Malaysia to emulate Egypt comes GE 13 ?
Egypt cuts off internet access
By Charles Arthur
Friday 28 January 2011
guardian.co.uk
Most of the major internet service providers in Egypt are offline following week-long protests
Egyptians protest Mubarak
Egypt appears to have cut off almost all access to the internet from inside and outside the country from late on Thursday night, in a move that has concerned observers of the protests that have been building in strength through the week.
“According to our analysis, 88% of the ‘Egyptian internet’ has fallen off the internet,” said Andree Toonk at BGPmon, a monitoring site that checks connectivity of countries and networks.
“What’s different in this case as compared to other ‘similar’ cases is that all of the major ISP’s seem to be almost completely offline. Whereas in other cases, social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter were typically blocked, in this case the government seems to be taking a shotgun approach by ordering ISPs to stop routing all networks.”
The cutoff appears to have happened around 10.30pm GMT on Thursday night.
Only one internet service provider appears to still have a working connection to the outside world: the Noor Group, for which all 83 routes are working, and inbound traffic from its connection provider, Telecom Italia, also working.
Protests in Egypt at the government’s rule have been building all week, and Friday was expected to see the largest demonstrations so far.
An analysis by Renesys, which provides real-time monitoring of internet access, says that “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.”
That has caused concern among observers who believe that internet access – which the Egyptian government limited earlier this week by cutting off social networks – is essential to ensure that government acts responsibly towards its citizens. Tim Bray, an engineer at Google, tweeted: “I feel that as soon as the world can’t use the net to watch, awful things will start happening.”
Nearer My God
Renesys found that: “At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.”
The company notes that Noor Group is the only working connection: “Why was Noor Group apparently unaffected by the countrywide takedown order? Unknown at this point, but we observe that the Egyptian Stock Exchange is still alive at a Noor address.”
Egypt blocks social media websites in attempted clampdown on unrest
Facebook, Google, Hotmail and Twitter among services blocked by government, report users
Charles Arthur, technology editor
Guardian UK
26th January 2011
Ben Ali and Mubarak
Internet sites such as Twitter and Facebook were cut off within Egypt today as the government of President Hosni Mubarak tried to prevent social media from being used to foment unrest.
Many sites registered in Egypt could not be reached from outside, according to Herdict.org, a website where users report access problems.
Twitter, YouTube, Hotmail, Google, Chinese search engine Baidu and a “proxy service” – which would allow users to evade obvious restrictions – appeared to be blocked from inside the country, according to reports on the site.
Twitter said blocking was intermittent and some users were able to tweet while Bambuser, a Swedish site for streaming video from mobile phones, said it had been blocked after being used by some protesters this week.
Nigga Please
About 24%, or 19.2 million, of Egypt’s 80 million population have internet access, usually through internet cafes, mobile internet or “public information technology clubs”. About 1m have home access via computer.
Far more people – about 26 million – have mobile phones, so protests could be organised via text message. Vodafone, one of the two largest mobile phone operators there, said it was not responsible for blocking Twitter. “It’s a problem all over Egypt and we are waiting for a solution.”
Other reports say the government has disabled mobile phone towers and the telephone service, and that all communications have been disrupted. This could not be confirmed.
The government could order internet service providers to filter out services or block sites, but usually cracks down on writers and bloggers. In 2009 the Committee to Protect Journalists listed Egypt as one of the 10 worst countries for bloggers because of the tendency to arrest critics.
The government might have ordered the military to commandeer communications centres, leading to the blocking.
But any piecemeal attempt to identify sites being used to organise protests or beam video to the outside world will inevitably lead to a cat and mouse game between the authorities and protesters, who will be able to stay one step ahead.
Meanwhile, Egyptian government websites were targeted in return by Anonymous, the group of hackers who take on opponents they see as unpopular or oppressive. Reports suggested that a number of official sites had been hacked or put offline.
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