@politisite: The world has indeed changed.. when demands are not for food or shelter but Twitter and facebook #egypt
This is a twitter post from several days concerning the unprecedented attempt of the Egyptian government to block the Internet from 27 January 2011. They successfully blocked the social media sites - Twitter, Facebook, and limited access to Yahoo and Google, Youtube.
According to Jillian York, a project coordinator at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, "The government does not have a central control point for the Internet, which means it must rely on being able to force ISPs to comply." Which is exactly what happened.
The easiest way to disconnect a country from the Internet is to cut the cables that leave the country. Egypt has a bunch of sea cables that go across the Mediterranean to Italy, and a few others that visit other Mediterranean destinations. Other cables run through the Red Sea towards east Africa and in the direction of India and beyond. But actually the fiber backbone that runs under the sea and across Egypt for international traffic seems unaffected. So something else happened. It should be noted that Egypt has only 4 major ISPs.
Renesys, an internet security firm based in Manchester, N.H., has observed that nearly all of the routes to Egypt were simultaneously withdrawn, starting at about 5 p.m. Eastern Standard Time Thursday night and 12:34 a.m. in Egypt. "Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn," the company wrote, "leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers."
A chart prepared by RIPE provides a glimpse at how Egypt's network went dark, shutting down 90% drop in data traffic to and from Egypt. Egyptian authorities are also reported to have stunted net access by shutting down official Domain Name Servers (DNS) in Egypt.
Renesys also noted that the only unaffected was Noor Group, which had 83 live routes, and which supports the Egyptian Stock Exchange. According to the article, this is an excellent planning on behalf of the Stocke Exchange, which was probably left online in order to continue work on 31 January.
Renesys reported: "Our new observation is that this was not an instantaneous event on the front end; each service provider approached the task of shutting down its part of the Egyptian Internet separately.
• Telecom Egypt (AS8452), the national incumbent, starts the process at 22:12:43.• Raya joins in a minute later, at 22:13:26.
• Link Egypt (AS24863) begins taking themselves down 4 minutes later, at 22:17:10.
• Etisalat Misr (AS32992) goes two minutes later, at 22:19:02
• Internet Egypt (AS5536) goes six minutes later, at 22:25:10.
First impressions: this sequencing looks like people getting phone calls, one at a time, telling them to take themselves off the air."
After Egypt fell of the grid, the world saw a new way of activism - offering dial-up connections to people so they can connect and to continue informing the world through social media, pictures, videos, and to organize the protest online. Here are some examples:
Today (01/02/2011), the internet access was resumed and according to renesys blog post all major Egyptian ISPs looked like they readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table:
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Update (13:36 UTC): We confirm that Facebook and Twitter are up and available inside Egypt, at least from the places we can monitor. No traffic blocks are in place, DNS answers are clean, IP addresses match,
no funny business. For now.
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Resources:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9206980/Egypt_s_Internet_block_aims_at_social_media
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12306041
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/the-internet-goes-dark-in-egypt/613
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml
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