Hi, Bob, Very interesting article. Thanks. here is another excellent technical one: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=egypt-internet-mubarak
I have spent the last three days analyzing and consulting on events in Egypt and the region and I am impressed by how rapidly information started flowing out of Egypt after the Internet and cell-phone cut-off. There was a 5-6 hour period in which news was severely truncated and spotty (maybe due to the fact that the cut-off was made just after midnight and it took people to wake up in the morning before they began to find work-arounds. By the12 hours after the cut-off I would say that the flow of information was perhaps 70% as good as it would have been without the cut-off. I am referring here to publicly available info. Information flows from the US and other embassies were essentially unaffected; there, the information limitations were that embassy personnel could not reach their regular sources and contacts in the Egyptian government for explanations. Interestingly, the major international news agencies seemed to have the same satellite uplinks in Cairo that they had in Baghdad when the US started bombing, and of course these were not subject to the cut-off. With these news agencies the limitations on information flow seemed mostly to reflect the fear that their correspondents had in going out into the streets, fears legitimate in Baghdad but not in Cairo. Part of my work is to put out estimates on Mubarak's likelihood of staying in power. As of 1100 hrs EST, this estimate was 92% that he will be toppled, compared to 50% two a half days ago when we began tracking this. Our next to last estimate was 85%, late last night. The continued strength of the demonstrations, the growingly common fraternization between the demonstrators and the army forces that Mubarak ordered in the major cities, and the withdrawal of the special internal police forces to a cordon around the Presidential palace account for the 85% to 92% movement in the estimate that Mubarak will go. We will be updating this as news continues to come in. Cheers, Lawry On Jan 29, 2011, at 10:50 AM, Robert Stennett wrote: > http://gigaom.com/2011/01/28/how-egypt-switched-off-the-internet/ > > > How Egypt Switched Off the Internet > > By Bobbie Johnson Jan. 28, 2011, 7:33am PST > Amid spreading protests, the Egyptian government has taken the incredible > step of shutting down all communications late Thursday. Only a handful of web > connections, including those to the nation’s stock exchange, remain up and > running. > > It’s an astonishing move, and one that seems almost unimaginable for a nation > that not only has a relatively strong Internet economy but also relies on its > connections to the rest of the world. > > But how did the government actually do it? Is there a big kill switch inside > Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s office? Do physical cables have to be > destroyed? Can a lockdown like this work? > > Plenty of nations place limitations on communications, sometimes very severe > ones. But there are only a few examples of regimes shutting down > communications entirely — Burma’s military leaders notably cut connectivity > during the protests of 2007, and Nepal did a similar thing after the king > took control of the government in 2005 as part of his battle against > insurgents. Local Chinese authorities have also conducted similar, > short-lived blockades. > > The OpenNet Initiative has outlined two methods by which most nations could > enact such shutdowns. Essentially, officials can either close down the > routers which direct traffic over the border — hermetically sealing the > country from outsiders — or go further down the chain and switch off routers > at individual ISPs to prevent access for most users inside. > > In its report on the Burmese crackdown, ONI suggests the junta used the > second option, something made easier because it owns the only two Internet > service providers in the country. > > The Burmese Autonomous System (AS), which, like any other AS, is composed of > several hierarchies of routers and provides the Internet infrastructure > in-country. A switch off could therefore be conducted at the top by shutting > off the border router(s), or a bottom up approach could be followed by first > shutting down routers located a few hops deeper inside the AS. > > A high-level traffic analysis of the logs of NTP (Network Time Protocol) > servers indicates that the border routers corresponding to the two ISPs were > not turned off suddenly. Rather, our analysis indicates that this was a > gradual process. > > While things aren’t clear yet, this doesn’t look like the pattern seen in > Egypt, where the first indications of Internet censorship came earlier this > week with the blockades against Twitter and Facebook, but when access > disappeared, it disappeared fast, with 90 percent of connections dropping in > an instant. > > Analysis by Renesys, an Internet monitoring body, indicates the shutdown > across the nation’s major Internet service providers was at precisely the > same time, 12:34 a.m. EET (22:34 UTC): > > Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to > Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table … The Egyptian > government’s actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the > global map. > > Instead, the signs are that the Egyptian authorities have taken a very > careful and well-planned method to screen off Internet addresses at every > level, from users inside the country trying to get out and from the rest of > the world trying to get in. > > “It looks like they’re taking action at two levels,” Rik Ferguson of Trend > Micro told me. “First at the DNS level, so any attempt to resolve any address > in .eg will fail — but also, in case you’re trying to get directly to an > address, they are also using the Border Gateway Protocol, the system through > which ISPs advertise their Internet protocol addresses to the network. Many > ISPs have basically stopped advertising any internet addresses at all.” > > Essentially, we’re talking about a system that no longer knows where anything > is. Outsiders can’t find Egyptian websites, and insiders can’t find anything > at all. It’s as if the postal system suddenly erased every address inside > America — and forgot that it was even called America in the first place. > > A complete border shutdown might have been easier, but Egypt has made sure > that there should be no downstream impact, no loss of traffic in countries > further down the cables. That will ease the diplomatic and economic pressure > from other nations, and make it harder for protesters inside the country to > get information in and out. > > Ferguson suggests that, if nothing else, the methods used by the Egyptian > government prove how fragile digital communication really is. > > “What struck me most is that we’ve been extolling the virtues of the Internet > for democracy and free speech, but an incident like this demonstrates how > easy it is — particularly in a country where there’s a high level of > governmental control — to just switch this access off.” > > > _______________________________________________ > Futurework mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
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