With the country racked by anti-government protesters and pro-democracy rallies, the country of Egypt has gone to extremes in an attempt to silence dissent and make the lives of protesters that much more difficult. Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak has ordered the Cairo-based government to shut off Egypt’s Internet connection. The 80-million-strong country of Egypt has completely disappeared off of the Internet map, with no access in or out of the country via online means. Mubarak has activated the kill switch on his country’s online access, despite the economic consequences.
“This is a completely different situation from the modest Internet manipulation that took place in Tunisia, where specific routes were blocked, or Iran, where the Internet stayed up in a rate-limited form designed to make Internet connectivity painfully slow,” writes Jim Cowie of Internet monitoring firm Renesys. “The Egyptian government’s actions tonight have essentially wiped their country from the global map.”
There’s one thing about the shut-down that is… well, not good, but not bad for Egyptian protesters. The country was only able to turn off its international access to the World Wide Web. Local servers and local Intranet traffic are still functioning. However, when the protesters have been organizing via Youtube and Facebook, neither of which is hosted in Egypt, it makes things a lot more difficult to fight back against the tinpot dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak.
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