Old Technology Finds Role in Egyptian Protests

January 31st, 2011

Echoes of the collapse of the USSR.

Via: BBC:

Fax machines, ham radio and dial-up modems are helping to avoid the net block imposed on Egypt.

On 27 January, Egypt fell off the internet as virtually all international connections were cut following an order from the government.

But older technologies proved their worth as net activists and protesters used them to get round the block.

Protesters are also circulating information about how to avoid communication controls inside Egypt.
Call charge

Dial-up modems are one of the most popular routes for Egyptians to get back online. Long lists of international numbers that connect to dial-up modems are circulating in Egypt thanks to net activists We Re-Build, Telecomix and others.

Dial-up numbers featured heavily in Twitter messages tagged with hashes related to the protests such as #egypt and #jan25.

ISPs in France, the US, Sweden, Spain and many other nations have set up pools of modems that will accept international calls to get information to and from protesters. Many have waived fees to make it easier for people to connect.

Few domestic lines in Egypt can call internationally to get at the modems, however. The Manalaa blog gave advice about how to use dial-up using a mobile, bluetooth and a laptop. It noted that the cost of international calls could be “pricey” but said it was good enough for “urgent communication”. The advice was posted to many blogs, copied and sent out by many others.

We Re-Build, which campaigns for unmonitored internet access around Europe, said it was also listening on some ham radio frequencies and would relay any messages it received either by voice or morse code.

Fax machines were also drafted in by online activists and others who wanted to contact people inside Egypt and pass on information about how to restore net access.

4 Responses to “Old Technology Finds Role in Egyptian Protests”

  1. RMOHANX says:

    I can’t wait for someone to insert peer-to-peer
    open mesh technologies (free, robust, configurable, nearly unstoppable) in these areas.

    Goodbye internet? Goodbye cell service? So what?

    Perfect….

  2. Kevin says:

    That type of system has been theorized since the 1990s, and probably long before that in “the literature.” A situation like Egypt is seeing now is the sort of motivation that just might make it happen to a greater extent in the future.

    Check out this technology: Vodafone NZ is rolling out femtocells that act as mini cell sites that route the mobile phone voice and data traffic over household DSL connections for anyone in range. The DSL customer isn’t charged for the data that goes over their connection. Vodafone is essentially getting more mobile phone coverage without having to build more towers.

    http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/4598576/Vodafone-now-selling-femtocells

    With that type of technology, “the masses” could conceivably build an ad-hoc mobile phone network when the corporate state takes the locked down one away. There would have to be some hard work done on routing calls over the freak-net, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for the three-propeller beanie set. Or, hell, make it easy and just use wi-fi.

    Maybe someone has a satellite Internet connection available and, well, there goes the neighborhood.

  3. RMOHANX says:

    Like it.

    This is more likely to be implemented/accepted than the independent, local, full P2P solution I’d hope for.

    Yet this also has an easy ‘kill switch’ and is still easily monitored (e.g. Packet Forensics, etc.) by public ‘servants’ and other ‘here to help us’ and ‘keep us safe’ by ‘protecting our freedoms’. (Ok, ran out of quotation marks.)

    Would hope to see a robust, fully-local, mesh-based P2P using Bluetooth by default, but having other protocols available.

    Hard to implement a kill switch on that.

    “Yes”, it’s in the literature. Enough technical material out there to float a Pacific Trash Vortex. Lot’s of stuff is ‘in the literature’ for a long, long time before it rises to attention.

    There’s a lot to keep track of, and separate wheat from chaff. That’s one of my very good reasons for reading Cryptogon.

  4. oelsen says:

    And then some open microwave jams a whole block, some sophisticated jammer surely can jam a wide area.

    The mesh should independently route over several frequencies, like 5Ghz and 2.5, 800 and 900Mhz, some LAN in between through the houses to fake wirelssfree (read: gov-supporting) areas.

    I am 100% certain, that within two years every http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Souk has its own MAN. FreeBSD and Linux have 802.11s alpha-implementations. Another possibility is IPv6 and a /64 for every mosque or church. A minaret can be used to cover a wide area, minaret-2-minaret for back bones.

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