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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
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
Why, someone might transmit some data in a copyright-monopoly infringing way on such an unrestricted network! Everyone knows copyrights are more important than fundamental liberty!
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.
Think of the poor CEOs who will have to stay without their gold plated toiletseats because of your egoism.
Its not like communications and the invention of the radio changed warfare and coordination forever.
Lends a whole new meaning to the phrase "Go for the gold", doesn't it?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
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.
Just what I want in the middle of combat in a civil war ... access to my facebook page.
Well, how else are you going to move your millions?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Did he say, "Hold my beer... hey everybody, watch this!" just before he started?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
To be fair, Huntsville has arguably the single largest concentration of engineering and technology talent between Atlanta and Houston (Alternately it could be argued that nearby Knoxville does, with ORNL right there). I should know, I live here. Among other things, the US rocketry program was born here (Werner Von Braun immigrated here, and is considered more or less the father of the modern city), NASA and MDA both have huge presences here, and we have the headquarters for much of the Army's weapons R&D. There's not many places like this in the South.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I live in Huntsville too. There are plenty of companies here that are/were innovative in computer hardware/networking/telecom separate from government business. I'd like to see more diversity in what the city does, but being in the south it carries such a stigma for the residents being stupid it is hard to attract other industries. Hence my sarcastic comment as GP to stir up discussion. BTW there is plenty of technical expertise around the South, Huntsville just shines so bright because of the government funding. Birmingham and Nashville both have strong but smaller technical businesses. TVA has scattered electrical and structural engineers all through the Tennessee Valley.
But this makes it so much easier to send out the message "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!"
I am officially gone from
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.
Wrong Rebels. Tunisia already had theirs. Tatooine style.
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
The south is a cesspool of bigotry.
The women are fat and ugly. The people are rude.
There's no heavy industry and the coastline is polluted.
No one should move here^H^H^H^H there.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
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.
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
Places like NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Fransisco that just have huge numbers of really smart people
No, they hold huge numbers of people. Full stop. You can't be that bright to live in ridiculously over crowded metropolis, if nothing else due to the damage it causes from a long term environmental perspective and the raw inefficiency of a large city.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The evidence is that cities are less (or at least no more) resource-intensive per capital than rural areas...
Besides, some of us like to be able to walk places, meet people, and aren't agricultural specialists.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
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
The women are fat and ugly...There's no heavy industry .
You seem to have contradicted yourself there.