Egypt's big internet disconnect - It could happen in Bolehland.

Lessons to be learnt....

Admist the great joy we have for the people of Tunisia and soon for the people of Egypt, we must wake ourselves to the very important lessons we can learn from them.

Bolehland is worse that Egypt or Tunisia in that we have a single racist party, umNO, controlling the country since 1957, 54 years to be exact.

Today we have a free internet access but this freedom will soon be gone forever when the racist party, umNO amends the Printing Presses and Publications Act (PPPA) to extend the scope of the PPPA to online publications.

I see great parallels between what is happening in Egypt and what will happen in bolehland.
  Egypt's big internet disconnect

As recently as a week ago, Egypt's internet was extraordinary in the Arab world for its freedom. For more than a decade, the regime has adhered to a hands-off policy, leaving unblocked everything ....

But last Thursday, the Mubarak regime shattered a decade's worth of accomplishment by issuing the order to shut down the mobile networks and internet links. Since the internet age dawned in the early 90s, no widely connected country had disconnected itself entirely. The starkness and suddenness of Egypt's reversal – from unrestricted to unreachable – marks one of the many tragedies of the Mubarak regime's brutal and hamfisted response to last week's emergence of citizen protests.

The internet cutoff shows how the details of infrastructure matter. Despite having no large-scale or centralised censorship apparatus, Egypt was still able to shut down its communications in a matter of minutes. This was possible because Egypt permitted only three wireless carriers to operate, and required all internet service providers (ISPs) to funnel their traffic through a handful of international links. Confronted with mass demonstrations and fearful about a populace able to organise itself, the government had to order fewer than a dozen companies to shut down their networks and disconnect their routers from the global internet.

If you do not see the similarities of what we have here in bolehland I don't know what else to say. Bolehland has only a few internet service providers and the majority of us are connected through TMnut which is owned by umNO! If I am not wrong the other providers also depend on TMnut for their international links.

The next thing we have worry about is what happened in Tunisa.

How Facebook Dealt With The Tunisian Government Trying To Steal Every User's Passwords

Facebook's security staff had been hearing anecdotal stories from people in Tunisia claiming their accounts had been hacked, along with some indications that something odd was going on. Eventually, they realized that the Tunisian ISPs appeared to be running a giant man-in-the-middle keylogger system, that would record a user's password any time they logged into Facebook.

Be worried, be very worried. Remember, TMnut is umNO owned - umNO is running the company! For all you know they already have all your personal information.

I really want to advise fellow Malaysians to be very careful when they are on the internet. Use a 'junk' email address. We have to think about what will happen when the day comes when umNO decides to shut down all internet connections to save the regime.

Pakatan has to think of ways to face that day and educate the Rakyat on how to get around the internet shut down when it happens.