Egypt's big internet disconnect [guardian]
Egypt shuts down its net with a series of phone calls [wired]
Twitter shut down [wired]
This is why I sometimes write political omg no she said 'political' it's just not... done material you're supposed to be post-post ironically detached into an ostensive art diary/journal/cv/entertainment psychomirror diary of a mad webwalker?... mostly having to do with the politics of information and divergent mental states.
Viva l'Internet! Hurrah for connectivity! Down with the real bandwidth pirates!
Information just wants to be free. This is our frontier; this is our country of the mind and of the net. This is suppression of the people's right to assembly and to converse. This is relevant to everything I believe about living in and being part of the network of this technology and of the people inhabiting, forming and shaping it as the communications medium of the next century.
I know, it's a corny emotional soapbox dramatic but hey- it's my blog ^_^
6 comments:
I found this on FB (omg i said a dirty word!) :"in Egypt virtual in SL and people are protesting here as well"
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Egypt/174/124/21
...and now Obama wants a Kill Switch for the USA too... they are all sooo frightened of freedom of information.
@soror, if the US does put in a kill switch, we'll have lost something essential about a culture we all love. But I can see it, because I'm still unconvinced that our new online community has a shred of real power when compared to that of governments and the multinationals that oh so gently pull their strings.
I could see the need for something like a kill-switch, in case the US and China go to war over the planet's dwindling oil reserves in a few years. Our infrastructure is very vulnerable to cascading failures of the sort we saw in the power grid in 2003. So much of our important infrastructure is becoming "smart," like the grid here in Virginia. Imagine what clever cyber-warriors could do here, as effectively as they did in Iran.
If we get this switch, I sure as heck hope that control of it, like control of our nukes, does into the hands of the military, with the President carrying the codes, and control does not some Federal agency that might panic.
US officers swear an oath to defend the Constitution, not some politico.
What does the Constitution, written at a time when none of this could even be dreamt of, have to do with it?
How to set up an emergency wireless intranet:
1. laptop with wireless card
2. a copy of this:MediaWiki
Iggy: there's no reason for a "all out kill switch." That is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. There is no good technical reason for it, and only political reasons for it.
Devices which should never be put on a publicly-accessible platform (nuke plants, power plants, etc) are wired up for costcutting and laziness reasons. This is insane. Would you leave your car/house keys on a shelf at the local grocery or bar?
2. The bastardizing, infrastructure-gutting and pipe-aggregation which would make such a technical scenario possible is directly the responsibility of the people who stole our network, stole money from us to upgrade and pocketed it and continue to misrepresent both their products and their capacities, dribbling out bandwidth for gouging purposes and whining all the way to their obscene profit wallows.
They suck my money up; let them suck the consequences up. They are engineering to fail (and who's agenda would THAT serve?)
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