Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

arabist.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 143 posts

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#81

Post by Locke1689 »

jemfinch wrote: post #57
jacquesm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take out a few core locations and you'd have a very hard time getting to google, or most other sites for that matter. All it takes for the vast majority of the internet to become unusable for the larger fraction of the population is to take the .com, .net and .org TLDs down. Your packets will still route but where do you want them to go? It would take long enough for people to regroup and find work-arounds that more…

> Take out a few core locations and you'd have a very hard time getting to google, or most other sites for that matter. Definitely untrue. How familiar are you with how the Internet works? Google and other major websites are massively multihomed: they peer with tens or hundreds or perhaps thousands of other ISPs and backbones in as many different peering points around the world. > All it takes for the vast majority o…

How familiar are you with how the Internet works? If you read any recent DS papers you'd notice that Tier-1 ASes follow a power law distribution. You'd only have to shut down a handful of peering ASes to cripple BGP routing in the US.

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#82

Post by navyrain »

awakeasleep wrote: post #58
jerf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at a loss as to what this additional infrastructure really permits that having lots of armored men with guns does not. Armored men with guns are a flexible bunch, they can do lots of things. The marginal distinction to the person in power between pressing a button and ordering other people to go shut the net down is pretty minimal; it's not like without this switch, the President is going to actually have go out…

I see this argument get a lot of play. These sorts of things are important because ease dictates more of what happens in life than posibility. Make it easier to turn off the net, there is more chance of it happening, and it'll take less resources from the controlling party to do it. Like you said, 'they' could already turn off the internet. So why bother with the effort to make a killswitch? Because the resources it'…

This point cannot be emphasized enough. Furthermore, it is certainly possible to imagine a scenario where ordering armored men to shut off the internet would be politically unfeasible, but spinning a story which necessitates of shutting off from the greater world internet might be within grasp.

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#83

Post by bad_user »

awakeasleep wrote: post #58
jerf wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am at a loss as to what this additional infrastructure really permits that having lots of armored men with guns does not. Armored men with guns are a flexible bunch, they can do lots of things. The marginal distinction to the person in power between pressing a button and ordering other people to go shut the net down is pretty minimal; it's not like without this switch, the President is going to actually have go out…

I see this argument get a lot of play. These sorts of things are important because ease dictates more of what happens in life than posibility. Make it easier to turn off the net, there is more chance of it happening, and it'll take less resources from the controlling party to do it. Like you said, 'they' could already turn off the internet. So why bother with the effort to make a killswitch? Because the resources it'…

     Because the resources it'd take to kill the internet manually matter
They only need to turn off one big ISP or 2 before the others are going to shut down themselves. Look at what happened with Wikileaks.

     If someone can always find a flaw in crypto implementations, 
     why bother with cryptography?
That's a pretty big IF, because it depends on finding flaws, and there is no recipe for that and you're also not certain if you're going to find any, regardless of the time/resources invested.

Also, crypto algorithms are public, peer reviewed and usually you're going to find out if a flaw exists sooner or later. And because there isn't any available method to make brute force attacks any easier or feasible if the key is large.

I am pretty sure the government can shut down the Internet, but I can bet they aren't able to decrypt my communications if I won't allow it ;-)

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#84

Post by nitrogen »

seancron wrote: post #28
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They're called mesh networks, and I think you've just described why they will never take off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking

Interesting. Are there any pieces of software that can transform ordinary laptops/phones into mesh networks? A quick search shows B.A.T.M.A.N. ( http://www.open-mesh.org/ ), but it looks a little tricky to setup. Are there any simple ways for non-technical users to run a mesh network node? A "click to install and run" solution would be ideal, but I'd be interested in hearing about other people's experiences with mesh…

The OLPC XO laptop has built-in mesh networking and is ruggedized, so it would be a great asset to have after a disaster of some kind. Maybe keep one stored in a Faraday cage to try to protect it against EMP ;).

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#85

Post by nitrogen »

sliverstorm wrote: post #73
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. They're called mesh networks, and I think you've just described why they will never take off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking

I've always been under the impression the reason mesh networks haven't taken off is because of the cost & speed benefits of centralized colocation data centers and trans-continental backbones, but maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.

The paranoid conspiracy theorist in me also suspects that this is why the FCC fought against UWB approval.

http://stevencrowley.com/2010/09/02/ultra-wideband-how-regul...

There are many devices using UWB, but as far as I know, none of them allow long-range communication:

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

http://www.gefen.com/kvm/product.jsp?prod_id=4318

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#86

Post by deno »

joshzayin wrote: post #32

Does anyone have a mirror of the site? It's unexpectedly dropping the connection for me.

It's been #1 top story on Reddit for some time. There's rorr.im mirror[1] and some old version without images in CoralCDN[2].

Perhaps most up-to-date and reliable alternative at the moment is actually their Twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/arabist

__

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2151054

[2] http://www.arabist.net.nyud.net/blog/2011/1/28/urgent-egypt-...

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#88

Post by exit »

csomar wrote: post #9

In Tunisia, it's not Internet that made the revolution success, but SMS. First, everyone has a mobile phone (even the poor). Second, you receive the message and read it instantly wherever you are. (You should guess it, few people here have smart phones). Third, there is more commitment that you go to the street. For those interested in the Tunisian revolution: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-12302232 I think t…

makes me wonder what an adhoc peer-to-peer sms system could do for the world.

Re: Egypt has shut off the Internet (update: not everywhere)

#90

Post by davidw »

mnutt wrote: post #47
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can see in a few years cell phones being powerful enough to broadcast network over a large enough area that they'll be ad hoc networks without a central kill switch. Cell phones have actually lost power, not gained power over the last two decades. Likely they'll lose more power still as the push to increase battery life continues and coverage increases.

That's true, but it all comes down to the use cases. With the awful AT&T coverage and carriers actively refusing to provide more bandwidth, wouldn't it be nice to have a phone that had WiMax? Power constraints are very real right now, but with growing bandwidth needs and none of the other variables changing very quickly, it's at least a possibility that someone could figure out how to put something like WiMax into a…

> Power constraints are very real right now

Because batteries don't scale according to Moore's law.

Post reply on HN