Egypt Coming Back On the 'net 137
An anonymous reader wrote in with the good news that after 5 days of blackout, "Egypt is coming back on-line. Some sites that didn't used to be available and are now back include two telcos: Vodafone Egypt and Etisalat Egypt. Guess that we can't have those IPv4 addresses back after all then."
Re:I'm not Egyptian (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, these protests are absolutely incredible. And from those Americans who have a clue what's actually going on in Cairo, Alexandria, Suez, etc, you're seeing a lot of support for the protesters. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans don't have a clue what's actually going on, and many that do are getting nothing but misinformation about who the protesters are and what they want.
There are a few major reasons for that:
1. For far too many Americans, "Arab", "Muslim", "terrorist", and "scary guy" are basically indistinguishable concepts. For instance, those that find Barack Obama scary because he doesn't look like they do will say he's a Muslim, even though he's never said anything remotely similar to "There's no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet." So the idea that Muslims could be doing something good in the world runs straight into cognitive dissonance.
2. The US government has close ties to the Israeli government, and the Israeli government is very scared that whatever comes after Mubarak won't be so keen on adhering to the Camp David Accords. As a result, the messages Americans have been getting from their government has been lukewarm at best about the protests.
3. Establishment media outlets have mostly followed the Obama administration's lead. Many reports are taking advantage of my first point to state that these were organized by the Muslim Brotherhood (despite plenty of evidence to the contrary), and are describing "chaos" and "looting" more than "protests".
4. Some have memories of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and fear that what Egypt is going through will lead to the same result.
A lot of Americans are ignoring their government, their media sources, and their fears, and supporting the protesters.
Salaam.
One site stayed up. (Score:5, Interesting)
One site that stayed up through all this was the Library of Alexandria [bibalex.org], which, among other things, hosts a copy of the Internet Archive. They now have photos up of their supporters surrounding the Library to protect it.
They stayed up because they have a direct connection to the 10Gb/s FLAG [wikipedia.org], the Fiber Optic Around the Globe link. That has a cable landing at Alexandria, and the Library is tied in there, without going through a local ISP.