Slashdot Mirror
Internet to Pakistan Goes Down
TwobyTwo writes "According to CNN, a power supply problem on an undersea cable has severed all outside Internet connectivity to Pakistan. Many businesses have been seriously impacted. Repairs will involve some disruption to access from other countries, and are tentatively scheduled for overnight." From the article: "'It's a worst-case scenario. We are literally blank,' said a senior foreign banker who declined to be identified. An official at the Karachi stock exchange said Pakistan's main bourse was unaffected as it had its own internal trading system."
Tinfoil hat ON:
OK, so what are the odds that the problem with the link is due to a faulty tap by an *unnamed* government? We have been tapping undersea cables now for years and have specifically developed technology for all types of cables including optical cables. Given Pakistan's role in the last few years, I would not be surprised to find a tap on this cable that *perhaps* has leaked or otherwise failed causing an increase in resistance resulting in the power problems. Come on now, this is a prime cable to look at given that India, Dubai and Oman are using the same link. Look for a deployment out of Groton or Bremerton soon....
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
How will Osama get his video messages to the internet without his DSL connection?! He's got lots of podcast subscribers.
Those damned terrorist crustaceans are at it again. >:(
Weird, I didn't notice it at all!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
of the closet with the Cisco 2502!
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
An entire country Slashdotted...
This is why that damned techy left the convo early
I should've known! The emir of Pakistan just wired me 80 billion dollars too... oh well, I'm sure it will still get here once the connection is restored.
stuff |
The whole point of the way internet routing works is to allow traffic to route across alternate links when the "best" link goes down.
Having a single pipe feeding an entire country is pretty damn stupid.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Pakistan is getting an infusion of capital and interest after being the focus of outsourcing efforts, just like India and China - so if people can't get in via the internet, would that not have a negative impact on their internet?
However, if they fix the cable before the bell rings again in the morning in Karachi, then more props to the Pakistani government for quick action - and see more companies rely on them. Just what we need, right, in this time where the US government doesn't want to give certain countries any leverage in international barganing?
Good thing I don't need to do any telephone banking!
We heard your collective screams and offer our prayers. I can only imagine in my nightmares if we lost our internets.
*shudder*
-- taking over the world, we are.
A typical Linux user
thank god I still have access to Tech Support services in India...
---
It hit his face.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
No email for you, Osama!
This is what you get for laying your cable over ancient R'lyeh.
Apparently "Dont put all your eggs in one basket" doesn't translate well.
Methinks some disgruntled IT professionals are behind it.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
Iran. India. Afghanistan.
They are either enemies with their neighbors or the their neighbors are, for whatever reason, less than trustworthy.
Just one of the cost of living in a tough neighborhood.
Thousands of packets dead!!!
Film at 11...
At least, they can't blame the rats this time. I wonder if they have the same provider.
Apparantly total shutdown of the Internet in Pakistan is common, but the article doesn't mention a timeframe, using the word brief. Its fairly surprising that one of the Indian subcontinents largest nations has just one line to support its Internet connections. In 10, 20, 30 years the amount of outsourced work and IT related industry located there will need a much more dependable connection, not to mention the rising home use.
Furthermore, the article mentions disruption to cities as far afield as Dubai, in India. Heres hoping upgrades in the form of more lines happen as soon as possible.
Pigeons!
- Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
...outsourcing is still good, right?
Synchronize your calendar and mobile phone via text messaging.
I'm a little curious about why the single point of entry into a nation's internet is through the ocean when the country is bordered on most sides by land. Was it a political decision or economic? I can see it going both ways.
Direct away from face when opening.
So their only point of connection was through the arabian sea? Maybe this will get them to improve relations with their neighbors so they can get a second link that runs through China or India, maybe Iran. Afghanistan seems like a dry hole for that sort of thing. A single point of failure for the entire country's networking... amazing.
Power cuts and connectivity "blackouts" seem to all come from the same source, one power line, one internet cable. I mean why countries relay on just 1-2 cables?. Because of the expenses?, How much did that power failure cost them?.
Trust is a weakness. (not really)
I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
Anyone in Pakistan care to comment or give us more details?
Mike doesn't like it when I ban whole countries.
Subnetmasks and ISPs are fine.
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
I got 15 percent less spam.
I was wondering why my Adwords clicks have dropped by 90%.
Osama Bin Lobster did it!
The rats chewed through the backup!
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
I would think that anything that has become irreplaceable to 8,000 years of progress after only 30 odd years is bound to doom us, regardless of its guise.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
spam dropped 56.8889%...
Does Pakistan really only have one link to the Internet, and an undersea one at that? I can understand there wouldn't be links to India, or perhaps China, but aren't there reasonably friendly countries to the west? Heck, can't someone lay a fiber cable (one of the 10km ones) to another country for the moment?
I am trolling
I juest read on Yahoo that noted author, historian and raconteur Shelby Foote has died. The cause of death wasn't announced. Even if you didn't agree with his politics, there's no denying his contribution to popular history. Truly an American icon.
Road Runner (TW) tech support now..
"...Internet Attacks from the Middle East seemed to grind to a halt today..."
I have notice a significant reduction in SPAM. Perhaps we should leave things alone?
Select * from users where clue 0
0 rows selected.
Not long afterwards, the Professor has managed to build a contraption out of bamboo and coconut fibers, connected into the wires and terminating into a speaker made of palm-leaves. The castaways hear out of it: "Osama? Osama? Why don't you call anymore? After that night in Tora Bora, you said you would never forsake me!". After a while, the castaways grow tired of it. The Professor than proceeds to connect his bamboo internet terminal to some of the wires, hoping to pick up dial-up modem traffic. The messages soon come across, printing on dried banana-peels: "Please help me. I am on desert island. Help me to leave, and I will give you $30,000,000. All you have to do is send me $10,000.".
Everyone turns to look at Thurston Howell the Third. Lovey hits him on the shoulder. "And I thought you were doing daytrading! Shame on you, Thurston!".
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
This has happened before. Last November, a boat dropped an anchor, breaking the underseas cable that feeds Colombia with Internet. Colombia feeds Ecuador (and maybe Venezuela, not sure on that one). So most ISPs in Colombia and Ecuador were out of service for about 24 hours.
:)
I live in Ecuador and would have been pretty ticked. Fortunately, I was vacationing in Peru at the time, happily accessing the Net from cybercafes on Lake Titicaca.
I'm currently in Pakistan, and I have to say that not having any Internet really sucks.
How am I going to read Slashdot now?
Damnit! I was trying to cut the India line but it was all jibber this jabber that and being underwater didn't help my vision.
According to CNN, a power supply problem on an undersea cable has severed all outside Internet connectivity to Nigeria. Many businesses have been seriously impacted. Repairs will involve some disruption to access from other countries, and are tentatively scheduled for overnight." From the article: "'IT"S A WORSE CASE SCENARIO, NO MORE WIRE TRANSFERS' said BIBI LUCKY, A SENIOR BANKER SEEKING TO TRANSFER MONEY. An official at the Lagos stock exchange said Nigeria's main main mail server was unable to send hundreds of mails queued to be sent to the outside world.
Adwords clicks have dropped by 90%. Suddenly clickthrough vs purchase ratios are up 500%.
"I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced."
Apologies to Obi-Wan.
...Outsourcing.....
If North America or Europe lost most of its internet one day? Can the economy survive without IP?
Proudly admiring their work setting up the Pakistany Internet Infrastructure.
Guy1: "Don't you think we should have more than one pipe into the country?"
Guy2: "Nah, there's not enough people using the internet over here, and besides, what's going to happen here!?"
Guy1: "Yeah, I guess you're right."
Not too much later... *Cowering in the shadows*Guy2: "Ummm, how far do you think we can get before anyone relizes what happened?
Generation Trance: What generation are you?
The Slashdot crowd finally went through with their threats and went after outsourcing. Only problem is that they got the wrong cable.
Joking aside, what would it mean if most connectivity to a large company's outsourced IT force was suddenly cut off? Does it look like such a great idea after all?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
And in another related story, the amount of zombie infections and attacks dropped dramatically worldwide as well!
There may be an internal trading system, but how can they say that there would be no effect on the local stock market/trading system?
The local stock/trading system can be found downtown Karashi. Just go to the the third street seller in the market and ask for Ali.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It is caused by a break in the SME-3 cable, in the Arabian sea, some 35 km south of Karachi. The problem started out on Monday morning [ reported on a local slashdot-style forum http://tech.one.com.pk/?q=node/87 ]
The repair operation is complex and might take up to two weeks possibly causing disruption in India and UAE as well, who are also connected by the same cable.
SME-3 is Pakistan's primary pipe to the internet and the only backup is through satellite uplink which is providing service to some high ISPs at 10% of regular bandwidth. Call centres are surely going through a real tough time and their business will probably be impacted adversly by this.
-- Binary Finary
coincidence ?
Damn, where is Aquaman when you need him?
I felt a disturbance in the Force, as if a million DSL connections cried out and then were silenced.
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
C:\>ping pakistan
Ping request could not find host pakistan. Please check the name and try again.
C:\>
tee hee
In Other compleatly non-coincidence news software Giant XXX started to hire 5,000 more developers today.
(posting anonymously)
((work for software giant XXX))
(((I like my job, please dont fire me)))
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
*** Osama has been left the channel #h8usa. Disconnected.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
I feel a great disturbance in the Internet. As if millions of Pakistani nerds cried out in terror, and were suddenly silienced.
Internet to Pakistan
Did anyone else at first think the Internet was trying to speak to Pakistan? "Internet to Pakistan: Microsoft called, they want their OS back."
Now that we know what the underwater cable is for, will someone in Pakistan please tell me what's in that damned hatch?
Share and Enjoy!
Pigeon Packet Transfer Protocol
Carrier Pigeon Internet Protocol
Pictures from the worlds first rfc 1149 implementation.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
is a very very bad man...
It certainly had no effect on the US market today. The DJIA is up almost 1.11% as it nears the close today!
Imagine the following chanted in a large stadiumU S A!
U S A!
U S A!
Shameless plug for the Greatest Country in the world!
We don't need no stinkin' backup! What could possibly happen to our
Now I understand why www.burqua-sluts.com isn't loading.
and we steal your internet connection.
Hacked by W.
...will you pleeeeese hand over Bin Laden, if we lay a second cable for you?
A huge disturbance in the net... as if a million hosts screamed in terror and fear, and suddenly fell silent.
From Monty Python. The Album Of The Soundtrack Of The Trailer Of The Film Of Monty Python And The Holy Grail. New York: Arista Records., 1975:
Good evening!
The last scene was interesting from the point of view of a professional logician because it contained a number of logical fallacies -- that is, invalid propositional constructions and syllogistic forms -- of the type so often committed by my wife.
"All wood burns," states Sir Bedevere. "Therefore," he concludes, "all that burns is wood."
This is, of course, pure bullshit! Universal affirmatives can only be partially converted. All of Alma Cogan is dead, but only some of the class of dead people are Alma Cogan. Obvious one would think.
However, my wife does not understand this necessary limitation of the conversion of a proposition. Consequently, she does not understand me. For how can a woman expect to appreciate a professor of logic if the simplest cloth-eared syllogism causes her to flounder.
For example: given the premise, "All fish live underwater" and "All mackerel are fish", my wife will conclude, not that "All mackerel live underwater", but that "If she buys kippers it will not rain" or that "Trout live in trees" or even that "I do not love her any more."
This she calls "using her intuition". I call it "crap" and it gets me very IRRITATED because it is not logical!
"There will be no supper tonight," she will sometimes cry upon my return home.
"Why not?" I will ask.
"Because I have been screwing the milkman all day," she will say, quite oblivious of the howling error she has made.
"But," I will wearily point out, "even given that the activities of screwing the milkman and getting supper are mutually exclusive, now that the screwing is over, surely then, supper may, logically, be got."
"You don't love me any more!" she will now often postulate. "If you did, you would give me one now and again so that I would not have to rely on that rancid Pakistani for my orgasms!"
"I will give you one after you have got me my supper!" I now usually scream, "but not before" -- as you understand, making her bang contingent on the arrival of my supper.
"God, you turn me on when you're angry, you ancient brute!" she now mysteriously deduces, forcing her sweetly throbbing tongue down my throat.
"Fuck supper!" I now invariably conclude, throwing logic somewhat joyously to the four winds, and so we thrash about on our milk-stained floor, transported by animal passion, until we sink back, exhausted, onto the cartons of yoghurt....
I'm afraid I seem to have strayed somewhat from my original brief. But in a nutshell, sex is more fun than logic. One cannot prove this, but it IS in the same sense that Mount Everest IS, or that Alma Cogan ISN'T.
Goodnight.
I'd fake it :)
... actually all Pakistani newssites I think of right now are online.
but
Maybe they're not based in Pakistan but can anyone actually confirm that all Pakistan is offline? Or almost?
Two years ago I noted in my blog about how Pakistan's entire bandwidth is depended on this one undersea connection (SMW3) and how 'little' it is when compared to what ordinary consumers have in the developed world.
Since then, Pakistan has leased a Hughes HGS-3 satellite and using it for various purposes, including telecommunications. Apparently now, all internet traffic is going through that and other satellite links... and from what I can tell even the country's biggest ISP Brain.NET (known for it's of the same name) site is taking forever to load. (Damn 6 second lags!)
Obviously, this is bad for the country's outsourcing ambitions, especially with a recent this sector due to rising costs in Bangalore.
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
Ouch, no redundancy! In my experience there's always some local law in place - made by people that don't understand the net - that makes situations like this crop up. Perhaps they want to monitor what their people are doing on the internet. Having one pipeline makes that easy.
In Soviet Russia, power outs you.
I know that they use fiber or what not but can the cable really handle all that bandwidth? Maybe this incident did the people a favor. "Yay, my page downloads in less then a second now with an error than the 30 minutes it took before!"
List of online newspapers.
Let's see, Bush's poll numbers are in the dirt, he has to go on TV tonight and spew more of the same , we need to keep going in Iraq forever to support Halliburton.
What if the powers that be though that catching Bin Laden today before he goes on TV would be great, and if so we need to cut off Pakistan to control the news.
hmmmmmm
* Carthago Delenda Est *
A significant percentage of the access is through satellite linkups. The dominant state run telco (monopoly?) Paktel has a receiver farm setup on the outskirts of Karachi (near the airport for ppl in the area). As well as links offered through various other ISP's. Yes a significant portion may be dead because of fiber disruption but no way could it be anywhere near 'all'. Also for those talking about redundancy submarine cables are an expensive proposition especially for third world countries. From my experience in Pakistan they heavily oversubscribe before actually having enough capital to expand capacity.
Call before you dig
Why is the parent marked as a troll?
Two years ago I noted in my blog about how Pakistan's entire bandwidth is depended on this one undersea connection (SMW3) and how 'little' it is when compared to what ordinary consumers have in the developed world.
Since then, Pakistan has leased a Hughes HGS-3 satellite and using it for various purposes, including telecommunications. Apparently now, all internet traffic is going through that and other satellite links... and from what I can tell even the country's biggest ISP Brain.NET (known for it's founders' famous DOS virus of the same name) site is taking forever to load. (Damn 6 second lags!)
Obviously, this is bad for the country's outsourcing ambitions, especially with a recent spike in interest in this sector due to rising costs in Bangalore.
Repost due to errors in original. Damn no edit rule!
Mozilla stole tabs from NetCaptor. So what? Right?
I presume the dialog above was the subtitled version because I did not detect any accent. ;-)
#!@
I have it on good authority that the real cause was due to the high volume of jobs being sucked overseas and the amount of code being squeezed off shore.
Porn is scattered all around the crash site...
"WebTV: bringing the Internet into the shallow end of the gene pool since 1995" - Martin Bishop
As if millions of PakMen screamed out and then were suddenly silenced...
> Many businesses have been seriously impacted...
Especially the ones selling Pen1s enlarg3m3nt products as their spam servers are now inaccessible.
thaat is so funny.
-India.
...a few days after a successfull communication blackout, arranged by US specialists, Osama Bin Laden has been captured in Pakistan by US troops. One US chopper with about 20 soldiers have been lost in the operation.
"...In my country, Internet goes down on you!"
Crunch!
I'm going to be a paranoid American... and go out on a limb with this quick mathmatical equation. (destruction of Pakistan's telecommunications infrastructure) x (2 NSA operatives) + 1 Presidental Address in 4 hours EST = Invasion? Just a thought....
How could they tell it was down?
I'm currently in Pakistan and just last week we were going over emergency plans for just such on occasion. It was my understanding that Baboo would use his dial-up modem to connect the country if needed.
The wheels are in motion, he said. But there was no motion. He is a very bad man.
How else are you going to get pr0n in the middle of the ocean?
We are the ocean gremlins. All your redundancy are belong to us.
Having run a small e-commerce site since 1995, taking visa/mc over the web, I have seem about 30% of my fraudulent orders come in with a Pakistan address, and another 60% come in with India as the address. ROW accounts for the other 10% of fraud.
Let 'em stay offline. I don't even try processing their orders immediately. The script recognizes certain keywords and holds the order for a week, and then EVERY single time I try to process a Pakistan or Indian order, I get "Denied" or "Call Auth Center."
The last VALID sale from either of those two countries was in 2001 or 2002 or so.
Let them stay dark I say.
I was thinking the same thing earlier today.
Seeing how we think Osama might be in that country. And seeing how we have submarines with undersea cable tapping capabilities.
Note that the article about there being too much data was in 2001. Moore's Law might have allowed us to compute this amount of data by now.
Sorry about that. I unplugged a cable that I thought led to an empty wall. Let me put it back...brb!
The US military has been keeping its plans pretty quiet in the media, but expect some kind of 'nuclear terror' used as justification for an invasion later this year.
Couldn't you use a couple of say 54Mbit channels on a SAT link for backup/redunancy?
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
So maybe it isn't really accurate to say that they are off the Internet -- it's just that the number of hosts they are able to reach has been greatly reduced. Surely this shouldn't cripple domestic uses of the Internet, only international ones... (No more so than a broken uplink at the office interferes with me reaching the local file server.)
Ok... now that's what I call a /.ing!
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
In the earlier days of the Internet in Pakistan, say 1996, the connection cost Rs70 per hour. In fact the first connection was from Paknet, the govt ISP.
/etc/passwd, which was plaintext and humungous. The passwords were a simple MD5 hashes and didnt take more than a cracking script with words like 'pakistan' 'sex' 'fuck' 'god' 'allah' 'cricket' and common names like Ali to produce a significant list of passwords.
Their connection was like a BBS system, where you'd dial into a BBS, and see the Linux 1.3.x kernel. You'd get a curses menu and seleced lynx to browse the net.
You could also select another option after which you could close the telnet window and use IE or netscape 3.0 through ppp.
Turns out, they were using a gigantic NAT, whereby everyone in Pakistan was channeled through a single IP address. Everyone knew that IP address, which was blocked by many IRC servers like the Dalnet. The customers must've been less than 65535 to fit at any time I imagine.
You'd have to try dialling MANY times to get a connection. At one time, we crossed the 100th attempt to dial to read a single email.
And boy was hotmail slow.
In the telnet menu, you could also drop yourself into a shell, which was my first brush with UNIX. All we knew was ls and cd (dont know how we learnt those, possibly from trial and error). We copied
Now why would you run a whole country on a Linux server with kernel 1.3.x with bad security? It is amazing that even in beta, Linux held up well enough to run the country of Pakistan's internet connection. After all who could afford a cisco over there? Or even multiple IP addresses?
Here in Canada, businesses are commonly provided with 64 IP address blocks by Bell and Telus, even if they really need one.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
from covering his press conference.
That's why the Internet connections are down. He was way too many fans now. He needs his rest.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
They figured it would be much easier to slip under the RIAA's radar if they cut their pipe on the outside and allowed for internal file sharing. In other news, the RIAA has opened its first Karachi branch.
I know some superheroes' names are somewhat obscure, like Shazam or Mr. Fantastic. But did we really need a Wikipedia link for Aquaman?
this
http://www.islamabad.net/offsites.htm
shows urls for "Pakistani Official Websites"
I clicked on a couple and was surprised a couple were still accessible. Particularly, the Ministry of Finace page.
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
afterall, why not capture packets at the ISP
They don't even need to capture at the ISP, since they've got sniffers at all the MAEs and every other big peering interchange POP already.
by Rudyard Kipling
THE WRECKS dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar--
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great gray level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.
Here in the womb of the world--here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat--
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth--
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.
They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"
--Paracelsus
If Nigeria requested our assistance in restoring the cables, send back a reply charging them $200,000,000,000, in cold hard cash, packed into several suitcases. :-)
The North Koreans are using them to battle the Lobstermen of the Fabled lost city of Atlanta. Sometimes they have scirmishes with Japanese Squidbots. Likely somebody just tripped on the cable. I do it all the time in my apt.
If I am gonna break my tin foil hat out of it's hermeticly sealed container I am gonna use if for something serious.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
I haven't noticed a drop in Spam, so most of it must not originate from there. How about we shutdown the rest of the countries one at a time, to try to pin point the problem?
With keywords like "a" and "the", this list would return close to 100% of all data communications. Obviously BS.
#!
One down and one to go.
Now all I have to do is finish the network cut
to India.
Of course, when you've got telecom monopolies, that seriously degrades your ability to get competitive diverse services, which degrades your ability to create a market that encourages more people to build connectivity. India has theoretically liberalized, but VSNL still seems to have a strong hold on most of the major cable landings, which has been a problem, since there's lots of fiber passing nearby on FLAG, SMW3, etc, and lots of terrestrial fiber to connect it to, if you could just get the stuff up the beach onto dry land without some bureaucrat trying to prevent competition. (Too many US politicians whine about outsourcing - they should only imagine what would have happened if India's telecoms had been liberalized five years earlier and caught more of the 1990s boom.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
maybe they should have a country-wide set of satellite links? not quite enough to provide the same qos, but at least some kind of a route to take.
But basically if they can run an oil pipeline along many of these regions, they can drag a fiber optic cable along with it; dealing with local telecom bureaucrats is often tougher than installing the cable system across the mountains.
There's some work going on connecting northern Pakistan with nearby parts of India, which is politically significant, just as restarting the bus line was.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Um... The Internet crashed?? LOL
These people at CNN really need to get one of those education things! The Internet did NOT "crash". There's just been a disruption in service due to the loss of an undersea cable. That's not a crash, it's a bloody disruption!
The headline should be: Internet access disrupted in Pakistan
That doesn't mean you can't have multiple failures that take out redundant systems - about a year ago, there were multiple cable cuts on different sides of Singapore that killed parts of some of the cable systems, so carriers who only used one cable consortium were in trouble for a couple of weeks. Similarly, there was an earthquake in the Mediterranean a couple of years ago that took out parts of half a dozen cable systems, and it took a long time to get them all fixed.
Land-based internet peering points in the US do have the possibility of things going wrong - but that's why any respectably large ISP has physically diverse connections into their important buildings, and access rings using those connections that can restore around failures, and big ISPs peer with each other at multiple locations. There are occasionally geographically entertaining problems, like that railroad tunnel near Baltimore that caught fire a few years back, taking out the circuits from several major ISPs - railroad right-of-way is a very popular way to route long-haul fiber, and often carries multiple long-haul providers as well as local telcos. Fortunately, my employer's network didn't use that tunnel, but we had sufficient diversity in that area that cutting one of our cables would have minimal impact (we design everything with that objective, but there are places like crossing the Rockies where you sometimes have to go a long ways to get an alternate route.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm quite sure the capable boats aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
At least not before I'm done with it.
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?st ream_id=423
"ECHELON and the Insecurity Industry"
You can grab it with StreamRipper (as the download link appears to be broken, even via ftp), and listen to your heart's content. I'll spare you the details, but at one point he mentions how the USS Jimmy Carter has been overhauled -- at MASSIVE expense -- to have a bigger "ocean interface", which means (as it has in the past) that, in addition to the incredibly rare rescue scenarios, they still believe that tapping undersea cables is a viable technique.
Since almost everything important is running on fiber nowadays, and the old cables are going the way of the dodo, the obvious conclusion of security industry observers (and of Sy Hersh, recently and notably) is that the big players in the sigint/commint community can tap undersea fiber.
This is not make-believe! It's not bull, or exaggeration. It's widely known and accepted within the intelligence community (including the community of intel watchdogs).
Generally, the US *does* tap endpoints (and the countries that it shares intel with, like Britain and Australia and New Zealand, all help), and there are really only a couple of cables of interest in the Mediterranean, but in Asia and the Middle East, there are a lot of places that the US does not have end-point access to via the ISPs.
Contrary to popular belief, it is far less risky for the US to tap an undersea cable than to do so covertly on land in a country like Pakistan (or to secure THAT level of intel cooperation with their government; they're cooperative in some ways, but not THAT cooperative).
did anyone parse this as the title to one of those cheesy ethnic porn flic's or was that just me?
This sounds exactly like another screwup by the NSA to do a tap of a major trunk line. In case you don't know about this, read here for more information about this crap.e gacy=zdnn)
(http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-529826.html?l
And it was not too long ago that connections to France went down, supposedly from a "problem" with an undersea cable too.
That probably explains why I got a bit less spam than usual today.
I call bullshit! I am in Pakistan this ver--NO CARRIER
Actually, submarines are properly refered to as "boats" -- at least they are by submariners, who are an entirely different breed than surface sailors.
Yes, they are that. Submariners are insane. (*VBG!*)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Not really, unless they've recently returned from a couple of years in London and it rubbed off on them. Kiwi's are more likely to use "eh" at the end of sentences, like Canadians.
Next thing you know, you'll be telling me Kiwis have taken a fancy to Tim Horton's Donuts, Maple Syrup, Beaver Tails (the pastry delicacy, for those who think I'm talking about an actual appendage from an actual beaver which I'm not), and Ice Hockey....
I mean, then you'd be like Canada (vast and interesting geography, fun-loving and relatively peaceful folk, brew some good beer, neighbours that sometimes make you wince but whom you depend on for defence, etc.) except with a nicer climate.
Careful, you might find your immigration figures from what would then be called "Northern Canada" go waaaay up.... (*grin*)
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Download porn.
I was wondering why I hadn't been hit on my any pakistani perverts today while in chat rooms....
They're in boats.
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
to make them hand over Bin Laden and allow the CIA to properly interrogate AQ Khan for selling nukes to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Instead of pardoning Khan with a slap on the wrist (naughty boy!) and allowing Osama to gallivant around Western Pakistan with immunity.
Stirred, not shaken...
~Once you have your choices narrowed down, the rest will fall into place.
KARACHI : Internet link remains suspended for 4 hours
March, 26 2005 Saturday
KARACHI, March 25: Internet connections and other telecommunications channels of the country remained down for about four hours when a key cable of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company got damaged on Friday afternoon.
A PTCL spokesman said a telecommunications cable (SEAMEWE III) got damaged in Gulbai at 4.33pm. He claimed that the phone utility had repaired the cable by 7.26pm, adding in the meantime all telecommunications channels, including the Internet, had been switched to the satellite channel.
However, the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association, V.A. Abidi, said the telecommunications channels had broken down before 4.33pm. "Internet service providers received a message from the PTCL about the suspension of the service at 4.30pm. Similarly, the service was partially restored at around 8.10pm," he said.
Mr Abidi recalled that the SEAMEWE III (South-East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe III) cable had also broken down in April 2003.
"Besides, it is wrong to say that the satellite channel is a substitute for SEAMEWE III. The PTCL employs over 300 megabits when it uses SEAMEWE III and it has only 34 megabits when it uses the satellite channel. And under the rules telephone traffic takes precedence over Internet traffic. So, how can the PTCL say that it uses the satellite channel as an alternative to SEAMEWE III?" he wondered.
Mr Abidi said the PTCL earned quite a lot from those who used the SEAMEWE III cable for telecommunications services.
He suggested that the PTCL should employ a portion of the revenue thus earned for the installation of a substitute channel without further delay.
He underlined the need for putting in place an alternative telecommunications cable.
The suspension of the telecommunications service inconvenienced a large number of people in the country who were unable to get online and make international calls.
It also panicked online traders who were unable to connect to the website of the Karachi Stock Exchange whose index has fallen considerably over the past few days.
Terrorist win
In 1996, Stephenson wrote a (long) article for Wired about FLAG. Most of his observations are also valid for the cable discussed here.
Its me from Pakistan, I must "acknowledge" that Internet speed atm really sucks :(
http://askaralikhan.blogspot.com/
What I noticed was the timing of 2 stories as they broke. I have now gone back to see what time they appeared on the BBC news website:
1) GMT 14:20 Pakistan rape acquittals rejected
2) GMT 14:34 Pakistan internet woes hit firms
Guess it was another of those strange coincidences !!
Unless, of course, they are Canadian. Then they're in obsolete, leaky, British cast-off boats. And perhaps, in big trouble....
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."