Slashdot Mirror
Syria Drops Off the Internet As Turmoil Spikes
CWmike writes "In what appears to be the latest bid by a government to throttle access to news and information amid growing civil unrest, the Syrian government Friday shut down all Internet services. Internet monitoring firm Renesys reported that starting around 7 a.m. EDT today, close to two-thirds of all Syrian networks were suddenly unreachable from the global Internet. In just 30 minutes, routes to 40 of 59 Syrian networks were withdrawn from the global routing table, Reneys' chief technology officer James Cowie said in a blog post. The shutdown has affected all of SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks as well as several of the country's ISPs, such as Sawa, INET and Runnet. Also down are the Damascus city government page and the customs web site. The only networks that appear to be somewhat reachable are a handful of government-owned networks such as one belonging to Syria's Oil Ministry, Cowie noted. 'We don't know yet how the outage was coordinated, or what specific regions or cities may be affected more than others,' Cowie wrote. 'If Egypt and Libya are any guide, one might conclude that events on the street in Syria are reaching a tipping point.'"
20 bucks says Syrian protesters will attempt a Tahrir Square.
10 more bucks says some concessions will have to be made.
Unsure about revolution.
(Lolcat)
Cuz I am in ur revolution and you can't stand it.
Long revolutions are long.
(/Lolcat)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I missed the part of the summary about people having a right to the internet, are you posting on the wrong thread?
Really bad case of 503 unavailable today.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... I've just installed an "Internet kill switch" in my house. Now - I just need to wait for the next time my wife or kids piss me off. Internet Nazi says, "NO INTERNET FOR YOU!"
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Part of any future protest movement is going to be managing international communication in the face of government-enforced information-blockades.
Part of any future totalitarian regime is going to be anticipating these and taking care of it.
--
On an unrelated topic, there are two ways to successfully run a totalitarian regime:
* Through fear and intimidation
* Through running it like a cult and silencing people at the slightest hint that they don't worship you.
Most regimes try use the first approach and some do so successfully. North Korea - the self-proclaimed 2nd happiest place on Earth - approximates the second but I'm sure they use the first when needed and they've been successful at staying in power for decades.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
they see me trollin', they hatin'...
The current troll for the Arab Spring is to start shouting that the brutal dictators are actually legitimate elected leaders and the revolutionaries are terrorists.
I think you installed it in Cowboy "503" Neal's house by mistake.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"In what appears to be the latest bid by a government to throttle access to news and information amid growing civil unrest, the Slashdot website Friday shut down all Internet services and gave out 503 errors.
I get so sick of hearing people say that the internet can't be censored (usually with some "The internet is *designed* to route around any censorship" crap). If a government wants to stop you from posting pics of you beating kids on the old internets, they don't have to develop some elaborate firewall that you and your hacker buddies can figure out how to bypass. All they have to do is show up at the handful of ISP's in the country with rifles and tell them to cut you off. No connection to your house, no internet for you.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Maybe there's a lower level protocol that can be used somehow. Even if it's only 1 way, can you broadcast across a router without needing to know the next hop? you could spoof a mac in the ARP request to send a message eg: 20:00:56:DE:AD
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Now that Syrians and journalists don't have the internet to inform them and keep in touch, they will pour down to the streets to do that. They will pull a Tahrir Square. Good for them!
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Mods, mod this back up, Govt doing kill switching has a lot of "innocent harm".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
ARIN announced that IPv4 addresses haven't run out after all...
Do you have ESP?
That is NOT how you remove internet access from your people! I mean, turning it all off overnight? Bloody amateurs!
Take a leaf from the venerable Monsieur Sarkozy to see how it's done. Uncontrolled internet access is hurting our artists! You access an image you're not supposed to -- like one of a child with mutilated genitals? Too bad, it's under copyright so you get your internet cut off. Totally your fault. Our artists need to make a living, too, you know. The point is, you do it GRADUALLY. Take it away a bit at a time. Suddenly turn off the internet and you're the guy who turned off the internet. But, build a system of laws to take it away slowly and nobody will even notice. That's how the G8 do it.
Time to watch AlJazeeraEnglish again and shield those protesters with my eyeballs. That worked for the protesters in Egypt too...
I hope they can report from inside Syria somehow. :(
From: U.N. Report Declares Internet Access a Human Right
The report, by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, comes the same day an internet-monitoring firm detected that two thirds of Syria's internet access has abruptly gone dark, in what is likely a government response to unrest in that country.
Full report, dated 15 May 2011: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
. . . . because this worked sooo well for Egypt!
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
We will smuggle DVDs in the streets, we will trade thumbdrives in buses, we will broadcast with homemade radios, we will even implement RFC1149!
Never will we surrender our data.
you're both so not funny...stop trying pleease....I feel embarrassed for you.
If you are a dictator, reasonably smart and been paying attention to current events, the following points should be occuring to you:
1. Be like Mike... er, I mean China.... be proactive about the interwebs. Put in a nationwide firewall, slowly censor the net so that stuff like twitter, facebook, gmail, etc. are not accessible to most of the normal population (i.e. non-geeks). This helps you avoid having to shut off the whole thing off later when the riots in the street reach epic levels.
Encouraging domestic, tightly-regulated and spied upon alternative companies, like China's Baidu and Renren, to substitute for the blocked USAsian sites is a bonus.
2. Never relinquish power, and be ruthless. Your only other option is imprisonment or death.
Nice guys like Mubarak who voluntarily give up power and refuse to annihilate protesters with cluster bombs end up getting arrested for (insert reason here). Kadaffi seems to have learned this lesson well.
3. Get nukes, and get them fast. If you don't, you can be bombed, invaded and arrested by USA/NATO at their whim. North Koreans and Iranians know this. Saddam didn't, and look what happened to him. Kadaffi is finding out right now the hard way.
This last one is a shame, and wouldn't be necessary if our leaders took to heart the founding fathers' plea about avoiding entangling alliances, not getting involved in the territorial disputes of Europe (and by extension the Middle East which is like 18th century Europe squared), be a friend of liberty everywhere but guardians only of our own. But noooo, Dubya had to avenge his father's wimpy mistake and prove to the world his dick size, and Obama had to... well I have no idea what motivates him but he is diving headlong into the Mideast and proving himself a clone of Dubya.
all they have to do is to have a good relationship in someone whose own country runs satellites (or other SIGINT) spying on shortwave signals and then they basically track the internet back to the home station
The name that worries me is Hama. It's a city in Syria where there was an uprising nearly two decades ago.
Hafez Assad (the father of the current president Bashir Assad) ordered the city of Hama to be put to the sword in 1982. Low estimates of the death toll for that one are 10K, with regime members boasting of much higher totals.
The Syrian regime has the advantage that the people in the regime and in control positions of hte military are largely Alawites, unlike the majority Sunnis. Thus, they'll be less likely to shy away from attacking the populace than say, the Egyptian Army was.
I'm not sure Bashir Assad will feel he has all that much to lose if the uprisings have indeed reached a state that seriously threatens his regime. He may resort to a family tradition.
Wikipedia link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_massacre
the question is this. what if there were a worldwide sort of police state?
the internet architecture depends on certain nodes being up, and all of them are run by big corporations and/or government authorities.
if you go back to paper, or back further, to spoken word and oral history, you decentralize.
Like father, like son. The apple didn't fall too far from that tree.
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I am looking at the interface now, I have down / up. Will fix when soldiers fight somewhere else.
Since Egypt I've been wondering about the feasibility of ad-hoc mesh networks. With plentiful wifi nodes and smartphones it seems like it would be somewhat possible to have them relay packets to maintain connectivity. You'd need to implement discretionary throttling for the individual owner of the wifi node / smartphone so their personal usage doesn't suffer too much.
But as long as you have enough people within typical cell tower range of an international border beyond which the regime has no repressive control, there would be no way for a government to prevent internet communications short of confiscating every computer, wifi node, and smartphone in the country. I don't think any government has the ability to do that quickly enough to suppress a mass social movement like this.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Don't look at Bahrain. Move along, nothing to see.
when it was being done on behalf of the US 'War on Terror'
Religion has been a controversial, deadly, and dividing issue throughout history. In the western world, we had the Lutheran split from the Catholic church. Later on in the US the KKK was once based on religion more than racism. There are still anti-Jewish sentiments abounding, i.e. "The Jews planned 9/11." And of course we still have the wacky religious nuts, such as the Westboro picketing nuts and that guy who predicted the 'Rapture.'
The thing is, Christianity hasn't really gone all genocidal (religious-cidal?) since the Crusades? Please correct me if I'm wrong.
But as several posters have stated, a lot of the conflict in the middle east in based on Sunni vs Shi'ite beliefs. These differences is one of the things I have on my list to read about, but haven't yet. Is it something like Protestant vs Catholic beliefs; mostly the same but with some small differences?
Basically, my main point is- grow the hell up and just let everyone have their own damn beliefs. And don't base your government on religion. I know, I know, don't place my beliefs on other cultures. But have we ever seen religious rule ever work out in the history of humans?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Yeah, they kinda help.
maybe the government cannot tell what information you are sending, but they can tell who you are sending it to, and how much you are sending.
even if they cant tell how much you are sending, they can tell this fact:
you are sending information out over an encrypted network, using tools designed to circumvent surveillance.
how do you work around that problem? if they can track the source of the electromagnetic transmission..... won't they investigate it?
i can see them doing something like this.
i just was futzing around with the wikipedia article about it.
they can't read your memory but they can tell your skin temperature, pitch of voice, eye movements, etc, and plug it into a computer to 'analyze' your veracity.