Egypt Goes Dark As Last ISP Pulls Plug 323
CWmike writes "Egypt is now off the grid. Four days after the Egyptian government ordered Internet service providers to disconnect from the Internet, the country's last working Internet company has abruptly vanished from cyberspace. Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange and other businesses, became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m. Cairo time (Eastern European Time), according to Earl Zmijewski, general manager with Internet monitoring company Renesys. 'It looks like they're completely lights-out now,' he told IDG News' Robert McMillan. Thought to handle only about 8 percent of the country's Internet connections, Noor had served as a critical lifeline to Egypt since the government had ordered service cut early Friday morning. Nobody is sure how Noor was able to keep operating, even as larger ISPs such as Vodafone and Telecom Egypt voluntarily cut their Egyptian networks off from the rest of the world."
To help with this, engineers from Google, Twitter and SayNow have rolled out a "speak-to-tweet" service, which lets people dial in to an international phone number, leave a voice mail, and have the audio file made available online via an automated Twitter update.
Re:Good-by financial markets???? (Score:4, Interesting)
Egypt's military has been the source of power for decades, so this is not like Tunisia where the military will just stand idly by.
Ironically in another Middle East Country -Turkey the military has often intervened when the governments have gone off track, so they have actually helped keep that country from going radical at times -although they are currently a little nervous about the moderate islamist government currently in power there.
Cries for Western Style Democracy seem to go unheeded in parts of the world where rigid power structures and theocracies reside. Not that Western Style democracy seems to be working that well in the US these days...
I'm just sayin'
Egypt Goes Dark (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How could this happen? (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.
You're not a corporation. I'm guessing Telecom Egypt's board members all gave little speeches about how they wanted to uphold the rights of their customers, but they had obligations to their employees to make sure they weren't punished, and an obligation to the shareholders not to put their equipment and future business at risk, and besides there are other internet providers to choose from, and they aren't actually preventing from people speaking so it's not really violating their free speech, and the terms of service had either explicit or implicit terms about how in times of mass protest, the service could be suspended.
And then they unanimously voted to shut down for a few days, while they all went on holiday to a more stable country to look at real estate. Just in case.
There was probably a bit of disagreement over whether or not they should and could stop paying their employees (aside from the security guards) during the shutdown.
Re:Good-by financial markets???? (Score:4, Interesting)
Nearly 80% of the 'common' people there support them in some fashion
Source? I can see that in 2005 elections [wikipedia.org], MB candidates running as Independents got 88 seats in parliament out of 454 - that's less than 20%, and a far cry from 80%.