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Egypt's Net Ruled By Phone, Not Kill Switch
schliz writes "Judging by the time it took for Egypt to go offline and back online, the Internet Society speculates that the country's connectivity is controlled by a 'series of phone calls', rather than a 'kill switch'. The Government-imposed internet blackout lasted five days, beginning last Friday, and ending on Wednesday."
Personally, I don't see how it can. Do the math, it doesn't add up unless the providers gouge the advertisers, and it won't take that long for users to figure out they're being gouged when the results come up flat.
These days, newspapers are facing many difficult problems.
If there is a college or University near you, see if they have a newspaper archive. There is one at the University of California at Berkeley that I often visit. There are hundreds of different papers going back to the 1800s. Browsing through these, you can get a pretty good feel for the popularity of papers and the competition between papers, as they all tried to scoop the others and inform the public.
The newspapers back in the 1920s, for example, were very entertaining, and I could see how people would buy two or three different papers a day.
The nation has thousands of papers around the country all doing original reporting. San Francisco had The Chronicle, The Call, The Bulletin, The Examiner and others all employing hundreds of people each before the newspapers invented and discovered the cash cow first known as "want ads" soon to be known as "classified ads." Want ads were both popular and a pure money maker. Every inch of a want ad page was pure profit.
This model was ruined forever by Craigslist and eBay. The paradigm shift took so much cash flow away from the newspapers that staff had to be cut and the quality of the product suffered creating a viscous cycle of ruination. People were less attracted to the cheaper product and circulation declined further causing other ad rates to fall, causing cutbacks, and so on down the drain.
So what does distribution on the iPad do to save the newspaper model? It saves the cost of a truck to deliver the paper to the various hubs, and it takes the delivery people out of the picture. It also saves money on paper and ink. So it basically saves money on one or two line items on the spreadsheet: printing and distribution.
In its stead, it adds a cost called iPad layout expense. The paper has to be redesigned for reading on an iPad. This means using some expensive software specifically designed to be used by publications publishing on the iPad. Knowing the way Apple operates, this means a system incompatible with other pad readers, such as the Kindle and Motorola Xoom. When all is said and done and when you factor in the cost of maintaining large server farms to do distribution, the amount of money saved is negligible. Because the people who are in this industry are so gullible, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't cost them more to do the iPad version than the print edition.
Of course, no matter what they do, they can't cover the lost revenue from classifieds.
Advertising in general becomes something of an issue as most people who subscribe to these iPad papers will be located internationally, so the local Macy's ads that prop up the NYC papers wouldn't be practical.
The final nail in the coffin will be clever aggregators who will deliver a custom paper for news junkies. The app that does the aggregation will cost like $2 (or free) as an app with no further fees. With it, you get a great newspaper pieced together from the stuff on the net. Compare that to $40/year for a subscription to one lone paper.
The fact is this app will win the day. It may or may not be as slick as the iPad papers we'll see shortly, but it'll be a lot cheaper if not free.
The upcoming experiments will be fun to watch and probably give developers a lot of ideas. But will any of these things save the newspaper as we know it? Sadly, no.
WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?
I think some people are imagining a light switch. Next to a red nuke button and a bat phone.
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
It wasn't a magic button? It was someone in a high position calling someone else in a high position saying make this happen? Really?!
What a stupid, stupid article. The internet just doesn't disappear if you tell it to do so in a stern voice you know...
I first noticed the following two phrases "time it took" and "series of phone calls" the first thing that popped in my head was "WTF they still have dial-up"? Which made me do a double take and read part of the article and waste some time.
... when both the intent and result is exactly the same.
Um, duh?
Did we really except Egypt to have organized enough to have a big red button for him to push? A lot of people communicate these days by phone, especially when you can't email them.
What it means is, you don't need a "kill switch" to shut down the entire network infrastructure of a country. You just need to give a few phone calls, and this is already possible - in Egypt and elsewhere.
...and the economic damage will last much longer. What company would want to have its operations in Egypt when it might have its net connection broken for days at the whim of the ruling power?
You don't expect that president of Egypt personally was calling providers, do you? :)
He flipped a switch. A big sign "SHUT DOWN INTERNET NOW" lit up in a special room, and well trained officials called ISPs with instruction to turn off that internet thingie. And ISPs said "Sure, no problem! Done!"
Killswitch
Hyperom.com
Check out these links for some truly cool pictures. These pictures speak to me and show me the pain and suffering of the Egyptian people.
But they are also some of the most beautiful pictures I have ever seen because they show people fighting to change their lives.
Feb 03 http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/02/egypt-protests-anti-mubarak-vs-pro-mubarak-riots/
Jan 30 http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/01/the-egypt-protests-part-2/
Jan 28 http://totallycoolpix.com/2011/01/the-egypt-protests/
Everyone who buys Wild Hunt will receive 16 specially prepared DLCs absolutely for free, regardless of platform.
Oh Egypt... a land where your words were lost but for a small stone
with three versions take heart.
Take pictures, document them. 8.5x11 glossy with a
PARAGRAPH of writing on the back tells us the truth
as you see it. Small pictures well selected are good.
Do not listen to CCN or FOX...
For one that twit Pierce what is his name is getting tiresome in his
bias and bating of "guests". Guests that may now feel
abused and more hostage than guest.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
In other news, spam out of Egypt almost completely ceased during the internet blackout!
I thought I had clicked to disable ads... Clicks the button again repeatedly
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
Stupid people! Why would you think it's a button ?!
It's Egypt after all (Pyramids, Sphinx etc), surely it has to be a hand lever or something similar.
Since there's only like 3 ISPs here, generally ran by incompetents. TEData I'm looking at you -- specifically.
WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?
It actually does make a difference, because it means that the Mubarak regime was able to keep each ISP scared enough to intimidate them into doing exactly what they said, even when that meant effectively cutting off their business. The timing of the calls -a little more than 13 minutes total- tells us that there was no hesitation from any of the ISPs. The only exception was the Noor group, who somehow managed to evade this order and remain online for days after the others had disappeared.
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for.
Side note: It was James Cowie at Renesys who first posited this scenario within hours of the shutdown.
I wrote a much longer consideration of the effects of the Egyptian outage for my country's national daily. In a nutshell, the design of our physical networks makes them vulnerable to the kind of coercive pressure exerted by the Mubarak regime. And a some of the powers-that-be like it like that.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
That's what a kill switch is. It's a law that enables the head of the state to shut down parts of the internet without judicial oversight.
Dilbert RSS feed
Exactly the whole debate of a "kill switch" is distractive. The real issue is that censorship can and does already happen, and what we should to do about it. There a number of central control points on the Internet, all of them depend on governments and corporations acceptance, funding to function normally. The US is using domains, others use DNS, Egypt now used psysical disconnection, china uses interception of data for sniffing. These are known, and from these it can be safely assumed that many, many more of these abuses exist without public knowledge. Tor works but is having too few outgoing nodes, proxies have trust problems, using these is an infraction themselves in many places, DNS cannot be redirected sometimes, the physical connections are always run by a corporation, not grassroots organizations interested in freedom of expression.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Probably the nukies have twitter accounts now.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
And you think it would be different anywhere else in the world? If the US government called Sprint and Comcast and told them "cut the power OR ELSE!" they wouldn't do it?
Think about it: They know exactly that the government can't do that for more than a few days. Else the economy is crippled beyond repair. Facebook, Google and all the other precious data mines would have left the country before you can say "relocation". Oh, they might even keep the workers. What's the problem with them working in the US, code is easy to transport. Needn't even hire container ships to get it around the planet. And if not, well, India has allegedly some they can hire.
OTOH, NOT throwing the switch when the feds want you to can reaaaaally make your business difficult. For more than a few days. Shame that you want to pull cable, unfortunately you can't dig up our road. We also just had a company start on a citywide WiFi network, and NO, it's not you. And btw, you have been selected for a random IRS audit. Long version.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Modify physical layout of the connections. Every house, block and street to have multiple links to each other, and proper routing in place. Servers should be distributed and virtual, no addresses. Attempts at censorship would become hard.
Data communications deserve total freedom of expression, just like in-person and voice communication. No central should have any controls.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
You're not. But the kind of people who make these sorts of phone calls will be delighted.
May the Maths Be with you!
"And btw, you have been selected for a random IRS audit. Long version"
or even worse the "Deep Forensics" version
because you know that they will find something you are not correct on.
Dem Treasury Boys iz a ruff bunch y'all dunna want to mess with dem.
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
And who would pay for all this? Technology could be a big help, but it's going to take something more sophisticated than that.
"If the US government called Sprint and Comcast and told them "cut the power OR ELSE!" they wouldn't do it?"
I imagine they would, for a time. But with the amount of lost revenue, they wouldn't comply for long unless legally compelled.
I have given some thought to this in the past. My current thoughts are towards some sort of shared-storage for blocks, exchanged wirelessly. Everything from PCs to mobile phones could take part then. Want a file? Maybe your neighbour has a piece, or your co-workers, or the person you pass in the street with the software on their mobile phone. A moment of contact, and the pieces are transfered. Latency would be pathetic, but it's an interesting concept for things where time isn't a factor. It might function something like the Freenet protocol.
and wtf has your post got to do with TFA about Egyptian Government killing internet acccess for it's citizens?
And when are they going to set this up? Who is going to maintain it? How will they afford it? Will these people have enough time left over to live their lives?
As with any other open-source project. Code is cheap, and needs only a few people to write it. So long as it runs off-the-shelf, common, affordable hardware. Might see a lot of interest from pirates, eager to escape transfer quotas.
the government can send a tank to your door.
I was always under the impression he used a Kill-Cork.
Timothy had nothing better to write about on this day, then to try and speculate what real story look like.
Goes the same with the editors that let this story pass
This is an example of people not understanding the difference between a metaphor and literal statement. When we talk about the president of the US having his finger on the button of a nuclear arsenal, we don't mean that there is a button somewhere that he would actually push with his finger. In fact, if he chose to launch nuclear missiles, he would make a phone call in which certain protocols would be followed, which would prompt additional phone calls and other communications to be made according to established protocols, and eventually a bunch of people would manipulate controls at their stations to initiate the launch. The "finger on a button" is simply a metaphor, something that some people apparently have difficulty grasping.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Which is pretty much the same scenario that just played out in Egypt.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
IF was at comcast I would do it under a order but first make all cable channels go free maybe even clear qam (some cable boxes freak out if they can't talk back to the head end / other parts of the cable system or if they loses some control signals)
The fact that a government functionary can pick up the phone, say, "Shut down your network" and be complied with without the slightest hesitation doesn't say a thing about technology, but it teaches us a lot about the nature of government, and perhaps makes it a little clearer to those of us in the outside world just what the pro-democracy protesters were willing to risk their lives for
+1
This is another example of why I get p1ssed off when people refer to the USA as a "police state" (I'm Canadian). People who use this term so loosely really have no idea what living in a police state truly means - It means the internet being shut off with a few phone calls, something that wouldn't happen in the USA without court orders, time, and much protest. To use the term "police state" to refer to nations like the USA belittles the risks people in true police states are actually taking..
You sure of that? Because AT&T went to great expense to accommodate NSA in a wiretap room. Wikileaks was cut off just after a SENATOR phoned Amazon.
What makes you think that "level 3 may or may not do it" will be any less "may or may not" than the ISP's in Egypt did? They weren't obligated to either.
Dem Treasury Boys iz a ruff bunch y'all dunna want to mess with dem.
When you speak in this manner you sound illiterate. Or black / nedneck. Or both.
You don't think that the Fed's couldn't do that in the US now?
The only good part is there are more then a few ISPs out there, and most of the big ones would ensure they have lawyers involved. I'm sure the situation can, and has, come up where a smaller ISP shuts themselves down because some Federal agent has showed up with some paperwork. I know it's happening to web-hosting companies now...
Anyone that thinks the 'kill switch' would be some jolly-red button like in the end of 'Land of Confusion' button is just silly.
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Vendors won't cooperate with this. They want exclusivity to their customers. They don't have the same ideology.
WTF is the damn difference? What BS is this statement trying to make? Am I supposed to feel better about the pending 'Kill Switch'?
Technically, there is a difference.
It means that an internet outage could be averted by a preemptive phone outage!
Free unix account: freeshell.org
enable "local peer discovery" in your torrent client... Seriously though, it would be nice to have some open source firmware for wireless devices that had mesh support that could be configured as always on or to turn on discovery when the wan connection dropped.
Get a web developer
Like TCP/IP? UDP? Multicast? NetBios? QoS (802.11p etc)? Good thing all those protocols used to talk between devices are manufacturer specific. Oh wait, they aren't.
Get a web developer
The educated technicians that try to implement this will find their networks shut down in other ways. The average Joe won't use such a network because it's not the default and they don't understand the technology or its implementation. The moment they have trouble with anything it's a reset to vendor-specific settings. The traffic will be shaped because it can be shaped at whim by the ISP; there is no Net Neutrality. So how does this idea succeed?
Idealism is great until it meets reality. That's not saying reality can't be changed BTW, but until it is you have to work within the known parameters or you're accomplishing nothing.
We're thinking along the same lines, yes. Only I'm thinking local as in physically local - broadcasting a 'I want this bit of data frame' at intervals, and seeing if any devices in the vicinity are running the protocol and have it in storage.
I could connect my cable lines to every single one of my neighbors -- in fact, I could connect up to every person in my town. I could install routers to continuously analyze and route traffic between us, and it would be an extremely stable/redundant/flexible system. Whenever the ISP decides to cut off service, I could still connect to the machines of the people in my community, but how does that help give us access to the internet?
Your idea is so full of fallacies that it is actually difficult to even point all of them out because they are all interlaced with one another. What you are suggesting is not helpful, at all. If you're suggesting the whole internet be turned into a P2P network, then what you are suggesting is simply not possible. The only solution to this problem is to stop the ISP's from ever shutting down their services, even when asked by the government. Any other solution is simply fantasy and would only be seriously considered by teenagers who, as we all know, are certainly the smartest people in the world.
That is incorrect!! According to Monsters Vs. Aliens. It's a huge red button on the wall.. right next to the identical huge red button for coffee. :)
--- If the bible proves the existence of God, then Superman comics prove the existence of Superman.
but how does that help give us access to the internet?
because only one person needs to find a feed once to any of the desired content and your all able to see it.
simply not possible.
It's actually fairly simple concept. Squid allows remote proxys, so if everyone of these houses had a squid proxy, and you had them all linked as remote proxy to yours, any content (even during a blackout) that any of them had connected to would be available without using the outside link. With wccpv2 which is supportable using most cisco routers, and of course dd-wrt squid can also cache streams, such as youtube, etc. So if the USA labels something like wiki-leaks as "dangerous" and flips the switch, if anyone in your back link had accessed that content, it would still be available to all.
Yes, given how the Dept of Justice has shown how they will interpret existing laws w.r.t. torture, detaining terrorist suspects, violations of how NSL's must be used, rendition of non-combatants, etc..., there is 100% likelihood that they [as in, the command structure under the President] already have a legal opinion saying they already have the power to order any and/or all parts of the internet shutdown.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I think the marvel is how she typed all that and was still fp. Does a gypsy come from egypt?
Oh, you mean it's not a big knife switch mounted near a huge Van de Graaf generator throwing off lightning bolts for theatrical effect?
Or maybe just a pushbutton switch on a Cisco router somewhere in San Francisco, that magically shuts the whole thing down?
That takes all the fun out of it.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
People who use this term so loosely really have no idea what living in a police state truly means
Agreed. I have friends and relatives who lived in Eastern Europe under Communism. People who make these statements have, in general, no clue what a real police state looks like, else they wouldn't have used such a strong term.