Slashdot Mirror
Is Algeria Deleting Facebook Accounts?
belmolis writes "Algeria is reported to be shutting down ISPs and deleting Facebook accounts in an effort to prevent anti-government protests from escalating as they did in Egypt. Is it likely that they are deleting FB accounts? Unless Facebook is cooperating, this would either require hacking FB to obtain administrator privileges or cracking the password of each account they wish to delete."
The problem is that you may send your username and password over HTTPS, each page after that you send your auth cookie over plain ol' unencrypted HTTP. Someone is capturing those auth cookies and using them to send delete commands to Facebook (no doubt after capturing all of the info and friends).
Use HTTPS Everywhere and force all your traffic that can be to be using HTTPS.
The consensus in the networking community is that the Internet to / from Algeria has not been shut down. See the Renesys blog for more details.
The situation with regards to social media is more uncertain, with reports of both blockage and routine service.
Dunno anything about facebook - who really gives a shit anyway, right? - but if Algeria really is trying to mess with its people's Internet activities, it all but guarantees they are the next regime to face the revolutionary wrath. So to speak.
It's the Streisand Effect to the nth degree.
They do have elections, though I'm not sure how hiqh-quality they are thought to be. The fact that said democracy has been continually operating under emergency powers since the end of the Algerian Civil War probably doesn't make people entirely cheerful.
Ultimately, though, I suspect that they are hitting the same demographic/economic crunch that has caused trouble for other states recently: Fairly high unemployment(particularly among the large portion of the population that is fairly young), rising costs of staple commodities, and the perception(generally accurate) that the state is corrupt and exploitative in favor of some well-connected elite. Even in well-functioning democracies, that demographic circumstance will produce substantial volatility. If the state is having any legitimacy issues: boom. (On the other side of the coin, as our dear friend Putin can attest, if you preside over a period of improved wellbeing for the population, people will eagerly forgive egregious corruption and repression...)
HTTPS doesn't do much good if the country in question implements transparent proxies at the borders of their national network infrastructure that decrypt SSL traffic, inspect the contents, then re-encrypt it with an SSL certificate issued by one of the authorities registered for that country (which is certainly within the realm of possibility for most governments). Have you ever looked at (let alone modified) the list of SSL authorities that your web browser trusts by default?
When I was in Vietnam recently, which blocks Facebook, they operated by intercepting DNS. They'd either make lookups fail or make them resolve to their own proxy. Before we realized this my wife uploaded a bunch of photos which then mysteriously disappeared overnight. We got around this by me firing up squid on my linode and using this as our web proxy, by IP address. (Authenticated obviously.) This way names are resolved in the good ole USA, geolocation says we're there (so get stuff in English), etc - AND the local government doesn't get to stick its grimy paws in my DNS lookups. To stops us they'd have to identify me personally, and spend resources on a single individual - and given we were foreign tourists they probably couldn't care less. After all, we'd leave in a few weeks and then we'd still post and say all the same things regardless. If we were locals we'd probably get on a watch list... They DID spend extra time on my exit processing at the airport, where the official wandered off with my passport and was gone 5-10 min.
If Algeria is next, we can hope for Libya too. Unfortunately, Libya's Khaddaffi known for his sex orgies has a likeminded friend in the senile Italian clown Berlusconi.
North African girls?! Who supply them? Are they traded goods?!
Yahoo writes: "Silvio Berlusconi, the long-serving prime minister of Italy, is facing multiple scandals that are entertaining and deadly serious. Italian prosecutors are seeking a fast track trial for Berlusconi on a number of charges. The charges include abuse of power and having sex with an under aged prostitute. On the first charge, Berlusconi is accused of bribing a British lawyer named David Mills to provide favorable testimony in court cases. The more entertaining charge concerns an alleged sexual encounter between the 74-year-old Berlusconi and a 17-year-old night club dancer named Karima El Mahrough, possibly an Egyptian national, and paying for the privilege. Berlusconi and El Mahrough have denied having sex. Berlusconi appears to be trapped in a curious contradiction in Italian law. The age of consent in Italy is 14 and paying for sex is not illegal. But paying for sex with someone under 18 is a crime punishable by three years in jail."
Times of India wrote: "An influential Italian Catholic newspaper said on Tuesday that the prostitution probe into Premier Silvio Berlusconi's encounters with a Moroccan teenager is like a 'devastating tornado' damaging the country's image"
Sorry Italy, the damage is done, years ago by not kicking out that turd.
Let us hope that at least some EU politician have b0ll0cks and can take that little fu**er in his b**** and tell the Algerian leaders and the Libyan Khadaffi pack to take their bags and go to Saudi Arabia for retirement. William Bush Jr is probably already there waiting for them, similing and waiving.