Twitter Confirms That They’re Being Blocked In Egypt

Ok so this is interesting to me from a data distribution model. Twitter is accessible natively (from their own web page/applications) and via third party applications over their API. I imagine the connection flow goes like this:

you -> native twitter -> you

Or

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> you

From what it sounds like, that is the path because it is the link to twitter that is being severed[1] and ultimately you can neither make the request for data nor receive a response.

Now what if the 3rd party app proxied your requests like so:

you -> 3rd party app -> twitter -> 3rd party app -> you

That way the 3rd party app would need to be blocked. Which is obviously a much more difficult problem as there are more than one of them. The only downside would be more bandwidth consumption for the 3rd party app.

If 3rd party apps routed messages through their ip's wouldn't this instantly become a much more difficult problem for the blockers?

[1]I'm talking about lower level blocking here at the dns or ip level. This is moot if they are doing higher level packet inspection and blocking everything with certain words in it (non encrypted).

Apparently there is something a foot there, http://www.examiner.com/foreign-policy-in-national/breaking-...

We actually have a few users who translate tweets about the Egypt Jan 25 Protests on curated.by. It's not what we designed the product for but we thought that is an interesting use case and maybe it even helps someone get a better picture of what is really going on:

http://www.curated.by/meedan/egypt-jan-25-protests

We arm the Egyptian government. Unlike the Tunisian revolution, we won't let this one go anywhere.

Egyptian users could access twitter (bypassing the block) by visiting a web proxy in another country and then logging into twitter through there.