As Day for Million Egyptian March Dawns, Gov’t Cuts Last Web Lifeline but Google & Twitter Offer Egyptians Tweets by Phone

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EGYPT’S LAST INTERNET LIFELINE HAS INDEED BEEN SEVERED REPORTS FORBES MAG
Here’s a clip.

When Egypt’s government took the dramatic step of shutting off the entire country’s Internet last Friday amidst nationwide protests, one strand of connectivity remained: the Internet service provider (ISP) Noor, which serves many of the country’s corporations, including its banks.

As of Monday evening, that remaining connection to the Internet seems to have been mostly severed. “It looks like our last terrestrial hope has been shut down,” writes Jacob Appelbaum, a spokesperson for the anonymity and anti-censorship organization Tor in his Twitter feed. “my connections to systems on Noor are all down.”

BUT NEW “SPEAK TO TWEET” MESSAGES ARE SHOWING UP ON TWITTER

Cecilia King of the Washington Post has the story:

As Egypt moved Monday to shut down its sole operating Internet service provider, Google and Twitter teamed up to create a service for people to send tweets from the nation through a phone call.

Over the weekend, a small group of engineers from the companies got together to create the service that allows anyone with access to voice service — landline or mobile — to leave a messsage that automatically gets transmitted into a tweet, according to the Google blog. People cut off from Internet and mobile services in Egypt could call +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855. Tweets from the call would be sent with the hashtag: #egypt.,,,,

Onward to the Million Egyptian March.

AlJazeera says that people are already streaming steadily to Tahrir Square for the march. Inshallah.