Turns Out Egypt Did Have An Internet Kill Switch
from the flip-the-switch dept
After Egypt shut off internet access a few weeks back, most of the analysis of how it was done suggested in basically involved calling all of the country's ISPs and ordering them to shut down access. Yet, a new report claims it really was more of a "kill switch" scenario, in that the majority of the shut-off came from flipping a single switch in the Ramses exchange -- a key data center in Cairo. That didn't stop everything, so the rest was accomplished with a few phone calls -- but it was that switch flip that did most of the work.The same report notes, as we predicted, that the economic impact of the shutdown were pretty big:
The presentation suggests the weeklong shutdown had severe effects on Egypt’s economy, in the short term from loss of commerce, and in the long term from a likely plummet in tourism, and an exodus of call centers from Egypt.Well, hopefully it also makes other countries aware of the negative impacts of killing off internet access.
The presentation concludes that the ministry’s course of action in obeying the orders may have some positive effects in the future: “Itʼs unlikely that Egyptʼs communications ministry will ever be asked to flip that switch again.”
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Filed Under: egypt, internet, kill switch
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Question...
How it's set up, it's unlikely that our government will actually stop the money train that is AT&T from getting what it wants, regardless of the consequences.
So it's more than likely that should this actually become part of our legislation, we'll continue to see monopolistic competition in the US.
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Re: Question...
But AFAIK in Egypt the providers bowed to the will of the government (on might argue they didn't have much of a choice) and the government just threatened they'd pull the plug in the CIX (which was probably not very likely as the government allowed one ISP to continue service, rumour has it, that that ISP had certain vital (read Suez Canal) services in its net block, though I haven't been able to confirm this; but it would at least explain why they didn't force the remaining ISP to shut down too)).
Cheers,
Drizzt
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Economic damage irrelevant
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Re: Economic damage irrelevant
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That doesn't quite make sense
http://stat.ripe.net/egypt/
The graph didn't just bottom out, it declined in steps. At one point it even steps up a little bit as (presumably) traffic is rerouted from one "failing" connection, to another.
I'm not saying the "One Big Kill Switch" theory isn't true, just that it doesn't appear to match the facts.
Shane
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Sort of a non-story.
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Re:
Its like never realizing that all of the traffic in your town routes around to a single intersection, and one day a single small fender-bender (or road-cones, the analogy is getting stretched a bit) serves to shut down everything.
And i am certain that the concept of "internet disconnect" came up somewhere.
politically connected manager: We have to find a we to shut down all internet traffic!
reluctant IT tech: well, in theory if you simply shut down This data-switch here, it will shut down all the data flow between here and everywhere, but i don't suggest..
politically connected manager: Brilliant! Throw The Switch!
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If I wanted to destroy the US Economy, I'd completely revel in the fact that the US Government would overreact over a minor network DDoS (or something similar).
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Accident of Engineering
If you're looking to bring a new fiber to link to Egypt, where are you gonna put it? It's just natural that most of Egypt's outside access hits Cairo first. There might be a dumb relay elsewhere (say, on the Mediterranean Coast), but to keep average latency down you'll want the first real routing hop for your link to be in Cairo. And it makes sense most of the links in Cairo would be in just one or two places that could be turned off just by cutting the power.
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sticking my tongue in a light socket is good because...
The quotation is from the presentation, but "positive effects" comes from Wired. In the context of the presentation, the quote could be read as "they'll never make THAT mistake again". Honestly, I can't understand how anyone could consider it a "positive effect, unless a) they're so authoritarian that they think teaching the people not to speak out is worth crippling the economy, or b) they're so stupid that they think doing something stupid and getting burned is a smart way to avoid doing that stupid thing in the future. (And considering that Homeland Security wrote the presentation, both are possible.)
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Dont kid yourself - Kill switch
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9WStvRc0rQ
http://www.y outube.com/watch?v=v6o792T2XNM
At this point I do not doubt for a minute that the NSA's equipment is in the middle, not just split.
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