[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
Advertisement

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 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

_ __________________ _



More information about the Link mailing list