Mahmoud Salem on the Egyptian Media

Mahmoud Salem skewers the Egyptian media's heavy-handed propaganda efforts: "Here to Inform ..."

Iran Restores Gmail; Can its "Intranet" Work?

Jillian C. York at Al Jazeera asks "Is Iran's Halal Internet Possible"? We've talked previously about Iran's efforts to create a national "Intranet" firewalled off from the global Internet, but its recent move in shutting down Google and Gmail (reputedly in retaliation for YouTube not taking down the video attacking the Prophet) had to be rescinded in the case of Gmail, when not only was there a popular backlash but even members of Parliament complained.

The Great Firewall of Iran: Blocking Google and Gmail

Though not as well known as the Great Wall of China, Sassanian Iran (in the centuries before the coming of Islam) was once protected by the Great Wall of Gorgan, protecting northeastern Iran from steppe peoples of Central Asia. With other fortifications to the west of the Caspian, Iran was protected by a network of defensive walls  rivaled in length only by their more famous Chinese counterpart. The eastern and western walls protecting the "Caspian gates" came to be associated with the mythological tales surrounding Alexander the Great and the so-called Wall of Gog and Magog.

Iran is now talking about erecting a wall of another sort, a firewall against the world, apparently as part of its declared intention of creating a national Intranet independent of the global Internet. It's latest step: 
Iran has cut off access to Google and Gmail,  Officially, the moves against Google were in retaliation for YouTube's not taking down the controversial film attacking the Prophet. YouTube is owned by Google.

Most access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media has been blocked for some time.

Iran claims its attempt to create a self-contained national Intranet is not primarily aimed at isolating its people from information, but at blocking the sort of cyber-attacks on its computer and scientific infrastructure, including its nuclear program, that it has experienced in recent years.

The National on Arabic E-Books

The National looks at the emerging market for e-books in Arabic.

AP Still Wrestling with those Internet Tubes or Whatever

This post is not specifically about the Middle East, but it involves many issues of interest, I think, to those of us in media, publishing, journalism, and blogging, and is relevant to anyone covering and writing about the Middle East.

The Associated Press, the enormous and venerable American wire service, has had what can be described, at best, as a curious relationship to the Internet and the blogosphere, and other things that have succeeded the era of linotype. I'll deal with that history in a moment, but first their latest venture: they've issued guidelines placing restrictions on exactly how their correspondents can Retweet (RT) other people's opinions on Twitter.

They are getting a lot of flak from their correspondents, as the link above notes. Now, while the headlines of my blog posts do go out on MEI's feed (@MiddleEastInst) and I occasionally add something there when news is breaking, it won't surprise my readers to learn that I'm too loquacious and too fond of nuance to editorialize in 140 characters. But I use Twitter constantly as a source for breaking news, and even though I'm a white-bearded guy in his 60s who remembers the Eisenhower Administration, I know what Retweeting is. I also understand that AP is trying to avoid bias: they worry that if you RT something some politician says, it means you agree with him. (Does anyone else think that's what Retweeting implies? At least always? The Egyptian revolutionaries used to RT Mubarak speeches.)

Anyway, from the link above it sounds as if AP is already backing off the original memo, suggesting that you just need to make it clear it's not your opinion.

This would not merit comment if it were not for AP's history of apparently not getting Web 2.0, or maybe even Web 1.0.

Flash back to 2009. Not 1991, when the savvy folks were on Compuserve and the World Wide Web was first invented, or 1995, when AOL ruled the world, or even the bold new Netscape days of 1999, but 2009. Two years ago. AP managed to make a fool of itself twice that year. First, it sought to claim copyright infringement against any website that used even short quotes from its stories (within the usual fair use parameters) and/or even linked to its stories. Here's a tech site story from the era, complete with a an astute comment (and imaginary AP quote) from the website:

“We figure that having writers in the thriving medium of web publication quote us and link back to our content can only hurt us,” Associated Press Vice-President and Strategy Director Jim Kennedy never said. “I mean, that sort of thing increases our visibility, reinforces our brand, provides free marketing, and ups our search engine ranking. Hogwash, I tell you. Hogwash,” he neglected to add.

Even before the Internet had stopped laughing at AP's attempt to deflect attention and hotlinks from their stories (horrors!), they struck again. Now, as I said above I'm a whitebearded guy in my 60s, etc., but I've had a personal YouTube account since 2006. Apparently in 2009 AP's administration was startled to learn that they had one too. having sent a cease and desist letter to one of their own affiliate stations for embedding a video from AP's YouTube channel that had embedding enabled.

Now for those of you out there who have never uploaded a video of your cat or hamster to YouTube, you can make your upload private, visible only to you, or family, or subscribers, or whatever. You can also make it public but not embeddable: that is: someone has to link to it, not put your video directly on their webpage, Apparently AP did not realize that it was allowing embedding for all its uploads, not just for its members (like the station they sought to sanction),  but just anybody.

Again, that was in 2009. Now they are wrestling with Twitter.

When the last dead-tree newspaper dies and AP moves the story on the last telex in the world, will they let me link to it?

Protests Growing Over Imprisoned Blogger

Although Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces has said it would avoid trying civilians in military court "except for violations of military law," in fact civilians have continued to appear in military courts since the revolution. The recent arrest of blogger/activist Alaa Abdel Fattah appears to be turning into a cause celébre for those opposed to SCAF and military courts. Summoned for questioning on suspicion of "incitement" in the violence at Maspero on October 9, he returned to Egypt after a visit to California and then refused to answer questions of the military prosecutor, on the grounds that 1) since he is a civilian they have no jurisdiction and 2) since military police were involved in the Maspero clashes a military prosecutor should not be investigating the incident.

Abdel Fattah, who founded a well-known aggregator blog with his wife Manal (most posts are in Arabic), and is a vocal presence on Twitter  (@alaa), has provoked a lot of sympathy, and growing protests in Egypt and Tunisia as well as in the online community.

If I had to guess, I'd wager that SCAF will let him go within the 15-day detention period since he has become such a high-profile figure. But I think he would remind them that there are thousands of Egyptian civilians detained by military prosecutors who have no international profile or support base.

Google Street View Takes You Inside the Iraq National Museum

For your weekend virtual enjoyment: A hat tip to our webmaster Dan McEwan for this one. If eight years of war in Iraq has had debatable results in terms of democracy or stability, it has at least brought Google Street View to Baghdad. And now, you can follow it right inside the Iraq National Museum in Baghdad. Click here, then move the little street view figure around, and you can do a virtual tour of the museum.

UPDATED: for several hours I put an embed here, but it was taking forever to load the main page, so I've deleted it; just click on the above link if you're interested.

An "Angie's List" Approach to Egyptian Handymen

Via a tweet from the indispensable @sandmonkey, who has also produced an epic series of tweets I hope he consolidates somewhere so I can link to his whole rant, Here's an intriguing website suggesting that the Egyptian revolution is opening up new vistas online: a site, Sana‘i, or as they put it, sanay3y.com, listing Egyptian handymen in various specialties and various parts of Cairo, with the ability to make online comments. A sort of Egyptian Angie's List for handymen.

Now San Francisco is Acting Like an Arab Dictatorship

As I was telling David Cameron the other day, (and no, I don't think he was listening), in the case of his threats to shut down access to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks during the British riots, such tactics remind me of the Iranian, Egyptian, Syrian and Libyan shutdowns of the Internet and cellphones to block protest organizers. It's now spread to another city, one previously, like London, not particularly known for its Gestapo inclinations: San Francisco. Yes, the birthplace of hippies and the Haight-Ashbury, the proudly liberal city with no visible Republicans, is joining the club. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, their subway, decided to shut down cellphone service in the subway to block planned demonstrations. Of course they got the demonstrations anyway and made a lot of people furious; and now BART itself has been hacked by the "Anonymous" people, who, when I'm being rational about it, I consider a public menace, but then there are times when you need a Robin Hood out there. I expect this of Husni Mubarak or Bashar al-Asad, but London? San Francisco?

Ban Now, Why Take Chances?

Google +, Google's attempt to take on Facebook, isn't even available to the general public yet. Not to worry: Iran has already blocked it anyway.

This Blog Now Available in Optimized-for-Mobile Version

Thanks to a new Blogger feature (not any tech genius of mine), if you are so addicted to this blog that you access it from a mobile device like a Smartphone, you'll get the optimized-for-mobile version, which shows the headlines and short intros, smaller photos, etc. It will look like the image at left, only smaller. If you access it on a computer you'll still see the usual version. If anyone out there actually accesses me from your phone, let me know if you prefer this version (I can turn it off, but sort of like the way it looks). It works fine with Android at least; if you have problems let me know.

The Day the Net Went Out in Syria

Approximately two-thirds of Syria's Internet connections were shut down this morning local time. According to the report, "The networks that are not reachable include, substantially, all of the prefixes reserved for SyriaTel's 3G mobile data networks, and smaller downstream ISPs including Sawa, INET, and Runnet."

If it reminds you of something, try this back on January 28, when cells and Internet went dark in  Egypt. The officials responsible have since had punitive fines levied against them, but then, Asad is counting on holding on to power.

Naguib Sawiris Kicks Himself Upstairs to Focus on Politics

Naguib Sawiris, Executive Chairman of Egypt's Orascom telecommunications giant and one of the (if not the) richest Egyptian businessmen is yielding the Executive Chairman post to the company's CEO because he has "decided to be more focused on social and political work, aiming to play a role in the transformation of post-revolution Egypt into a civil democracy," according to this business article on Al-Masry al-Youm English. Two major points left out of the article that would be intuitive to Egyptian readers but not necessarily to others:

1. Sawiris is the ultimate, overall major investor in Al-Masry Al-Youm, though they don't disclose that here.
2. Sawiris is a Copt, one of the most visible Copts in the country who isn't the Pope or carries the name Boutros-Ghali (Boutros or Yusuf).

What this means is unclear. He's not going to run for President — he's a Copt — but the growing sectarian issues may have some influence on his decision. While if the change in Egypt is merely a change in which millionaires run the country — from Gamal Mubarak's business cronies to a new bunch of millionaires — it may not be a good sign. (Though to be fair, Sawiris is not a millionaire. He's a billionaire.)

The Night the Internet Died in Egypt

It's past midnight here but I'm still watching Egypt, where the day of the big demonstration has already dawned. Time to go to bed. But first:

Read this article and look at this graphic.
Times are GMT. Egypt is GMT +2. Egypt's Internet started to go dark just after midnight local time, and flatlined by 12:30. The night the Internet died in the cradle of civilization.

Details from the link:

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.

At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet's global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.

Indeed, I can't raise any .eg sites, not even official ones like Al-Ahram. Also see here.

You can shut down the Internet for a while, but how do you conduct normal commerce? Ben Wedeman of CNN tweeted tonight (well, last night now) that he couldn't check into a hotel since Reservations couldn't access the Internet.

Iran shut it down pretty hard in 2009 to break the demonstrations and Egypt seems to be doing the same tonight. Though in Iran if I recall correctly you could still access government sites from abroad. But Egypt depends on tourism, international trade, the Suez Canal, international remissions, all things that need connectivity. How long can they keep it shut down before they go from acting like North Korea to having North Korea's economy? Not long I suspect.

It's a reminder that the Internet is not the universal democratizing engine some expect as long as governments still control where the plug goes into the wall, or where the ISPs talk to the world. But it also says you're desperate, if you unplug the world for the day. Friday is not a major day for business in Egypt, of course, but can you keep it down Saturday and beyond?

I'll have more tomorrow. Am up too late as it is. But look at that graph.

Is Egypt Shutting Out the World Before Tomorrow?

UPDATE II: Several activists and two of the senior Brotherhood figures have been arrested in the small hours of the morning apparently. Tomorrow is going to be serious business, I fear.

UDPATE: If this story is true, it could be a bad augury for tomorrow. Why would security forces burn cars unless they're acting as provocateurs to justify a hard crackdown?

Egyptian bloggers and tweeters have been reporting major problems accessing the Internet altogether — not just Twitter and Facebook, which have reportedly been sporadically down for the last couple of days. Yesterday Suez was cut off — mobile service, landlines, SMS, even in some neighborhoods electrical power. If they shut down all Internet access, the outside world is going to have problems reporting tomorrow's demonstration. Many foreign media have already been arrested but later released.

It worked in Iran in 2009. Can it work in Egypt? It's generally even more connected, but we'll see. (Shades of when I first lived in Egypt in 1972, when the phone system was undependable and getting a phone line took years, as opposed to now, when everyone's mobile.)

How Facebook Fought Back Against Tunisia

An interesting tech piece at The Atlantic on how Facebook sought to defend its members against a massive, state-level attempt by Tunisia to steal all the passwords.

Tunisian Opposition Offers Tech Guidance for Beating Internet Censorship

Tunisia's protesters, faced with the crackdown on new and social media I noted yesterday, are fighting back: the Nawaat website offers a technical guide to beating the government blockages (link is in French).

Global Voices Online also looks at the rising tide of Tunisian Internet censorship.

Meanwhile, Brian Whitaker of The Guardian, who's given the fullest English-language coverage I've seen to the Tunisian events, gives fuller coverage of the Internet crackdown.

Stuxnet More Subtle than First Thought?

Remember the flap over Stuxnet? The alleged computer worm that may have deliberately targeted the Iranian nuclear program? (If not, click the link.) While the usual suspects (the US and Israel) plead that they know nothing (nothing!) this report in Wired suggests Stuxnet was a very subtle program aimed at introducing gradual, undetectable changes into a system.

The technical details are way beyond me, so I merely refer you to the article, since we've dealt with this story before. It does sound increasingly like Iran may have been the target.

Shin Bet Chief on Internet Dangers

They say when you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. I suppose when you're an internal security service, everything begins to look like it's helping your enemies.

Israeli Shin Bet Chief Yuval Diskin told a conference on homeland security that Google Earth, the Internet, and smartphone apps have given terrorists access to intelligence they didn't have before. He said:

"The terrorist threat in the future has become more complex," Diskin said. "The world has turned into a 'global village' and everything is available to everyone. The world is smaller and broader and technology can cross continents."

Don't you just hate it when that happens?

The Internet has made it possible for a lot more openness: this blog once had some fun with Google Earth that might not sit well with Shin Bet, but that I would consider liberating, not threatening. On the whole, I think technology has opened things up, because it empowers everyone, not just the terrorists. Arabs can read the Israeli media. Arabs and Israelis quarrel all the time on forums, but at least they're interacting. Technology is opening up the world, and that's for the best. They can have my Google Earth when they pry it from my cold, dead hands.

Oh, yes: those dangerous IPhone apps Diskin mentioned: are they available for Android?

Emiratis Will Keep Their Blackberries

The UAE's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, which had threatened to cut service to Blackberries on October 10, has announced that Research in Motion (RIM), the Canadian firm behind Blackberry, is now in compliance with UAE requirements and that Emiratis will be able to continue using their Blackberries.

The UAE set the October deadline last summer when the Saudis were threatening to shut down Blackberry service (see earlier posts here).

Though the Emiratis get to keep their Blackberries, they presumably understand that the government may be reading their mail now.