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Well, that was fun.
Yesterday the site went black in solidarity with efforts to defeat SOPA/PIPA, bills pushed by big content producers being considered by Congress that could break the internet.
To read more about it, you might start with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has done great work tracking this issue.
The most traffic this blog ever got was on January 28. Shortly after midnight, I posted that the internet had been shut down in Egypt. The news spread on technology sites like Slashdot and Reddit, eventually bringing down the site. I had internet because I was not in Cairo: I was in the middle of a reporting trip in Tunis, but was spending all my time after the curfew still in place then making calls to Cairo. I had landlines for friends, and quickly confirmed that at least three major ISPs had been simply shut off. It confirmed my gut feeling that something big was coming, and as I flew back to Cairo the next day what became an uprising had begun, defeating the police state.
I still feel that shutting down the internet (and mobile phones) was the key, pivotal tactical mistake of the Mubarak regime that pushed so many to join the protests. It took several days for the internet to be re-established, but in those few days a sense of urgency had been created, galvanizing the protestors' spirit and giving the whole Egyptian uprising story a new angle.
All of this was brought back to mind by this Wired story (via Boing Boing) about a State Department-funded project to quickly deploy, basically, the internet in a suitcase:
The idea is that the system will automatically set itself up. Drop a unit near another unit and they’ll start talking to one another and trading data. Add another and all three will talk to one another. Add a thousand and you can cover a whole city. Then if one of those routers is hooked up to an internet connection, everyone on the network can connect. If that connection disappears, users can still try to update an application like Twitter or send e-mail to the larger internet and the outgoing notes will go into a holding pattern until the mesh network finds another connection to the greater net.
In those early days, even a rapidly deployable intranet would have been useful — especially if you were able to use a Twitter-like service that was decentralized, working like P2P, and advertise services on it so they would be found automatically (like a central repository of some sort that would act as the intranet's home page). Even more useful would be a suitcase satellite internet, like a Bgan on steroids, that could immediately deploy wifi over a sizeable area and handle, say, 100 simultaneous users.
;)
General Rushdi al-QamariHossam has been a sterling job of late of putting together a who's who of State Security, partly derived from files and a CD of pics he obtained during last month's State Security HQ raid, to track down who was doing what and who's going where post-revolution. You can see it all by going to www.piggipedia.net.
This entry is on the State Security officer who would have been in charge of shutting down Egypt's internet on the eve of January 28. The question, as always, is where is he now? Has he been simply moved to another office? Will there be accountability for State Security or will these generals who ran Egypt's repression on a day-to-day level simply move to new positions in a superficially restructured State Security?
Read Hossam's post for the details.
I just received a call from a friend in Cairo (I won't say who it is now because he's a prominent activist) telling me neither his DSL nor his USB internet service is working. I've just checked with two other friends in different parts of Cairo and their internet is not working either.
This just happened 10 minutes ago — and perhaps not uncoincidentally just after AP TV posted a video of a man being shot.
Will update with more info. The ISPs being used by my friends are TEDATA, Vodafone, and Egynet.
Update: It's not everywhere. A foreign journalist at the Semiramis Intercontinental hotel says he has internet access.
Update 2: The Semiramis uses Noor as its ISP. I am trying to confirm whether Noor uses a different technology to connect to the internet, such as satellite, rather than the main fiber optic cables that connect Egypt to the rest of the world. If anyone knows about this, please let me know in the comments. Never mind, they apparently use a dedicated fiber optic connection and a source said they did not receive any instructions.
Update 3: Via POMED:
The AP confirms that the Egypt government has disrupted Internet service and “deployed an elite special operations counterterrorism force” hours before a new wave anti-government protests are expected to begin. A major service provider for Egypt, Italy-based Seabone, reported early Friday that there was no Internet traffic going into or out of the country after 12:30 a.m. local time.
I received news earlier tonight that riot-control police were moving out of Central Cairo and that troops from 'Amaliya Khassa (Special Operations) were now in Central Cairo, wearing green fatigues. These are not military troops — they depend on the Ministry of Interior.
Two points on Rami Khouri's latest column, about US initiatives to encourage internet use and youth etc.
This one I partly disagree with:
But what do young people actually do, or aim to achieve, with the new media? Are the new digital and social media a credible tool for challenging established political orders and bringing about political change in our region?
My impression is that these new media today play a role identical to that played by Al Jazeera satellite television when it first appeared in the mid-1990s — they provide important new means by which ordinary citizens can both receive information and express their views, regardless of government controls on both, but in terms of their impact they seem more like a stress reliever than a mechanism for political change.
Watching Arab pundits criticize Arab governments, Israel or the United States — common fare on Arab satellite television — is great vicarious satisfaction for ordinary men and women who live in political cultures that deny them serious opportunities for free speech.
Blogging, reading politically racy Web sites, or passing around provocative text messages by cellphone is equally satisfying for many youth. Such activities, though, essentially shift the individual from the realm of participant to the realm of spectator, and transform what would otherwise be an act of political activism — mobilizing, demonstrating or voting — into an act of passive, harmless personal entertainment.
Sure, there might be a lot of passive users of the internet. But when in so many countries the internet is being used to mobilize, spread information and organize, it can hardly be called a passive medium. It draws in an admittedly small number of internet users and turns them into activists and organizers, And unlike al-Jazeera, no one is paying the bloggers and activists who use the internet to mobilize. It's a substantive improvement over what al-Jazeera does, especially because the internet is not controlled by a government.
The second point is dead on:
One cannot take seriously the United States or any other Western government that funds political activism by young Arabs while it simultaneously provides funds and guns that help cement the power of the very same Arab governments the young social and political activists target for change.
Feeding both the jailer and the prisoner is not a sustainable or sensible policy. I would not be surprised if some wise-guy young Arab soon sends a tweet to Hillary Clinton saying, “you’re either with us, or you’re with the security state.”This is an awkward and untenable position for any foreign government that wants to promote political activism and pluralism in the Middle East. It damages Western government credibility, leads to no significant changes in our political cultures, and often discredits the local activists who become tarred with the charge of being Western lackeys.
Clinton's Internet Initiative is essentially a substitute — and a poor one at that — for a real policy to deal with authoritarian regimes. As was Obama's Cairo speech and its 16 micro-initiatives. You don't have to invade dictatorships — please! — but you don't have to support them either. Training young people to use the internet is a ridiculous idea — they will do so anyway.
Better to learn from the largely American success of internet start-ups such as Google: don't be evil. Cut off the funding to dictators, occupiers and regimes that carry out ethnic or religious segregation. Refuse to meet them and give them the recognition they crave. Stop humoring them because of your imperial ambitions in the Middle East — these ambitions are ruinous to America both financially and morally.
The National's Matt Bradley has a story on the Muslim Brotherhood's Facebook clone:
IkhwanBook joins a veritable suite of Brotherhood-affiliated (“Ikhwan” is Arabic for “Brotherhood”) websites, such as IkhwanWiki, IkhwanWeb, IkhwanGoogle – a “Cusotmized [sic] search engine specialized in searching muslim botherhood’s [sic] websites” – and IkhwanTube. Many of the sites are published in English and each of their functions is tailored to Brotherhood-related content.
The article then wonders why the Ikhwan bothers: IkhwanBook is after all technologically extremely inferior to the real Facebook, and the other sites are not that sophisticated either. And there are plenty of young Brothers on Facebook — anyone who's ever met them can expect to be friended within 24 hours, after all.
Brian Whitaker, noting the story, writes:
The interesting and slightly puzzling question is what the Brotherhood hopes to achieve by this. It's hard to imagine the Ikhwan sites gaining anything like the popularity of those they replicate, and they look like a move towards exclusivity which is generally uncharacteristic of the Brotherhood.
I think both Matt and Brian miss the point slightly. The first reason for having all these sites — and believe me, there are a LOT of Ikhwan sites out there, practically one for every governorate of Egypt plus many more on specific issues before you reach the Facebook and Wikipedia clones — is that there simply is enthusiasm to build them. Beyond the apparent correlation one notices between tech-savvy and religious inclination (just visit any of the computer malls on Midan Sphinx in Cairo), there are a lot of young talented programmers in Egypt who would love to show their enthusiasm for the gamaa by building websites for it. And there are a lot of young people in the Brotherhood, no matter how elderly the leadership is, for whom these websites may be a way of expressing their views as well as gain practice in the art of political and religious rhetoric.
The second reason is that this resonates with the groupthink and in-group mentality that the Muslim Brotherhood cultivates. These sites won't replace Facebook or Wikipedia, they are a virtual gated community (gated, that is, by strong symbolic references and imagery that are likely to alienate those not already versed in the Ikhwan universe) for like-minded people, where they can create a more orderly version of the sites that they copy and where the membership is self-selecting. The Muslim Brothers tend to socialize together, marry within each others' families, work together (or for each other) and a whole lot more. It's a support group as much as a political organization. It makes sense that, online, they will tend towards a closed ecosystem — alongside the open internet, not instead of it.
It's just the way online forums thrive: through community-building. That's true for computer geeks and religious geeks.
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Oh please let this be true:
Adrian Lamo, a former US hacker turned journalist who had been conversing with Manning online and later gave up his name to the authorities, said he also claimed to have handed 260,000 classified US embassy messages to Wikileaks.
According to Mr Lamo, Manning said the documents showed "almost-criminal political back dealings" made by US embassies in the Middle East which, if true, would cause enormous embarrassment to key allies in a notoriously volatile area of the world. Mr Lamo claims Manning said that "Hillary Clinton and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and find an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format, to the public".
If Wikileaks publish this, I promise to spend the summer combing through these documents and getting other analysts to do likewise!
Above is a dynamically updated chart from Trendistic.com, a service that tracks trending topics on Twitter. It shows how much Twitter users have been using the hashtag #flotilla over the course of the past week, and naturally this includes a peak since this morning. According to Trendistic, #flotilla is one of the top trending topics at the moment, accounting 0.78% of tweets worldwide.
But you wouldn't know that from Twitter itself, which has #4wordsbeforedeath trending. It was popular last night, but as this time only accounts for 0.18% of tweets. So what gives?
There is some speculation that Twitter may be banning #flotilla from its trending calculations. Twitter can ban common words so as not to give false results. But #flotilla is hardly a common word. Last June, Twitter intervened (at the request of the State Dept.) to keep its servers going when #iranelection was trending. It was rightly applauded for doing so. So what's up with not allowing #flotilla to trend, and redirecting searches on the word to the homepage (just try it from your account.)
Update: There have been suggestions that Twitter's recently announced new rules on trending may be to blame. On Twitter's site, it says:
UPDATE: Recent Trending Topics Improvements
5/14/2010:
Twitter is about what is happening right now, and we have recently updated our trending topics algorithm to reflect this. The new algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the "most breaking" news stories from across the world. (We had previously built in this 'emergent' algorithm for all local trends, described below.) We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting. While this is very much a work in progress, with this tweak we have taken a big step toward capturing how trends quickly emerge and grow on Twitter. We also think it's compelling to know what the "most popular" topics are, and we will look to capture this in some way in the future.
It is important to note that this new algorithm does not "block" any topics from trending. If topics you saw regularly in your Trending Topics menu have disappeared or are not showing as consistently as before, do a saved search for them on your homepage. That way, in one click, you can view search results for topics that matter most to you. Also consider localizing your Trending Topics menu, as shown below.
These changes do not really help explain why #flotilla is not being allowed to show as trending. First, it is a recently popular topic. Second, Twitter's website does not allow you to do a saved search for them — when you enter flotilla or #flotilla as a search term, it returns the full latest twitter feed, not tweets with these words. The system has clearly been set up to ignore "flotilla" both in trending and in search. I've asked Twitter for an explanation, which I'll post here if/when I receive it.
I should also note that #freedomflotilla is now trending.
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Issandr El Amrani
I'm getting reports that #flotilla is now trending, although having checked myself I still don't see it. However, both "Gaza flotilla" and #freedomflotilla are trending pretty high. The other thing is that doing a search on "flotilla" now works. It's still a mystery why it wasn't recognized earlier today.
A few days ago Hillary Clinton made a major speech about internet freedom. She said:
On their own, new technologies do not take sides in the struggle for freedom and progress, but the United States does. We stand for a single internet where all of humanity has equal access to knowledge and ideas. And we recognize that the world’s information infrastructure will become what we and others make of it. Now, this challenge may be new, but our responsibility to help ensure the free exchange of ideas goes back to the birth of our republic. The words of the First Amendment to our Constitution are carved in 50 tons of Tennessee marble on the front of this building. And every generation of Americans has worked to protect the values etched in that stone.
One step towards that would be to fix the various impediments the US puts on accessing data, including from Middle Eastern countries. Take SourceForge, one of the most important repositories of open-source software in the world, where developers collaborate on building all sorts of tools, including the kind that might facilitate evading internet censorship. It turns out that since early this month it's been blocked in various countries including Iran, Syria, Sudan as well as other places upon which Washington has imposed sanctions.
Arab Crunch has a post by Abdelrahman Iblidi, a Syrian programmer, criticizing the legislation that forces SourceForge to ban users from these countries and others (Cuba, North Korea.) Syrian developers have had similar problems before with Google Code and other US-hosted sites. This example of internet censorship is particularly grating because open-source technology has often provided solutions to go around internet censorship and protect user privacy, such as Tor.
[I was alerted to this issue thanks to a tweet by one of the Egyptian blogosphere's leading open-source advocate, Alaa].
OK, this is quite cool: an architect commissioned to create a new project in Sixth of October City outside of Cairo (which is currently mushrooming with competing shopping mall / residential / office projects) created the draft of the project in Second Life. The website for the project is here.
Issandr El Amrani | Activism Algeria Cia Egypt Iran Israel/Palestine Media US afghanistan bds bloggers blogroll diplomacy egyptology gaza gazawar history internet islam jazeera jerusalem jihad marwanbarghouti qaeda reconstruction settlements wall web ✪ akhbare-rooz (iranian political Bulletin) | List of organizations considered "subversive" by Iranian ministry of inteligence [in Farsi]. ✪ The Daily Star - The Gaza scorecard, one year later | Rami Khouri. ✪ Israel approves east Jerusalem building project | Yet another new settlement. ✪ Library of Congress on Islam in Early America « Anonymous Arabist وين الناس | Fascinating. ✪ Tweet freedom | On Twitter activism in Egypt, unfortunately confuses arabawy.org for arabist.net. ✪ Cairo's US Embassy is Worse by Far | Mamoun Fandy: "The embassy has become an embodiment of the meaning of disgracefulness in Cairo, in terms of people's behavior, rudeness, and impoliteness." ✪ gary's choices - The Decade's First Revolution? | Gary Sick on Iran. ✪ لا لحجب الإنترنت بالجزائر - Non à la censure de l'Internet en Algérie - No to Internet Censorship in Algeria Petition | Petition. ✪ Egyptian minister slams Al-Jazeera for 'instigating civil war' - Ynetnews | Over Gaza wall. ✪ Video: Gaza war: One year on, Palestinians struggle to rebuild life from the rubble | guardian.co.uk | ✪ CIA Bomber a Jihadi Blogger? — jihadica | Interesting background on Abu Dujana, as the bomber was allegedly known. ✪ Dear Metallica | Letter asking the metal band not to perform in Israel. ✪ Free Barghouti Now - Haaretz | OK. ✪ The Daily Nuisance | News From The Frontier | New online site from Israel/Palestine ✪ Three days in Iran - The Big Picture - Boston.com | Great pics of Iranian protests.
Issandr El Amrani | 1001 Algeria Economics Egypt Intelligence Israel/Palestine Jordan Military Morocco Obama abaza afghanistan africom bloggers castlead europe funny gay gaza history homosexuality immigration internet israellobby livni m6 massad nights uspolicy waelabbas warcrimes westernsahara whitaker â�© Egypt puts archives on Web to boost Arabic content | But what's the address? â�© Muslims in Europe: A Report on 11 EU Cities | Open Society Institute | Tons of interesting questions raised by this ground-breaking poll. â�© Abkhazia Is Recognized by Even Smaller Nauru - NYTimes.com | Sharqeya next? â�© Pro-Israel Lobby Group’s Iran Petition Features Lots of Questionable Names « The Washington Independent | Such as "Porn Sex Video" and Comfylovely". â�© LedgerGermane: Karzai Says Afghan Army Will Need Help Until 2024 | Yikes. â�© Future of US-Egypt Relations: A View from the Next Generation | Notes on another POMED event. â�© POMED Event: U.S. Military Assistance: Obstacle or Opportunity for Reform? | Steven Cook, Emile Hokayem, etc. some discussion of Egypt-US military relations. â�© Mideastwire.com | Zaitout: reports about Algeria-US agreement over temporary military bases | Handle with care. â�© British court issued Gaza arrest warrant for former Israeli minister Tzipi Livni | The Guardian | More of this please. â�© Nights to remember - The National Newspaper | Arabian Nights conference in NYU Abu Dhabi. â�© Obama's Big Sellout : Rolling Stone | Must-read Matt Taibbi story on Obama's bailout of Wall Street. â�© Al-Masry Al-Youm | Police raid home of prominent blogger | Wael Abbas sentenced to six months of prison in absentia for stealing his neighbors' internet??!?! â�© We will not bow to this Moroccan king | Paul Laverty and Ken Loach | Comment is free | The Guardian | Strongly worded op-ed for Aminatou Haidar. â�© David Ignatius - Jordan's ex-spy chief wasn't too good to be true | On former GID chief Saad Kheir - a dubious tribute. â�© Orientalism in Reverse | Brian Whitaker critiques Joseph Massad's "Gsy International" theory.
Issandr El Amrani | Egypt Israel/Palestine Jordan Lebanon Media Religion Sudan Syria aligomaa castlead darfur gaza goldstone hesba internet islam israellobby law mepp nyt saudi uspolicy warcrimes westernsahara ✪ ‘Abuse’ of Islamic rule lands lawyer in court - The National Newspaper | About time someone stopped Nabih el Wahsh and his ridiculous hesba claims, but this needs to go further: a judicial ruling or new law should declare hesba unacceptable in courts.
✪ Israel FM to tell U.S. envoy no peace deal possible | Lieberman always says what's on his mind.
✪ Mideast sliding into 'darkness': Jordan king | Jordan's king does his Cassandra routine.
✪ Sudan: SLM Warns US Envoy Not to Visit Darfur Areas Under Its Control Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English) | "The Sudan Liberation Army Movement [SLM] led by Abdul-Wahid Nur who resides in France has warned US Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration not to visit the areas in Darfur that are under its control and where he is expected to hold a conference in the "Darbat" area in Murrah Mountain on 20 October."
✪ Unjustifiable To Lose ‘Goldstone’ Asharq Alawsat Newspaper (English) | "It is not the time for point-scoring. Goldstone’s report marked the beginning of the international justice the Palestinian people need. The issue goes beyond political wrangling between Hamas and the PA, and also goes beyond the assumed price for slip ups. It is about responsibility for people’s lives."
✪ ‘The Times’ lets everyone off the hook on Goldstone | The NYT's continued hasbara on the Goldstone report.
✪ BBC NEWS | Middle East | UN body to debate Gaza 'crimes' | Slated for 14 October.
✪ Fatah seeks joint action with Hamas over Gaza report - Yahoo! News | About time.
✪ ei: Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza | Ali Abunimah: "Just when it seemed that the Ramallah Palestinian Authority (PA) and its leader Mahmoud Abbas could not sink any lower in their complicity with Israel's occupation of the West Bank and the murderous blockade of Gaza, Ramallah has dealt a further stunning blow to the Palestinian people."
✪ “The Challenge of Moderation in Islam: Egypt’s Religious Institution Versus Extremism.” | POMED notes on speech by Egyptian Mufti Ali Gomaa.
✪ Palestine on the brink: only a quick de-escalation can prevent an explosion | Israel Policy Forum | Hussein Ibish.
✪ Abbas Cancels Israel War-Crimes Report, Boosting Hamas - Yahoo! News | It's over for Abbas, morally now and politically eventually.
✪ Saudi, Syria agree to 'remove obstacles' to closer ties - Yahoo! News | They also called for a NUG to be formed in Lebanon.
✪ Security Council to raise UN Gaza report next week - Yahoo! News | Libya move to push for discussion of Goldstone report moves ahead, despite Mahmoud Abbas's failure to push for it (and his subsequent reversal.)
✪ All these Abdelazizes | New head of Western Sahara mission MINURSO is Egyptian.
✪ Oren likens Goldstone to… Nazi threat | Israel Ambassador to US Michael Oren: Goldstone = Nazis = Nuclear Annihilation.
✪ Agents arrest dozens for theft scheme in US, Egypt | Egyptian hackers engage in $2m phishing scam.
✪ Pew Forum: Mapping the Global Muslim Population | Pew report says there are 1.57bn Muslims, analysis and breakdown through maps and more.
Issandr El Amrani | Iraq Israel/Palestine Jordan Libya Media Obama Religion Saudi Arabia Terrorism bibi internet islam netanyahu qadhafi settlements ✪ The first Islamic search engine? - The Majlis | About imhalal.com which filters haram links out of searches. Seems pretty useless to me but it's fun to keep on searching for dirty words, and if you try you'll see the site does not work very well. ✪ ei: Liberation, not a fictitious Palestinian "state" | Hassan Abunimah on the Fayyad plan and the alleged Obama outlines for peace, which he describes as including "international armed forces in most of the Palestinian "state"; Israeli annexation of large parts of East Jerusalem; that "All Palestinian factions would be dissolved and transformed into political parties"; all large Israeli settlements would remain under permanent Israeli control; the Palestinian state would be largely demilitarized and Israel would retain control of its airspace; intensified Palestinian-Israeli "security coordination"; and the entity would not be permitted to have military alliances with other regional countries." And of course no right of return. ✪ Israel PM vowed not to freeze settlements: minister (AFP) | "AFP - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed not to freeze settlement construction in the West Bank, according to one of his ministers quoted on Wednesday." ✪ Brian Whitaker's blog | Trials of a Jordanian poet | One year for poet who used Quranic references in his love poetry, gets threats from MB, mufti calls him apostate. ✪ LedgerGermane: Rectum? Damn Near Killed 'Em! | Prince Muhammad bin Nayif's would-be killer had explosives stashed in rectum. Ouch. ✪ Quarante années de crimes | Ibn Kakfa on 40 years of the criminal Qadhafi regime, which "disappeared" many dissidents at home and abroad. ✪ Iraq's flawed media law | Brian Whitaker on the draft Iraqi media law, which resembles that of other Arab states.
Issandr El Amrani | Egypt Israel/Palestine Obama Saudi Arabia Terrorism US avigdorlieberman bloggers censorship internet israellobby mubarak propaganda rights Writer banned from ‘DailyKos’ after satirizing settlements | Shame! More of the Worlds Worst Dictators | Parade.com | What, Hosni only at #20? מגזין הכיבוש Occupation Magazine | How Israel is hiring students and demobilized soldiers to wage a propaganda war through comments across the web. Israeli FM wants Hitler photo to mute world pressure - Yahoo! News | Pathetic. Saudi Efforts to Combat Terrorist Financing - WINEP | I hate to link to WINEP's fluff piece for Stuart Levey, but my hatred for the al-Sauds trumps all. Of course they tolerate individuals who donate to extremists, and we still don't know enough about their role in 9/11. Mubarak invited to Washington in August | The Cable | Egyptian reports had put date at August 15, this says August 17. But will it not be a state visit? Nothing formal announced by White House yet. Amnesty condemns Saudi anti-terror campaign | World news | The Guardian | This comes after years of hearing about how great the Saudi rehabilitation model is... but many of those arrested in anti-terror campaign are just dissidents.
Issandr El Amrani | Egypt Israel/Palestine Technology amosalon arabic gamalmubarak gaza hamas internet literature maren strikes succession tonyjudt ANALYSIS / Loud-mouthed rabbi reflects IDF's religious bent - Haaretz - Israel News | Article on Brigadier General Avichai Ronski, the Israeli Army's chief rabbi. Interesting tidbits on how he brought the influence of settlers and religious right, was recruited by Dan Halutz to "bring the IDF closer to the sectors of the public that opposed the Gaza disengadgement." Egypt: See no strikes, hear no strikes, report no strikes | Menassat | Joe Mayton on how journalists are prevented from covering strikes in Egypt. What's the point of learning to type in Arabic | Bint Battuta of Bahrain on Microsoft's new Maren software, which allows you to type Arabic in Roman characters and have them converted on the fly (like Yamli but as part of OS.) She takes issue with the assumption that Arab users don't want to learn how to type with an Arabic keyboard. Daily News Egypt - On The Inheritance Of Power In Egypt | Osama El-Ghazali Harb, prominent Egyptian political scientist and former Gamal recruit to Policies Committee before he left in a huff, on inheritance of power and Gamal's schemes won't work. Amos Elon (1926–2009) - The New York Review of Books | Tony Judt on the Israeli writer. OPT: Gaza-Egypt crossing to open three days a month | Hamas, PA and Egypt agree to allow 3 days a month and move towards 2005 AMA; article details continuing difficulties for those making the crossing.
Issandr El Amrani | Iran Israel/Palestine Saudi Arabia Syria Technology arabic bloggers internet settlements web Arab Techies in Business | More Arab geekery. Arab Techies | Cool Arabic tech/web projects. Love in KSA « Saudiwoman’s Weblog | On the importance of women's reputation in Saudi. "Politics, culture, and dissident:" New study maps out trends in Arab blogosphere | Menassat | Cool map of the Arab blogosphere, divided by country, language, and political trends. Saudia Arabia leads Arab regimes in internet censorship | World news | guardian.co.uk | Saudi, UAE, Syria and Tunisia top the list. Syria Comment » Archives » Apologies to Howard Schweber and Barak’s Settlement Shuffle | Josh Landis has some good links on the US-Israel settlements face-off here. As well as on the question of the impact of Iran's political crisis on Syria.
Egyptian mega-blogger Wael Abbas is being detained at Cairo Airport after his passport was confiscated last night. This is the first time this happens to Wael, who is currently holding a sit-in with a banner at the airport requesting his passport back. He's been Tweeting his situation - below are his updates as of 8:40am Egyptian time.
Update: Wael tweets at 10:40am:
waelabbastwitter2.png
شارع طلعت حرب - Google Maps
Google Maps adds Arabic names for streets (here Talaat Harb)
Why is it that I am finding it so difficult to access the sites of Yediot Ahronot and al-Hayat today?
