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.
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?
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.
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.
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'
Ironically, Noor means light in Arabic.
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Nope. The Muslim brotherhood explicitly has been saying for the last week how they're staying out of this one. Mubarak would LOVE to blame this on terrorists or outsiders, as a way of delegitimizing the protests, so they're not going to try helping him out on that. Egypt is not really known for their extremism, and democracy would likely moderate any factions that try it, especially since there is a very large secular crowd in the country as well as millions of Christians.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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!
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.
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:
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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.
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[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?