Tuesday, February 1, 2011

getting turned off

The anti-government protests in Egypt are getting larger and more dangerous, and that country is in major crisis. Apparently the Egyptian government thinks it's not in its best interests that the angry mobs be able to communicate with each other, so their government has for the moment shut down their Internet. Which makes me wonder, how do they do that? Do they just flip a switch and it's gone? Could our government do that too? And what would that look like if the Internet were suddenly gone, even for a day? Would it get us away from our computers and into the streets, developing into a rabid mass of Twitter-less nomads?

As Conan was saying in his monologue last night, if you want people to stay immobile in their homes, then the last thing you'd want to do is get rid of the Internet!

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