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Libya Blocks Internet Access As Citizens Protest
An anonymous reader writes "As protests rage across the Middle East, in particular gaining strength in Libya, Djibouti, Iraq, Bahrain, and Yemen over the past two days, Libya has taken the lead role in blocking internet access to its citizens. Residents of Tripoli, Libya are reporting wide-spread internet blockage for most sites, and access to circumvention tools like OperaTor and VPN is also being blocked."
It worked so well in Egypt, why not do it in Libya, too.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
If there is commentary they don't like, they will seize the domains. If there is protest, they shut down the internet. If there is risk of protest, they will set up an internet kill switch.
I'm glad I'm in the United States of America, a country that fights censorship. I'm in the United States of America, oh, never mind.
Fight Spammers!
Are Thuraya satellite phones still working? Libya have been trying to jam these for a long time I believe, at least in areas close to Tripoli
No Internet?
Libya is doomed!
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
tools like OperaTor and VPN is also being blocked.
Taking away their OperaTor, now that's just cruel.
I guess they just saw how well it went for Egypt and decided it was a win-win.
How long before the Governor of Wisconsin blocks the Internet for his people?
I hear he's bringing in some Koch Brothers employees on camels tomorrow.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This article has some more information: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/libya-blocks-access-to-facebook-al-jazeera-others/302 It doesn't look like the whole Internet is blocked, yet.
http://www.lpphilly.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/egypt.jpg
and it did NOT work!
I was one of the ppl, who actually joined the revolution due to the fact that I did not have an internet connection.
So i went to Tahrir square. To my surprise, i found thousands like myself, who found themselves there because they could not
get their updates online, so decided to go see whats going on, and then latter on got involved. It even got worse when the gov. cut of news channles like Jazeera.
What i am noticing is extreme insanity, because you would think that there is some kind of analyst or adviser who saw that happen in Egypt and decided it was a bad idea, but nooooo..they are just too smart for that. Its the same school of thought i guess.
The lunatic is in my head
Is that bad?
Yes, the Libyan standard of living is better than Egypt's, but then so is Mexico's. If you've been to Mexico, you will see that a minimum wage of about $1,800/year leaves adequate room for discontent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_wages_by_country
Maybe this is motivation for contributing to the Freedom Box project: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/721744279/push-the-freedombox-foundation-from-0-to-60-in-30
-rozzin.
1. advise the leader to cut off Internet 2. youngling without porn goes to street 3. ??? 4. Profit!
more to go.
One problem in almost all Muslim nations (and a whole lot of non-muslim nations as well, but they don't seem to be on fire... yet) is that the wealth is extreme badly distributed. The rich are filthy rich, Mubarak and his immidiate family have tens of billions together. That is a shitload of money putting them among the richest people on the planet. These leeches suck their country dry.
But oddly enough not so dry as to deny all services. And this is the second problem. These countries are getting full. To put it not so nice, Muslims breed to fast. So did we in the west but we had some nice wars to get rid of our surplus when modern medicine meant that a woman having a dozen kids actually saw most of them reach adulthood.
In Egypt, Lybia, Tunesia, Morroco etc etc, there are a lot of young people having at least some sort of education (not all universities are equal) but absolutely no need for their services. Unemployment is a HUGE issues.
They ended up with a dangerous mix of young people (who could think enough for themselves not to believe the old lies, could through the internet see that there is a different world and who have nothing to loose and everything to gain) and an old elite who cannot change with the times.
Some have feared that this would breed dangerous fanatical terrorists... and it did not. Al Queda has failed, the youth has accomplished without violence more in the last couple of months then decades of terrorism.
Whether it will mean anything? I don't know. Nothing has really changed yet, dictators are pretty easily replaced but what comes in their place isn't always better. The problem is two fold after all. Distribute the wealth of Mubarak in Egypt will help but won't solve the chronic over-population. Where will all these unemployed find jobs when there just isn't enough work? Hitler solved this by going to war (read up on history) but lets hope they don't go that route. Farming doesn't take a lot of labor anymore, factories are all in China, it ain't that simple to get millions to work. The west with far less unemployed and better run economies is showing this.
China
None of this applies however to China. The situation might not be perfect there but the people there are feeling that things go forward. The middle class is growing, people are improving their lives and the young have plenty of opportunity. For people to risk all they got to feel they got nothing left to loose. The Chinese got plenty to loose.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
bit.ly isn't going to work next time i need it?
Seriously, they'd be doing each other and the rest of us a big favor if they did.
Besides, doesn't this guy just look like he's asking to get the kind of treatment WBC and Anonymous like to hand out?
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
The dictators may intimidate the two or three ISPs into shutting off the internet, but they can't shoot all the birds out of the sky!
Arbor Networks has been providing some really good graphs detailing typical usage and sudden drops of internet traffic.
http://nic.ly/ is down (and not resolving) as a result of this, and at least a couple of the root servers for .ly (dns.lttnet.net and dns1.lttnet.net) are down, although out-of-country resolution is still functional (although, it's not clear to me if they're simply running off of caches).
I suspect bit.ly is pretty happy they've been pimping j.mp lately. :)
-Ed Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.
You put a dent in Facebook spam scams for a bit.
As the governmetns are starting to figure out, blocking the internet does disrupt the ability for organizers to get the word out (eg. everyone protest at these specific locations at these times), but once you shut the internet off for everyone, it magnifies the amount of people suddenly upset (and now with nothing better to do but join in). I recall seeing some quote by a protestor who said "we had nothing better to do" once the internet was off so they joined in the rapidly-growing protests.
They also fired on people, killing 84. Somehow they don't seem to understand that killing people will only make their situation worse. Libya will probably follow the same path as Egypt did, at least I certainly hope so. It's time for the people to take the power back.
There is http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4534017/ or even George W. Bush.
Of course, I thought that George W. Bush was one of the stupidest people in the country until I realized that 47.9% of the votes were for him.
Fight Spammers!
By Glenn Garvin | The Miami Herald (A McClatchy Paper)
... the airport-gropers of Homeland Security.
Virtually at the same moment Obama was demanding that Egypt stop monkeying with Facebook and Twitter, Maine's imitation-Republican Sen. Susan Collins announced that she plans to reintroduce a bill that died in Congress last year. Collins gave the bill a smiley-face name, the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Internet geeks, about the only people who've noticed what the government is up to, prefer to call it the Kill-Switch Bill, because that's what it would do: Give the president the authority to turn off the Internet whenever he pleases.
The bill (assuming Collins follows through on her announced plan to keep it substantially the same as the one she sponsored previously) would give the president the right to declare "a national cyber emergency" and seize authority over any part of the Internet he decides is "vital" to the "economic security, public health or safety of the United States, any state, or any local government." And just in case that's not broad enough, the bill also allows him to snatch anything the White House deems "appropriate."
But this is America, dammit, so the bill includes safeguards for our liberties. The president can only grab stuff for four months at a time. And while the bill says his designations on which parts of the Internet are "vital" are not subject to judicial review, he will have the advice of an enormous new cyberspace bureaucracy presided over by one of our most civil-liberties-sensitive agencies
[...]
Even more ominous was an interview given last year by Collins' supporter, Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. "We need the capacity for the president to say, Internet Service Provider, we've got to disconnect the American Internet from all traffic coming in from another foreign country," Lieberman told CNN. "Right now, China, the government, can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have that here, too."
What makes me laugh is the author's pretending - downright posturing - that America's right doesn't want an internet kill switch...lollll...the right will do the "reluctantly signed of on" gig in public, and celebrate in private. You only have to watch Fox for a half hour to see that our right ain't real thrilled with the idea of the American people having untimely access to the inconvenient truth.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Assuming most of you do not run Windows, there is no cause for concern of course.
But there is already a mega-hole backdoor in Windows.
They listen to whatever they want, whenever they want.
Between the fact that the laws haven't caught up to the technology and the Patriot Act, they're laughing right in your faces while they're doing it.
And before all you gurus respond with some tech savvy lackluster comment, let me just say;
you may not run Windows, but I guarantee you someone that you love does.
3rd time posting this now. Somehow, strangely, this post keeps getting deleted.
I think we should shut down parts of the internet untill the search engines stop supporting scam sites. The latest stats say the internet is 83% scams. We should join Lybia and shut down google, msn, yahoo, etc, for continualy allowing scams and profiting from them. Their owners should even be arrested for participating in theft. They are more interested in the income these sites pay then than protecting the public literaly from being stolen from. Lybia may be doing this for the wrong reason but the principle of control over a service provider that is allowing its service to scam the public is not a bad thing. The internet needs more control and the search engine listing services need to be made to pay every time a person is ripped off by a site they host..