Editorial: 鈥�Egypt: the message still gets through鈥�
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THE internet may transcend national boundaries but an entire country can still take itself off the information map surprisingly quickly. At 2230 GMT on 27 January, the Egyptian government did just that as people took to the streets across the nation.
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Egypt was isolated from the rest of the internet by making changes in a system known as the border gateway protocol (BGP), which internet service providers (ISPs) use to connect to each other鈥檚 networks. The government ordered the country鈥檚 ISPs to alter their BGP configurations to cut the links to other networks. Technically this is 鈥渁 very simple thing to do鈥�, says Rik Ferguson of the California-based security firm Trend Micro.
In many western nations, staging a similar cut-off might not be so easy, Ferguson says, as it would require hundreds of ISPs to follow the government鈥檚 orders. Egypt has relatively few ISPs.
Savvy citizens, assisted by online activists, are still finding ways to access the web. It remains possible to use Egypt鈥檚 old dial-up networks to access ISPs outside the country, and from there, the rest of the internet. A group called We Rebuild is digging out details of how to do this and passing them on to people in Egypt.
Google and Twitter, meanwhile, have jointly launched Speak To Tweet, which allows Egyptians to dial numbers outside the country and leave voicemails. These are uploaded and linked to Twitter. As 快猫短视频 went to press, nearly 500 messages had been uploaded.