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.
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.
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.
> The UN should be let in
By whom?
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.
> Down with the dictators! ... what?
And up with
So far the Egyptian President has been taking the relative high road for somebody in his position. I'm not sure whether he's worried about war crimes or about being lynched on the way out of town. But as oppressive as things have been, he could have ordered a brutal crack down on the protesters. At this point the armed forces are still trying to avoid unnecessary blood shed.
Not that it means it's alright for him to continue without a legitimate election, but lets keep things in context.
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.
Yea, thats how the UN works, it just goes in.
Actually the UNSC would hem and haw for weeks about it, someone would threaten a veto or four, probably France just to be a pissed off spoiler because of the Suez Crisis in '56. Then there'd be the decision about the make up of the peacekeeping force, someone would insist on alot of African Union troops, probably France, which would piss off the Egyptians and the Arab League, since some of those AU troops are Christians, and by then the entire place is stable on it's own, or a farking war zone like Mogadishu on a Sunday in 1993.
The only folks who just "go in" are the Americans and sometimes NATO.
77% Discount Viagra, if my inbox is any indication.
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.
Sadly, unless the military get involved the most likely replacement will be some islamic hardline fascist group like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egypt's military has been the source of power for decades, so this is not like Tunisia where the military will just stand idly by.
Ironically in another Middle East Country -Turkey the military has often intervened when the governments have gone off track, so they have actually helped keep that country from going radical at times -although they are currently a little nervous about the moderate islamist government currently in power there.
Cries for Western Style Democracy seem to go unheeded in parts of the world where rigid power structures and theocracies reside. Not that Western Style democracy seems to be working that well in the US these days...
I'm just sayin'
Who's next...? Down with the dictators!
Silvio "Pimp" Berlusconi
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
A Roman-style Senate which had NO leaders. No caesars or presidents or anybody else who might become sick with power.
Also Google's pretty genius. All you need is a standard voiceline to post your tweets online. Nice. Wonder if anyone is making using of Dialup to post online? Despite many claims that dialup is worthless, it's actually quite useful - just slower (watching youtube requires a 5 minute buffer time) (or a youtube-to-3GP downloader).
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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?
Democratically elected governments.
He is already a real dictator.
They have been shooting protesters, do they need to rape them too?
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"?
If that is what the people want it is their right to have such a government.
I don't think the Muslim Brotherhood will take over. Egypt actually has many political Opposition parties and alternative leaders, like Ayman Nour, the Wasat party, etc. They'd be far more likely to win than the Brotherhood. Keep in mind they've been sitting this one out for various strategic reasons. Even so, if they had to run for elections, they'd run towards the center like many other groups. Banning a party, as Mubarak did, will only make it more hardline. Whenever a far right party wins seats, they either are forced to moderate their ideas or they usually lose the next election.
Despite many claims that dialup is worthless, it's actually quite useful - just slower
If all you used was some specific programs that made use of API calls... dial up might be indistinguishable from broadband. Last I checked standard dial up could deliver about 4-5 Kb/s. 2 Kb/s with a crappy connection to the CO.
A tiny program written specifically for tweeting or IM with a bare bones interface (like IRC) could easily work on dial up. I should know.... for years my connection at home was 2.8 Kb/s with THREE bonded modems. If I could do IRC on *that* it's absolutely possible to just do IM and tweets.
A Roman-style Senate which had NO leaders. No caesars or presidents or anybody else who might become sick with power.
Really? How did a Roman-style Senate prevent corruption and nepotism? Sincerely curious.
Egypt's military has been the source of power for decades, so this is not like Tunisia where the military will just stand idly by.
This just in: the military is standing by while the people exercise their right to revolution.
In the beginning, there was null.
The Muslim Brotherhood aren't an islamic hardline fascist group. They are in favour of a secular state. And in any case they are no where near having majority support.
But as oppressive as things have been, he could have ordered a brutal crack down on the protesters.
He did.
The commanders of his military all said "fuck that", and his order went ignored.
All he has left at his command is the regular police force, and he likely won't have that for long.
Things aren't as bad as they could have been not because he showed any degree of restraint or sanity, but because his generals didn't join him on the oblivious power trip.
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.
High road? He's been on TV crowing about how he is the country's leader of freedom. Nothing but hollow rhetoric.
He fired the entire cabinet of technocrats, in a lame attempt to deflect blame to others, and is only making the crowds angrier. He could have ordered a more brutal crackdown, but he knows that's what caused the Shah of Iran to lose, so he's not willing to make such a suicidal move. The high road would have been for him to announce a peaceful transition to democracy and upcoming elections and a repeal of his emergency powers that he's been using to suppress free speech and jail people without cause. Egypt is known for the most brutal police and prisons in the region.
First, the Roman Senate most definitely had leaders, and they had amazing powers to manipulate it. It was these powers that allowed it to be subverted eventually by military men like Pompei, Caesar and Crassus, and then be swept aside as Octavian did. And Octavian wasn't even a caesar, just a mere first citizen :)
Second, the Senate was a consultative body, which had no actual power, legislative or otherwise. All it could do was issue advice decrees. Unless those were made into laws by other Roman institutions that actually had legislative powers, Senate proclamations remained just that - proclamations. Of course, the main reason those proclamations had some influence, and were largely implemented as laws once adopted was the fact that the Senate was comprised of the richest, most influential and sick with power Roman citizens.
Third, read some history before you post funny things on slashdot.
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.
Apparently you haven't been paying attention to egypt. Nearly 80% of the 'common' people there support them in some fashion, including sharia law. They've been inciting people there for weeks, and they also have been driving the various opposition groups to overthrow the government. Whenever whatever happens, you can bet that the muslim brotherhood will have a hand in it, besides that they're already ratcheting up the 'time to exterminate israel' speeches.
Yep interesting times, wouldn't surprise me to see in a few years 'islamic countries try to drive the jews into the sea' thing again, with yet another bloody nose.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
You know, Saudi Arabia is also next door. I wonder if they are next?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
that is 90% of the UN, and they have no power
warning pointless sig
What are you basing your assumption on that the regime will be replaced by extremists? The protesters seem to be of every walk of life and from every ideological point of view. Even the Muslim Brotherhood recognizes the secular Nobel Peace Price laureate ElBaradai as the main opposition spokesperson now.
If anything, this could very well mean a good thing for the west, with a more secular and broader government of this huge power in the middle east. Of course, uncertainty doesn't make everyone in the different western governments jump up in joy (even though they arguably should) by this uprising. That said, it would obviously speed things up enormously if the Egypt military would throw their weight behind the protest, and the first signs to that end are already there.
"This should be fun, and by fun, I mean a wholly depressing insight into the cognitive ability of some grown adults."
We should send them our porn.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
> Down with the dictators! ... what?
And up with
Ponies. Preferably of the OMG! variety.
Duh.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Great answer. But in Egypt today all there is are crowds demanding Mubarak leave, and if that happens, there is no "democratically elected government" waiting to fill that vacuum.
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 ----
If that is what the people of Egypt want, they have every right to it.
Really? How did a Roman-style Senate prevent corruption and nepotism? Sincerely curious.
I'm trying to see how any incarnation of a Senate is anything but the very definition of corruption and nepotism. Yeah, I'd be curious as well.
It is important to note that Rome was a Republic, not a democracy. The Senate was essentially a lifetime appointment originally and turned into an inherited office over time. Arguably the U.S. Senate is heading that way too.
Nearly 80% of the 'common' people there support them in some fashion
Source? I can see that in 2005 elections, MB candidates running as Independents got 88 seats in parliament out of 454 - that's less than 20%, and a far cry from 80%.
That takes time. That does not mean letting a brutal dictator stay in place is a good idea. If he was smart he would have already announced when elections would be held and withdrawn his bullshit emergency powers.
No sadly it isn't
Mubarak hasn't lost any palaces or military bases. He still is in control with the military backing him.
The reason they are not firing is because they simply don't have to. The protesters are poor living hand to mouth before the protests and will eventually have to stop just to get food and survive.
It is a waiting game. The protesters don't have enough support and the leaders will be ruthlessly found, beaten tortured and murdered once things calm down. You don't put the head of your Intelligence service as your second in command for nothing.
You're going to have to show me some citations there. Do you actually trust opinion polls in a police state that lacks free speech?
When you ban all other political parties, they get together, moderates and radicals alike. It's because they have a common goal to get rid of the existing regime and are being persecuted together. That's why the Brotherhood is seen as popular because they are the !=Mubarak party. When you remove that block, the supporters fragment once more. Look at Iraq for example; all the formerly-banned opposition groups have divided into their respective parties; Communist, Salafi, secularist, Velayat, etc. They were all opposed to Saddam, and he painted them all as Muslim extremists, traitors, puppets of Iran, Israel, and the US, etc. Most of them weren't.
If you remove Mubarak and allow the formation of political parties once again, you won't see religious extremism take over. Jeffersonian democracy is not like that, instead you get competing factions that will cancel each other's votes out. You'd get a spectrum of political parties from right to left; the Muslim Brotherhood, the Wasat, the National Democratic Party (Mubarak's regime), Socialist party, Communist party, etc. Egypt is not the same as Iran or Saudi etc. You have a large urban class, Cairo is like the Hollywood of the Arab world, and there are tens of millions of non-Muslims living in the land. This revolution is not over religion, it's over political freedom, poverty, and against police repression.
Which in the long term will ensure Egypt would have the same sort of revolution Iran had. I wish our leaders had the stones to admit he needs to go and that we have been propping this asshole up.
Just pointing out...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
"Small voluntary civilian gatherings started on 15 April around Monument to the People's Heroes in the middle of the Tiananmen Square in the form of mourning for Hu Yaobang."
"The movement lasted seven weeks after Hu's death on 15 April. In early June, the People's Liberation Army moved into the streets of Beijing with troops and tanks and cleared the square with live fire."
Sometimes brutal crackdowns take a while to get organized.
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.
many people will disagree that the Muslim Brotherhood is in favor of secularism
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=11146
the Muslim brotherhood has ties to fascism that predate WW2 and has active ties to Europe and the US in addition to the Middle East.
-I'm just sayin'
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.
Yeah, and for some damn reason we still deal with them, but invade Iraq and hang its leader for using weapons we and our allies sold them, to kill people we help the Turks kill too.. Riddle me that batman.
What is the point of going dark on the internet? With the cutting of the internet though, world opinion has turned against the Egyptian government. News crews are going to be going in and getting stories, so you won't stay out of the public eye. People will still find ways of calling out and reporting to the world what is going on. Cutting the internet simply raises a huge "LOOK AT ME" flag on the world scene. The UN will get involved, then the US. Ultimately your dictatorship gets overthrown and you either wind up a bullet ridden corpse, or dangling from a noose. Cutting the internet triggers the beginning of the end, so why go dark on the internet. What's the point?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Wow, quiet the fair and balanced news source you picked there. Might as well link to something on stormfront while you are at it. These are the same assholes who tend to make their man of the year torturers and murders. So long as they tortured or murdered brown people.
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
His chief problem is the loyalty of the Army. It's hard for folks in Western democracies, where the military is subservient to civilian will, to imagine such a situation where the Army holds the balance of power, but in many regimes in the world that's precisely how it works. That's what got Ben Ali booted out of Tunisia. The Army wouldn't open fire on protesters, and that was it. The police, which traditionally in such regimes, are the real source of terror, do not have the numbers or the weaponry to put down mass riots, and if the Army won't step in, then the regime is finished.
Why do you think Khomeini create the Basij and Revolutionary Guard in Iran? To assure a parallel military structure under his direct command that he didn't have to worry about the loyalty of when he or his successors needed to start bloodying the streets with the corpses of his opponents. Guys like Mubarak and Ben Ali, being dictators in the more conventional vein, didn't have the mad genius of a fanatic like Khomeini, and thus they're police and "personal" military squads are insufficient to the task.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
So somebody wants the U.S. Army moving into Egypt now that America has finally been able to start walking away from Iraq?
Yeah, that sounds like a plan for me!
I have a better plan: Let's put together a multi-national force from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia move into Egypt. That will do wonders for world peace, especially when those countries start to move into Gaza as well.
Or a meat popsicle. Or both.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And when they lose again, and this time Israel says "Fuck you, we're keeping Sinai", then all the anti-Israelis will moan and groan about how mean and nasty Israel is.
I'm not sure how repeating history will get the Arab countries out of their current troubles.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Egypt president is a hero??????? who said so??? have you been to Egypt or lived in there????
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.
I have a novel idea: How about we stay the fuck out. The last thing the US needs is to get involved in "nation building" where we weren't invited. Our track record over the last several decades isn't that good when it comes to nation building anyway. Just not our forte.
Oh, don't get me wrong, when you need people killed or stuff broken, our American military is seriously second to none. Perhaps that is what we should stick to, when it is appropriate.
At this point, it would seem the Egyptian citizens have taken responsibility for their own destinies, and unless we are clearly and unambiguously invited, we should stay out. And even if invited, if we can't help them according their own wished, for any reason, then we still stay out. The LAST thing we need is sticking our noses in the middle east when it isn't wanted. From what I can tell, what the citizens want from the US is only VERBAL support anyway. They don't want us there, for good reasons.
Again, this is from a vet, so is a son of a retired Korea/Vietnam vet. If you have no experience in the military or have no family members to risk, you are welcome to disagree.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Even more sad is that the last time America tried to get involved more directly with Egypt, it very nearly resulted in World War III starting.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
Stated in the article is how the Soviet Union decided that it had enough and wanted to conquer Israel with Syrian & Egyptian assistance. The only thing that stopped Russia? The fact that Nixon put the USAF at DEFCON three and opened up all of the missile silos in North Dakota with the promise they would be used if Soviet forces ever stepped foot into Israel. Soviet paratroopers flew over Syria and nearly made it to Israel before Leonid Brezhnev called them back home.
Somewhat directly as a result of this whole mess, OPEC also started the '73 Arab Oil Embargo that also shifted much of the geopolitics of this part of the world to what we recognize today.
That part of the world is very explosive and I could see this being a triggering event for countries like Iran wanting to get ambitious again.
[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.
Makes it harder for the protesters to organize. If they organize they might actually start doing real damage. Also while it doesn't stop the press it does make messes (read atrocities, beatings, mass graves) easier to hide. Though Egypt bodies have a tendency to stick around.
Yea, thats how the UN works, it just goes in.
Actually the UNSC would hem and haw for weeks about it, someone would threaten a veto or four, probably France just to be a pissed off spoiler because of the Suez Crisis in '56. Then there'd be the decision about the make up of the peacekeeping force, someone would insist on alot of African Union troops, probably France, which would piss off the Egyptians and the Arab League, since some of those AU troops are Christians, and by then the entire place is stable on it's own, or a farking war zone like Mogadishu on a Sunday in 1993.
The only folks who just "go in" are the Americans and sometimes NATO.
And if the Americans did that they would be "evil empire builders!!11!!" and only "there for the (oil|canal|unobtanium)!!!!1! "
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Their butler, Jeeves, of course. Duh!
All you have to do is go to www.askjeeves.com....oh wait...
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Why start WW3 over a tiny little apartheid state?
I just do not understand how a nation that does that, then uses its intelligence agencies to commit murders all over the world and hides/lies about its nuclear weapons is somebody we should be risking our necks for.
Mod parent way the fuck up.
I don't think the Muslim Brotherhood will take over. Egypt actually has many political Opposition parties and alternative leaders, like Ayman Nour, the Wasat party, etc. They'd be far more likely to win than the Brotherhood.
The Muslim Brotherhood would win in Egypt for the same reason Hamas wins in Palestine:
They provide social services to the poor.
The Muslim Brotherhood run low cost hospitals & schools throughout Egypt.
They also provides job training for the unemployed and care facilities for widows and orphans.
It's hard to overstate the political credibility they get from these social services.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
... You might as well take a step into the twelfth century, that's about where you are, technologically, at the moment.
It's not just technologically that they (the government) are in the twelfth century. Here's hoping that the people prevail,
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
Down with the dictators!
And up with ... what?
Dear leaders! New overlords! Terrorists and warlords! Theocracies which would be more violent, more restrictive on your freedoms, encourage more wars, screw you over figuratively (and literally if you're a woman), and further hurt the very economy you had a revolution to improve, but at least they'll promise that you'll go to heaven if you pay your taxes and be a good little soldier!
My but I'm cynical today...
Yes, it's a great idea to use elections as metrics in a country that is in open revolt in significant part due to dissatisfaction with rigged elections.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
(Godwin time!) So the holocaust was ok just because the Nazi's were democratically elected (initially)? Sorry, democracy is not a magic wand that makes evil acts acceptable. A majority does not have a right to abuse a minority, no matter how many people agree to it.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
According to official records, 2 300 000 registered voters have cast their votes, resulting in a turnout of around 23%.
Yeah, really representative.
Dilbert RSS feed
I did not suggest it would. Considering they keep building settlements and have secret nukes I am surprised they are not sneaking into Sinai already while the Egyptians are otherwise occupied. I guess no top soil to steal there.
Not saying the Egyptians are any better.
Oh my God, it was the W3C of the ancient world.
Its hard to overstate the moronicness of the Isrealis and the others in similar circumstances who are not doing this sort of thing. We could be turning Afghanistan into a decent place and making the locals love us. Instead we waste lives and billions of dollars on chasing cave dwellers and propping up their drug dealer dictator.
"Ties to fascism" could just as easily be spun as "ties to those who were fighting the Colonial oppressors of Egypt." Have you ever heard of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend?" You don't have to agree with each other, you just both have to hate someone else more.
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 never said it did. The NAZI party is not even a choice in Egypt as far as I understand the situation. Do you have any useful input?
UN does not mean it needs to be primarily US troops, in fact, based on proximity to Europe and the US being tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, it makes more sense to use a predominately EU based force.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
He is having a hard time cracking down. The army has said it doesn't intend to fire on Egyptians and some of the police are joining the protestors or are unwilling to fire. The remaining police haven't been shy about firing on people. The death toll is over 100 from most reports.
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
The only difference was they had to cut their standards drafts, blog musings and tweets in stone.
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.
>> What is the point of going dark on the internet?
I'm thinking this isn't about the rest of the world or they'd be kicking journalists out too
They're not worrying about the UN (who does?) and the US is busy elsewhere (everywhere?) at the moment
I bet this is intended to degrade communication within the country and limit coordination of the protests.
I bet it is also not gonna help. - I saw footage someplace of what looked like protesters riding on the outside of a military vehicle & figured their government is done...
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 May 22, 2000 it was reported that since Operation Desert Fox there had been 470 separate incidents of AAA or surface-to-air missile fire at Coalition aircraft and Iraqi aircraft had violated the southern no-fly zone 150 times (source)
Probably because China doesn't fire missiles at our aircraft which are enforcing UN resolutions due to them invading their neighbors?
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
Look, what would you have done? We needed those smurf-berries or it would have been lights out by the end of the month!
Dude, maybe you didn't fully read the GP's original comment but in context your reply sums up to"if the people of Egypt want to drive the Jews into the sea then that's their 'right' to choose as a democratic country." I can't honestly think of a more apt reference to the election of the Nazi party. That being said I don't think it will be that extreme, but I don't think what Egypt will get will be a democracy. At best they'll get to elect their next Dictator or ruling oligarchy sort of like the Palestinian's election of Hamas: Their first, and last, democratic election.
I got out of the Marine Corps 6 months ago after 5 years in the infantry.
I absolutely believe that there are things we need to be doing in the middle east, and some of it involves troops on the ground.
But dealing with Egypt isn't one of those things. And I don't think anyone in power in the US is saying that it is.
"Everybody" is a lot of people. I think you are misinformed.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
Yep. Its kind of a sick way to look at this, but it is good for policy in the US.
There is no way that the "Internet Kill Switch" is going to fly now, it would be political suicide.
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"
Save your breath. Those people don't listen.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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.
How do you propose making Afghanistan a "decent place"?
I'm also not sure who this "we" and "us" is that you are referring to.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
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
Egypt and Tunisia are two instances of people revolting for themselves. Past scenarios involve people that (for one reason or another) were too insecure in their ability to stand up for themselves.
When little Billy goes to school everyday and gets bullied and does nothing about it, sometimes others take it upon themselves to act on his behalf (whether welcomed or not). Once little Billy decides to kick the bully in nuts, things tend to change, albeit rather slowly and not without a long period of "things getting worse before they can get better."
The reason international peacekeeping forces should not get involved directly has nothing to do with "nation building not being our forte." Instead, it has everything to do with letting it just happen, and hopefully things work out well enough for Egypt that an example is set and repressed people around the world begin standing up for themselves for a change, NO MATTER WHAT THE PERSONAL RISK!!!
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
I must disagree. The ability to squelch the internet is but a stepping stone for fascist oppression and has a definite appeal for the Security Theater that is DHS.
Those who would give up essential liberty -- yadada yadada yadada...
UN does not mean it needs to be primarily US troops, in fact, based on proximity to Europe and the US being tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan, it makes more sense to use a predominately EU based force.
Unfortunately, some of them visited Egypt uninvited in 1956, and it might not exactly calm things down if they went back again.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
All he has left at his command is the regular police force, and he likely won't have that for long.
AIUI, the Interior Ministry's massed police essentially lost a battle with the protesters a few days ago. He may not have much by way of police to call on anymore.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Probably mostly because there have never been any UN resolutions against China for,say, invading Tibet. Wonder why.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
On May 22, 2000 it was reported that since Operation Desert Fox there had been 470 separate incidents of AAA or surface-to-air missile fire at Coalition aircraft and Iraqi aircraft had violated the southern no-fly zone 150 times (source)
Probably because China doesn't fire missiles at our aircraft which are enforcing UN resolutions due to them invading their neighbors?
Yes!!! That's why we invaded Iraq!
I *knew* we'd eventually retcon a good reason.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
Sadly, unless the military get involved the most likely replacement will be some islamic hardline fascist group like the Muslim Brotherhood.
That's not a forgone conclusion, but *any* revolution runs the risk of getting subverted toward unintended ends.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
It's more profitable. Duh.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Its hard to overstate the moronicness of the Isrealis and the others in similar circumstances who are not doing this sort of thing. We could be turning Afghanistan into a decent place and making the locals love us. Instead we waste lives and billions of dollars on chasing cave dwellers and propping up their drug dealer dictator.
The Western powers are intellectually married to a "we've got a right" attitude, rather than a "let's be smart about this" attitude.
That's why our solutions for third-world problems always fare so well.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Finally some common sense.
I mean, be honest, people. Imagine your country is in turmoil and you overthrow your government for insane corruption. You finally get rid of them. Now suddenly some foreign soldiers come in, declare that they are going to "help" you (whether you like that or not) and they suddenly decide how your country should be rebuilt, because what's good for them at home is good for you there too.
Let's even imagine their intentions are good and they're not just there to open your country to stripmining corporations, they genuinely want to aid you rebuild your country, albeit in their image of a "good country".
How welcome would they be, huh?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Muslim Brotherhood aren't an islamic hardline fascist group. They are in favour of a secular state. And in any case they are no where near having majority support.
Of course, an actual Fascist group would be secular. The frequent denotation of Islamic extremists as "fascist" is just slander.
Or maybe metaphor, as "grammar Nazi" has come to mean someone who insists on enforcing a prescriptive set of grammatical rules.
The US political dialogue is so screwed up that most people don't seem to know what 'liberal', 'conservative', 'socialist', and 'fascist' mean anymore. So you get people calling others they don't like "sociofascist commynazis".
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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#
Perhaps not:
http://twitter.com/arabist/status/30786981814341632
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The importance is most likely tied to the ability to change leadership without resorting to mass protests and riots in the street calling for the removal of someone.
Democracy also works within a republic by allowing the citizens to chose who is representing them. That's how it's supposed to work within the US and yes, eventually, enough people get disgruntled with their representatives and either vote for someone else, or fail to vote entirely which in both cases can result in their replacement.
Having a Roman style senate is little different then having a dictator that you do not agree with. Having a US style senate is in theory at least.
command and control communications structure.
The protest were able to be coordinated relatively easily by the internet. They saw some of this coming and going via twitter and a few other social sites which is probably why Google and others is trying to get things going again. Basically, taking down the internet is like jamming the radio frequencies or communications of the enemy on the battlefield. It makes them a lot less organized, less effective due to that, and steals their low tech advantage away from them. Now it will take resources to send messages by hand, there's a greater chance of intercepting them as well as more time in reacting to them. It puts the government back into an advantage.
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?
Must be a long time since you last checked. Even in the late 90s, I've had a 14.4 Kb/s modem.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
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.
- He is already a real dictator.
So, you're thinking they couldn't do worse?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
The UN should be let in
How about the west cancel immediately their HUGE military and financial aid for this dictator (whom they have backed for the last 30 years without more than lip-service to freedom, democracy, and all those things they claim to hold dear), unequivocally call for him to step down, and then stay out of the way? Leaving egypt to the egyptians would make a nice change.
As long as there have been empires there have been excuses for interfering in other countries, in the name of justice, civilisation, stability etc etc. Now people are claiming we need to intervene because otherwise there will be danger to the Suez, or an Islamist takeover, or a military coup. These are old lies, and we should know better than be taken in by the likes of Blair (the 'peace envoy' who thinks Mubarak should definitely stay), or Clinton talking of the need for stability and western interference.
- They have been shooting protesters, do they need to rape them too?
No, but they could open fire on mass demonstrations, or other means of crushing dissent.
So, yes, it can get a lot worse without rape.
That is what a genuinely brutal dictatorship looks like. Sadly, too many divert their attention and misdirect their anger at let's pretend "dictators" instead of the real thing.
Of course for mass death, it's hard to beat Mao.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
He is talking about kilobytes per second. You're talking about bits or bauds.
Football Odds
Dunno I tend to hang out in Internet cafes while in Malaysia and I am pretty sure the guys browsing porn on public terminals there are mostly Muslim. The preferred delivery mechanism is yahoo mail so governments who want to filter porn are going to have to block mail too.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
We have a few unused IPv4 addresses again !
Nearly 80% of the 'common' people there support them in some fashion, including sharia law.
Almost correct. According to some news sources, nearly 80% of the *Muslim* people support some form of sharia law, not necessarily with the Muslim brotherhood in power.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Yeah.. but the Nassa comment is from Michael Totten; and here is another:
"If you don’t join us now, when Saddam’s regime falls and Iraqis cheer the US Marines, you are really going to feel like a jackass."
The bloke is a jerk.. why are you quoting him? because it reinforces your islamaphobia?
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
What do you mean by a 'Kelvin bits per second modem'?
You failed like the parent.
>>>The Senate was essentially a lifetime appointment originally and turned into an inherited office over time.
I don't know what happened in the long term, but originally the Senate was an elected position. Later-on the Romans added an elected Assembly for the Plebians. So Rome a a Democratic republic much like the U.S. (which copied the roman model with some changes).
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
>>>Last I checked standard dial up could deliver about 4-5 Kb/s
I'm sure you meant 4-5 kB/s (kilobytes per second). As for speed, I used compressed dialup which squeezes text to about 5% its original size and images to ~10% their original size. It looks like crap but loads webpages as quickly as my 700 kbit/s DSL line (less than ten seconds).
Now what's the deal with three bonded modems only having 2.8 kB/s? 3 * 5.3 == 16 kbyte/s for a digital line and 3 * 3.3 == almost 10 kbyte/s for an analog line.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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.
Open the stargate, and scare RA into coming back.
Land that pyramid spaceship and take over egypt but with more slaves that have better food.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Readers of Front Page Mag are not "many people". They are a small niche of far right wing nuts. Their conspiracy theories are are as far out as any on the web, and usually more hateful.
If you want to know the reality of the Muslim Brotherhood, you could do worse than to start with wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_brotherhood
These are your old time conservative Muslims. Not your modern fundamentalist types. And certainly not fascist.
Unfortunately, some of them visited Egypt uninvited in 1956, and it might not exactly calm things down if they went back again.
Isreal != europe
But Britain and France are certainly European.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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
Having a representative body like a Senate already identifies the system of government as a republic.
Not necessarily - modern constitutional monarchies are also representative democracies like the USA, and dictatorships like Egypt can also be republics.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
NEW dictators!
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
If he doesn't want to leave, he isn't going to arrange a peaceful transition. If he were to leave today there would be a vacuum. If the people don't want a new dictatorship, they need to have some alternative poised to take over.
Actually, you are more accurate than you think. Theocracy is exactly what to expect here.
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Pull back to the green zone, funnily enough the only area the soviets conquered too, then build power plants, schools, hospitals in short bring their life style into the 20th century at least. Make real roads, investments in business, a Marshall plan for the controlled portions of Afghanistan basically.
You know, Saudi Arabia is also next door. I wonder if they are next?
Saudi Arabia's military and religious police make Egypt look like a fucking holiday camp by comparison.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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
I don't think, at this point, anyone in Afghanistan would trust the US to do this. Someone - one of Bush's political appointees IIRC - had the bright idea of making US-provided medical care in Afghanistan conditional on actively assisting the US against the Taliban and the warlords. Said warlords started killing medical workers on sight and things haven't improved since.
Al-Jazeera says that opposition groups have agreed to form a comission together to take the lead until elections are held.
What they need now is for Mubarak to step down. Though I didn't entirely understand why it's even necessary. Mubarak has no legitimacy in eyes of the people of Egypt and that's what matters, right? People and opposition could just seize the moment and declare a new government. Who cares if some old man hiding near Israeli border thinks he's still a president. (Mubarak is not even in Cairo) One can't be a president without the people.
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.
He's already out of town. (In Sharm el-Sheikh to be exact)
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.
Actually, Obama recently renewed the state of national emergency that the US has been in since 9/11/01. Under a state of national emergency, the President can do pretty much anything he wants, including suspending parts of the Constitution, seizing the means of production, etc. So if the US government wanted to shut down the internet, they could do it tomorrow, no new laws needed.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Up with miniskirts!
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.
http://www.gloria-center.org/gloria/2011/01/interview-on-egyptian-revolt
You can start reading there, then keep reading to whatever your hearts desire. Also re-read my original post, and you'll understand what I said.
Om, nomnomnom...
sumdumass, is that really you?
The military IS in charge right now. Egypt's presidency has been held by people with strong military ties since Nasser back in 1956. Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak, all were highly-placed military officers who remained close to the military after assuming the presidency.
The fight in Egypt is over succession. Mubarak wants his son to take over, but Mubarak Jr., though he has military experience, does not have the deep political ties to the military which Mubarak Sr. does, and is therefore not acceptable to the military. The real contest is between the military and the national police... and the national police have a poor record themselves for being corrupt, head-busting power-brokers, and are heavily infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood (the Islamist organization that gave birth to Hamas in the wake of the wars with Israel). The Egyptian police also have several times attempted coups of their own, but have never succeeded (the most recent such attempt was in 2008).
The Egyptian army is much like the Turkish army, in that they are somewhat secular and do not want to see their country become Islamist (i.e. run by Wahabiists). Yes, the army rules Egypt with an iron fist. But the alternatives (the national police and the Islamist revolutionaries) also would rule Egypt with an iron fist, and come with an agenda that is much more aggressive and repressive. There are no options that do not end with a dictator; at least the current dictatorship has honored its peace treaties and kept the Suez Canal open. And the military in Egypt is certainly more respected and "trusted" (if that word can realistically be used) by the general populace than the internal security forces and police.
In any revolution there has to be something you are heading towards as well as something you are heading away from. Where is the non-jackbooted "other"? In Egypt, there is none, nor will the major power-players allow there to be one. Therefore, the most likely outcome (particularly given that the national police and their political handlers made the critical mistake of abandoning their jobs on January 29th to try to provoke the army into firing on civilians in the ensuing chaos... which the army refused to do) is that there will be a non-Mubarak president which is nonetheless beholden to the army. The newly-appointed vice president Suleiman is just such a person. It is worth noting that the office of vice president, which if the president resigns is the one to take over per the Egyptian constitution, has been empty for the entire duration of the Mubarak rule up til a couple of days ago. Of course, the extent to which the Egyptian constitution matters in a situation like this is a roll of the dice. But there is also a new prime minister named Shafiq who at one point was the highest officer within the Egyptian air force, which further strengthens the military's hand. The chief question is whether Suleiman is "not-Mubarak" enough to satisfy all the major stakeholders and the majority of the public.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
"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
Now what's the deal with three bonded modems only having 2.8 kB/s? 3 * 5.3 == 16 kbyte/s for a digital line and 3 * 3.3 == almost 10 kbyte/s for an analog line
That was three 56k modems with v90 compression. The analog lines were so far away from the CO, and I was told by one of the tech guys for the telco that it was going through some other equipment too before it got to me. Some repeaters or something. He may have said something like digital to analog conversions, but none of it made much sense to me back then.
Hard to remember at this point, but basically I could not negotiate the v90 compression due the poor quality of the line. I could barely squeeze 1kB/s out of each line.
Ohhh, and voice was shitty too on them.
What it *was* good for was remote controlling a colocated server I had only a few miles away. The bandwidth of a Jaz disk (remember those?) travelling at 50mph between my condo and the colo facility was remarkably fast :)