Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout--like we're seeing in Egypt, for example--you'll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dialup Internet or even ham radio, could still work since these "abandoned" tech avenues aren't being policed nearly as hard..

In order to get around the total shut-down of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online since phone service is still operational. It's slow, but it still works--the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

Unfortunately, the dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to --a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980's. FidoNet can only be used to send simple text messages, and it's slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network another one can quickly pop up to take its place.

You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create an ad hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using , since the signals are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of these efforts are still getting off the ground but hackers are already cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into and out of the country.