You sure heard of the Internet blackhole Egypt lived in when Mubarak's regime shut down the whole internet during January revolution. Other countries are filtering and censoring the Internet, Tunisia, Syria and Iran are just few examples. And recently the availability of the internet to the demonstrators in the Occupy Wall Street movement is an essential issue.

For an unknown reason, the Galaxy Tab's sold here in Egypt has got no Android Market on them. I.e. there is no way to get real applications, and you should just stick to the shitty Samsung Apps that has got almost nothing. I know how frustrating this might sound, but calm down, there is a solution for this.

1. Open the Phone application.
2. Dial *#272* then your device's IMEI number ( it's on the back of the galaxy tab)
3. You'll find something like "EGY" being selected as your Sales Code, change it to "XSG" and tap Ok/install.
4. The device will reboot and reset, and voilà!

The only problem here is that you will loose your 3G setting, but you still can find it anywhere online.

Is rate limiting an entire connection censorship?

Tags: Censorship, Security, Gr33n Data

Today, Juniper Networks announced a definitive agreement to acquire Trapeze Networks, a technology leader in enterprise wireless local area network (WLAN) systems and management software.

Virtual Servers are cool, everybody is going virtual now. But we (Networking guys) hate them sometimes. The vSwitches inside the Virtual Servers are now responsible for moving the packets between the different Virtual Machines in there, hence the packets never touch the wire, and the physical switches and security devices become more and more blind and can never QoS or secure that traffic.

Now it seems that the IEEE is planning to let the switches do their switching again. VEPA (Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator or IEEE802.1Qbg) are meant to let the vSwitch handle the packets to the adjacent edge switches.