Internet in Lebanon Back After Cable Ruptures, Knocks Nation Offline

Internet service in Lebanon is slowly and partially returning on Friday after damage to an underwater cable knocked the entire nation offline several times this week.

The cable, which lies about 30 miles off the Egyptian coast, broke on Wednesday. The cable is part of the India-Middle East-Western Europe system, an 8,100-foot-long fibre-optic link between eight countries in the Middle East, Europe and Asia.

The system went live in 2009, but Lebanon didn’t join the network until the summer of 2011.

During the breaks between outages, Lebanon’s telecommunications minister Nicolas Sehnaoui was periodically updating Lebanese citizens on the government’s progress in restoring the nation’s Internet access.

Live from Cyprus: Changes have just been applied few minutes ago. This will increase the speed back to normal all over Lebanon

— Nicolas Sehnaoui (@NicolaSehnaoui) July 6, 2012

On Friday, the nearby nation of Cyprus agreed to re-route some of Lebanon’s web traffic in and out of the country, while Lebanon’s state-run telecom provider said it would start routing traffic through a series of reserve cables, according to local news outlet The Daily Star.

Those steps were taken with the hope of returning the country’s Internet to full speed, but reports from Lebanon’s capital of Beirut indicate that Internet users there were still experiencing slow or completely unavailable Internet connections.

Not in #Lebanon RT @mashable: Internet Access Is a Human Right, Says United Nations on.mash.to/PkgkrB

— Abdelrahman M.Chehab (@AbdelrahmanCh) July 6, 2012

“slow is probably the best word to describe Lebanon’s Internet.” dailystar.com.lb/News/Local-New…

— Stephen Dockery (@S_Dockery) July 6, 2012

SEE ALSO: History of the Internet in a Nutshell [INFOGRAPHIC]

In October of last year, a BBC report found that Lebanon had one of the slowest Internet connections in the world.

What would you do if your entire country was knocked offline? Share your ideas in the comments below.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, CGinspiration

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AVG Anti-Virus Free 2012 build 2127 Download Offline

The free version of the AVG Antivirus protection tool.AVG Antivirus 2012 Free Edition is a very popular antivirus program, rated #1 by CNET, which provides very high quality basic protection for your windows PC. The 2012 is the latest version that has recently been released by AVG Technologies.This is the Best antivirus software available for download for free.

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How to Use Offline Files in Windows to Cache Your Networked Files Offline

The problem with storing all your files on a file server or networked machine is that when you leave the network, how are you going to access your files? Instead of using a VPN or Dropbox, you can use the Offline Files feature built into Windows.

Note: You should probably not be using this guide to make your 2 terabyte movie collection available offline—while it may work, it is not recommended just because the Offline Files feature isn’t made for storing massive amounts of data offline.

If you’re new to networking, be sure to check out our guide to networking Windows 7 with XP or Vista, or the guide on how to share files and printers between Windows 7 and XP.

First you’ll want to connect to the PC that hosts the shared folder. There’s a number of ways to do this, but one easy method is to use the Windows + R key combination to bring up the Run box, and then type two backslashes and the IP address or hostname of the PC you want to connect to. You could also do the same thing in the Windows Explorer location box, of course.

Once you connect to the machine (you may need to input a username and password, depending on how your network is setup), you’ll see the folders that are shared on the other computer. Right-click on the folder and select Map Network drive. On the next screen, you’ll be asked to pick a drive letter and optionally use different credentials.

Note: again, you could map the drive a different way if you want.

Once you’ve mapped a drive and opened it up in Windows Explorer, you can go to any sub-folder of the drive and select “Always available offline” from the context menu.

Once all the files have been processed you will get a message telling you that they will be available offline.

For example, I have made a single folder called “Personal” available offline, which contains a single text file called My Plans, which contains “Text Text Text Text” as seen below.

So now if you disconnect from the network you should still be able to access your document, as seen in the following screenshot:

Note: You will be able to see a list of the other folders, as it has cached a list of the folders, but if you try open a folder that you have not made available offline it will appear to be empty until you connect to the network again.

So now that offline files is set up you can open your files and make changes to them.

While most of the time you would want your syncing to be done automatically, you could always do it manually if you choose, by right-clicking on the folder that contains offline files, selecting Sync –> Sync selected offline files from the context menu. You could alternatively do this on a per-drive basis.

If you would rather automate things, you can set up the syncing to take place automatically. To do this, type Sync Center into the Start Menu and press enter. When the sync center opens click on the View sync partnerships link on the left hand side, then double-click on the offline files that appear on the right hand side to get a list of what you files are available offline.

Once you have selected the folder that you want to schedule syncing for, the Schedule button will become available on the menu bar. Once you select it, a screen will appear asking which folders you want to create a schedule for, and a wizard will take you through the rest of the process to configure the schedule.

If you edit a file while you are offline and somebody else on your network also edits the same file, you’ll have a conflict that needs to be resolved. Windows will skip syncing those files and mark them as a conflict, but that’s easy to fix.

Type Sync Center into the Start Menu and press enter.

 

When the Sync Center opens, click on the View sync conflicts link on the left hand side, where you will find a list of all the files that did not sync.

To resolve the conflict, right-click on the file and select View options to resolve from the context menu.

This will give the options to either keep the version that you created while you were away, keep the version on the server that someone else edited while you were away, or keep both versions and rename the one that you created.

You can add a layer of security to your offline files by using EFS(Encrypting File System), which is disabled by default and needs to be enabled. Note: This will only encrypt your offline files and not the files on the server.

To enable offline files, type Sync Center into the start menu and press enter. When Sync Center opens click on the Manage offline files link on the left hand side, which will bring up a dialog box. You’ll need to switch to the Encryption tab and then click the Encrypt button.

While the offline files feature isn’t the same thing as Dropbox, it’s definitely a useful feature that’s worth a look if you use networked folders.

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Offline Gmail Returns, Sort of

Offline Gmail is back. Originally built around Google’s Gears plugin, the company announced earlier this year that it was pulling the Gears-based feature and rewriting it to use HTML5 and web standards. Now offline Gmail is back (along with offline support for Google Docs and Calendar) and no longer requires the Gears browser add-on.

Offline Gmail does, however, require the Google Chrome web browser. In fact, the offline version of Gmail is an entirely separate app you’ll need to install through the Chrome Web Store. The Web Store app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets and uses a widescreen layout that will look familiar to anyone using Gmail on an iPad or the new three-pane mail interface.

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