar lose value in relation to their own currency, yet they are struggling with things like higher petroleum prices that are wiping out any profits they may have experienced from higher wheat prices.
In other words, this is a perfect storm of converging events that essentially is making it impossible for ordinary people in Egypt to be able to eat food anymore. It is also a dangerous feed-back loop given their location next to many major oil reserves in the world, especially sitting on a major international trade route that is going to make this a vicious feedback cycle to drive up food prices even more that will in turn stop international trade in food. When you can't eat, you get desperate and usually don't give a damn about who is in charge.... you'll eat their hide and certainly would be willing to go to desperate ends to simply live until tomorrow or not care if you don't.
The situation is really bad, and unfortunately American policies over the years including domestic America policies are really screwing with the Egyptian people right now... much of it as unintended consequences originally intended to help.
Even somebody like Chavez isn't going to help much in this situation, and Mubarak seems to be making some particularly stupid moves in this explosive situation. I don't think Obama is necessarily doing anything worthwhile either, and IMHO should be doing something like shipping millions of tons of wheat to Egypt at least to calm the situation down a bit. Bread and circuses can make a difference, but right now Egypt has neither and the people are really pissed as a result. Cutting off the internet gets rid of the circus, so they are making their own with the protests. Way to go there.
You're officially even less connected than Bhutan. You might as well take a step into the twelfth century, that's about where you are, technologically, at the moment.
If the internet had been gradually degraded over time by a lack of investment in infrastructure and monopolizing the service providers as a government monopoly, the network connections could have been cut on a more gradual process that could have been effectively done the same thing but not even noticed by either the citizens or the international community at large. Unfortunately the Egyptian government didn't have the "foresight" to go that route.
The next shoe to drop is cutting off international telecommunications of all kinds. I wonder how long it will be before Egypt drops off the phone exchanges or even out of the international postal union. That is when you know it will be real bad.
You don't need to send men with guns when you can do the same much easier by sending one man (perhaps two) with a piece of paper.
Comply or be arrested, have your equipment confiscated as evidence, your premises padlocked and your bank accounts frozen while you wait for any and all licenses you have to be examined by court.
They'll probably even let you defend yourself from "outside" - your trial won't be up for a couple of months/years anyway.
Have fun feeding yourself and your family with no money, no job and no free time as you are too busy with your court case.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Or a meat popsicle. Or both.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I hope one thing that comes out of this is some work on ad-hoc networking.
Example: a self-orgainzing, ad-hoc, robust re-routing and load balancing network using WiFi enabled machines. To join you'd bring up your machine and sniff for WiFi access points identifying as the net you're after. You'd connect to the strongest one, and if you didn't already have the software you'd bring up a browser and the neighbor would serve you a copy of the routing-and-configuring software. Accept and load it and you're now another node on the net.
Security risks of accepting such software are obvious. (Especially after malware authors and authoritarian government security operations build attacks or sock puppets with spyware.) But it has the advantage that you can play without having anything preloaded in advance of the network disruption. In a situation like Egypt's it could easily be worth the risk.
Others: Software-defined cell phone base stations, to replace shut-down cellphone infrastructure with VoIP over whatever works - or just enable the nearby phones to talk to each other over a square mile or so. Right NOW you'd need some special hardware for the radio part. (Can't use a handset because the built-in diplexer keeps it listening and talking on the wrong halves of the cellphone bands.) But in the future? And you don't need a LOT of "cells" to cover a city. Then there are smartphones that can switch over to WiFi "microcells" when available. Those wouldn't need any special radio to create the pirate cells.
I could go on...
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
My pyramid shaped Fleshlight flashlight still works.
My source makes no mention of the cause priority, so I picked a few at random. I apologize if my statement's in error, but my sentiment remains. Shutting down communication is not a reasonable response to a movement for change.
On a more general scale, I'd actually support the use of the Internet to protest for or against any cause. Want to use the Internet to organize a protest in favor of censorship? I'll help you do it, but I'll mock the irony.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Get out of your basement more often, you're out of touch with reality.
[okay, I snatched that from Independence Day]
No news in; no news out; if they attain 'peace' within a week or so, they allow 'journalists' to print how the uprising was caused by a few malcontents. Eventually they go all China and control internet accessibility... all in the name of peace. And the worst part is, they could come out looking squeaky clean, like, "Ah, Mubarak handled business, saved monuments, etc."
(I doubt that will happen, of course, but I think that's Mubarak's thinking/hoping/wishing/praying.
By betraying Ra for Allah, the Egyptians brought this upon themselves. They will lose their Stargate for this.
Reading articles like this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12322948
Remind me how awesome geeks are around the world!
Stay connected people!
Letting in the UN or any other country or group of countries into Egypt should be a cure of last resort, radical surgery when there's Khmer Rouge-style genocide already taking place. That point has not been reached. This is a matter for the Egyptians to settle among themselves.
Or how would you feel if the UN intervened in the LA riots? The chaos in Iraq is partly the product of misplaced good intentions (never mind the possible economic "motives"), a war supposedly to topple a dictator without a clear plan on what to do after the downfall of the regime.
Foreign intervention, no matter how well intentioned, always leaves a bad taste in the mouth. If anything, national pride is hurt, as the citizens now feel they have to be rescued from themselves. It would be more difficult to re-establish a working government, than if the country was invaded after a war between countries of nearly equal military strength (as was the case after the defeat of Japan and Germany in World War II).
I heard a NPR report today on this which mentioned some Egyptians are using dialup modems now and connecting to international numbers for an access point. Not sure how widespread this is.
I also wonder if a site-to-site wi-fi system using the infamous cantenna could be used to daisy chain net access from across the border. I know the Burmese Tiger rebels used this tactic pretty successfully.
Whilst dial up is a viable means it is by no way the hardest to stop. There is no reason why sat comms wouldn't be a viable (and still working) means of accessing the internet.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flamebait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
On an utterly unrelated note, what on earth is the problem with "who cares?" I've never seen it misused in any writing, unlike the very common "I could care less" (or, to reinforce your point, "I couldn't care less", since your quoted remarks are the accurate ones.
I really wonder if people here (and also Google or Twitter) will remain so supportive if the end result turns out to vaguely (!!) resemble the Iranian Revolution from 3 decades ago...
One that hath name thou can not otter
"Everybody" is a lot of people. I think you are misinformed.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
The USD hasn't really changed much in value vs the Egyptian Pound over the last year (it's down about 5% or so) - historically it's pretty much business as usual. In fact, the great weakening of the dollar due to the bailout is pretty mythical - vs GBP and EUR it's pretty average right now (actually pretty strong against GBP), the exception being JPY which is strong at the moment. Look at the 10y charts and it's really doing fine (unlike 2008!).
I agree about the screwed up farming subsidies re: ethanol, and the price of wheat has certainly risen sharply since the middle of last year, but I don't see evidence for the fx markets having much to do with it.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Governments big enough to give you anything you want...etc.
Since the Egyptians aren't using them...maybe we can reclaim their IP address blocks...
I'm just saying....
"Everybody" is not merely "a lot of people". It implies _all_ people. You seriously misrepresented that reply.
this isn't about getting information. It's about keeping army's hands busy with porn ... they loose porn, they eventually get off the barracks and pacify people.
I know you were mostly wisecracking, but FWIW some analysts are saying the the military is deliberately staying neutral, viewing their role in the national psyche as more important than Mubarak's tenure. So (according to what I've read) they did occupy some critical sites, but didn't try to quash the rebellion.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I agree about the screwed up farming subsidies re: ethanol, and the price of wheat has certainly risen sharply since the middle of last year, but I don't see evidence for the fx markets having much to do with it.
Supposedly, now that the US mortgage bubble popped, hedge funds are moving into areas that result in a similarly inflated price for foodstuffs.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
My source [wikipedia.org] makes no mention of the cause priority, so I picked a few at random. I apologize if my statement's in error
FWIW, some of the net media is saying exactly what you said.
But undoubtedly, everybody and their dog is trying to spin this to support their views.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating," - really?
Read more closely!
"... even as larger ISPs such as Vodafone and Telecom Egypt *voluntarily* cut their Egyptian networks off from the rest of the world."
Simple, I guess Noor just didn't "volunteer" then!
Sometimes I assume people understand my sarcasm without me explicitly saying it is sarcasm.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
There's a solid Internet connection still open into Egypt, with substantial bandwidth. It's probably better if I don't give the details in an open forum.
I really wonder if people here (and also Google or Twitter) will remain so supportive if the end result turns out to vaguely (!!) resemble the Iranian Revolution from 3 decades ago...
Whether we like it or not, some of us accept the right of sovereign peoples to self-determination.
That said, most experts are not overly worried about Egypt becoming a theocracy driven by Sharia law. My guess is that the more likely scenario -in the short term, at least- is a muddled mess more reminiscent of Iraq than anywhere else. There are a number of long-repressed factions who are decidedly secular, and who represent important constituencies within the Egyptian population.
... That is, of course, unless the army decides to act 'for the good of the country' and impose its own ruler. Given that this is the way Nasser, Sadat and Mubarak all came to power, this possibility should not be underestimated.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
They're Mudslums. They hate women. You might be able to appease them with some goat fucker porn, though.
Does this coutry have any presence in FidoNet? It's a useful form of distributed communication.
usually precedes an invasion. Commander, prepare the militia.
We will probably have to go back to more traditional forms of fact gathering.
CIA Factbook on Egypt (publicly available): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/eg.html
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Not everything is down. The IP block of the The Ministory of Communication is still up.
Noor is the ISP for the stock exchange as well as for many major banks. That would suggest quite a few reasons as to why they were not shut down with the rest...
I was talking to a guy from telecomix on irc yesterday who was working on a pretty sweet project trying to get net and phones to people in egypt. Generally they seem to be organizing quite a few cool things. In this case the guy was gearing up to buy a bundle of phone lines (enough for about 2000) and hooking it up to a computer with SIP on the egypt side. The end goal was to setup what is essentially a new Dial-in ISP. But I didn't really have time/knowledge to understand the details. Anyway they're doing some pretty rad stuff so it's worth checking out.
Still, there really is only so much you can do given just a couple days notice and a country in the middest of an information lockdown (not to mention a general revolution).
Dude... seriously?
At least they SOMETHING to help the people in egypt. What do you want? a full scale google invasion?
And by the way a google employ (exec) was kidnapped by plain clothed security forces in cairo and is missing since several days. The arrest was caught on video. See around 1:11
Not quite so cushy after all.
It seems they changed their mind about staying neutral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNyCmdZFewc&feature=player_embedded#
You know, cutting off all international phone calls is even easier than shutting down Internet access...
Intermec Portable Computers - Find New and Refurbished Intermec 2435,Intermec 2415,Intermec 2425,Intermec cn3,Intermec ck3, Intermec CK61 mobile computer,CK31,CK30 handheld computer, 751, 741,6400 ,730 5020 T, 5023, T2485 & T2486 Terminals and REPAIR SERVICES Here At liberty-sys.com
More info:- http://www.liberty-sys.com/mobile-computers/intermec/portable-computers/intermec.htm
Perhaps not:
http://twitter.com/arabist/status/30786981814341632
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Uh... that's total BS. The MB was, by their own admission, behind the curve on this demonstration. They were definitely no the instigators (and you'd be pissing off a LOT of Egyptians if you claimed they were) and only even agreed to join on friday (4 days in). There are sources on the net for all this stuff but I'm a to lazy now to find them for you. Just google "Muslim Brotherhood Joins Protest" and look what day those articles are reffering to.
On top of that all that, in the last two days they've just come out backing ElBaradei as a leader for the opposition. He is both a copt by ethnicity and secular by politics. Not the most radical islamic of moves now is it.
While I definitely do not agree with many of their policies and ideas but still... you might want to inform yourself about their opinions and actions just a bit more before you go ranting all Glen Beck on us...
seriously, for all intents and purposes they do seem to want a democracy. I mean NOW is their chance if ever to influence and form the shape of the next government to come. and what do they do? they put themselves squarely behind a secular leader who espouses a very western sort of government system.
Little random anecdote to give an example of why I doubt the 80% figure: my friend who is a reporter for an international news org was covering a big demo in cairo on friday. as a crowd of MB followers is passing by the begin to chant some of their recognizable slogans. promptly and spontaneously the much much larger surrounding crowd of demonstrators totally drowns out those chants with the chant "Muslims, Christians we are all Egyptians". (A refrain which has been heard quite a bit during these last days.)
It ain't all fox news out their bro... ;-)
The food shortage isn't something "America caused". Egypt did this to themselves. Nassar just HAD to have a dam, to prove that Egypt was a "modern" country, but it destroyed the Nile-based ecology and economy -- before the Aswan Dam was built, Egypt was a net food EXPORTER.
Here's an excerpt from a letter written in 2008, by a PhD who lived there at the time, was in thick with the higher-ups, and knew the situation firsthand:
=======
The Aswan High Dam (read Miles Copeland's book "The Game of Nations") blocked silt and nutrient transport downriver and into the eastern Mediterranean. Egypt had a thriving coastal sardine fishery, which landed about 18,000 tons of sardines a year. Within two years after completion of the dam, the sardine fishery collapsed, with the yield falling below 500 tons a year. It has stayed down ever since.
It took a bit longer to use up the nutrients in agricultural soils, or for the irrigated soils, deprived of their annual "flush", to become so saline no crops would grow.
Deprived of sediment, the Delta will probably also erode. That's what's happening to New Orleans and vicinity - we've messed around with the river enough that the sediment transport is less and the delta is no longer self-sustaining, but is gradually (well, not so gradually) sinking into the Gulf of Mexico.
Egypt had a lot of very good fisheries and freshwater biologists - some of them among the best in the world. Nasser convened a scientific panel to advise him about building the dam. They told him what would happen. He didn't like ...
hearing that, so all those scientists lost their jobs and had to emigrate. The U.S., for example Texas A&M University, profited greatly by snapping them up.
Well, the reasons for building it were primarily political and had to do with the Cold War. Nasser sucked the Russians and the U.S. into a bidding contest. The Copeland book lays it all out, in a rather amusing way.
And of course Egypt had, as a matter of national pride, to have a gigantic dam. ...
Big dams (well, all dams) eventually silt up - they have a finite lifetime. Once the reservoir is silted up the dam can no longer regulate water flow. Don't remember what the anticipated lifetime of Aswan is - maybe a century or less.
=======
[Undoing a bunch of moderation to post this, but I couldn't let the historical ignorance stand unchallenged.]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think you might be mistaken. The video claims it was the police who killed the teen, not the military. You can tell when the titles says, the police did it.
Well, all people are a lot of people. Unless the majority of the world population suddenly died without me noticing.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
We have a few unused IPv4 addresses again !
Pretty much sums up the situation in Egypt.
While the US gov't is discussing the possibility of an Internet kill switch, Egyptian gov't is doing it. Good chance for the US to see what it looks like, and what people might do in an event kill switch is activated.
Every harsh word you utter has the right address. It only sounds harsh because the one on the envelope is the wrong one.
we are currently working on a voice to text translation for all speak to tweets. You can view and contribute at http://egypt.alive.in
Get a web developer
Can't stop the signal, Mal.
I wonder how will they find out about this new service from google, if they don't have access to look it up...
Maybe facilitating dialogue will prevent it from turning out like the Iranian Revolution 3 decades ago.
In chaos, whoever manages to organize has the upper hand. In the absence of civil discourse, people will hunker down in the security of clans and/or religions, which are rooted in strong, pre-existing social networks. To get a secular democratic state, you need an open press of some sort.
It's like the Egyptians -- all 83 million of them -- are having the world's largest LAN party! :)
In chaos, the most ruthless and absolutely focused people tend to have the biggest upper hand.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Without the Internet they can't have a revolution - o dear...
I guess the american and french revolutions in the late 18th century never happened then, they didn't even have telegraph or telephone, much less internet wifi and cable or satellite TV
Whether we like it or not, some of us accept the right of sovereign peoples to self-determination.
Though this stance itself ends up muddled, really looks a bit like lip service regarding those events. We don't really want it. Mubarak is very much "our guy"... it's ultimately easier to convince a dictator (vs. "sovereign people with self-determination") to see and do things the "proper way".
But yeah, it will probably not end too bad - but I'm not sure why there's "unless" in the last section about the army. It seems like Mohamed ElBaradei is being designated as the next "democratically" chosen savior.
(BTW, "theocracy driven by Sharia law" is a bit too far in context of, most likely, Iran; even with the Revolution and its effects, its still quite secular and modern, for the region / including our "allies")
One that hath name thou can not otter
As phone lines are still available, at least one IAP (french FDN : http://blog.fdn.fr/post/2011/01/28/Censure-de-l-internet-en-%C3%89gypte-:-une-humble-action-de-FDN ) furnishes a phone number for modem access : +33 1 72 89 01 50. (login: toto password: toto)
Hope this might help a bit.
Although I can definitely see the point of getting Egyptians on the net by any means possible to assure their access to foreign and independant sources of news about the situation - I fail to see the point of allowing Egyptians to phone in Tweets. Twitter as a medium only works well (imo) if a sufficiently large percentage of the people is using it. If it is reduced to a small minority, wouldn't they be much better off with some way to publish their "tweets" to a service that has somewhat better tools to search and organize the information, like a simple forum or something similar, posting the transcribed message as well as the audio fragment for example?
Think about happens when you take the internet away from a typical teenage girl. When you have news, you sit back and read about it. Maybe play a little farmville. Check your stocks. Without the internet, many egyptians have nothing to do besides go outside and protest.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Not only did the commanders refuse to stop the demonstrators, I was listening on NPR and they commented that the military is protecting the demonstrators as long as they don't get violent.
I don't read AC A human right
On the positive side, when the Aswan Dam fills up, it will provide a bunch of very fertile land that will be simply begging for agricultural usage and have fairly close access to irrigation resources too. The silt of the Nile will start to flow downstream again, and in the long run I think it will be a net gain for the Egyptian people. But in the meantime it is going to be a huge ouch for everybody involved.
The silt that is being blocked by the dam will eventually get to the delta, but it will simply take more time to get there.
As for the Mississippi River, the Army Corp of Engineers has sort of done the opposite: It has "improved" the ability of the river to send the silt downstream so in effect the Mississippi River Delta is getting larger, but unfortunately that is in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico where it doesn't really do anybody any good and certainly isn't helping to maintain the marshes on the southern coast of Louisiana, Texas, and the rest of the Gulf Coast region.
I wonder if the world needs the internet equivelant of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty?
To be fair, Google already has the infrastructure set up in the form of Google Voice. It seems like all they've really done is set up a Google Voice voicemail box that posts the recorded message to twitter.
sumdumass, is that really you?
"Obama all but ignored Mubarak's announcement, declaring that "an orderly transition must be meaningful, must be peaceful and must begin now.""
woah, three nuanced ideas in one sentence? slow down college boy!
look sig is kool