Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger
In Brief
- The Internet was designed to be a decentralized system: every node should connect to many others. This design helped to make the system resistant to censorship or outside attack.
- Yet in practice, most individual users exist at the edges of the network, connected to others only through their Internet service provider (ISP). Block this link, and Internet access disappears.
- An alternative option is beginning to emerge in the form of wireless mesh networks, simple systems that connect end users to one another and automatically route around blocks and censors.
- Yet any mesh network needs to hit a critical mass of users before it functions well; developers must convince potential users to trade off ease of use for added freedom and privacy.
More In This Article
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Overview
Bill Joy Podcast
Just after midnight on January 28, 2011, the government of Egypt, rocked by three straight days of massive antiregime protests organized in part through Facebook and other online social networks, did something unprecedented in the history of 21st-century telecommunications: it turned off the Internet. Exactly how it did this remains unclear, but the evidence suggests that five well-placed phone calls—one to each of the country’s biggest Internet service providers (ISPs)—may have been all it took. At 12:12 a.m. Cairo time, network routing records show, the leading ISP, Telecom Egypt, began shutting down its customers’ connections to the rest of the Internet, and in the course of the next 13 minutes, four other providers followed suit. By 12:40 a.m. the operation was complete. An estimated 93 percent of the Egyptian Internet was now unreachable. When the sun rose the next morning, the protesters made their way to Tahrir Square in almost total digital darkness.
Both strategically and tactically, the Internet blackout accomplished little—the crowds that day were the biggest yet, and in the end, the demonstrators prevailed. But as an object lesson in the Internet’s vulnerability to top-down control, the shutdown was alarmingly instructive and perhaps long overdue.
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10 Comments
Add Commentthis is one of the best articles scientific american has done in a long time
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGovernments should also fund such a shadow web, and quickly.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf course, this would make controlling population difficult. But if the government can close internet, terrorists or enemy waging cyberwar* can, too. It is easier to blow up a server or a cable than heavily guarded power plant, but damage is the same.
*If a country wages cyberwar, how do you call a person? Cyber-soldier? Not, perhaps. Internet-soldier, maybe?
Do not rely on your government to help you. If your government has a hand in the new founded internet, they will have ways of monitoring you and or controlling what you do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWake up!
We are anonymous
We are legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us.
Jerzy New, think you have missed the point, The 'plan' is to exclude gov'ts and any other entity that could interfere with the New Net.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"*If a country wages cyberwar, how do you call a person? Cyber-soldier? Not, perhaps. Internet-soldier, maybe?"
Certainly NOT a christian soldier, (that's a joke)
I guess this is a major part of why I stayed with a small local provider. We at least won't be among the first to be shut down, if we can find anyone to talk with. Isn't "network" what the Internet is supposed to be about? So weareanonymous, will you be able to keep the Internet going, as well as disrupt parts of it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswell, most people have wi-fi of some sort.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisguess I need to turn mine on & share per the mag article
Governments should not control what we do online. But we also should understand that they will never do that.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this<a href="http://medulamedula.com">Medula</a>
Thinking about it again, maybe they ARE christian solders, and no that's not a joke
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut the point is they are having a bloody good try.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Internet is indeed a fragile entity. It is unfortunate that major shortwave broadcasters such as the BBC World Service and Radio Canada International have chosen to curtail or eliminate their shortwave programs and are instead utilizing streaming technology on the web to transmit their schedule. Civil unrest or natural disasters can make short work of the Internet. Shortwave broadcasting is far more robust. A transmitter and multiple inexpensive receivers are all that are required. We are increasingly dependent on the web but it may ultimately be to our detriment if the current model persists.
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