Hasta La Gadget!

The future of propaganda is in your pocket. The Egyptian government has utilized emergency services to get its pro-regime messages onto the phones of protesters, a fact confirmed by Vodaphone.

The carrier issued a statement stating that Hosni Mubarak’s regime was sending “messages to people” that weren’t “scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content.”

Wired managed to get a hold of two of the texts. The first, sent on Monday, reads, “Egypt’s youth. Beware rumors and listen to the voice of reason. Egypt is above all so preserve it.” The government sent another yesterday reading, “To each mother-father-sister-brother, to every honest citizen. Preserve this country because the homeland stays forever.”

Isn’t that Murbarak has a Twitter account?

The company has approached the government to complain. “Vodafone Group has protested to the authorities that the current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable. We have made clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator.”

What’s a country to do when its government has instituted one of the largest Internet blackouts in history? Simple: turn to older technologies. Protesters in Egypt are adopting a number of outdated pieces of tech, from dial-up modems to ham radio to fax machines.

The modems are actually being provided by a number of activist groups like We Re-Build and Telecomix, getting people online to voice complaints via sites like Twitter (the proper hastags, incidentally, are #egypt and #jan25). As the BBC points out, a number of ISPs in countries like the US, France, Spain, and Sweden are waiving fees and setting up the means for making calls to Egypt to help circumvent the informational blackout.

Anonymous, the hacktivist group that gained a good deal of prominence in recent months, thanks to its role in the Wikileaks fight, has been faxing information from the whistleblowing site to Egyptian schools.

The aforementioned We Re-Build is relaying information from ham radio via phone and Morse code.

Tonight I had a few beers, a nice dinner, and watched a documentary about people in other countries. And then I learned that the Egyptian government has decided to turn off the internet. More »

Tonight, President Obama will deliver the annual State of the Union address, and while partisan politics (and some great shots of various people nodding off) will rule the night, the US government is getting into the Web 2.0 game in a big way tonight. The speech — scheduled for 9:00 pm ET — will be streamed live on the web, and immediately following said speech, the White House will host an ‘Open for Questions’ event on Twitter making use of the hashtag #sotu, while other government officials will answer questions submitted on Facebook, as well as the White House website’s webform. On Thursday night, the President will also answer questions on YouTube. We’ll let you know if and when the government hatches a plan to answer questions on Yahoo! Answers.

[Image Credit: Pete Souza for the White House]

Obama’s State of the Union address goes Web 2.0 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 17:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Embattled whistle-blowing site WikiLeaks has found refuge in the arms of Sweden’s The Pirate Party. A Swiss branch of the new political party is now hosting the site whose domain has changed from the now defunct WikiLeaks.org to WikiLeaks.ch, a Switzerland-based domain.

The move follows EveryDNS.net’s decision to drop the site late last night, the apparent result of a number of DDoS attacks. EveryDNS’s owner, Dynamic Network Hosting, issued a statement last night, explaining the decision,

The interference at issues [sic] arises from the fact that wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks. These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites.

WikiLeaks is using attempting to turn lemons into lemonade, using the move to solicite donations. “WikiLeaks.org domain killed by US everydns.net after claimed mass attacks KEEP US STRONG,” the site wrote on Twitter last night.

A similar message appears at the top of WikiLeaks’ new homepage, complete with the image of a stern looking Julian Assange.