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| News spreads - Protests in London yesterday, sadly not very widely reported by any news broadcasters |
I thought I'd dedicate this post to the recent civil unrest that's been happening in the Middle East, not the political side of it - although it is very important - but the technology side.
Newspapers are becoming more redundant because only in the last few years news travels very far very quickly with the help of the Internet - namely Twitter. The first I heard about the Tunisian unrest was through Twitter's @BBCBreaking news feed and then "tweeted" by thousands of others. It was then relayed on the news later that evening unless you watch the 24-hour news.
But governments in the East don't like it... it makes them suspicious, creating fears that other countries are spying on them and spreading hate about them. I was annoyed to hear that all lines of communication had been severed with the outside world - mainly by the Egyptian and Libyan government. I have some extended family living in Cairo so we never heard from them to see how they were. Communications (mostly) are back up and running.
This was censorship that went a little too far, as the governments had taken their money, their homes, their families and finally their free speech as you are now seeing with Mr Mubarak in Egypt and Col. Gadaffi in Libya, and previously done in China and Zimbabwe.
People will always find a way round the censorship. In Egypt people set up illegal DNS servers which gave the few people that knew what they were doing to get the word out to the rest of the world before foreign news journalists could report it which in most cases was pre-recorded as it was too dangerous to report live.
The governments should realise that even trying to cut all communications to the outside world, they can't silence everyone as there's always a way round it.
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