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Syria Drops Off the Internet Grid
hypnosec writes "Amidst the ongoing civil war, Syria has gone off the Internet as of a few hours ago, with all the 84 IP block within the country unreachable from the outside. Renesys, a research firm keeping tabs on the health of the Internet, reported at about 5:25 ET that Syria's Internet connectivity has been shut down. The internet traffic from outside to Syrian IP addresses is going undelivered, and anything coming from within the country is not reaching the Internet. Akamai has tweeted that its traffic data supports what Renesys has observed."
Reader trickstyhobbit adds a report from Slate that the connection "appear[s] to have been knocked off line by heavy fighting earlier this morning. They are also reporting that the shutdown may have been intentional to aid in a government operation."
Maybe Syria doesn't need to come back, or if it does, maybe not with a full block. IPv4 addresses are valuable!
Time to unplug the router, wait a few seconds, and plug it in again.
A communication disruption can only mean one thing.
This prolly means that the regime ( the Assad one ) is in their last ditches, and fighting the eponymous fight. Soon, some rebel fraction is going to take over in Syria. Some of whom may be heavily bearded men who think that democracy is filth. And so on, and so on...
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
For those of you who think the internet is some magically self-healing construct immune to accidental or intentional disconnection of nodes and subnetworks, this should serve to show that if you aren't in charge over the physical infrastructure, you are at the mercy of those who are.
of my favorite (most hated) phrase: "The [I]nternet is down(1!1!)".
I usually think to myself "yes, the entire Internet. Gone. The bastards finally did it".
If you can get a working land line, there is always Dialup Providers you could call. Better than nothing I suppose, especially if its an emergency.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Syrian government has been threatening cutoff for a while. My money says this is no accident.
Deja Moo: The distinct feeling that you've heard this bull before.
I CAN'T GET TO LOLGOATS!
I'm surprised areas like this don't have satellite coverage. I live in the middle of nowhere in New York and my satellite connection pops out in Colorado. We have a backup generator and all so when folks 15 miles away have no internet (they can all get cable/DSL) or power we don't even notice. I would think that if there was satellites in line of sight someone should hook themselves up to this and pop out in Italy or something. As long as you can generate power there is no problem staying online. I'm sure of course this comes down to economics.
neorush
The whole of the Middle East and Most of Africa are in the slow zone.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Directional WiFi into Lebanon, Jordan or Turkey.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Gosh folks, this is really Syria's.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
It was encoded into the very Internet. That will teach them to try and mess with artifacts in the Low Transcend that they don't understand.
You just want www.pus.sy
Do you prefer to wear your tin-foil hat as a helmet, or as a tricorn with a jaunty feather in the band?
..or hang up and dial back in?
Syria isn't Afghanistan. They may not be Europe or the US, but they do have urban centers with modern amenities. Those amenities simply don't penetrate very far outside those areas.
Cellular is just a last mile solution to reach the mobile devices. The actual infrastructure that carries data between cells is primarily a physical network, generally fiber, with some copper to older towers. It's not going to do much to get data in and out of the country if Syrian Telecommunications has shut off the network.
Unless you were just trying to make a joke. In that case, keep trying. Eventually you might.
John
Looks intentional: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/nov/29/syria-blocks-internet
Syrian government claims that this is the result of a "terrorist" (rebel) attack on the main connection cable, and that engineers are working on fixing it.
"appear[s] to have been knocked off line by heavy fighting earlier this morning." - uhhhh, no. Unless they were specifically all targeting some ruthless fiber optic cable or they managed to level their entire country, I don't think it happened by random chance. 10% of internet connections in Syria would be random chance.
Are you sure you don't mean the Unthinking Depths?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
Still might be worth throwing together a proof of concept, hmm...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Dude, curse you! you made me spit out my banana cream pie at my waitress.
.. spit out my banana cream pie at my waitress.
At the cheesecake factory?
Not your typical Syria-related locale but yes, busted. Hmmm, goat-cheese falafel factory.
Yep, not to take sides in this at all, BUT...'Palestine' is not a nation, country or even a single collection/race of people. Palestinians are a mixed bag of several ethnic groups & have never been a single people or nation, per se.
Having said that, Israel never existed as a nation or had any recognised borders in the region until 1948, yet lay prior claim to the land - "God gave it to us!".
So, who is right, the Muslim with 500 years & 20+ generations of people already living there, or the Jew, who was there 2000-5000+ years ago & has withstood everything God, nature and man have thrown against him since the early days...?
There's a mythos you don't expect to see much anymore. Even Vinge himself mocked it, in Rainbows End. Though he mocked the whole thing, including Tines. Tines definitely never took hold, but the Zones of Thought sure proliferated for a while. It's too bad the contents of Orion's Arm really can't be turned into a game. An MMO in that universe could have been interesting, if it wasn't for the fact that all the interesting parts can't be depicted.
Syrian internet is dead!
(Ok, I know it's overused... but in this case it could actually apply!)
I'm an individual! Just like everyone else!
Under certian circumstances might we all agree that a people have the right to emergency communication when under oppression?
Perhaps a certian human rights document needs to be unanimously agreed to in modern times which includes unubstructed secret communications with anyone in the world or beyond.
Just my 2cents worth...
From their email of 1600 yesterday...
davecb@spamcop.net
See especially JP Hogan's Voyage From Yesteryear: http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
BTW, some social semantic desktop ideas to consider for Tonika (but in Java): https://github.com/pdfernhout/Pointrel20120623
Something to cosider on social organziation: http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."
Se also on new economic balances my "Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vK-M_e0JoY
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.