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Syria Falls Off the Internet Again
New submitter briancox2 writes with news that all internet traffic from Syria has disappeared. Umbrella Security Labs explains:
"Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP distributes routing information and makes sure all routers on the Internet know how to get to a certain IP address. When an IP range becomes unreachable it will be withdrawn from BGP, this informs routers that the IP range is no longer reachable. For example, one of the name servers for the DNS zone .SY is ns1.tld.sy with IP address 82.137.200.85. Normally our routers would expect a BGP route for 82.137.192.0/18. Currently that route has disappeared and we no longer have a way to reach the nameservers for .SY that reside in Syria. ... Currently there are just three routes in the BGP routing tables for Syria, while normally it’s close to eighty. ... Effectively, the shutdown disconnects Syria from Internet communication with the rest of the world."
...they use Centurylink.
Have you read my blog lately?
has the nation Syria also fallen into a black hole? please?
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Oh Snap the net is down!
Well someone plug it back in! Also, I'm pretty sure you have to use a crossover cable when connecting one Internet to another.
Had absolutely nothing to do with it!
Glad to know Umbrella Corp is diversifying. When can I order my clone of Milla?
The "non-TOR" internet does not route around damaged sections.
Forgive me for a moment, but that's exactly what the Internet was designed to do. This is accomplished via routing protocols which store multiple routes to a single destination in the event of failure.
Unless you're trying to imply that TOR is a superior "type" of Internet, in which case it should be pointed out that TOR is simply an application which runs on top of all of the fiber, copper, and wireless links built by current providers. So it really doesn't matter if someone either physically cuts the cord or starts filtering your routes, TOR will not function without the underlying layers of physical and network connectivity.
When a government attempts to squelch dissent, too often they wind up resorting to suppression of the freedom of speech and access to information. The internet, a luxury to many of us living large 1st-World lives, is the epitome of freedom in the Third World.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Obviously I don't understand networking all that well. How do you cut off a whole country from the internet?
It would be interesting to find out how Syria is physically connected to the Internet, and who the operators on both sides actually are.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Releasing the Skynet virus into Syria requires them to be disconnected from the rest of the world.
This might not have had anything to do with Basar Al Assad (or whatever) and his fight with rebels. It could just be they tried to migrate Syria to Windows 8...
If Syria can't make it back to technological civilization can we have their IPV4 address space,then?
Everyone assumes that this was done deliberately but Syria is in the middle of a civil war and technical problems could be just as likely. I imagine router replacement parts would be hard to come by at the very least.
Obviously Syria hates freedom, someone should feed them a helping heap of freedom!
Censorship != Damage ........
Now I do wonder, what the true issue is?
Snarkieness aside something is wrong. I wonder what it is.
In conflicts communication traffic analysis is commonly used to predict offensive or other major actions. Total communication blackouts will often hide troop movements (either side) or block information about movements so defensive or counter offensive actions can take place.
The optimist in me wants to believe a backhoe dug up a cable.
The pessimist in me wonders about a major escalation that could be internal or at a border. What if the rumor that Sadat moved his WMD to another country for what might now prove to be unsafe keeping.
Time to watch the news.... or in the case of a large conflict watch the city wide smoke signals.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
civil war - A war between citizens of the same country. Al-qaeda affiliated terrorists or not as long as the vast majority of rebels are Syrian citizens, which they are, than its a civil war
And nothing of value was lost
those Dell "PCs" that they bought!!!
THeres a limit to what it can do. Thats like saying "if my RAID6 array fails when 3 drives go down, then its not providing redundancy". Sure it is, you just exceeded its capacity to do so.
If Syria has dropped off the internet due to the inaccessibility of the .sy domain, then, the internet is not routing around the damage.
I see where you are coming from, but I think you're still confusing the issue. The .sy domain is inaccessible as a result of Syria withdrawing its routes from the global BGP table. Since Routing Protocols like BGP operate at a lower layer than DNS and TOR, these services are unavailable as a result. So while TOR may be able to help if Syria were simply filtering DNS, this is not the case.
It's like having your arm chopped off and wondering why you can't move your fingers.
Get with the times and stop posting rubbish that is 20 years out of date.
The Internet is still built on routing protocol which is almost 20 years old. This is the reality that we face. Whether you believe it to be rubbish or not is irrelevant - if a country can control which routes it advertises in this manner, a major redesign (or a new global routing protocol) would be required to work around it.
You can't just route around something like this, something has happened (or been done on purpose) to remove the Syrian IP blocks from the Internet. Tor runs on top of the existing infrastructure (IP, frame relay, whatever) and cannot function without it. Tor can do nothing to fix a problem like this.
Then every other country US (and it's allies) indirectly invaded is in fact a civil war of that country.
To quote a wikipedia article on the subject:
"Due to significant involvement, both direct and indirect, of foreign nations and militant groups, the conflict is sometimes described as a proxy war.[442]"
Civil war.. with dozens of countries involved and same number of dodgy groups linked to cia and al-qaida. Right. If it makes you feel better.
Interestingly I saw a prediction of this in the comments section of the Guardian newspapers Syria coverage a couple of weeks ago. The comment noted that this would be in order to hide violent action by government troops.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Correction to a factual error. The Israelis bombed Syrian government installations - reputedly to destroy weapons en-route to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Here you go https://yallasouriya.wordpress.com/ - a well known "rebel" blog says:
#yallasouriya 12:39 am on May 8, 2013 Permalink | Log in to leave a Comment
#Syria Internet dial up info
Pass this to #Syria, a way to get back into internet
Dial up access #Syria: +46850009990 +492317299993 +4953160941030 user:telecomix password:telecomix OR +33172890150 login:toto password:toto
IT HAS STARTED – INTERNET CONNECTION IS BEGINNING TO GO OUT IN SYRIA!
The local news media in #Homs, Syria said it would happen and it has begun. Warn your Syrian friends to be prepared for the worst, and pray for the best. God Bless Syria!Black heart (cards)
via Anonymous News Network & Hope Merrett
URGENT: Please share with media and humanitarian organisations
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
The Boston Police Department is under surveillance by the FBI, CIA, Treasury and even DoD units.
The Chief, when learning of the undercover investigation made a rash decision to pulled the plug on the Main District Office sending 5 blocks of Boston into darkness. This was necessary for the Chief to go to the basement and start dismantling the Meth Lab installed there and disposing of raw cocaine and other assorted drug culture items beloved by the 'Officers' of the BPD.
America, Russia, and China all benefit from keeping their proxy war semi-secret.
Seriously, I am curious, would it be possible/feasible to create a more decentralized infrastructure eg. by using (many) wireless transmitters instead of just "one big cable"? I am also wondering the same thing for big cities ... why the heck doesn't my house have an inbuilt network (that is owned by the house owner, not some isp) and is directly connected to its neighbor buildings? I mean, seriously, if enough people do this then it should be possible to route most traffic through that internal network instead of having to rely on the ISP (and it also promotes people to offer their own content/services/whatever as they have a pretty awesome connection by default).
This is obviously the work of sharks trained by the US government.
Both sides in this conflict are evil, so I'd say nothing is lost if news about Syria can't be accessed from the internet.
TOR would route around these issues with minimal effort. The internet as it is now known, is being controlled and censored. The internet as it was, is now TOR. Get with the times and stop posting rubbish that is 20 years out of date.
So you are seriously claiming that TOR will work when the computer it is installed on has no IP address or no connection to the Internet at all???
Really?
Go install TOR on a laptop. Unplug it from the ethernet and turn off the wifi card.
Just TRY to use TOR that way, and you will find out exactly how stupidly wrong you are.
But would it be possible for the insurgents to take control of the physical network in the areas they control, negotiate and set up new connections to networks in the neighboring countries?
I guess the telco(s) i Syria have more or less a star topology infrastructure with the hub in or near Damascus, and I guess the international connections use dedicated fibers from the hub to similar hubs in other countries, as well as satellite links and possibly some forms of terrestial point-to-point radio links.
How hard would it be to reconnect equipment they get hold of, and reorganize the topology?
If some of the dedicated fibers carrying international traffic, pass through rebel territory, can they connect to these links, eg. at the repeaters?
There is no substitute for common sense. Especially, no body of rules will do.
like The Onion scorned.
al-CIA-da rebels backed by israel have cut the cables, so Syrian people can't post about the incasion
The Internet is routing around the damage, the damage in this case happens to be called "Syria."
I am sure this is not connected to Israel's deniable nuclear weapons...
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
What's "pretty bloody obvious" is that you have no clue about how the Internet works.
There was a problem was cabling in the sea, is that it again???
Theere's only so much routing around damage that can be done, particularly when authoritiesb don't want the damage routed around.. This is technology, not magic.
OTOH, if some people around the borders put up radio links into less oppressive places, they can route around the damage to an extent.
From the article, one of Syria's tld nameservers is unreachable. That shoudln't affect in any way the ability of folks in Syria to access any website that doesn't have a .sy extension, and it also shouldn't affect the rest of the world's ability to access any websites in Syria that have another tld. The headline is misleading.
This is akin to saying that I've fallen off the Internet if the DNS servers for my domain name are offline. While you can't get to my website, you can certainly get to other websites on the same server if they're using other DNS servers, and I can still continue to work normally because my ability to resolve my own hostnames is not a requirement for me to access the rest of the Internet.