How Egypt Switched Off The Internet | Hacker News Reader

How Egypt Switched Off The Internet

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128 pointsdoron66 comments

Warning: this is probably offtopic.

There is an interesting initiative in Spain (http://guifi.net/en/what_is_guifinet) that's trying to build an open (wifi-based, mesh-structured) network. Although the idea always seemed really cool to me, I thought that it was a hopeless effort. On the one hand, the "mainstream" network is much faster and reliable. On the other hand, you need a proxy node to reach the actual Internet.

Nonetheless, this specific news has opened my eyes about the importance of such non-government-controllable networks. For one, it would allow citizens to get in touch with eachother, escaping the government control. Additionally, a single proxy in a neighboring country would be enough so that news could leak.

For these reasons, I'm going to try to join this network asap. Further, I encourage you all to join any similar project going on near you, or try to build one if it doesn't exist.

Let the networking begin!

I remember reading recently about a similar project in Germany. Thankfully my failing memory allowed me to google an even better link. Shame they don't seem to have anything in my city. Tech center of the Netherlands, my ass!

All networks are government-controllable; the only difference is how easy or hard it is for government to do it. Ultimately networks run on physical hardware and men in black boots can go pull the plug (or install a wiretap).

Completely wireless networks only require power. The only way to take them down is to take down every node, when every household in the country could be a node that means the only way to take down the network is to start a civil war.

True, but there are still the options to set up strategic frequency jammers, set up rogue nodes transmitting /dev/random to each other at max speed, nodes with routing black holes, randomly sabotage every TCP stream... etc.

Where can that be fixed? The nodes need to have the intelligence to route around potential rogue nodes.

In the UK the spectrum regulator is looking into "white space" use - basically even though this frequency is licensable, if you are using it in an area where no licensee's are, and you're under a certain power, that's fine. Assume that we can disconnect from their geo-location control databases, and burst transmit across many frequencies - jammers become an unrealistic problem.

I hate to sound like a paranoid delusional, but this is a time when having even a basic amateur radio license seems like a really great idea. It's not impossible to for the government to shut down the airwaves, but it is a lot harder to do it on a broad scale. Communication is essential to a free society, and it's startling to me that our government wants the same ability. It seems so entirely counter to our core principles as a nation.

Never has it been more clear that blocking free expression is the primary tool of tyrants to prevent change and reform within their society.

On the other hand, it may temporarily solve the ipv4 address exhaustion issue

Temporarily, IPv4 exhaustion is not a problem anyway. It is a long-term problem.

I really hope that's what it will end up being.

But I fear that the actual end result will be an Egypt ruled by one of the Muslim extremist groups that operate there and which are far more organized and poised to take advantage of a power vacuum.

Kind of like iran. Is it being posed as a religious revolution led by the islamic faction?

It's less clear than you think. It didn't work in Iran and it might not work here. The arrogance in social media will have to be reconciled with failed revolutions.

Or by the western governments who back them.

Another excellent example on why it is utterly important that we develop open-source GSM tools, both software & hardware.

So OpenBTS is doing a reasonable job on the base-station side, at least for small call volumes: http://openbts.sourceforge.net/

Does anyone know of an open-source stack for handsets?

There's osmocomBB. and there was openmoko but development stopped in '09...

The problem is, running something like this would be a) illegal due to frequency problems and b) if we leave aside the legal implications, you might be killing valid emergency service calls.

That said I think it's excellent for the direction of future telco developments.

Egypt did shut-down mobile networks, right? So you'd be enabling emergency calls! And re illegal: if you start burning cars in the streets then I'd argue that running an 'illegal' base-station is one of your minor problems...

I think someone should start a Kickstarter site where weatherized mobile base stations are developed from off the shelf parts, such that they can be quickly assembled, packaged, and shipped to neighboring countries where there is a totalitarian Internet blackout, so they can be smuggled across the border.

Even IM, SMS, and small still images are a threat to such regimes, especially in times like this.

Good idea, sadly OpenBTS being 1/10 the cost of existing infrastructure, still makes it (ballpark figure) $5k to operate something like the BurningMan 1 BTS network (so cheap in the telco world! Ohh, I'm not considering the power system in that figure).

Sure, GSM is ubiquitous, but WiFi is getting there and more commoditized. (Completely O.T. but I find the lack of people hacking their HP printers with WiFi in, quite a lack!)

We get closer and closer to a William Gibson-esque world all the time.

Good idea, sadly OpenBTS being 1/10 the cost of existing infrastructure, still makes it (ballpark figure) $5k to operate something like the BurningMan 1 BTS network

This is well within the budget for a well publicized Kickstarter campaign. Just a dozen of those in the capital city for 1 week would be extremely valuable.

I seem to be posting this a fair bit recently: * http://www.villagetelco.org/ * http://www.open-mesh.org/

But yes, I've been considering getting one on and off for 12 years. Sadly data over amateur radio doesn't appear to have progressed much in that time. Still, as voice comms it's pretty solid! Some countries UHF radio is still very popular (e.g. Australia).

It depends what you mean about progress. Digital communications evolved and it's nice to have data capability that can span the globe with a 100W radio (PSK shortwave). The bandwidth is not there, unless you go up in frequency, but then the range is limited without repeaters. I ran a VHF AX.25 node for a long time, using a 486 linux machine and soundcard as modem. With a good antenna and location I had people connecting from 50km or more and with my internet connectivity some even used tcp/ip. I could also connect to other nodes, using my peers as repeaters. My point is although the communication is slow, it's very easy to get something going with cheap radios (mine was a used modified radio from commercial frequencies), homebuilt antennas , computers that nobody wants anymore and of course open source.

Getting quite OT here.

I was looking at building a AX.25 node 10 years ago, with a 15km range on a basic amateur license, with maybe 28kbps. Almost all integrated into a radio with a digital output that cost the same as a PC.

That's what I mean about lack of progress... not much advanced today - it's a bit cheaper and easier, with better range, but no better bandwidth. If the frequencies & range are a fundamental issue, OK. When I was reading 10 years ago there was a strong dis-interest in data from my local groups, who thought it was ruining their voice comms. Still today I find the local amateur radio groups have little interest in packet radio beyond maybe running a webcam over AX.25. The interested HAMs are running community WiFi projects.

It seems kind of ironic to have to get a license to get around services the government might shut down.

you only need a license to broadcast legally, if you're trying to over-throw a government, it would seem unlikely that you'd be too worried about doing it legally.

HAM radio is interesting, because it is the most decentralized form of communications. Cell phones are internet and land lines are all routed through some corporation or government entity. HAM radio relies only on RF propagation. Repeaters are another matter, they can be knocked out, but a decent HF tx will get you a good distance.

There are apparently some renegade hackers running HAM radio out of egypt. Apparently theyre sending morse code back and forth.

http://werebuild.eu/wiki/Egypt/Main_Page#Hamradio

"40m band, ~7-7.3 MHz LSB, 318.5 degrees(northwest/north from cairo), Friday night until the morning (16:00-05:00 UTC). ON/KC0SJH will be calling CQ"

They also seem to be coordinating free dialup links. Biggup.

It'd be good if they could setup a digital packet system instead. On lots of frequencies to prevent jamming.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packet_radio

it's not impossible to for the government to shut down the airwaves, but it is a lot harder to do it on a broad scale

it's trivial to jam most ham frequencies.

But is it trivial to jam most ham frequencies across the 3.8 Million Sq. Miles of the U.S.? Or Europe (Same Size)? Or even just Germany (135,000 sq. miles)?

Edit: For comparison Egypt is about 387,000 sq miles.

I realize that you would not have to cover the entire country to be effective, but probably at least 90% of residential areas. Especially in Europe where the radio operators only need to reach over a nearby border.

You probably only need to isolate the most populous centers.

I'm not a ham, but I'm sure this thingie http://www.iritel.com/iritel/latinica/proizvodi/radio%2520ko...

will cover very sizable area without a problem.

I tend to be a paranoia cynic (after all, paranoia is a baseless suspicion of others' motives) but our own politicians are up to unsavory shenanigans of their own in this space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_kill_switch

Why is it surprising that a country could shut down access to the internet? It's not as if the internet is some sort of magic cloud where packets fly in and out to destinations across the world. It's a system. It has points of failure just like anything else. Granted it was built to survive failure but if you didn't build your internet infrastructure like the designers envisioned it's probably pretty easy to turn it off.

When I lived in NYC I was really surprised to find out that most transatlantic cables terminated in this tall windowless building on Duane and Chambers street. If you basically took that building away you probably could turn off the internet for a good portion of people in the US. Or at the very least make it hard.

My point being - in Egypt there probably is a similar building that houses all of their DNS servers, lines to other countries, etc. So its not hard to believe that someone just decided to walk in and turn off the power.

If this comment is interesting to you, you must read Mother Earth, Motherboard [1]. It's a fantastic long technojournalist piece by Neal Stephenson dealing with transoceanic cables.

[1] http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

I tried, I couldn't cope with the writing style. Is it really worth me pushing through it?

Yeah:

  In a nicely Pharaonic touch, one of the six ducts going 
  into the ground here is the sole property of President 
  Hosni Mubarak, or (presumably) whoever succeeds him as 
  head of state. It is hard to envision why a head of state 
  would want or need his own private tube full of air running 
  underneath the Sahara. The obvious guess is that the duct 
  might be used to create a secure communications system, 
  independent of the civilian and military systems (the 
  Egyptian military will own one of the six ducts, and ARENTO 
  will own three). This, in and of itself, says something 
  about the relationship between the military and the 
  government in Egypt.

If you have StyleBot, this makes it a lot more readable:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

  body {
  	width: 600px;
  	margin: auto;
  	line-height: 1.7;
  }

Who knows, what with old broken software installed on old broken routers, but there are transpacific cables, and Asia is directly connected to Europe... so I think there would be no loss of Internet functionality in this case. NYC-LON ping times would be a lot higher, of course, but that's exactly why those cables exist -- to make things faster.

Those links are not designed to suddenly handle all transatlantic traffic in addition to their regular load of J-pop.

To try and shed some light here, the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the protocol used between routers to communicate which range of IP addresses a router handles. So for instance, my router will advertise to other routers that it handles from 10.1.1.1 to 10.1.1.255 and the other routers will then send traffic bound for those IP addresses to my router.

From what it seems like in the article, the Egyptian government coordinated with ISPs or forced ISPs to simply clear all of these entries. So for IP addresses in Egypt there are no corresponding routing rules, making them for all practical purposes completely taken off the internet since there is now no way to route traffic there.

Foolish move by the government. Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya are broadcasting images non-stop, and satellite TV cannot be turned off with a switch. Shutting off communication is ruinous to a modern economy like Egypt. Plus it broadcasts fear and emboldens the protestors. A suicidal move by the government (or so I hope!).

It's all of a piece. After all, Mubarak's response to citizens violating curfew today was to expand the curfew nationwide. "The Frog and the Scorpion" comes to mind.

Wait, what? I thought a couple cables on the mediterranean got damaged. What's this with hermetically sealing the country etc? Whether or not it was deliberate, I doubt it primarily due to someone going and switching off the routers, it was this:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7218008.stm

and this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7222536.stm

This is different. http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-interne...

Analysis by Renesys, an internet monitoring body, indicates... careful and well-planned method .... Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro: "First at the DNS level, so any attempt to resolve any address in .eg will fail — but also, in case you’re trying to get directly to an address, they are also using the Border Gateway Protocol, the system through which ISPs advertise their internet protocol addresses to the network."

A complete border shutdown might have been easier, but Egypt has made sure that there should be no downstream impact, no loss of traffic in countries further down the cables.

Would someone with more network knowledge speak to the role Border Gateway Protocol plays here?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

The article is full of smart sounding nothing. BDP is the mechanism to say where the routers for some network segment are (where to go to deliver the packet with a given IP). DNS servers for .eg are in Egypt. AFAIK both things "don't work" looking form our side if you turn off the entry routers for the cables leading into Egypt. If they claim that they know that internet does function in Egypt but can't reach anything to the outside, then the question is if the users there see DNS resolution or not. If they don't then the DNS servers are turned off. But I think turning off the mentioned routers is more than enough for behaviour described in the article. Nothing smart.

Someone should set up pirate DNS and pirate backbones using sat coms and packet radio to link Egypt with the outside world.

I'm sure they are. And regular old phones are apparently working (who'd have thought it!!!) so modem to modem, bbs style, is an option to bridge wifi/packet gaps.

Fidonet FTW!

Some of those radical activists with ocean-going ships should get themselves some kit to handle this eventuality. You could fit a lot of comm gear and some capable uplinks onboard. It would be a lot more useful than throwing debris at Japanese whalers.

A good analogy (I think) is real borders. In this case airspace borders.

What Egypt have done would be the equivalent of saying to it's air controllers "Any plane incoming for an Egyptian airport, tell them we don't know where it is." And the only option that plane has is to return home (real analogy: the message gets sent to the source airport and the plane disappears into a black hole).

However, any plane that wishes to fly through Egyptian airspace to reach other countries, that's fine, and get's it's routing directions just fine.

The alternatives that the article are talking about, closing down the "bottom" routers: close down all the airports, instead of the whole airspace. This has the same effect, but is harder to co-ordinate.

A complete border shutdown would be like unplugging the cables... any aircraft flying through the airspace would be blackholed, and aircraft attempting to fly in will be blackholed, any attempting to fly through will be blackholed... all with a polite notice of course.

DNS would be equivalent of keeping the airports open & saying "shut down all the screens and don't let any airline attendant tell people the gate that their plane is flying from" (except that are millions of gates...). If you're smart enough to have written it down (cached), or know the gate directly, then you're still going to make your flight. If you don't, you've no chance of making it. (Let's not add vhosts into the mix... okay, maybe for fun... like arriving at the plane, and them saying "this service stops at 100s of destinations, and you've lost your ticket, so we can't let you board").

More detailed information/discussion from fellow geeks in NANOG (North American Network Operator Group). This is the go-to mailing list for me when anything weird happens on the internets.

Connectivity status for Egypt - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031313... Egypt Telecom AS isolation - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031377... 3500 Egyptian prefixes? - http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2011-January/031407...

How much of an opportunity/necessity is developing a redundant, satellite-based internet? (I just asked that on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2152845)

Technical and cost factors make satellite basically uninteresting for most markets until Ka band comes out (there is limited use now, such as wild blue in USA, but the satellite with Ka coverage for Mideast was lost due to a launch problem with a rocket, and all other Ka capacity seems to go to HDTV broadcast vs data.

Personally the most interesting thing I see is O3b, which is maybe a year away.

Ku and L are good for limited markets, but just cost too much for YouTube users anywhere with terrestrial alternatives.

Bandwidth efficient protocols and proxies, combined with wifi and pirate gsm mesh networks, which can talk to unmodified laptops and cellphones for end users, are probably the best tech for situations like Egypt or post natural disaster.

Deficient from any discussion I've heard about the Egypt crisis, is it's potential impact on fiber optic connections THROUGH Egypt. Admittedly Egypt hasn't touched those yet (as far as I know) but volatility there does potentially put those vital connections at risk.

Half of India's traffic to the rest of the world goes through Egypt (remember the undersea anchor incident?) and East Asia can route through Suez as well. If Suez goes down as a fiber gateway, suddenly all Asia <-> Europe traffic is forced to go through the US which would have implications

> Ferguson suggests that, if nothing else, the methods used by the Egyptian government prove how fragile digital communication really is.

I don't think this instance proves how fragile the technology is, rather it proves that you can use this technology to build a system that is easily controlled from a central point. The same technology could have been used to build a robust system that was not easy to shut down completely.

As an IT guy, I cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like to be ordered to shut down the routers like that.

Given that Egypt is one of the places people sent to Guantanamo are threatened with (ie talk or we will send you to Egypt instead of this nice safe and comparatively comfortable place) I think almost anyone would comply.

More interesting would be if you happened to have satellite equipment already in country that they didn't know about or ask to have shut down. You can get a little l band terminal the size of a laptop, and a lotnof remote sites in egypt have real vsat links too.

Problem with satellite if your downlink is within Egypt.

Conceivably a problem if your providers billing server is in Egypt, even if your downlink is elsewhere, as the RAS probably can't talk to your authorisation server in your billing system...

So let that be a lesson to you if you buy a satellite service as a backup - go to a neighbouring country to get it! :-)

I think if I were buying satellite Internet service from Egypt I would almost certainly choose a UK/Europe hub. There's some benefit to another middle eastern hub for access to middle eastern sites (which might be local due to language and customers), but for me, most of my traffic could be going to the US or Europe, so may as well get a hub in Europe to avoid the somewhat-expensive Egypt to Europe fiber portion.

Yeah, I totally agree. I'm in the UK, I think if I had to look seriously for that sort of backup I'd go with Sweden or Switzerland (due to strong personal freedom there) - pretty certain we fall under the same satellite coverage as them.

This article claims that .eg urls won't resolve, but I can go to http://www.google.com.eg and that seems to work just fine. Does Google operate differently somehow or is the article just incorrect?

There's a 14 day expiry on that domain name (at least on 8.8.8.8, google's DNS server). So you should be good for something close to that, my guess, up to 14d - 6h from when the BGP routes were dropped.

So your main issue is for .eg urls that are not cached in the DNS hierarchy you are using. Basically the root servers will direct you to one of (approx) three eg. root servers. These are probably down, or unreachable (due to BGP drops).

To my (basic) understanding of DNS, once your local server knows that ns[1-4].google.com is responsible for this domain, it doesn't need to go to the eg./eg.com. root servers to get updates.

And yes, you're probably getting directed to a "local" version of google.com.eg.

I use to work on the team that maintains the webserver that serves Google websearch. google.com.eg (and any other google search domain) can be served out of many of Google's datacenters, in various places around the world. The user is sent to the "closest" data center that can serve their request, to minimize latency. Country-specific domains don't have to be served out of the local country (that would be pretty unmanageable, given the number of country specific domains Google has).

Never anywhere have I seen such a flood of hyperbole! Still interesting however.

The government of Egypt is actively blocking its population from communicating. There is no such thing as hyperbole in this context.

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