Amid spreading protests the Egyptian government has taken that hard step of bringing down the internet across the country by late Thursday. There are a lot of hot discussions are happening around it on human right violation, Government Policies, right or wrong etc etc.. But the wonder to me was how they might have executed this ? Is there a single point of control like a switch, where you can make it off and on ? or do they cut the pysical media ie. network cables? is such kinds of lock-down really work? Burma, China, Nepal like many countries have imposed controls over internet usage in the past years. But none of them was like this - a complete shut down.
According to "Access Controlled" - a book written by MIT people as part of OpenNet Initiative describes two main ways to achieve complete control - one is to switch off the routers which is the traffic gateway to your country, second is to go even one step down and switch off each of the ISP's routers so that none of them can do trafficking. So the Egyptian approach can be either of the two. According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, at 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), they observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Some mobile services were also got affected. But it seems some of the ISPs were functional, who were providing internet to Egyptian stock exchange. According to the Inernet Society (ISOC), virtually all of Egypt's router were off at the same time, up on this the authorities have reported that they have taken down the Egyptian country code domain name servers (DNS). So none of the domains having ".eg" suffix wont be reachable. But internet traffic through Egypt to the rest of the world is not blocked (Flag Tecom for example) but all traffic that is coming IN to and going OUT of Egypt is being blocked. So this blocking has been done intelligently without affecting the world internet traffic but at the same time isolating the country from outside world by all digital means. So that they could handle the diplomatic and economical pressures from other countries and make it harder for insiders to reach out the world. Though the initial censorship was on facebook and twitter (here) and many of the Egyptians were able to dodge this using tools like Tor,VPSN, Hotspot sheilds, Proxy sites etc, but this final cut has made the end of digital communication to them.
Finally all these remembers me is that as long as these kinda locks doesn't fall on us, the cyberspace is pure democratic. Basically internet is not just me and my friends , my government also matters.
According to "Access Controlled" - a book written by MIT people as part of OpenNet Initiative describes two main ways to achieve complete control - one is to switch off the routers which is the traffic gateway to your country, second is to go even one step down and switch off each of the ISP's routers so that none of them can do trafficking. So the Egyptian approach can be either of the two. According to internet monitoring firm Renesys, at 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), they observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Some mobile services were also got affected. But it seems some of the ISPs were functional, who were providing internet to Egyptian stock exchange. According to the Inernet Society (ISOC), virtually all of Egypt's router were off at the same time, up on this the authorities have reported that they have taken down the Egyptian country code domain name servers (DNS). So none of the domains having ".eg" suffix wont be reachable. But internet traffic through Egypt to the rest of the world is not blocked (Flag Tecom for example) but all traffic that is coming IN to and going OUT of Egypt is being blocked. So this blocking has been done intelligently without affecting the world internet traffic but at the same time isolating the country from outside world by all digital means. So that they could handle the diplomatic and economical pressures from other countries and make it harder for insiders to reach out the world. Though the initial censorship was on facebook and twitter (here) and many of the Egyptians were able to dodge this using tools like Tor,VPSN, Hotspot sheilds, Proxy sites etc, but this final cut has made the end of digital communication to them.
Finally all these remembers me is that as long as these kinda locks doesn't fall on us, the cyberspace is pure democratic. Basically internet is not just me and my friends , my government also matters.
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