How Egypt Switched Off The Internet

http://gigaom.com/2011/01/28/how-egypt-switched-off-the-internet/

by doron • 15 years ago

128 65 15 years ago

ljordan• 15 years ago

Never anywhere have I seen such a flood of hyperbole! Still interesting however.

bradleyland2• 15 years ago

The government of Egypt is actively blocking its population from communicating. There is no such thing as hyperbole in this context.

kilburn• 15 years ago

Warning: this is probably offtopic.

There is an interesting initiative in Spain (http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet) that's trying to build an open (wifi-based, mesh-structured) network. Although the idea always seemed really cool to me, I thought that it was a hopeless effort. On the one hand, the "mainstream" network is much faster and reliable. On the other hand, you need a proxy node to reach the actual Internet.

Nonetheless, this specific news has opened my eyes about the importance of such non-government-controllable networks. For one, it would allow citizens to get in touch with eachother, escaping the government control. Additionally, a single proxy in a neighboring country would be enough so that news could leak.

For these reasons, I'm going to try to join this network asap. Further, I encourage you all to join any similar project going on near you, or try to build one if it doesn't exist.

Let the networking begin!

a0004• 15 years ago

I remember reading recently about a similar project in Germany. Thankfully my failing memory allowed me to google an even better link. Shame they don't seem to have anything in my city. Tech center of the Netherlands, my ass!

idlewords2• 15 years ago

All networks are government-controllable; the only difference is how easy or hard it is for government to do it. Ultimately networks run on physical hardware and men in black boots can go pull the plug (or install a wiretap).

InclinedPlane• 15 years ago

Completely wireless networks only require power. The only way to take them down is to take down every node, when every household in the country could be a node that means the only way to take down the network is to start a civil war.

bradleyland2• 15 years ago

I hate to sound like a paranoid delusional, but this is a time when having even a basic amateur radio license seems like a really great idea. It's not impossible to for the government to shut down the airwaves, but it is a lot harder to do it on a broad scale. Communication is essential to a free society, and it's startling to me that our government wants the same ability. It seems so entirely counter to our core principles as a nation.

boneheadmed• 15 years ago

Never has it been more clear that blocking free expression is the primary tool of tyrants to prevent change and reform within their society.

fwdbureau• 15 years ago

On the other hand, it may temporarily solve the ipv4 address exhaustion issue

ars• 15 years ago

I really hope that's what it will end up being.

But I fear that the actual end result will be an Egypt ruled by one of the Muslim extremist groups that operate there and which are far more organized and poised to take advantage of a power vacuum.

atomical• 15 years ago

It's less clear than you think. It didn't work in Iran and it might not work here. The arrogance in social media will have to be reconciled with failed revolutions.

joubert3• 15 years ago

Or by the western governments who back them.

erikabele3• 15 years ago

Another excellent example on why it is utterly important that we develop open-source GSM tools, both software & hardware.

rst• 15 years ago

So OpenBTS is doing a reasonable job on the base-station side, at least for small call volumes: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Does anyone know of an open-source stack for handsets?

Swannie12• 15 years ago

The problem is, running something like this would be a) illegal due to frequency problems and b) if we leave aside the legal implications, you might be killing valid emergency service calls.

That said I think it's excellent for the direction of future telco developments.

Swannie12• 15 years ago

I seem to be posting this a fair bit recently: * http://www.villagetelco.org/ * http://www.open-mesh.org/

But yes, I've been considering getting one on and off for 12 years. Sadly data over amateur radio doesn't appear to have progressed much in that time. Still, as voice comms it's pretty solid! Some countries UHF radio is still very popular (e.g. Australia).

slug• 15 years ago

It depends what you mean about progress. Digital communications evolved and it's nice to have data capability that can span the globe with a 100W radio (PSK shortwave). The bandwidth is not there, unless you go up in frequency, but then the range is limited without repeaters. I ran a VHF AX.25 node for a long time, using a 486 linux machine and soundcard as modem. With a good antenna and location I had people connecting from 50km or more and with my internet connectivity some even used tcp/ip. I could also connect to other nodes, using my peers as repeaters. My point is although the communication is slow, it's very easy to get something going with cheap radios (mine was a used modified radio from commercial frequencies), homebuilt antennas , computers that nobody wants anymore and of course open source.

tocomment• 15 years ago

It seems kind of ironic to have to get a license to get around services the government might shut down.

sfphotoarts• 15 years ago

you only need a license to broadcast legally, if you're trying to over-throw a government, it would seem unlikely that you'd be too worried about doing it legally.

HAM radio is interesting, because it is the most decentralized form of communications. Cell phones are internet and land lines are all routed through some corporation or government entity. HAM radio relies only on RF propagation. Repeaters are another matter, they can be knocked out, but a decent HF tx will get you a good distance.

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

There are apparently some renegade hackers running HAM radio out of egypt. Apparently theyre sending morse code back and forth.

http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page#Hamradio

"40m band, ~7-7.3 MHz LSB, 318.5 degrees(northwest/north from cairo), Friday night until the morning (16:00-05:00 UTC). ON/KC0SJH will be calling CQ"

They also seem to be coordinating free dialup links. Biggup.

bane• 15 years ago

It'd be good if they could setup a digital packet system instead. On lots of frequencies to prevent jamming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

borism2• 15 years ago

it's not impossible to for the government to shut down the airwaves, but it is a lot harder to do it on a broad scale

it's trivial to jam most ham frequencies.

kgermino• 15 years ago

But is it trivial to jam most ham frequencies across the 3.8 Million Sq. Miles of the U.S.? Or Europe (Same Size)? Or even just Germany (135,000 sq. miles)?

Edit: For comparison Egypt is about 387,000 sq miles.

I realize that you would not have to cover the entire country to be effective, but probably at least 90% of residential areas. Especially in Europe where the radio operators only need to reach over a nearby border.

joubert3• 15 years ago

I tend to be a paranoia cynic (after all, paranoia is a baseless suspicion of others' motives) but our own politicians are up to unsavory shenanigans of their own in this space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_kill_switch

pmchiu• 15 years ago

Why is it surprising that a country could shut down access to the internet? It's not as if the internet is some sort of magic cloud where packets fly in and out to destinations across the world. It's a system. It has points of failure just like anything else. Granted it was built to survive failure but if you didn't build your internet infrastructure like the designers envisioned it's probably pretty easy to turn it off.

When I lived in NYC I was really surprised to find out that most transatlantic cables terminated in this tall windowless building on Duane and Chambers street. If you basically took that building away you probably could turn off the internet for a good portion of people in the US. Or at the very least make it hard.

My point being - in Egypt there probably is a similar building that houses all of their DNS servers, lines to other countries, etc. So its not hard to believe that someone just decided to walk in and turn off the power.

pchristensen• 15 years ago

If this comment is interesting to you, you must read Mother Earth, Motherboard [1]. It's a fantastic long technojournalist piece by Neal Stephenson dealing with transoceanic cables.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

Swannie12• 15 years ago

I tried, I couldn't cope with the writing style. Is it really worth me pushing through it?

jrockway• 15 years ago

Who knows, what with old broken software installed on old broken routers, but there are transpacific cables, and Asia is directly connected to Europe... so I think there would be no loss of Internet functionality in this case. NYC-LON ping times would be a lot higher, of course, but that's exactly why those cables exist -- to make things faster.

idlewords2• 15 years ago

Those links are not designed to suddenly handle all transatlantic traffic in addition to their regular load of J-pop.

adolph• 15 years ago

Analysis by Renesys, an internet monitoring body, indicates... careful and well-planned method .... Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro: "First at the DNS level, so any attempt to resolve any address in .eg will fail — but also, in case you’re trying to get directly to an address, they are also using the Border Gateway Protocol, the system through which ISPs advertise their internet protocol addresses to the network."

A complete border shutdown might have been easier, but Egypt has made sure that there should be no downstream impact, no loss of traffic in countries further down the cables.

Would someone with more network knowledge speak to the role Border Gateway Protocol plays here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

acqq• 15 years ago

The article is full of smart sounding nothing. BDP is the mechanism to say where the routers for some network segment are (where to go to deliver the packet with a given IP). DNS servers for .eg are in Egypt. AFAIK both things "don't work" looking form our side if you turn off the entry routers for the cables leading into Egypt. If they claim that they know that internet does function in Egypt but can't reach anything to the outside, then the question is if the users there see DNS resolution or not. If they don't then the DNS servers are turned off. But I think turning off the mentioned routers is more than enough for behaviour described in the article. Nothing smart.

stcredzero4• 15 years ago

Someone should set up pirate DNS and pirate backbones using sat coms and packet radio to link Egypt with the outside world.

Swannie12• 15 years ago

A good analogy (I think) is real borders. In this case airspace borders.

What Egypt have done would be the equivalent of saying to it's air controllers "Any plane incoming for an Egyptian airport, tell them we don't know where it is." And the only option that plane has is to return home (real analogy: the message gets sent to the source airport and the plane disappears into a black hole).

However, any plane that wishes to fly through Egyptian airspace to reach other countries, that's fine, and get's it's routing directions just fine.

The alternatives that the article are talking about, closing down the "bottom" routers: close down all the airports, instead of the whole airspace. This has the same effect, but is harder to co-ordinate.

A complete border shutdown would be like unplugging the cables... any aircraft flying through the airspace would be blackholed, and aircraft attempting to fly in will be blackholed, any attempting to fly through will be blackholed... all with a polite notice of course.

DNS would be equivalent of keeping the airports open & saying "shut down all the screens and don't let any airline attendant tell people the gate that their plane is flying from" (except that are millions of gates...). If you're smart enough to have written it down (cached), or know the gate directly, then you're still going to make your flight. If you don't, you've no chance of making it. (Let's not add vhosts into the mix... okay, maybe for fun... like arriving at the plane, and them saying "this service stops at 100s of destinations, and you've lost your ticket, so we can't let you board").

pessimist• 15 years ago

Foolish move by the government. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are broadcasting images non-stop, and satellite TV cannot be turned off with a switch. Shutting off communication is ruinous to a modern economy like Egypt. Plus it broadcasts fear and emboldens the protestors. A suicidal move by the government (or so I hope!).

rhizome• 15 years ago

It's all of a piece. After all, Mubarak's response to citizens violating curfew today was to expand the curfew nationwide. "The Frog and the Scorpion" comes to mind.

dfj225• 15 years ago

> Ferguson suggests that, if nothing else, the methods used by the Egyptian government prove how fragile digital communication really is.

I don't think this instance proves how fragile the technology is, rather it proves that you can use this technology to build a system that is easily controlled from a central point. The same technology could have been used to build a robust system that was not easy to shut down completely.

kongqiu• 15 years ago

How much of an opportunity/necessity is developing a redundant, satellite-based internet? (I just asked that on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152845)

rdl3• 15 years ago

Technical and cost factors make satellite basically uninteresting for most markets until Ka band comes out (there is limited use now, such as wild blue in USA, but the satellite with Ka coverage for Mideast was lost due to a launch problem with a rocket, and all other Ka capacity seems to go to HDTV broadcast vs data.

Personally the most interesting thing I see is O3b, which is maybe a year away.

Ku and L are good for limited markets, but just cost too much for YouTube users anywhere with terrestrial alternatives.

Bandwidth efficient protocols and proxies, combined with wifi and pirate gsm mesh networks, which can talk to unmodified laptops and cellphones for end users, are probably the best tech for situations like Egypt or post natural disaster.

CitizenKane• 15 years ago

To try and shed some light here, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol used between routers to communicate which range of IP addresses a router handles. So for instance, my router will advertise to other routers that it handles from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.255 and the other routers will then send traffic bound for those IP addresses to my router.

From what it seems like in the article, the Egyptian government coordinated with ISPs or forced ISPs to simply clear all of these entries. So for IP addresses in Egypt there are no corresponding routing rules, making them for all practical purposes completely taken off the internet since there is now no way to route traffic there.

lacker• 15 years ago

This article claims that .eg urls won't resolve, but I can go to http://www.google.com.eg and that seems to work just fine. Does Google operate differently somehow or is the article just incorrect?

Swannie12• 15 years ago

There's a 14 day expiry on that domain name (at least on 8.8.8.8, google's DNS server). So you should be good for something close to that, my guess, up to 14d - 6h from when the BGP routes were dropped.

So your main issue is for .eg urls that are not cached in the DNS hierarchy you are using. Basically the root servers will direct you to one of (approx) three eg. root servers. These are probably down, or unreachable (due to BGP drops).

To my (basic) understanding of DNS, once your local server knows that ns[1-4].google.com is responsible for this domain, it doesn't need to go to the eg./eg.com. root servers to get updates.

And yes, you're probably getting directed to a "local" version of google.com.eg.

scottyallen• 15 years ago

I use to work on the team that maintains the webserver that serves Google websearch. google.com.eg (and any other google search domain) can be served out of many of Google's datacenters, in various places around the world. The user is sent to the "closest" data center that can serve their request, to minimize latency. Country-specific domains don't have to be served out of the local country (that would be pretty unmanageable, given the number of country specific domains Google has).

redwood• 15 years ago

Deficient from any discussion I've heard about the Egypt crisis, is it's potential impact on fiber optic connections THROUGH Egypt. Admittedly Egypt hasn't touched those yet (as far as I know) but volatility there does potentially put those vital connections at risk.

Half of India's traffic to the rest of the world goes through Egypt (remember the undersea anchor incident?) and East Asia can route through Suez as well. If Suez goes down as a fiber gateway, suddenly all Asia <-> Europe traffic is forced to go through the US which would have implications

Swannie12• 15 years ago

More detailed information/discussion from fellow geeks in NANOG (North American Network Operator Group). This is the go-to mailing list for me when anything weird happens on the internets.

Connectivity status for Egypt - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031313... Egypt Telecom AS isolation - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031377... 3500 Egyptian prefixes? - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031407...

EGreg• 15 years ago

Wait, what? I thought a couple cables on the mediterranean got damaged. What's this with hermetically sealing the country etc? Whether or not it was deliberate, I doubt it primarily due to someone going and switching off the routers, it was this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7218008.stm

and this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7222536.stm

teraflop• 15 years ago

This is different. http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-interne...

NoSalt• 15 years ago

As an IT guy, I cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like to be ordered to shut down the routers like that.

rdl3• 15 years ago

Given that Egypt is one of the places people sent to Guantanamo are threatened with (ie talk or we will send you to Egypt instead of this nice safe and comparatively comfortable place) I think almost anyone would comply.

More interesting would be if you happened to have satellite equipment already in country that they didn't know about or ask to have shut down. You can get a little l band terminal the size of a laptop, and a lotnof remote sites in egypt have real vsat links too.

Swannie12• 15 years ago

Problem with satellite if your downlink is within Egypt.

Conceivably a problem if your providers billing server is in Egypt, even if your downlink is elsewhere, as the RAS probably can't talk to your authorisation server in your billing system...

So let that be a lesson to you if you buy a satellite service as a backup - go to a neighbouring country to get it! :-)

How Egypt Switched Off The Internet

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