How to Foil a Nationwide Internet Shutdown

[Ed Jewett]

Communicate if Your Government Shuts Off Your Internet

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Scenario: Your government is displeased with the communication going on in your location and pulls the plug on your internet access, most likely by telling the major ISPs to turn off service.
This is what happened in Egypt January 25 prompted by citizen protests, with sources estimating that the Egyptian government has cut off approximately 88 percent of the country's internet access. What do you do without Internet? Step 1: Stop crying in the corner. Then start taking steps to reconnect with your network. Here's a list of things you can do to keep the communication flowing.
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Contents

[hide]

• 1 Preventative measures
  • 1.1 Make your network tangible
    
  • 1.2 Broadcast on the radio
    
  • 1.3 Phone
    
  • 1.4 Fax
    
• 2 Getting back online
  • 2.1 Find the privately-run ISPs
    
  • 2.2 Ad-Hoc Networking
    
• 3 Get satellite access
  
• 4 Packet Radio
  

Preventative measures

Make your network tangible

Print out you contact list so your phone numbers aren't stuck in the cloud. Some mail services like Gmail allow you to export your online contact list in formats that are more conducive to paper, such as CSV or Vcard, and offer step-by-step guides on how to do this.
Broadcast on the radio

CB Radio: Short for "Citizens Band" radio, these two-way radios allow communication over short distances on 40 channels. You can pick one up for about $20-50 at Radio Shack and no license is required to operate it.
Ham radio: To converse over these radios, also known as "Amateur radios," you have to obtain an operator's license from the FCC. Luckily, other Wired How-To contributors have already explained exactly what you need to do to get one and use it like a pro.
Phone

Set up a phone tree: According to the American Association of University Women, a phone tree is "a prearranged, pyramid-shaped system for activating a group of people by telephone" that can "spread a brief message quickly and efficiently to a large number of people." Dig out that contact list you printed out and follow the steps on the AAUW website to spread the message down your pyramid of contacts.
Enable Twitter via SMS: Though the thought of unleashing the twitter fire hose in your text message inbox may seem horrifying, it would be better than not being able to connect to the outside world at all. The twitter website has full instructions on how to redirect tweets to your phone.
Alex Jones and infowars.com have a telelphone number for people to listen to his radio show by phone in case the internet goes down, or if you don't have internet. The phone in listen line is 512-646-5000.
Fax

If you need to quickly send and receive documents with lengthy or complex instructions, phone conversations may result in misunderstandings and delivering the doc by foot would take forever. Brush the dust off that bulky old machine, establish a connection by phone first with the recipient to make sure his machine is hooked up, then fax away.
Getting back online

While it might be relatively easy for a government to cut connections by leveraging the major ISPs, there are some places they wouldn't get to so readily, like privately-owned networks and independent ISPs.
Find the privately-run ISPs

In densely populated areas, especially CBDs and city suburbs there are multiple home WiFi networks overlapping each other, some secure some not. If there is no internet, open up your WiFi by removing password -- if enough people do this it's feasible to create a totally private WiFi service outside government control covering the CBD and you can use applications that run Bonjour (iChat on Mac for example) to communicate with others on the open network and send and receive documents. **needs more clarification
If you are a private ISP, it's your time to shine. Consider allowing open access to your wi-fi routers to facilitate communication of people around you until the grid is back online.
Return to dial-up? o_O
Ad-Hoc Networking

Most wireless routers, PCs, laptops, and even some ultra-mobile devices like cell phones have the ability to become part of an "ad-hoc" network, where different "nodes" (all of the devices on the network) share the responsibility of transmitting data between one another. These networks can become quite large, and are often very easy to set up. If used properly by a tech-savvy person, such networks can be used to host temporary websites and chatrooms. There are many internet tutorials on the internet for ad-hoc networking, so feel free to google some.
Apple computers tend to have very accessible Ad-Hoc functionality built in, including a pre-installed chat client (iChat) that will automatically set up an Ad-Hoc "Rendezvous" chatroom between anybody on the network, without the need for an external service like AIM or Skype. Ad-hoc network hosting functionality is built in to the Wifi menu.
Windows computers have several third-party Ad-Hoc chat applications available (such as Trillian) and setting up an Ad-Hoc wifi network is almost as simple as on a Mac.
Linux operating systems, of course, have plenty of third-party apps available, and most distros have Ad-Hoc network creation support built in.
Get satellite access

You can have very, very slow internet if you have something similiar like an Iridium phone, which would allow you to do dial-up at 2400 baud, which at least gives you email. This will also work when your government has shut down GSM and telephone access, and will work pretty much anywhere on the planet. If you're in the right place, get yourself KA-SAT access (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA-SAT) which is satellite broadband and will not be routed through any Internet exchange certain local governments may monitor or block (unless that government is part of EU or err... uncle Sam.
Packet Radio

Back to the 90s: there do exist short wave packet radio modems. These are also excruciatingly slow, but may get your email out.


This page was last modified 21:41, 29 January 2011 by fruttaman. Based on work by wwbsp, mymatecoxy, darkmagentarose and howto_admin.

http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Communicate_...r_Internet

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Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down

By Patrick Miller, David Daw, PCWorld Jan 28, 2011 3:50 PM
These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it's organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we've seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you're trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can't rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections.
Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi

Even if you've managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it won't be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they can't get online to find you. If you're trying to coordinate a group of people in your area and can't rely on an Internet connection, cell phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network of sorts--essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices that can all find each other and communicate with each other. Even if none of those devices have a working Internet connection, they can still find each other, which, if your network covers the city you're in, might be all you need. At the moment, wireless mesh networking isn't really anywhere close to market-ready, though we have seen an implementation of the 802.11s draft standard, which extends the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to include wireless mesh networking, in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop.
However, a prepared guerrilla networker with a handful of PCs could make good use of Daihinia ($25, 30-day free trial), an app that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi adapter driver to turn your normal ad-hoc Wi-Fi network into a multihop ad-hoc network (disclaimer: we haven't tried this ourselves yet), meaning that instead of requiring each device on the network to be within range of the original access point, you simply need to be within range of a device on the network that has Daihinia installed, effectively allowing you to add a wireless mesh layer to your ad-hoc network.
Advanced freedom fighters can set up a portal Web page on their network that explains the way the setup works, with Daihinia instructions and a local download link so they can spread the network even further. Lastly, just add a Bonjour-compatible chat client like Pidgin or iChat, and you'll be able to talk to your neighbors across the city without needing an Internet connection.
Back to Basics

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout--as we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even ham radio, could still work, since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't being policed nearly as hard.
In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.
Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet--a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending only simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to take its place.
You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create an ad-hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using Ham Radio, since the signals are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of these efforts are still getting off the ground, but hackers are already cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into and out of the country.
Always Be Prepared

In the land of no Internet connection, the man with dial-up is king. Here are a few gadgets that you could use to prepare for the day they cut the lines.
Given enough time and preparation, your ham radio networks could even be adapted into your own ad-hoc network using Packet Radio, a radio communications protocol that you can use to create simple long-distance wireless networks to transfer text and other messages between computers. Packet Radio is rather slow and not particularly popular (don't try to stream any videos with this, now), but it's exactly the kind of networking device that would fly under the radar.
In response to the crisis in Egypt, nerds everywhere have risen to call for new and exciting tools for use in the next government-mandated shutdown. Bre Pettis, founder of the hackerspace NYC Resistor and creator of the Makerbot 3D printer, has called for "Apps for the Appocalypse," including a quick and easy way to set up chats on a local network so you can talk with your friends and neighbors in an emergency even without access to the Internet. If his comments are any indication, Appocalypse apps may be headed your way soon.
Tons of cool tech are also just waiting to be retrofitted for these purposes. David Dart's Pirate Box is a one-step local network in a box originally conceived for file sharing and local P2P purposes, but it wouldn't take much work to adapt the Pirate Box as a local networking tool able to communicate with other pirate boxes to form a compact, mobile set of local networks in the event of an Internet shutdown.
Whether you're in Egypt or Eagle Rock, you rely on your Internet access to stay in touch with friends and family, get your news, and find information you need. (And read PCWorld, of course.) Hopefully with these apps, tools, and techniques, you won't have to worry about anyone--even your government--keeping you from doing just that.
Patrick Miller hopes he isn't first against the wall when the revolution comes. Find him on Twitter or Facebook--if you have a working Internet connection, anyway.
David Daw is an accidental expert in ad-hoc networks since his apartment gets no cell reception. Find him on Twitter or send him a ham radio signal.

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http://www.pcworld.com/article/218155/ge..._down.html