It’s like a bad movie where you wake up and the world has disappeared.

Though many have already heard, Egypt has shut of the entire internet to their country.

80 million people now live with no internet, cell, or SMS service… The kill switch has been thrown and never in the history of the net has a country been taken completely dark in totality.

Below is a security firms analysis of how and when connections went dark.

“At 22:34 UTC (00:34am local time), Renesys observed the virtually simultaneous withdrawal of all routes to Egyptian networks in the Internet’s global routing table. Approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic with Egypt’s service providers. Virtually all of Egypt’s Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide.”

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypt-leaves-the-internet.shtml

So what did people in our office do upon hearing the news?

Well we came up with a bunch of solutions with how to get around it of course!

Some of our favorites:

• Powerful individually owned wifi repeaters

• HAM radio to internet bridges

• TOR (on one of the rare networks that are still up)

• Bionic Pigeons

Many people have been discussing how people could set up their own internet in the wake of the shut off. I think that one thing that is missing from the discussion going on is the fact that what is driving the protests is distributed access to technology. The lowest income levels now have SMS and the low mid bracket can have data piped right to a cell phone. Even if we could invent a work around the lack of adoption of any of these technologies into this “mobile data revolution” limits its reach and action.

The most powerful thing going on here is the raised expectations of the populace to get their data anytime they want it via a mobile platform. Imagine how many more people took to the streets when they weren’t distracted by facebook, reddit, news, and other things on their mobile or desktop device.

We often talk about the mobile revolution here at LEVEL in technical and business terms. These recent developments in the world however show us just how the advanced technical work we do with mobile solutions can effect the very fabrics of people’s lives.

Long live the LEVEL mobile practice!!! Because, in small, wonderful ways we drive equality between all data users on the planet.

The User Interface (UI) Developer position has always been a crucial role here at LEVEL. In the past 5 years, I’ve watched this role change and evolve as Web technology has progressed. Back in the day, we used to call these individuals HTML Architects, Web Producers, or Front-End Web Developers, but times have changed. HTML is just one of many technologies they work with, and they’re no longer limited to just building Web pages.

Web development has seen a steady shift toward the client side – where more and more functionally is now achievable directly in the Web browser. Business logic and functionality that at one time could only be created with server side languages can now be done with JavaScript and HTML5.

The UI Developer of old used to have more in common with designers than engineers, but that’s no longer the case. While a sense of design and good user experience has always been important, a solid understanding of object-oriented programming has become more critical. Today we use JavaScript to create interactivity, access data sources, work with APIs for Facebook and Google Maps, build application frameworks, and more.

More than any other position at LEVEL, the UI Developer is most affected by advancements in Web technology. With advancements in Web browsers, frameworks, and open-source development tools, there is always something new to learn and experiment with. As we start the new year, it will be exciting to see what new ideas come out of the development community and how those will shape the UI Developer of the future.

Want to learn more about what a UI Developer does? Post a comment or contact us.