Paul Marks, chief technology correspondent
On 29 November, three days after it was slated for dropping cluster bombs in a playground, Bashar Al-Assad's embattled regime in Syria has severed all external connections to the internet, cutting the nation off from cyberspace. Many cellphone networks are also down.
It's possible the outages have been ordered to stymie transmission of news reports of fresh atrocities - but the Syrian government insists that a rebel attack on a key internet backbone cable caused the severance of services.
That's unlikely, says internet analytics outfit CloudFlare.com, owing to the systematic way it appeared to have been taken down. The video above shows the internet paths out of Syria closing down, one at a time. And at 01:00 GMT on Friday the New Hampshire-based traffic analyst Renesys said starkly: "In the global routing table, all 84 of Syria's IP address blocks have become unreachable, effectively removing the country from the internet."
The internet activist collective Anonymous claims to have undertaken its own analysis and has vowed revenge for the outage on behalf of the internet itself, rather than Syria's rebels: it has started a takedown programme targetting Syrian government websites around the world.
If Al-Assad's operatives did indeed take down the net (and they have done it before) they are failing to learn from Egypt's experience: a five-day internet outage in January 2011 did ousted president Hosni Mubarak no good at all. As Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim said later that year, technology can help to foment revolutions - but with or without it, it's the will of the people that's likely to prevail.
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