“According to our analysis, 88 percent of the ‘Egyptian Internet’ has fallen off the Internet,’” said Andree Toonk at BGPmon, a monitoring site that checks connectivity of countries and networks, to the Guardian...
The Egyptian Stock Market is still online, however, because the ISP that powers it, Noor Group, was left alone.
Popular Science
Just another example of how the Banks, Investors, and Big Business control everything on this planet. And how freedom of the rich to exploit the poor is always prioritized over freedom of speech. But this got me thinking about what Wall Street's reaction to these protests has been.
CAIRO (AP) -- Fitch Rating on Friday revised down its outlook for Egypt, dropping it to "negative" as mass protests in the country turned violent, engulfing the capital and other cities in a serious challenge to President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule...
Oh noes. People are fighting for their rights to democracy, free speech, and bread and they're ruining our wonderful dictatorship.
"The Outlook revision reflects the recent upsurge in political protests and the uncertainty this adds to the political and economic outlook ahead of September's elections," said Richard Fox, head of Fitch's Middle East and Africa Sovereign Ratings. Egypt is slated to hold presidential elections in the fall.
God knows we can't have uncertainty. We need to have a guarantee that 50% of Egyptian workers will continue to live on less than $2 a day. Hey why not make it 75% living for under a quarter a day. Their muslims they should love fasting.
Analysts have downplayed the likelihood that President Hosni Mubarak's regime would be ousted as a result of the protests. But the mass rallies in which tens of thousands have clashed with riot police have pushed to the surface latent concerns about Egypt and raised questions about the economic impact on the country.
This doesn't raise questions about people dying or the call for greater levels of democracy. No. We don't give a shit about those things. We wanna know if our money is gonna be safe. That's all we care about.
While Egypt has enjoyed respectable economic growth figures, even during the global financial meltdown, the rallies have centered on the inequality in income distribution, allegations of corruption, and the grinding unemployment some analysts have put as high as 25 percent. Egypt's GDP growth is projected at about 6 percent in 2011.
yahoo finance
This stuff really makes me sick. Investors make more money than almost any other profession. Yet they show complete apathy and often opposition towards basic human rights.
The fall of the Tunisian government two weeks ago has raised concerns that other authoritarian governments in the Middle East could also be toppled. Yahoo Finance
Are you fucking kidding me. Raised concerns!? Oh no, the corrupt circus in the Middle East won't go on forever. People like this fail to realize that the primary reason that Islamic fundamentalism exists is because of the extreme inequality of wealth in the Middle East.
What's even more troubling is news that one American company is aiding Egypt's harsh response through sales of technology that makes this repression possible...
Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, "disappear" truckloads of cyber-dissidents.
The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment.
Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients...
Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.
Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.
Common Dreams
People are profiting from illegal government spying and repression. They downgrade their investments when dictatorships move toward democracy. Pretty sick shit.
A system that allows people to not only behave like this but also make millions from these shady business deals should be eliminated and replaced with worker control over industry aka economic democracy aka socialism. Like the Tunisian revolution, it must be peaceful and come from below. But this has to be worldwide