We've Heard of This Facebook Thing the Young Folk Like; Sounds Like a Good Place for Press Releases

Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces is, whatever else you may say about it, trying to understand the new world in Egypt. Unfortunately, it's sounding more and more like one's aging parents who keep using 50's hipster slang to sound like they're in tune with the times. Its use of SMS messaging to send out uninformative press releases has drawn a lot of complaints, so now they have gone and started up a Facebook page, to show they get it. Unfortunately, they don't. (Website in Arabic.) It's more like, "Hey, now that we're hip to this groovy new thing the young folk like, let's use it to send out what we were sending out on the fax machine."

Points for effort, but a misfire so far. Via Zeinobia.

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"Our Revolution is like Wikipedia"

Wael Ghonim, the Google executive behind We are All Khaled Said, comes up with a suitanly techie metaphor:

Our revolution is like Wikipedia, okay? Everyone is contributing content, [but] you don't know the names of the people contributing the content. This is exactly what happened. Revolution 2.0 in Egypt was exactly the same. Everyone contributing small pieces, bits and pieces. We drew this whole picture of a revolution. And no one is the hero in that picture.

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Syria Lifts Ban on Facebook, Twitter

Syria has lifted is years-long blockage of Facebook and Twitter. At first this seems counter-intuitive, that at a moment when social networking has been so central in Tunisia and Egypt, Syria opens things up.

In the past, they've also blocked Blogger, which hosts this blog. As a result my hits from Syria have been few, far between, and possibly from government sources that aren't blocked. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, this turns out to mean.

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The Night the Internet Died in Egypt

It's past midnight here but I'm still watching Egypt, where the day of the big demonstration has already dawned. Time to go to bed. But first:

Read this article and look at this graphic.
Times are GMT. Egypt is GMT +2. Egypt's Internet started to go dark just after midnight local time, and flatlined by 12:30. The night the Internet died in the cradle of civilization.

Details from the link:

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.

Indeed, I can't raise any .eg sites, not even official ones like Al-Ahram. Also see here.

You can shut down the Internet for a while, but how do you conduct normal commerce? Ben Wedeman of CNN tweeted tonight (well, last night now) that he couldn't check into a hotel since Reservations couldn't access the Internet.

Iran shut it down pretty hard in 2009 to break the demonstrations and Egypt seems to be doing the same tonight. Though in Iran if I recall correctly you could still access government sites from abroad. But Egypt depends on tourism, international trade, the Suez Canal, international remissions, all things that need connectivity. How long can they keep it shut down before they go from acting like North Korea to having North Korea's economy? Not long I suspect.

It's a reminder that the Internet is not the universal democratizing engine some expect as long as governments still control where the plug goes into the wall, or where the ISPs talk to the world. But it also says you're desperate, if you unplug the world for the day. Friday is not a major day for business in Egypt, of course, but can you keep it down Saturday and beyond?

I'll have more tomorrow. Am up too late as it is. But look at that graph.

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How Facebook Fought Back Against Tunisia

An interesting tech piece at The Atlantic on how Facebook sought to defend its members against a massive, state-level attempt by Tunisia to steal all the passwords.

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Shin Bet Chief on Internet Dangers

They say when you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. I suppose when you're an internal security service, everything begins to look like it's helping your enemies.

Israeli Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin told a conference on homeland security that Google Earth, the Internet, and smartphone apps have given terrorists access to intelligence they didn't have before. He said:

"The terrorist threat in the future has become more complex," Diskin said. "The world has turned into a 'global village' and everything is available to everyone. The world is smaller and broader and technology can cross continents."

Don't you just hate it when that happens?

The Internet has made it possible for a lot more openness: this blog once had some fun with Google Earth that might not sit well with Shin Bet, but that I would consider liberating, not threatening. On the whole, I think technology has opened things up, because it empowers everyone, not just the terrorists. Arabs can read the Israeli media. Arabs and Israelis quarrel all the time on forums, but at least they're interacting. Technology is opening up the world, and that's for the best. They can have my Google Earth when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Oh, yes: those dangerous IPhone apps Diskin mentioned: are they available for Android?

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