Egypt internet black out.

[[SS]Midnight]

Saw this link on the TTL forums. ...wow.

Egypt Leaves the Internet
By James Cowie on January 27, 2011 7:56 PM

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/...internet.shtml

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

[Tagger]

Why bother stealing FB passwords like Tunisia when you can just hit the off switch?

[Tagger]

China Doesn't Want People Talking About Egyptian Uprising Online


"Whatever you think of how much impact social media has had on recent political uprisings and protests around the globe, it appears that many governments are worried about the impact. We've already seen how Egypt shut down the internet to try to slow down communication among protesters. And there's at least some sense of dominoes falling, with Egypt following Tunisia, and a few protests starting to show up in a few other countries around the Middle East.

It looks like China has decided not to risk being the next domino by having the various microblogging/social network sites in that country block any mention of Egypt. I do wonder how effective that move actually is. Once people realize it, won't that just make them wonder why, and make them more likely to seek out info on Egypt?"

[Tagger]

Sorry for triple posting. But, I wanted to post this before heading home:

A Look At How Egypt Shut Down The Internet


"from the a-few-phone-calls dept
With Egypt taking the extreme step of shutting down the internet last week, a lot of people started wondering just how does a country go about doing that. According to a report by Ryan Singel at Wired, the answer appears to be with a series of phone calls to ISPs. Wired published this telling image from Arbor Networks, that shows just how dramatic the cut off was:


The report notes that while there isn't anything like a big red "stop the internet" button, and there are a variety of different internet providers, it's still possible to shut them all down with just a few phone calls. And you can kind of see that in the fact that the turn off didn't all happen exactly at once, but there were a series of drops over the course of a few hours, leading up to that big drop off. The report does note that at least one ISP, Noor, appears to still be operating, which appears to represent that tiny bit of blue at the bottom of the chart.

It looks like ISPs as a bottleneck may be yet another piece of internet infrastructure that's a bit too centralized."