Libya Shuts Down Internet

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/libya_shuts_down_internet.php#more

by pitdesi • 15 years ago

152 84 15 years ago

sudonim2• 15 years ago

The uprising in egypt was relatively peaceful. The media spotlight was on and Mubarak may have restrained from using force to save his own skin. Comparing the two because Egypt also shut down the internet is natural, but Mubarak is not Qaddafi. Even if the internet shut down is ineffective at quashing dissent, it seems unlikely that Libya's path will be at all similar to Egypt.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

I think there is a very crucial similarity: there are signs that the military is refusing to shoot their own people. It's why ultimately the revolution in Egypt worked.

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

It's a great precedent, especially if you're the military and you want to be rid of the dictator and grab power yourself.

mitko• 15 years ago

indeed if you tune in to twitter channel #lybia you can hear a lot about shootings. Tweets say that there are ~500 shot people in Lybia.

Disclaimer: I don't use twitter, but I don't know of any other real time source of info.

krschultz• 15 years ago

Unfortunately the protesters will pay the price. I'm not sure there is anything the rest of the world can do to help, or at least the US, because foreign military force delegitimizes any home grown revolution. When the group in power are willing to use deadly force the protesters won't be able to win based on numbers only. If Egypt's military had crushed the protesters I doubt it would have turned out the same way.

danenania3• 15 years ago

Even if it's true that the protesters can't win in a straight up battle, time is on their side, and there is no workable long term strategy for a government when the mass of its people are against it and a large segment is willing to brave gunfire and die for their rights. The regime can take the whole country down with them, but they can't regain control. Every bureaucracy including the military will rot from the inside as people see the essential brutality of the state unmasked and defect at all levels. There will be strikes and disobedience at every level. A state cannot function in this way for long regardless of how much firepower it commands, if for no other reason than eventually it will simply go broke.

So long Gadhafi.

thematt• 15 years ago

There are lots of things the US can do to support a home grown revolution without directly sending in our military. In fact, we have multiple three letter agencies that specialize in exactly that type of support.

jonpaul2• 15 years ago

While you may have a point. There was this one time when a foreign military helped a homegrown revolution and it seemed to work out alright....

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

qeorge• 15 years ago

Mubarak may have restrained from using force to save his own skin

My understanding is that he did order the military to attack the protesters, and they refused. At that point, his focus probably shifted to just getting out alive.

panacea2• 15 years ago

"At that point, his focus probably shifted to just getting out alive."

And with as much fiat currency credits as he could.

Bossman2• 15 years ago

So sad. Many people dying over there. I wish all citizens over there all the best.

mcantelon• 15 years ago

I've heard that part of the army is now supporting the protesters, which is a very good sign.

Bossman2• 15 years ago

Absolutely a good sign. Hope it puts things in their favor. There have already been too many deaths.

mahmud3• 15 years ago

When was this shutdown? my twitter stream has news out of Tripoli 15 seconds ago.

[Edit:

There IS internet, but he is cutting power of sporadically.

Reports of his son Saif being shot, and Gaddafis fleeing to Venezuela.

Several Libyan ambassadors already resigned.

Various military units defected, and sided with the public against the hired mercenaries.

csomar2• 15 years ago

It seems that some (hackers?) opened dial-up servers for them in foreign countries. Some pages are giving these numbers and the login to connect.

mahmud3• 15 years ago

Not any hackers, the Dutch ISP xs4all is givin away free dialup, others too (I even tweeted one such yesterday)

But, no, a good chunk of Tripoli is online. Benghazi is devastated but victorious.

FWIW, Gaddafi is on his way out :-) Few more days (maybe hours!)

motters2• 15 years ago

Google transparency traffic also suggests that the shutdowns have been sporadic. Maybe it's a kind of internet curfew.

uvdiv• 15 years ago

Are those sources reliable? I note that Al Jazeera reports Saif al-Islam making a televised address very recently:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/02/20112211112...

"Early Monday" Libyan time means within last 4 hours; your comment was posted 4 hours ago, so either I screwed up time zones, or the address was pre-recorded, or the reports of his being shot are inaccurate.

edit: According to this liveblog the address started around 1:00 AM Libyan time, or 23:00 UTC/GMT:

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/middle-east/2011/02/17/live-blog-...

mahmud3• 15 years ago

I was in the thick of the confusion, listening to the firehouse.

The son is OK but ambassadors have resigned.

il2• 15 years ago

If you're using a .ly domain for your startup, this should give you pause. Not because of potential downtime, but because by buying a .ly domain, you are directly financing this oppressive regime.

jasonmcalacanis• 15 years ago

For now.... turning off people's ability to download Mad Men, porn, farmville and starcraft2 is NOT a winning strategy for staying in power.

I give Gaddafi two weeks....

eru• 15 years ago

What odds are you offering?

neworbit• 15 years ago

Maybe. He's likely to be more ruthless than Mubarak was, since he's not all that reliant on external support these days (whereas the US propped up the Mubarak gov't for quite a while). I give him longer than that.

codeglomeration2• 15 years ago

I would say buying their oil has more of an influence, rather than owning a .ly domain. The earning for the domains are probably insignificant compared to the oil.

il2• 15 years ago

True, but it's a lot easier for the average hacker to stop buying their domains than their oil.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

Exactly; 10$/yr is nothing compared to oil revenues.

EDIT: Hm, my bad, I didn't bother to look it up, just assumed it's like all other top level domains.

cma• 15 years ago

Oil is fungible, .ly domains are not.

levigross• 15 years ago

wahoo bit.ly :)

barrydahlberg• 15 years ago

Is oppressive.ly registered?

pc-pro-schools• 15 years ago

If you own a .ly TLD I'd recommend slapping a 301 redirect on it and grabbing yourself a .com or something not attached to such a unstable country.

swombat• 15 years ago

First they laugh at you...

Then they ignore you...

Then they shut down your internet...

Then you win?

(I hope...)

stcredzero3• 15 years ago

Then they shut down your internet...

Then you win?

At best, it's an admission of defeat.

At worst, it's an admission that you're repressive and you don't care who knows it.

brc4• 15 years ago

I think with Gaddafi he never really bothered to hide behind a fig leaf of democracy or even legitimacy with other governments. The Libyan government was always a lot more totalitarian than the Egyptian, and didn't really pretend.

I have a friend who has worked in Libya and has nothing nice to say about it. He told me that the airport is still littered with the wrecks of planes from Reagans' bombing in the 1980's. Whether they are still there as a reminder of the 'imperial west' or because the Libyans are too lazy to clean them up is not known. Having seen the amount of litter in pictures of Libya, it's harder still to say for sure.

On the flip-side I really hope Libya becomes an open-access free and secular state in my lifetime. There is some really cool architectural/historical things in Libya that is effectively off-limits to anyone but the most intrepid and determined traveller. Just imagine the ability to take a trip through the mediterranean middle east without having constant border issues, government minders, etc etc. I suppose it's a somewhat selfish view, but I bet a few of the locals wouldn't mind a more organised tourist trade.

csomar2• 15 years ago

It would be cool if they only shut down the Internet and you win.

dagw• 15 years ago

s/ignore you/shoot at you/

jhamburger• 15 years ago

One problem I see with this strategy is that it signifies a recognition of the resistance. If I were Gaddhafi, I'd be doing everything to downplay the significance of the protests, make it seem like a fringe element that won't amount to anything. When you shut down the internets, you're telling people "This is for real. It's going down right now, time to choose a side. You're closer than you think."

panacea2• 15 years ago

The luxury of being an armchair prognosticator. (I don't disagree with you)

brc4• 15 years ago

In the fullness of time, it will probably be traced back as one of Mubarak's mistakes, as well. Because it propelled the story from the background to the foreground - 'Egypt shuts off internet' is a pretty major headline. It also let the protestors know that they were hurting the regime.

But then I wouldn't expect a north-african dictator really understanding the consequences. They are much more likely to see it in a pure military sense - the enemy are communicating using the internet. Let's close the internet.

adrianN2• 15 years ago

I think it's hard to downplay protests when there are thousands on streets rioting.

motters2• 15 years ago

Google suggests that it's a periodic flatline rather than a complete blackout. Maybe a sort of internet curfew outside of business hours.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/

troymc• 15 years ago

That's a neat proxy of Libyan internet connectivity.

Unencrypted Google searches went to near zero for several hours twice recently. The rest of the time they've been getting through, but a bit less than usual. The graph for Gmail is similar.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=LY&l...

YouTube is a different story. It looks like YouTube in Libya got blocked about three days ago, yet there's still a little bit of YouTube traffic getting through.

http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/traffic/?r=LY&l...

btilly• 15 years ago

For those who are interested, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/20/unrest-morocco-i... says that protests are also happening in Morocco, Iran, Algeria, Yemen and China.

If this continues to spread it could end up being the biggest change in geopolitics since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

blahedo• 15 years ago

I think even if it stopped now, it's already the biggest geopolitical event since then—the only thing that comes close would be the US Afghanistan and Iraq invasions, but this is bigger. If it continues it may become the defining event of the 21st century, or at least the first half thereof.

uxp• 15 years ago

Wikipedia was an article on the 2010-2011 Middle East and Arab wold protests, with quite an alarming map.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Arab_world_pr...

I personally found it very inspiring to see that so many countries in northern Africa and the Middle East have had protests against their governments. Besides Tunisia, I honestly was ignorant of anything else that was going on over there until Egypt got all the attention it did here in the states, of which I am assuming is because they are such close allies/associates to the US.

danenania3• 15 years ago

Protests/riots also reported in Iraq:

http://www.torontosun.com/news/world/2011/02/20/17347131.htm...

Sounds like they're loving their new "democracy" :-/

rospaya• 15 years ago

9/11 was the biggest geopolitical change since the fall of the Iron Curtain.

nandemo• 15 years ago

Was it?

9/11 didn't change any borders. It didn't change the set of US allies and enemies, neither did it cause a change of government in US. It only caused a protracted but still relatively small war in Afghanistan. Its government fell but this change didn't spread to other countries. One could argue that 9/11 was a factor in the growth of radical Islamism (cf. speeches by Islamic leaders all over Europe, incidents in Netherlands, etc) but apart from the London bombings we didn't have any major incident linked to 9/11.

brc4• 15 years ago

One of the biggest commonalities between these countries is a very large bulge at the young end of their population statistics. These are countries with a large population of young people. That fits pretty well - a young person with no job and no prospects is going to have the energy and stamina to sit in protest.

My question is : how did these countries end up with so many young people from a (relatively) small older population? Did everyone have 10 children? Did all the old people die (or leave)?

I'm genuinely curious about this one.

elviejo• 15 years ago

Maybe comes from the fact that child mortality has reduced dramatically.

But the habit in this countries of having more than 5 children hasn't changed yet? Probably it takes a generation for families to adapt to the fact that you don't longe need to have several children to make sure that some of them survive to adulthood.

Take a look at this TED presentation for some amazing facts. http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_shows_the_best_stats_y...

shareme• 15 years ago

When they changed to Industrial birth rates did not decrease as of yet to catch up with the change..hence the high young people amounts..

Those countries with a longer time as an Industrial nation have lower birth rates..USA, UK, etc..

mcdowall• 15 years ago

A really interesting piece by the BBC on the issues in the region..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12482313

aik• 15 years ago

Gaddafi's son, Saif, live stream: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

sudonim2• 15 years ago

On mac, I've had persistent problems with the live stream directly on the AJ site, but youtube also carries it:

http://www.youtube.com/aljazeeraenglish

(2nd video box on the page)

danenania3• 15 years ago

They just keep spouting the Orwellian bs. It's all they know.

Kilimanjaro• 15 years ago

Related: Uganda's president just won elections extending his 25 years in power.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12516562

Unbelievable how much tyranny, fraud and corruption goes unpunished around the world.

cristoperb• 15 years ago

This article is from February 18. All routes came back up about 7 hours later. Though since then there have been reports of internal outages, dns blocks, throttling, etc..

mckoss• 15 years ago

Can anyone comment, not on the social harm caused by using an .ly domain, but rather the risk of failure of the DNS system to continue to honor your records.

I would presume that Libya has outsourced the DNS root servers and administration outside their country. Does anyone know who administers .ly from a practical standpoint? Is there a risk of them becoming unavailable if the regime falls (or as a tactic used against their own citizens)?

MediaBehavior• 15 years ago

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible but in the end, they always fall - think of it, ALWAYS. --Gandhi

[Even though individual tyrants usually seem unable to conceive that this will apply to them]

abalashov2• 15 years ago

More as a pedantic nitpick, and not that it's necessarily relevant, in the sense that it may not undermine the veracity of the claim "Libya shuts down Internet":

Traceroutes (or pings) halting at a certain point does not a dead route necessarily make. Traceroute operates by setting the TTL (Time to Live) field of a packet to 1 and forwarding it along.

In principle, routers that reach a value of 0 when they decrement the TTL drop the packet and send a backward ICMP TTL-exceeded-in-transit notification to the sender, which is how the address of the router is discovered. Then traceroute sends out another datagram, increases the TTL by 1, and so on until the desired endpoint is reached or a maximum TTL value is exceeded (to avoid getting the datagram into routing loops).

In practice, some networks - especially at the edge, outside the core infrastructure of large backbone haulers - block outgoing ICMP TTL-exceeded-in-transit messages, and sometimes all ICMP, including ICMP echo reply, administratively prohibited, and port unreachable messages. These are all diagnostically useful, but can also be used to profile an endpoint or map the interior of a network. I would especially expect a government like Libya's to make a policy of blocking such revealing messages at all border routers associated with national-level Internet egress points.

There is a constant and lively debate in the BGP and inter-domain networking community about the relative benefit of ICMP messages for troubleshooting and normal operations (after all, there was a reason the protocol was created) vs. the perceived security liabilities of having unrestricted two-way ICMP interactions with the rest of the Internet.

So, it's not clear what it means for traceroutes through the Telecom Italia AS to "fail," nor does this necessarily indicate that Libya has gone dark. It would be more convincing if all BGP announcements associated with Libyan blocks were withdrawn, although that would only happen if every one of their blocks was a provider-independent, RIR (regional Internet registry, RIPE in Libya's case)-issued block, not a delegated part of a foreign provider's larger aggregate announcement, so even then, who knows.

For what it's worth, I am unable to reach the same conclusion as the article, at least at this moment. Here is the latest list of allocations to Libya from http://countries.nerd.dk[1]:

   sasha@octavia:~$ egrep 'ly$' zz.countries.nerd.dk.rbldnsd
   41.208.64.0/18 :127.0.1.178:ly
   41.252.0.0/14 :127.0.1.178:ly
   62.68.32.0/19 :127.0.1.178:ly
   62.240.32.0/19 :127.0.1.178:ly
   80.231.6.0/23 :127.0.1.178:ly
   80.231.214.0/23 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.146.0/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.154.128/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.174.208/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.175.64/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.182.24/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.182.128/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.183.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.186.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.213.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.214.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.218.144/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.221.0/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.221.160/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.222.64/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.227.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.232.0/24 :127.0.1.178:ly
   82.205.251.0/25 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.13.32/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.13.176/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.13.192/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.13.224/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.14.96/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   84.11.45.48/28 :127.0.1.178:ly
   86.62.4.0/30 :127.0.1.178:ly
   88.202.120.0/23 :127.0.1.178:ly
   91.188.4.96/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   91.188.7.16/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   91.188.7.40/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   91.188.7.64/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   91.188.7.96/27 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.209.168.4/30 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.209.168.16/30 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.224.160/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.226.104/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.226.120/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.229.208/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.240.128/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.247.16/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.247.232/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   213.255.248.200/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   217.194.135.152/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   217.194.136.192/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   217.194.136.240/29 :127.0.1.178:ly
   217.194.137.160/29 :127.0.1.178:ly

If you go find your nearest BGP looking glass (such as: 'telnet route-server.gblx.net' as I prefer the Cisco interface, you can find others at www.bgp4.as/looking-glasses) and do, for example:

   show ip bgp 41.208.64.0/18

... you will find the announcements for all of the above alive and well.

P.S. Why does everyone who says "if you have a .ly domain, you are supporting the Gaddafi regime!" assume that the .ly TLD is managed directly by Libya? [2] Many smaller, less Internet-involved (if not wholly Internet-unconnected) countries outsource management and use of their TLD to foreign companies in exchange for licensing fees.

EDIT: It does appear that '.ly' is managed from inside Libya now, but if so, that's a relatively recent development. There was a UK company that managed the 'ly' zone for quite some time.

Now the primary nameserver seems to be dns1.lttnet.net, associated with Libyan Telecom and Technology, and whose IP is 62.68.42.9 and indeed part of one of the Libyan allocations above (62.68.32.0/19).

If it's stability you're concerned about, then look who else is involved as a backup other than lttnet.net:

   sasha@octavia:~$ host -t SOA ly
   ly has SOA record dns.lttnet.net. khaleds.lttnet.net. 201102220 3600 900 2419200 600
   sasha@octavia:~$ host -t NS ly
   ly name server dns1.lttnet.net.
   ly name server ns-ly.ripe.net.
   ly name server dns.lttnet.net.
   ly name server phloem.uoregon.edu.
   ly name server auth02.ns.uu.net.

Don't jump to conclusions.

---

[1] Most of these are /27s and smaller that are part of larger aggregates. I can't quite put my finger on why such small subnets are listed, given that the smallest announcement allowed in the global BGP table is a class C (/24). I would guess this list was compiled from the more granular delegation data found in WHOIS records, not a full BGP view.

[2] Also, you only started caring about this now?

AnthonBerg2• 15 years ago

"P.S. Why does everyone who says "if you have a .ly domain, you are supporting the Gaddafi regime!" assume that the .ly TLD is managed directly by Libya? [2] Many smaller, less Internet-involved (if not wholly Internet-unconnected) countries outsource management and use of their TLD to foreign companies in exchange for licensing fees."

If this is the case, and someone is paying for a .ly domain, then their payments go to Libya in the form of licensing fees, thus supporting the regime.

abalashov2• 15 years ago

In a broad sense, perhaps, but this implies a 1:1 correlation about the licensing arrangement that remains to be established.

More importantly, Mr. Muammar has been in power since the 1969 coup. Now we are supposed to start caring about his trafficking in adverb suffixes?

RiderOfGiraffes• 15 years ago

For reference, as of now, here are the recent Libya stories:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237053 : Libya blocks Facebook, ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237424 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2237787 : What happens to bit.ly?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238267 <- Dead

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238272 : Libya disconnect

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238274 : Death toll mounts

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2238407 : Libya shuts down internet