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."
Having a single pipe feeding an entire country is pretty damn stupid.
Actually, some of their larger users have been routed around to satellite backups, but the load is way, way too much and it pretty much unusable according to TFA.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
At least, they can't blame the rats this time. I wonder if they have the same provider.
Although it's not likely that this was a bad tap, afterall, why not capture packets at the ISP, rather than the bottom of the sea?
Carnivore for crabs anyone?
http://computer.howstuffworks.com/carnivore.htm
I really, really hope that was supposed to be a joke.
Just in case it's not: The term "Tin foil hat" refers to supremely paranoid people believing they stop your mind being read by aliens, and as a result the phrase has now become synonymous with being paranoid. Hence why it was applied in this context.
You try running a land line through here
Pakistan isn't exactly known for having hospitable terrain. Or being well developed in outlying areas. Packets can route around "damage" only if there's actually a route there to use. The infrastructure just isn't there. Hell, according to the factbook, 40% of the "highways" aren't paved. I'd wager that high speed data lines aren't exactly a high priority.
As for links through China...the Chinese don't seem to like having their own citizens using their links to the net, let alone another country. And there's the little problem of trying to run a landline through the same mountain range that K2 calls home.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
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?
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).