Quotulatiousness

February 9, 2011

Nokia: the company on the burning platform

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

Nokia has a problem. The ordinary cellphone market which mere years ago they bestrode like a Colossus has been overshadowed by the smartphone market, and they’re just an ordinary company in that market.

In the memo, Mr. Elop shares his vision of the current state of the mobile landscape, where Apple controls the high-end of the wireless market with its iPhone, where Google’s Android not only is making its mark in the smartphone arena but now conquering the mid-range market with Android and how Nokia is even losing the fight to control the low end of the cellphone market — an arena in which the company has traditionally dominated — as it struggles to compete with China’s MediaTek for market share and mind share in emerging markets.

“The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience,” he writes.

“Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable … And the truly perplexing aspect is that we’re not even fighting with the right weapons. We are still too often trying to approach each price range on a device-to-device basis.”

Update: Eric S. Raymond thinks the memo shows that Nokia’s new CEO has the courage to grasp the nettle:

If this memo does nothing else, it proves that Elop is not afraid to look facts in the eye and propose drastic remedies for a near-terminal situation. I cannot recall ever hearing in my lifetime a CEO’s assessment of his own corporation that is so shockingly blunt about the trouble it is in. The degree of candor here is really quite admirable, and does more than any other evidence I’ve seen to suggest Elop has the leadership ability to navigate Nokia out of its slump.

It’s clear from the memo that Elop is preparing his company to change their flagship smartphone OS. You can’t get more obvious than ‘We too, are standing on a “burning platform,” and we must decide how we are going to change our behaviour.’

The available alternatives are Android or WP7. Apple’s iOS is right out because Nokia needs to be able to sell cheap on a huge range of handsets. RIM and WebOS are tied to one company each. MeeGo’s been tried and failed. There are no other realistic contenders.

I think we’re being given some subtle clues that it will be Android.

Update, 12 February: Andrew Orlowski has some post-tragedy analysis of Nokia’s collapse into the arms of WP7:

There are times when you don’t want to intrude on public grief, but Nokia has spent 15 years (or more) trying to avoid this day.

New CEO Stephen Elop would argue otherwise, but giving up control of your platforms means giving up control over your destiny – and Elop has given Nokians not one twig of consolation around which a bit of dignity could be wrapped.

He’s also signalled the end of Nokia as a high R&D spend technology company. “We expect to substantially reduce R&D expenditures”, said Elop bluntly in this morning’s webcast. The new Nokia will be a global brand and a contract manufacturer whose primary customer is itself.

“Disaster” and “stitch-up” are two of the texts I received this morning from Nokians. Finnish press reports 1,000 staff in Tampere walking out. A surprise? Not really. For 15 years Nokia has defined itself, to its partners and customers, as the Not-Microsoft. Now it’s utterly dependent on them. There’s no Plan B.

[. . .]

How does Nokia recreate the product-centric, almost skunkworks development culture of the 1990s, while retaining its global logistical strengths, such as its ability to customise for local markets? How does Nokia prevent Microsoft from stealing its ideas? How does it create services that don’t brass off its biggest customers, the operators? Some of these are very old questions, and the Microsoft tie up does nothing to resolve them — it might even complicate them.

The impact on morale is probably the most immediate thing Elop has to address — it’s a huge blow to Finnish national pride. Elop’s brutal assessment in his “Burning Platforms” intranet post is that Nokia was hopeless at strategy, rubbish at marketing, and couldn’t write software. He all but told Nokians that they should have stayed in the rubber boot business.

What a motivator!

Fifteen years ago

Filed under: Government, History, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

John Perry Barlow wrote the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, There is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in
bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

February 8, 2011

Smartphone data usage surging

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

In a development that will surprise nobody (unless you work in the planning department of a cell phone company, apparently), smartphone users are indulging in data faster than predicted:

With costs of maintaining their networks flying through the roof, the nation’s largest wireless carriers are attempting to limit the mobile Internet usage of their most download-happy customers through speed slowdowns, price tiering and by raising costs.

Yet Americans’ mobile Internet usage is growing exponentially. Video, multimedia-heavy apps and other data hogs have even casual users sucking down more data than they realize.

“As the mobile Web continues to get better, people are using it more,” said Todd Day, a wireless industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan.

[. . .]

In June 2010 — when it scrapped its unlimited data offering and moved to a capped system — AT&T (T, Fortune 500) said that 98% of its smartphone customers use less than 2 gigabytes per month of data, and 65% use less than 200 megabytes.

But that was six months ago. At the rate mobile Internet traffic has been expanding, June was practically the stone age.

[. . .]

The heaviest data users tend to have Android devices, which run widgets that constantly update with data over the network. Android users download an average of 400 MB per month, and iPhone users are a close second with 375 MB per month, according to Frost & Sullivan. On the flip side, BlackBerry devices tend to download just 100 MB per month.

Update: “Brian X. Chen says “Verizon iPhone Shows You Can’t Win: Carriers Hold the Cards”:

The launch of the iPhone on Verizon adds to the mountain of evidence that you just can’t trust wireless carriers.

On the day that iPhone preorders began last week, Verizon quietly revised its policy on data management: Any smartphone customer who uses an “extraordinary amount of data” will see a slowdown in their data-transfer speeds for the remainder of the month and the next billing cycle.

It’s a bit of a bait-and-switch. One of Verizon’s selling points for its version of the iPhone is that it would come with an unlimited data plan — a marked contrast to AT&T, which eliminated its unlimited data plans last year.

Verizon incidentally announced a plan for “data optimization” for all customers, which may degrade the appearance of videos streamed on smartphones, for example.

Verizon didn’t send out press releases to alert the public of this nationwide change regarding data throttling and so-called “optimization.” The only reason this news hit the wire was because a blogger noticed a PDF explaining the policy on Verizon’s website, which Verizon later confirmed was official. Obviously it’s bad news, so Verizon wanted to keep a lid on it.

Hookers with Blackberries on Facebook

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:17

The latest round of moral posturing by politicians has accomplished great things: more sex workers now use Facebook to communicate with prospective clients, fewer are using Craigslist. Success?

A study by sociology professor Sudhir Venkatesh on trends in the world’s oldest profession, published by Wired, estimated that 25 percent of hookers’ regular clients came through Facebook compared to only three per cent through Craigslist.

Five years before that, in 2003, nine per cent of the prostitutes regular clients came through Craiglist and none through the then infant Facebook.

“Even before the crackdown on [Craigslist’s] adult-services section, sex workers were turning to Facebook: 83 per cent have a Facebook page, and I estimate that by the end of 2011, Facebook will be the leading on-line recruitment space,” Venkatesh writes.

Venkatesh says that there’s another key indicator for those who frequently hire prostitutes:

Curiously, he found one of the three main ways a sex worker can boost her earning potential is not to get a boob job but to buy a BlackBerry. “This symbol of professional life suggests the worker is drug- and disease-free,” Venkatesh explains.

Of prostitutes that own a smartphone, 70 per cent have BlackBerries while just 11 per cent own iPhones. Feel free to write your own hilarious jokes using that information.

February 7, 2011

X-47B takes flight, Navy pilots feeling threatened

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

Lewis Page looks forward to the day US Navy aircraft carriers don’t have pilots cluttering up the works:

The disappearance of swaggering pilots from the flight decks of US naval aircraft carriers came a step closer on Friday with the first flight of the X-47B robot tailhook stealth jet.

The X-47B is intended to demonstrate that unmanned aircraft can take off from aircraft carrier catapults and land back on deck again using tailhook and arrester wires. Such arrested landings have long been regarded as one of the most difficult and dangerous feats for human pilots to master, and US naval aviators tend to measure their manhood (or occasionally these days, womanhood) by the number of “traps” in their logbook.

Not content with automating the Top Guns out of their main trick, the X-47B is also intended to demonstrate autonomous air-to-air refuelling. This is another vital trick which human pilots find quite difficult (the act of flying the probe of the to-be-fuelled aircraft into the basket trailing at the end of the tanker plane’s hose is traditionally described as being of similar difficulty to “taking a running fuck at a rolling doughnut”).

February 3, 2011

CRTC head called to testify before Commons committee

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:29

In what some are hailing as a victory for Canadian internet users, but might well be just another Conservative sop to public opinion, the head of the CRTC has been called before a Commons committee:

The chairman of the CRTC will appear before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology on Thursday, as the regulator’s decision on usage-based billing for Internet services continues to generate anger among consumers and businesses.

Konrad von Finckenstein, chairman of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, will appear before the committee of federal MPs to explain the regulator’s decision, which allows large Internet providers like Bell Canada to charge smaller providers who lease space on their networks on a per-byte, or usage, basis.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper vowed to review the decision, lending clout to Industry Minister Tony Clement’s announcement to examine the CRTC ruling a day earlier. Mr. Clement and Mr. Harper’s cabinet, of course, have overturned the CRTC before — most notably by striking down the regulator’s ruling that Globalive, which now operates Wind Mobile, couldn’t launch service in the regulated sector because of foreign financial backing.

The problem for the government is that they need to be seen to do something, but the best “something” would be to open up the Canadian market to foreign competition in order to drive prices down toward world levels. That would upset too many cosy arrangements for the current beneficiaries of licenses to print money government approval to operate.

Tools for protest marchers: anti-kettling app

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Patrick Kingsley talks to the developers of “Sukey”, a new mobile phone app intended to help protesters avoid being kettled by police:

Cairo, it wasn’t. But at about a quarter to four last Saturday afternoon, on a crowded backstreet in central London, something happened outside the Egyptian embassy that deserves at least a footnote in the annals of protest history. A crowd of students weren’t kettled.

In the context of recent British protests, this was a near-miracle. At each of the previous four major student protests in London since the Millbank riot on 10 November, police have kettled — or, in their terminology, “contained” — thousands of protesters, preventing them from leaving an area for several hours, and often from accessing basic amenities such as food, water and toilets.

Police kettle protesters supposedly to quell violence, but protesters arguably only turn to violence out of frustration at being kettled. Most notoriously, police trapped hundreds of teenage schoolchildren inside a tight grid on Whitehall on 24 November — and only subsequently did a few of them smash up a police van abandoned in their midst.

Saturday’s non-kettle, then, was a victory in itself. But the real excitement wasn’t that it didn’t happen — but how it didn’t happen. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly why police and protesters behave in a certain way at a certain time, but one explanation for the kettle’s failure to form lies with a new communications network, which launched that afternoon: Sukey.

February 2, 2011

QotD: “Welcome to the Canadian Internet. Now stop using it.”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Economics, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Welcome to the Canadian Internet, where extreme concentration in telecoms and a weak, lame regulator have given rise to a nation where your Internet access is metered in small, ungenerous dribs, and where ranging too far afield during your network use results in your ISP breaking into your browsing session to tell you that you’re close to being cut off from the net.

The incumbent telcos have successfully petitioned for “usage based billing,” wherein their customers only get so much bandwidth every month (they’ve also long practiced, and lied about, furtive throttling and filtering, slowing down downloads, streams, and voice-over-IP traffic). This will effectively make it cheaper to use their second-rate voice-over-IP and video-on-demand service than it is to use the superior services the rest of the developed world enjoys.

If you were a Canadian entrepreneur or innovator looking to start your own networked business, this would be terminal. How can an innovative service take hold in Canada if Canadians know that every click eats away at their monthly bandwidth allotment? I can think of no better way to kill Canadians’ natural willingness to experiment with new services that can improve their lives and connect them with their neighbours and the wide world than to make them reconsider every click before they make it.

Cory Doctorow, “Welcome to the Canadian Internet, now stop using it”, BoingBoing, 2011-02-02

February 1, 2011

Egypt still offline in advance of “million-man march”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Middle East, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:46

Renesys is still reporting almost no internet connectivity to or from known Egyptian sites:

As we observed last week, Egypt took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the Internet. The government didn’t simply block Twitter and Facebook (an increasingly common tactic of regimes under fire), but rather they apparently ordered most major Egyptian providers to cease service via their international providers, effectively removing Egyptian IP space from the global Internet and cutting off essentially all access to the outside world via this medium. The only way out now would be via traditional phone calls, assuming they left that system up, or via satellite. We thought the Internet ban would be temporary, but much to our surprise, the situation has not changed. One of the few Egyptian providers reachable today, four days after the start of the crisis, is The Noor Group. In this blog, we’ll take a quick look at them and some of the businesses they serve.

January 31, 2011

Showing their true colours?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:42

To mark the Egyptian government’s shutdown of cellphone and internet access to their angry citizenry, the US government wants to have the power to do the same. Subtle, eh?

Legislation granting the president internet-killing powers is to be re-introduced soon to a Senate committee, the proposal’s chief sponsor told Wired.com on Friday.

The resurgence of the so-called “kill switch” legislation came the same day Egyptians faced an internet blackout designed to counter massive demonstrations in that country.

The bill, which has bipartisan support, is being floated by Sen. Susan Collins, the Republican ranking member on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The proposed legislation, which Collins said would not give the president the same power Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak is exercising to quell dissent, sailed through the Homeland Security Committee in December but expired with the new Congress weeks later.

The bill is designed to protect against “significant” cyber threats before they cause damage, Collins said.

Got to admire the balls of brass required to introduce legislation to do something in America at exactly the same time the US government is demanding that Egypt restore their citizens’ internet access. Breathtaking hypocrisy.

Update: By way of American Digest, a most appropriate image:

Smartphone release cycles speed up

Filed under: Economics, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:05

It’s tough to always have the newest electronic wonder, and (at least in the smartphone world) getting harder all the time:

If you bought a smartphone within the past year, you might already have noticed that your once-cool superdevice is feeling outdated.

There’s a reason for that: “Android’s law.”

Smartphones are continually outdueling one another in terms of performance, and they’re coming to market at a breakneck speed.

For instance, if you picked up the Motorola (MMI) Droid when it went on sale in November 2009, you had the best Android device on the market. But then the twice-as-fast Nexus One went on sale in January 2010. Then the HTC Droid Incredible hit the market in April. Then in June, the Evo 4G put the Droid Incredible to shame. The Samsung Galaxy S came out later that month. Then the Nexus S … You get the point.

The average time smartphones spend on the market is now just six to nine months, according to HTC. But it wasn’t always this way: Average shelf time was about three years prior to 2007, HTC estimates.

US Army to keep MRAP, speed up development of JLTV

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:48

For your morning dose of military acronyms, here’s a report from Strategy Page on a recent change in US Army planning caused by field experience in Iraq and Afghanistan:

The U.S. Army has decided that the MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) should be a permanent part of their vehicle fleet. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Four years ago, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps were in the midst of spending $20 billion to buy over 20,000 MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles. Shortly thereafter, the terrorist resistance in Iraq collapsed, and so did the need for MRAPs. This resulted in about a quarter of the MRAP orders being cancelled, and others changed to designs more suitable for use in Afghanistan, which had far fewer roads to use them on.

While the troops appreciated the MRAPs, some of the generals saw serious problems in the future. In Iraq and Afghanistan, people in these bomb resistant vehicles were much less likely to be killed or injured if they encountered a roadside bomb. But MRAPs are basically armored trucks (weighing 8-23 tons) that are hardened to survive bombs and mines, and cost about five to ten times more than an armored hummer.

As you can see, the MRAP isn’t a dainty sort of vehicle (this one has the recent overhead wire kit attached):

But now, thousands of those MRAPs will stay in service after the war in Afghanistan has ended. They will be considered armored combat vehicles, not transport, like the hummer and army trucks, and not used on a daily basis. This will keep down the operating expenses, as MRAPs consume a lot of fuel.

In addition to keeping thousands of the MRAPS, the army is developing a heavier replacement for the hummer, using a design with lots of MRAP features. This is the JLTV(Joint Light Tactical Vehicle), which is arriving a little ahead of schedule, as part of a program to massively upgrade army vehicles every few decades.

The JLTV competition is still underway, with three vehicles being tested:


Image from Wikipedia.

In addition to being built to better survive mines and roadside bombs, the JLTV will be able to generate 30 KW of electricity (for operating all the new electronic gear, and recharging batteries), have an automatic fire extinguishing system and jam-resistant doors. Like the hummer, JLTV will be easy to reconfigure, for everything from a four seat, armed scout vehicle, to an ambulance, command vehicle or cargo or troop transport. The hummer will continue to be used outside of the combat zone, where most troops spend most of their time. But the JLTV will be built to better handle the beating vehicles take in the combat zone, including a design that enables troops to quickly slide in armor and Kevlar panels to make the vehicles bullet and blast proof.

Shock! Horror! Wikipedia contributors are disproportionally male!

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

Don’t worry, kids, the New York Times is on the case:

In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure.

But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women.

About a year ago, the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that runs Wikipedia, collaborated on a study of Wikipedia’s contributor base and discovered that it was barely 13 percent women; the average age of a contributor was in the mid-20s, according to the study by a joint center of the United Nations University and Maastricht University.

And this is clearly evidence of neo-patriarchal oppression, right? If so, the mechanism by which this form of oppression is accomplished is a bit less than crystalline: anyone can sign up to contribute to Wikipedia. If the NYT thinks that this is really a problem, then we can’t have that many serious problems.

With so many subjects represented — most everything has an article on Wikipedia — the gender disparity often shows up in terms of emphasis. A topic generally restricted to teenage girls, like friendship bracelets, can seem short at four paragraphs when compared with lengthy articles on something boys might favor, like, toy soldiers or baseball cards, whose voluminous entry includes a detailed chronological history of the subject.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

Isn’t it normally considered positive that women are not as inclined to obsessive monomania as men are? Doesn’t this evidence rather support the notion that (some) men devote disproportional effort to topics of interest that (most) women would consider unhealthy?

January 29, 2011

Wired How-to: Get back on the internet after a government shut-down

Filed under: Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:47

A post at the Wired How-to wiki on getting back online after your government attempts to shut down internet access:

Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.

This is what happened in Egypt January 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government has cut off approximately 88 percent of the country’s internet access. What do you do without Internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here’s a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.

This article is part of a wiki anyone can edit. If you have advice to add, please log in and contribute.

January 28, 2011

Egypt goes dark, shuts down DNS servers

Filed under: Liberty, Middle East, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:40

Updates added to the bottom of this post

The Egyptian government is attempting to foil protests by eliminating internet traffic. Renesys reports:

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

I have seen very little traffic coming to this site from Egypt before the DNS server shutdown (under 40 unique visitors last year, according to FlagCounter), so the following information isn’t likely to be of direct assistance to Egyptians, but hopefully some can be filtered onwards.

The first suggestion (from Shereef Abbas) is to use Google’s Public DNS 2 to change “your DNS ‘switchboard’ operator from your ISP to Google Public DNS”.

John Perry Barlow suggests “more tools to access blocked websites and maintain anonymity”: http://jan25.in/how-to-access-blocked-websites-by-government and https://www.torproject.org/download/download.html.en.

Update: Vice President Joe Biden appears to be missing a wonderful opportunity to shut up.

Biden urged non-violence from both protesters and the government and said: “We’re encouraging the protesters to – as they assemble, do it peacefully. And we’re encouraging the government to act responsibly and – and to try to engage in a discussion as to what the legitimate claims being made are, if they are, and try to work them out.” He also said: “I think that what we should continue to do is to encourage reasonable… accommodation and discussion to try to resolve peacefully and amicably the concerns and claims made by those who have taken to the street. And those that are legitimate should be responded to because the economic well-being and the stability of Egypt rests upon that middle class buying into the future of Egypt.”

Egypt’s protesters, if they’re paying attention to Biden at all, will certainly be wondering which of their demands thus far have been illegitimate.

Update, the second: Live blogging the protests at the Guardian. And several sources are recommending the coverage streamed online from Al Jazeera’s English-language site.

Update, the third: The effectiveness of Egypt’s internet blackout shows why giving the American president (or any national leader) an internet “kill switch” is such a bad idea. To most of us, anyway. I’m sure that to some people it’s an argument in favour.

Update, the fourth: National Post has a graphic showing the locations of the reported activity:


Click to enlarge

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress