[LINK] Egypt shuts off Internet
Jan Whitaker
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
Fri Jan 28 18:16:46 AEDT 2011
The day part of the Internet died: Egypt goes dark
JORDAN ROBERTSON
January 28, 2011 - 5:50PM
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About a half-hour past midnight Friday morning in Egypt, the Internet
went dead.
Almost simultaneously, the handful of companies that pipe the
Internet into and out of Egypt went dark as protesters were gearing
up for a fresh round of demonstrations calling for the end of
President Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30-year rule, experts said.
Egypt has apparently done what many technologists thought was
unthinkable for any country with a major Internet economy: It
unplugged itself entirely from the Internet to try and silence dissent.
Experts say it's unlikely that what's happened in Egypt could happen
in the United States because the U.S. has numerous Internet providers
and ways of connecting to the Internet. Coordinating a simultaneous
shutdown would be a massive undertaking.
"It can't happen here," said Jim Cowie, the chief technology officer
and a co-founder of Renesys, a network security firm in Manchester,
New Hampshire, that studies Internet disruptions. "How many people
would you have to call to shut down the U.S. Internet? Hundreds,
thousands maybe? We have enough Internet here that we can have our
own Internet. If you cut it off, that leads to a philosophical
question: Who got cut off from the Internet, us or the rest of the world?"
In fact, there are few countries anywhere with all their central
Internet connections in one place or so few places that they can be
severed at the same time. But the idea of a single "kill switch" to
turn the Internet on and off has seduced some American lawmakers, who
have pushed for the power to shutter the Internet in a national emergency.
The Internet blackout in Egypt shows that a country with strong
control over its Internet providers apparently can force all of them
to pull their plugs at once, something that Cowie called "almost
entirely unprecedented in Internet history."
[more at http://news.theage.com.au/action/printArticle?id=2156780 ]
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or
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~Madeline L'Engle, writer
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