Patrice Riemens on Tue, 1 Feb 2011 15:15:25 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Ben Rooney: Egypt Cuts Off The Net. Net Fights Back (Wall Street Journal Tech Blog) |
bwo Michael Polman/ Antenna original at: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2011/01/29/egypt-cuts-off-the-net-net-fights-back/ Egypt Cuts Off The Net. Net Fights Back By Ben Rooney Protestors in Egypt are using dial-up to get round net blocks Egypt´s sealing off the country from the rest of the internet has provoked a series of low-tech initiatives aimed at allowing at least some sort of connection. Yesterday a small French ISP, NDF opened up a dial-up line to allow access to anyone with a modem. The international dial-up numbers only work for people with access to a telephone modem and an international calling service, which not all Egyptians have. However, an Egyptian couple have published a comprehensive guide on how to use the mobile phone network to connect to international dial up internet providers. "In a nutshell we need to dial another international ISP, but since most of our homes back in Egypt have no international phone-call capability we will by-pass this by linking to the mobile-phone network which is by default has international capability but unfortunately a little pricey (~2 LE a minute) but sufficient to make urgent communication on internet," the couple wrote on their blog. The post goes into great detail on how users can circumvent the blocks put in place by the Egyptian government. Other such sites are springing up across the net. We Rebuild, which describes itself as "a decentralized cluster of net activists" has compiled an Egypt resource page which lists all of the ways in which activists are using the net, and other resources. Elsewhere there are reports that China has blocked mention of Egypt on Sina Weibo, the biggest Twitter clone in China. A search for "Egypt" on the Sina microblogging service brings up a message saying, "According to relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results are not shown", says Aljazeera. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org