Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 18:21 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
In reply to: Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog) by jspaleta
Parent article: Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Funny thing, we HAD such an infrastructure before.

During the last days of the USSR the most reliable news were transmitted by FIDONet, running over the phone lines, radio links and a variety of other media types. There was even an illicit underwater cable running to Finland.

During the 93's White House shooting in Russia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_... ), the famous Kremvax was used to send news about the tanks in Moscow into the foreign newsgroups.

However, it all requires a strong technophilic community which just is not there right now.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 28, 2011 19:07 UTC (Fri) by gmaxwell (guest, #30048) [Link]

The internet has made us lazy. Most of the time we can press a button and talk to much of the world, so why should we spend effort designing and building wireless adhoc darknets or even learning ham radio?

Of course some rare individuals rally enjoy tinkering with this stuff, but isolated people don't make an interesting network. A network of one is not that valuable. It's not just technophilic which is required, but people who are so extremely technophilic that they'll spend time and money building "unnecessary" rube-goldberg networks.

Unless we can find some real value for these kinds of networks outside of rare censorship events they simply won't be built.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 29, 2011 21:43 UTC (Sat) by job (guest, #670) [Link]

Tell us more about that underwater cable! Sounds like a remarkable story.

I too was involved in FidoNet but almost all ran over modem lines which would have been even easier to shut down than the Internet of today. Also, it was a store-and-forward network whichs is unfair to compare to a packet-switching network.

Egypt Leaves the Internet (Renesys blog)

Posted Jan 30, 2011 1:12 UTC (Sun) by edison (guest, #54104) [Link]

I am curious of more information about the illicit underwater cable?