Spammers do this all the time (on a temporary basis) and they might do it here.
As far as IANA stepping in, ain't gonna happen. Too politically charged, and you don't have to announce your blocks. Lots of people (including the US DOD) use some of their blocks internally and never announce them.
If I had to guess, I would suspect that either there is a choke point or points (say, at the landing stations for the undersea cables coming into Egypt), or that the Egyptian government has a choke-hold on the 4 main ISPs there. Either way, the peers seem to be physically up, just not announcing many address blocks (or those announcements are blocked).
As always, I wonder whose gear they are using to do this, and who might be advising them.
Like BGPMon, they note that the Noor Data group has not been shut off, and note that the "the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address." I have to suspect that this is not a coincidence.
One has to wonder what economic damage will be done by disconnecting a whole country from the Internet. Keeping the stock exchange on-line may not be enough.
There is a quick look BGP level analysis available from BGPMon. Except for Noor Data Networks, the number of announced address blocks is way down. This means that most Egyptian IP addresses are now not reachable from the rest of the world.
Here is BGPMon on the dating of the outage :
At this point egypt.gov.eg is offline. This network, 81.21.104.0/24 was withdrawn at January 27th at 22:28 UTC . Another example is www.ahram.org.eg an Egyptian news paper. This network 196.219.246.0/24, became unreachable at the exact same time, January 27th at 22:28 UTC.
I think that it is safe to assume that this outage is related to the big protests planned for tomorrow.
Du'h. It's different because this is a new proposal. Drastically change the amount of reporting required of accountants, and you would get comments about that too.
It would be safer (and probably more useful in practice) to figure out a way to find out where they are or if they are overhead. You are unlikely to spot them just glancing into the sky, but they radiate RF, and that should be detectable.
The same police who shoot people and routinely lie about it and almost never get punished can be trusted not to use these new toys to spy on people salaciously ? What BS. What will happen if they are caught ? Nothing. So, it will go on.
In this context, spam means web sites that don't actually contain any real content, just junk text, lists of keywords, etc., together with paid links or banner ads and the like. They won't answer any question you may have, unless you are asking to see more spam. There is more and more of this crap, and it dominates some web search queries.
I think that the solid consensus among the people I know that track such things is that the spammers are winning and the quality of search is going down. I know that this is my own experience. That may or may not mean that Google is slacking off, but I don't think that perception comes from thin air.
Open Source is a very detailed specification since it is the code doing the thing it is supposed to do.
No, it is not.
Code is
1.) a very poor means of documenting a standard and
2.) subject to change if not standardized.
If you doubt #1, imagine you bought a computer game from me and, when you asked how to play it and what the rules were, I said, "it's an open source game, read the source code."
To add just a little, open standards and open source are optimized differently.
A standard is used for interoperability. So, if I am going to write some program that interoperates with what you are doing, I have to know what you are doing (i.e., there has to be a standard). This has to be published in some fashion, maybe totally freely (IETF standards are free to all), maybe not quite freely (you have to pay to get most MPEG standards). Most standards (if they get adopted) have many independent implementations. The Internet requires interoperability, and so this works well with the Internet. RAND is in many cases the Internet equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) - company X won't sue companies A,B and C over patent Z, because, if they do, companies A, B and C will sue X over a host of RAND term patents they hold, each such suit costing X millions of dollars.
Now, typically in open source the code is the thing. Many open source projects have no need to be an open standard, as they don't really have to interoperate with anything. I get a copy of the code, and install it. I may not care in the least what the code is doing "under the hood," but it needs to work. The details of the code's internal working may not be clear at all, even if I read the code. But, at long as it works (and I don't have to maintain or extend the code), this is of secondary importance. For this, I want access to the code, but the principles behind it are less interesting.
Video is an interesting intermediate case where there are lots of proprietary solutions and an open source project can gain traction, but people want interoperability, so developers need to know how the underlying video protocol works so they can implement it in their own video system, browsers, etc.. So, ideally video should be open source, but unless we are all going to just rely on Adobe it has to be an open standard. H.264 is an open standard moving in the direction of RAND on line (but not fully there yet), WebM is an open source moving in the direction of an open standard. We'll see which gains the most traction in the new world of HTML5; my guess is that both will, as I bet both will do what it takes to match the other.
There are open standards, and open source, and they are not the same. The IETF, for example (subject to yesterdays Birthday Article) deals with open standards. Linux, by contrast, is open source.
An open standard means that no one party controls the generation of the standard, and that the standard is openly available. Generally, open standards are developed by SDOs (Standards Defining Organizations, such as the IETF or the W3C). As a general rule "anyone" can participate in their creation (but this may require that you or your company be a member of some organization or have some other qualifications). Many open standards have patent encumbrances. Typically, SDOs seek RAND (Reasonable and NonDiscriminatory) licensing terms; some even require a particular patent licensing policy as a condition for participation. The IETF, however, requires disclosure and seeks, but does not strictly require, RAND terms. While an open standard may have some code associated with it, typically the entire point of an open standard is to allow you to go off and write your own code, generally under whatever code license you want. This is how the Internet was developed.
Open source means that the source is licensed by GPL or BSD> or some similar licensing. Now, generally open source means that the code is available, but in practice many open source projects are more or less closed to outside participation, and they frequently do not provide documentation sufficient to replicate what they are doing.
The IETF does not legally exist, and has no members (legal or otherwise). The IETF Trust does legally exit, to hold IETF copyrights and trademarks, and ISOC (a 501(3)c charity) serves to support the IETF, although there is nothing legally binding the IETF to ISOC (nor could there be, as non-existant entities cannot enter into binding contracts).
Actually, they are. MPEG-LA has said that H.264 will be permanently royalty free for Internet broadcast video. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but my understanding is that they cannot retract that. They might even lose the rights to enforce their patents if they tried. (Again, you are insane if you rely on slashdot for legal advice, from me or anyone else.)
Now, a new party could come along and sue, but that is true for WebM or any other standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Spammers do this all the time (on a temporary basis) and they might do it here.
As far as IANA stepping in, ain't gonna happen. Too politically charged, and you don't have to announce your blocks. Lots of people (including the US DOD) use some of their blocks internally and never announce them.
Are you sure that they did this transfer recently ? Have a link ? It is not trivial to do on short notice.
If I had to guess, I would suspect that either there is a choke point or points (say, at the landing stations for the undersea cables coming into Egypt), or that the Egyptian government has a choke-hold on the 4 main ISPs there. Either way, the peers seem to be physically up, just not announcing many address blocks (or those announcements are blocked).
As always, I wonder whose gear they are using to do this, and who might be advising them.
The Rensys blog has a similar, but more detailed, analysis of the withdrawal of Egyptian BGP announcements.
Like BGPMon, they note that the Noor Data group has not been shut off, and note that the "the Egyptian Stock Exchange (www.egyptse.com) is still alive at a Noor address." I have to suspect that this is not a coincidence.
One has to wonder what economic damage will be done by disconnecting a whole country from the Internet. Keeping the stock exchange on-line may not be enough.
There is a quick look BGP level analysis available from BGPMon. Except for Noor Data Networks, the number of announced address blocks is way down. This means that most Egyptian IP addresses are now not reachable from the rest of the world.
Here is BGPMon on the dating of the outage :
At this point egypt.gov.eg is offline. This network, 81.21.104.0/24 was withdrawn at January 27th at 22:28 UTC . Another example is www.ahram.org.eg an Egyptian news paper. This network 196.219.246.0/24, became unreachable at the exact same time, January 27th at 22:28 UTC.
I think that it is safe to assume that this outage is related to the big protests planned for tomorrow.
Du'h. It's different because this is a new proposal. Drastically change the amount of reporting required of accountants, and you would get comments about that too.
I assume that any Internet measure that mentions child pornography in its preamble is based on false pretenses and should be opposed. It saves time.
"If criminals would always schedule their movements like railway trains, it would certainly be more convenient for all of us."
The Valley of Fear
It would be safer (and probably more useful in practice) to figure out a way to find out where they are or if they are overhead. You are unlikely to spot them just glancing into the sky, but they radiate RF, and that should be detectable.
The same police who shoot people and routinely lie about it and almost never get punished can be trusted not to use these new toys to spy on people salaciously ? What BS. What will happen if they are caught ? Nothing. So, it will go on.
In this context, spam means web sites that don't actually contain any real content, just junk text, lists of keywords, etc., together with paid links or banner ads and the like. They won't answer any question you may have, unless you are asking to see more spam. There is more and more of this crap, and it dominates some web search queries.
I think that the solid consensus among the people I know that track such things is that the spammers are winning and the quality of search is going down. I know that this is my own experience. That may or may not mean that Google is slacking off, but I don't think that perception comes from thin air.
Open Source is a very detailed specification since it is the code doing the thing it is supposed to do.
No, it is not.
Code is
1.) a very poor means of documenting a standard and
2.) subject to change if not standardized.
If you doubt #1, imagine you bought a computer game from me and, when you asked how to play it and what the rules were, I said, "it's an open source game, read the source code."
In the long run, all patents will expire, and so any open standard will eventually become open source.
To add just a little, open standards and open source are optimized differently.
A standard is used for interoperability. So, if I am going to write some program that interoperates with what you are doing, I have to know what you are doing (i.e., there has to be a standard). This has to be published in some fashion, maybe totally freely (IETF standards are free to all), maybe not quite freely (you have to pay to get most MPEG standards). Most standards (if they get adopted) have many independent implementations. The Internet requires interoperability, and so this works well with the Internet. RAND is in many cases the Internet equivalent of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) - company X won't sue companies A,B and C over patent Z, because, if they do, companies A, B and C will sue X over a host of RAND term patents they hold, each such suit costing X millions of dollars.
Now, typically in open source the code is the thing. Many open source projects have no need to be an open standard, as they don't really have to interoperate with anything. I get a copy of the code, and install it. I may not care in the least what the code is doing "under the hood," but it needs to work. The details of the code's internal working may not be clear at all, even if I read the code. But, at long as it works (and I don't have to maintain or extend the code), this is of secondary importance. For this, I want access to the code, but the principles behind it are less interesting.
Video is an interesting intermediate case where there are lots of proprietary solutions and an open source project can gain traction, but people want interoperability, so developers need to know how the underlying video protocol works so they can implement it in their own video system, browsers, etc.. So, ideally video should be open source, but unless we are all going to just rely on Adobe it has to be an open standard. H.264 is an open standard moving in the direction of RAND on line (but not fully there yet), WebM is an open source moving in the direction of an open standard. We'll see which gains the most traction in the new world of HTML5; my guess is that both will, as I bet both will do what it takes to match the other.
There are open standards, and open source, and they are not the same. The IETF, for example (subject to yesterdays Birthday Article) deals with open standards. Linux, by contrast, is open source.
An open standard means that no one party controls the generation of the standard, and that the standard is openly available. Generally, open standards are developed by SDOs (Standards Defining Organizations, such as the IETF or the W3C). As a general rule "anyone" can participate in their creation (but this may require that you or your company be a member of some organization or have some other qualifications). Many open standards have patent encumbrances. Typically, SDOs seek RAND (Reasonable and NonDiscriminatory) licensing terms; some even require a particular patent licensing policy as a condition for participation. The IETF, however, requires disclosure and seeks, but does not strictly require, RAND terms. While an open standard may have some code associated with it, typically the entire point of an open standard is to allow you to go off and write your own code, generally under whatever code license you want. This is how the Internet was developed.
Open source means that the source is licensed by GPL or BSD> or some similar licensing. Now, generally open source means that the code is available, but in practice many open source projects are more or less closed to outside participation, and they frequently do not provide documentation sufficient to replicate what they are doing.
I had to read the post twice to get that the OP was referring to a real, not a virtual, tunnel.
Well, there is the International Essential Tremor Foundation.
That is a rather different IETF.
Or, to put it another way, the IETF does not exist in the same way that the Debian Project does not exist.
There are evidently classes of non-existance, as the IETF does not not exist in the same way that (say) Rivendell does not exist.
The IETF does not legally exist, and has no members (legal or otherwise). The IETF Trust does legally exit, to hold IETF copyrights and trademarks, and ISOC (a 501(3)c charity) serves to support the IETF, although there is nothing legally binding the IETF to ISOC (nor could there be, as non-existant entities cannot enter into binding contracts).
Actually, they are. MPEG-LA has said that H.264 will be permanently royalty free for Internet broadcast video. I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice, but my understanding is that they cannot retract that. They might even lose the rights to enforce their patents if they tried. (Again, you are insane if you rely on slashdot for legal advice, from me or anyone else.)
Now, a new party could come along and sue, but that is true for WebM or any other standard.
Bandwidth != usage. Netflix is not even in the top 100 of web sites. It uses lots of bandwidth because it is a video source.
Won't Chome and Opera also have plugins for H.264 ? Unless those are banned, this
doesn't seem very profound.
You obviously have not talked much with Richard Stallman, Just say the words "intellectual property" in his presence.
No, it is not. Open source is not the same as an open standard in much the same way that an open wallet is not the same as an open store.