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Engineers Hijack Libyan Phone Network For Rebels
An anonymous reader writes "A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications. The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago."
All Your Web Are Belong to Us.
WTG rebels!
Can you hear me now?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Hackers are bad! We need to pass laws to prevent them from doing this!
It really shows how brittle and easily compromised the infrastructure is. That, in my mind (what's left of it), is a 'bad thing'.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Well done. You didn't even need a war, just an "armed conflict", to set an example why the MIC needs more money to defend against cyber attacks.
Maybe i'll actually have a signal on my cell phone if someone would hack a few t-mobile antennas
... and by pass the last mile thieves.
Oh, wait there are laws that prevent this.
Come on FCC get with the program.
Now that's the porn shortage fixed.
Just what I want in the middle of combat in a civil war ... access to my facebook page.
Those rebels need to get disciplined and kick butt, not surf the net.
"Ousama Abushagur, a 31-year-old Libyan telecom executive raised in Huntsville, Ala., masterminded the operation from his home in Abu Dhabi."
1) Hijack Libyan phone network.
2) Restore rebel communications.
3) Route Gadhafi loyalists calls through your $5.99/min sex chat line or call forwarding service.
4) ????
5) Profit!
Have gnu, will travel.
no guns. no rulers. no god based crusading terrorist profiteers. more advanced dna babys.
Let some guys do the same with the american networks and everybody around them will turn up dead as they are terrorists.
In our quest to achieve peaceful, democratic government in the Middle East...
Sanctions have failed for 30 years.
Negotiations have failed for 80 years.
Bloody conquest has failed for over 1,000 years.
Turning off Facebook and Two Girls, One Camel has gotten it done in 8 countries in six months.
It wants your Thunderbolt.
Help support the open802.11s project to bring mesh wifi to linux
http://open80211s.org/
The IEEE is in no rush to finalize the standard, and the companies are in no rush to produce products, so once again it's up to the open source community to get this started.
First they've got the most incompetent rebel army in the world, now they're going to spend all their time on the phone boasting about their magnificent "victories".
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Can you fear me? How about now?
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
TFA says that the rebels wrested control of the infrastructure away from Kadaffi. However, I expect that Kadaffi's government has the equipment and know-how to monitor calls. Therefore, I wonder if the rebels' calls will end up being insecure.
Still, it's probably worth having some level of telecom. And they could come up with some kind of code to obscure their messages.
I think for you, the 1/8" audio jack oughta do the trick.
To be fair, we haven't been trying to spread democracy in the middle east until W. used it as an excuse for his holy war. Our foreign policy has been mostly based on keeping a dictator we like in power and giving him as many guns, tanks, and jets that his poor country could afford with oil wealth. When they started to get a little sassy with us like Saddam or the Ayatollah did then we worked covertly and overtly to subvert their regimes.
I got here through a series of tubes
Uh you're aware that we never backed "the Ayatollah", right? He was the guy who replaced the brutal dictator we did like. We didn't even install that one, the UK did, though certainly with US backing.
If you're a disorganized and scattered band of protesters-turned-rebels trying to go about restoring communications infrastructure, how do you communicate to coordinate everything that's required to restore communications infrastructure?
I think calling it "a democracy in the middle east" is funny. Imagine this, what if we set them up as a "democracy" and they all come out and vote in a government that ours HATES! Haha...oh the irony. Frankly I don't have any problem with Imperialism as long as we iron out states rights more. The individual states need to wrestle back whatever power they can from the Feds, but that will be tricky considering the big purse strings that the feds hold.
But over all, we should be adding stars to the flag. Lets go for United States of Earth before the next century? That would make us all U.S.E. and that smacks of an invite for extraterrestrials to have their way with us. "But they call themselves USE...we couldn't resist. It was futile."
Take the Red Pill.
Actually, I think it was somewhat disturbing that it took a month to get this communication system back online.
It wasn't a matter of "getting it back on line". Doing that would have routed all the calls through its hub which was in Gadhafi's hands.
What they were doing was reengineering the network, cutting off its original (physical!) connections and route to its original hub, obtaining and installing a replacement network operations infrastructure, cell phone database server, and links to out-of-country telecoms, hacking and installing a siezed database into the server, negotiating peering agreements, and bringing it all on line. All without any help from the (Chinese) manufacturer of the equipment, which stonewalled them.
This was NOT "plug the ethernet into a new hub".
Four weeks, of which one was sitting on their thumbs while the replacement equipment was hung up in customs? Sounds like they've got some FANTASTIC people doing the work.
I recognize them as "hackers" (in the old-school sense). They earned it big time. Hats off to 'em.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Imagine this, what if we set them up as a "democracy" and they all come out and vote in a government that ours HATES! Haha...oh the irony.
Didn't that already happen in Gaza with Hamas (for some value of "we")?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
TFA says that the rebels wrested control of the infrastructure away from Kadaffi. However, I expect that Kadaffi's government has the equipment and know-how to monitor calls. Therefore, I wonder if the rebels' calls will end up being insecure.
If you'd read it more closely you'd have seen that this was much of the point of the exercise.
The original network, physically and logically, worked through a NOC in Tripoli and under Gadaffi's control. Yes they turned it off and jammed the signals - no doubt when spying on it was less effective than cutting it off. But a big part of bringing it back up was cutting the rebel-held equipment off from the Tripoli infrastructure and replacing that core with a new one that was under rebel control.
Assuming they got it right and don't have any leaks, all the traffic is now going through a satellite uplink in rebel-held territory and doesn't travel through Gadaffi-held territory. To tap it now Gadaffi's people would have to intercept and decode the satellite link or the individual cellphone-cell links, or make their own (probably physical) crack of the wire/fiber infrastructure in rebel-held areas.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Holy shit O_O you are a scary fucker...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel