Return-Path: <sentto-279987-3696-1004533814-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com> Delivered-To: fc@all.net Received: from 204.181.12.215 [204.181.12.215] by localhost with POP3 (fetchmail-5.7.4) for fc@localhost (single-drop); Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:11:07 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 26194 invoked by uid 510); 31 Oct 2001 13:09:30 -0000 Received: from n10.groups.yahoo.com (216.115.96.60) by 204.181.12.215 with SMTP; 31 Oct 2001 13:09:30 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-279987-3696-1004533814-fc=all.net@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.1.221] by n10.groups.yahoo.com with NNFMP; 31 Oct 2001 13:10:15 -0000 X-Sender: fc@red.all.net X-Apparently-To: iwar@onelist.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_0_0_1); 31 Oct 2001 13:10:14 -0000 Received: (qmail 84565 invoked from network); 31 Oct 2001 13:10:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by 10.1.1.221 with QMQP; 31 Oct 2001 13:10:13 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO red.all.net) (65.0.156.78) by mta2 with SMTP; 31 Oct 2001 13:10:13 -0000 Received: (from fc@localhost) by red.all.net (8.11.2/8.11.2) id f9VDAMW11299 for iwar@onelist.com; Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:10:22 -0800 Message-Id: <200110311310.f9VDAMW11299@red.all.net> To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List) Organization: I'm not allowed to say X-Mailer: don't even ask X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net> X-Yahoo-Profile: fcallnet Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list iwar@yahoogroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:iwar-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 05:10:21 -0800 (PST) Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com Subject: [iwar] [fc:Does.Official.Taliban.Site.Exist?] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Does Official Taliban Site Exist? By Patrick Di Justo, Wired News, 10/30/2001 <a href="http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,47956,00.html">http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,47956,00.html> Afghanistan's Taliban government, which declared the Internet unholy and banned its use for millions of Afghan citizens last June, maintained a website until shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and still has at least one e-mail address through its embassy in Pakistan. The DNS entry for the Taliban's website currently points to the null IP address 127.0.0.1. Before Sept. 11, however, it directed users to the official page of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, an austere, multi-layered website hosted by Brain.net.pk, a Pakistani ISP with a server farm in Singapore. The most recent version of the website, resurrected by Google's cache, puts a surprisingly moderate face on the regime: The website offers its readers interviews with Taliban leaders, investment opportunities in various Afghanistan businesses, and even includes a section for questions and comments. One unanswered question is how the Taliban accessed the Internet from within Afghanistan at all. Bram Abramson, director of Internet Research with Telegeography of Washington, doubts there was ever any high-speed Internet infrastructure placed in Afghanistan to begin with, since the country has been at war almost continuously since 1980. "There's just no way to know what their bandwidth is like," he said, adding that he believed any Internet traffic into and out of Afghanistan before the bombing campaign would have been limited to portable satellite terminals connecting to Singapore or the United Arab Emirates. Since the U.S. bombing began Oct. 6, he believes Afghanistan has been off the Net completely. N.R. Liwal, an Internet solutions provider in Peshawar, Pakistan, said that if the Taliban is using satellite terminals to get online, they aren't using his. Despite a website that proclaims, "We brought the Internet to Afghanistan", Liwal says his company, the Liwal Group, spent the last two years trying unsuccessfully to bring solar-powered VSAT technology to Afghanistan, with connectivity services to be provided by SingTel of Singapore. VSAT (Very Small Aperture Terminals) systems use geostationary communication satellites and portable (less than 1 meter) satellite dishes to bring the Internet to otherwise inaccessible places. "Satellite wireless is the only way to get e-mail and Internet in Afghanistan," Liwal wrote in an e-mail. Perhaps worried by Liwal Group's advertising claims that their system would allow full communications with the outside world from anywhere in the country, Afghanistan's rulers balked at adopting the technology. "We were trying to establish (an Internet presence)," Liwal said, "but (were) not permitted by Taliban." Brain.net.pk, with an internal fiber network connecting 162 Pakistani cities, is the largest ISP in Pakistan, and is the one the Taliban chose to use when it went online. Brain.net provides e-mail service to the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, as well as hosting for the Taliban's website. Like most of Brain.net's consumer traffic, the Taliban's embassy is connected to Brain.net over a 56K dialup line. Irfan Shahid, manager of operations for Brain.net, handled the Taliban's domain setup last April. He said that after the terrorist attacks, www.afghanistan-ie.com (and its cognate, www.afghan-ie.com) received more traffic than Brain.net permits for its customers, so the ISP shut it down. Brain.net's websites are housed in Singapore, which is relatively close to Pakistan, cheap to access and blessed with almost unlimited bandwidth. Brain.net owns a small place in Internet history. Nearly 20 years ago, a scrap of code written by Brain Computers founders Basit Alvi and Amjad Alvi in Lahore, Pakistan, became the first computer virus to enter the public's consciousness. Baber Rabbani, the director of the Peshawar office of Brain.net, refuses to discuss what he knows about the Taliban's Internet presence. When asked if Brain.net has any users located outside Pakistan, he immediately said no. Rabbani says the Afghanistan phone system has very noisy analog lines that are totally unsuitable for dial-up use. Even the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, he added, doesn't have an Internet link to the outside world. He gave an even stronger denial when asked if Brain.net did any domain registration for people outside Pakistan: "No, never," he said, indicating he did not want to talk about Brain.net's connection to its neighbor's government. Rabbani was enthusiastic, however, when talking about technical information regarding the company, such as Brain.net's primary link to the outside world (SEA-ME-WE3, an undersea fiberoptic cable that stretches from Germany to Japan), the company's Unix/Linux server farms in Lahore and Singapore, and about its backup satellite link with Interpacket. Yet of the four public e-mail addresses the Taliban used, the only one that evidently remains active is afghan@brain.net.pk. However, there has been no response to repeated messages sent to that address. One person not worried about discussing his supposed connection to the Taliban is Nisar Ahmed Atayee, an expatriate Afghan who lives in the Los Angeles suburb of Newbury Park. His website, ShariatOnline.net, was named by the Times of India as an official Taliban website. Atayee insists he is using his website only to alert the world to the horrific drought in Afghanistan. The placement of the Taliban flag and seal on his website is, he says, merely to identify it as the product of a proud Afghan. "It is the flag of my country, since the 1990s, and that is all," he explained. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Pinpoint the right security solution for your company- Learn how to add 128- bit encryption and to authenticate your web site with VeriSign's FREE guide! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yQix2C/33_CAA/yigFAA/kgFolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> ------------------ http://all.net/ Your use of Yahoo! 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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 20:59:58 PST