HUA HIN , Thailand - The ever-benevolent uncle of the Internet has been busy
this week helping the repressed and down-trodden masses of humanity communicate
more effectively and get their voices heard.
Google has teamed up with Twitter to offer a "speak-to-tweet" service enabling
anti-government protesters inside Egypt to get around a total Internet outage
following widespread civil unrest in the country.
What started with the blockage of a few social websites used by protesters to
vent their anger at the current 30-year administration
of President Hosni Mubarak escalated into a total Internet blackout in Egypt
this week and mobile phone text messaging services remained patchy.
The country's four main Internet providers - Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom
Egypt and Etisalat Misr - pulled the plug last week, and the fifth, Noor Group,
shut down Internet services on Monday. Internet access was restored on
Wednesday, although at the time of publication the situation remains tense.
Google's digital lifebuoy did not need Internet access to function; users
simply called one of three dedicated numbers and left a voice mail, which was
then translated into an audio file message that automatically displayed on
Twitter with the #egypt identification tag.
The official Google blog stated that the company staff, like many other people,
had been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and considered how they could
help people on the ground. The company's video website, YouTube, has been
streaming live coverage of al-Jazeera's broadcasts as events unfold.
Hundreds of "speak-to-tweet" messages have appeared on the micro-blogging
website http://twitter.com/speak2tweet
this week as Egyptians strive to be heard above the digital blackouts.
"The government is spreading rumors of fear and of burglary and of violence ...
the only incidences of theft and burglary are done by the police themselves,"
said one of the messages from an English speaker.
Volunteers from across the web have also been working to translate many
messages from Arabic into English; these were displayed on a publicly viewable
spreadsheet on Google Docs.
Facebook has also been a pivotal tool for government opposition groups as it
boasts five million users in Egypt alone, making it the highest number per
country in the Arab world. Company executives will no doubt be feverishly
debating the role their website has played in the recent uprisings in Egypt and
Tunisia.
Facebook is hugely popular in many countries that are autocracies or
dictatorships, and it stands to reason that government tolerance for the
website, which is now seen as a political weapon, may begin to wane following
its instrumental role in this week's events.
Mubarak's decision to sever Internet access to Egypt's 83 million inhabitants
could well have deeper ramifications from a business and economic viewpoint.
Several large technology companies, including Microsoft and Hewlett Packard,
were already rerouting operations out of the country and may well be
reconsidering their options within it.
Several large high-tech office parks, such as Cairo's Smart Villages created in
2003, were set up by Egypt to attract big companies in an effort to create jobs
for its young, educated workforce. Those aspirations appear to be unwinding now
as the country has been thrown back into the digital dark ages.
Smart Villages stated that by the end of 2009, there were 28,000 professionals
working at various companies, and by 2014 it expected more than 100,000 would
be working at some 500 companies - predictions that may now need some serious
revisions.
The Barack Obama administration also urged the Egyptian government to restore
Internet access as it is considered a human right in the US, with a statement
from the White House reading: "It is our strong belief that inside of the
framework of basic individual rights are the rights of those to have access to
the Internet and to sites for open communication and social networking."
Evidently, the Mubarak administration did not agree, as its own official
Information Technology Industry Development Agency has also been offline for
most of the week.
Security
Another week rolls by and another major security bulletin gets released by
Microsoft in what seems to be a frequency that is increasing at an alarming
rate. As usual the culprit is Internet Explorer (again), and the flaw, if
exploited, will allow hackers to gain access to compromised computers and
personal data.
The bug potentially affects every single user of IE, a total of around 900
million people across the globe. Buried deep within Windows itself the flaw
appears to affect the way IE handles some web pages and documents and may
result in displaying fraudulent links which, when clicked, will install
malicious scripts.
Microsoft has released a security patch
(http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2501696) while it works on a long-term
solution. The company claims that there is no evidence that the glitch has been
exploited - yet.
Firefox and Chrome are looking more appealing by the day.
Internet
The World Wide Web is running out of addresses. An imminent announcement by the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is expected to
tackle the dwindling pool of available IP4 (Internet Protocol 4) addresses.
This week the Asia Pacific Network Information Center (APNic) has put in a
request for more net addresses which will leave only five blocks of 16 million
IP addresses remaining.
IPv4 was drawn up in the 1970s with a capacity for around 4.3 billion
addresses. The rapid growth of the Internet has quickly depleted that stock
which is expected to be completely exhausted by September.
A successor, IPv6, which supports trillions of addresses, is already up and
running - notably in Japan and China - but adoption by global Internet
providers, organizations and governments has been slow.
In the United States, where, according to The Economist, network operators in
America have invested heavily in address-saving technologies and having
received the lion's share of addresses before today’s rules were put in place
many large companies and government agencies still have plenty of spare IPv4
addresses lying around unused.
In China, which has only one address for every four people, there is more
urgency - during the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing "everything from live
television and data feeds to security and traffic information was streamed over
a vast IPv6 network", The Economist reported.
Similar concerns are shared in South Korea, while in Japan, NTT, the country's
largest telecoms firm, has been offering IPv6 services to the public since
2000, the report said.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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