Recently in Politics Category

We're still piecing together the data that can confirm or deny much of what's been reported overnight, but one thing is clear: something very strange was going on with Tripoli residents' Internet access. Service was restored suddenly in Tripoli, flickered on and off for a couple of hours, and then died, with the majority of the country's international BGP routes withdrawn from service for good measure. Today the routes are back in Tripoli, but ADSL service isn't. This morning we're looking back at this curious overnight episode, and speculate about what might have happened.

(Updates on the restoration of Syria's internet at the bottom of this page. --jim)

Starting at 3:35 UTC today (6:35am local time), approximately two-thirds of all Syrian networks became unreachable from the global Internet. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the routes to 40 of 59 networks were withdrawn from the global routing table.

This image shows the current state (green: reachable, red: unreachable) of each network prefix in the Middle East this morning, visualized as a packed Hilbert-curve representation. The size of the colored area is proportional to each country's Internet presence, so you can see that Syria's Internet (red block near the top center) is a little smaller than that of Kuwait.

Libya's nationwide Internet blackout is entering its second full day. From a technical standpoint, it's clear that this is a very different strategy than the one used by Egypt in the last days of the Mubarak regime. The ultimate outcome is probably going to be the same. Let's take a few minutes to compare the two, and think about the implications for future Internet engagements in the Jasmine Revolution.

Early reports from Algeria tonight suggested that another Internet takedown may be underway, similar to the one that affected Egypt. So far, however, we don't see confirming evidence for it.

Algerian providers get their international connectivity via submarine cables from Europe, with diverse transit from a long list of providers: Level3, Cogent, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, France Telecom, and Tinet. A pretty wide range of Algerian providers (Telecom Algeria, Wataniya Telecom Algeria, SPA Anwarnet, Smart Link, Orascom/Djezzy, etc.) have direct international connectivity, as seen in the BGP routing table. There's still no Internet exchange, or at least none that's widely advertised. All of that presumably makes a "kill switch" strategy somewhat more difficult to implement.

Algeria typically has about 135 routed network prefixes in the global routing table, and our data show that they are all still routed and relatively stable. Traceroutes inbound confirm that sites hosted in these prefixes are still alive, and spot checks of websites hosted in Algeria show that most are up and functioning normally. A few that we checked were unreachable, including the telecommunications regulatory authority (http://www.arpt.dz), the Prime Minister's office (http://www.cg.gov.dz), and other sites hosted at Djaweb (Telecom Algeria's hosting brand).

It's possible that new Internet blocks have been put in place that would not be visible from outside, such as Iran-style throttling or shutdowns of residential connections. We'll have to wait for some assessment of drops in inbound/outbound traffic levels to spot those subtler internal changes.

As of approximately 20:46 UTC, four hours after this blog was first published, Noor started disappearing from the Internet. They are completely unavailable at present as shown below

As we observed last week, Egypt took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the Internet. The government didn't simply block Twitter and Facebook (an increasingly common tactic of regimes under fire), but rather they apparently ordered most major Egyptian providers to cease service via their international providers, effectively removing Egyptian IP space from the global Internet and cutting off essentially all access to the outside world via this medium. The only way out now would be via traditional phone calls, assuming they left that system up, or via satellite. We thought the Internet ban would be temporary, but much to our surprise, the situation has not changed. One of the few Egyptian providers reachable today, four days after the start of the crisis, is The Noor Group. In this blog, we'll take a quick look at them and some of the businesses they serve.

Thanks to all for great comments and questions. Please see below for latest updates on the ongoing Egyptian Internet blackout, including some trace-based analysis and a few words about neighboring countries. After this morning we'll be closing this post out, and looking for the restoration. Hopefully sooner than later. --jim

Confirming what a few have reported this evening: in an action unprecedented in Internet history, the Egyptian government appears to have ordered service providers to shut down all international connections to the Internet. Critical European-Asian fiber-optic routes through Egypt appear to be unaffected for now. But every Egyptian provider, every business, bank, Internet cafe, website, school, embassy, and government office that relied on the big four Egyptian ISPs for their Internet connectivity is now cut off from the rest of the world. Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, Etisalat Misr, and all their customers and partners are, for the moment, off the air.

Last week, we looked at the problem of incorrect DNS answers emanating from China and the potential impact on Internet users outside the country. In this blog, we'll consider a proposed and partially implemented solution (DNSSEC) and the broader problem of hosting global services in any country known to tamper with Internet traffic. We'll even suggest a rating system from one to five stars for evaluating countries, and we'll note that while the US was once a 5 on this scale (highest rating), it is currently a 4 and might be headed to a 3 or 2. In general, the direction for the world seems to be for a less open and more censored Internet, and that is the truly unfortunate part of this story.

There's been sudden interest recently in a Chinese route hijacking incident that occurred way back in April, brought about by a new report to the US Congress that highlighted the event (see pages 236-247). A second Chinese event, also in the report, has received almost no attention despite being much more interesting (technically, anyway). A Chinese DNS censorship incident occurred just one month earlier, in March, and although we already presented an analysis of that event (here and here), today we'll provide an update on the incident and its scope. But first, let's step back and get some context on events such as these, and see if the hype is warranted.