Tag Archives: net neutrality

And now, Libya.

Web, ,

In which another country’s dictator tries to disconnect it from the world.

Have you been paying attention to Libya? (And Bahrain? And Yemen? Algeria?) Well, it disappeared from the Internet tonight:

“Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn at 23:18 GMT (Friday night, just after midnight Saturday local time), and Libya is off the Internet. One Libyan route originated by Telecom Italia directly is still BGP-reachable, but inbound traceroutes appear to die in Palermo. A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete.

“We wondered whether anyone would repeat Egypt’s strategy. Tonight, it appears that we have our answer.”

Continue reading And now, Libya. →

THIS is what net neutrality really means, okay?

Soapbox, ,

In which I explain to you why you must be for net neutrality.

Egypt is missing. The entire country dropped off the Internet today (and the cell network as well), moments after AP video footage of a protester being shot in the head began to emerge. It looks like there’s one network left, Noor, and currently the assumption is that it was allowed to stay connected to the rest of the world only because it carries the country’s stock exchange traffic. That’s one pipe out of 80 massive, country-feeding connections:

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP [border gateway protocol] routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

The Internet was designed to be self-healing. It was built to carry data even after entire cities had been destroyed. If you understood even a little of how core routers work, you’d love the Internet eleven times more than you already do, and you would know how utterly fucked up it is that an ENTIRE COUNTRY has gone dark. 80,000,000 voices have been silenced. Continue reading THIS is what net neutrality really means, okay? →