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."
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)
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.
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.
You've been watching the Discovery channel too much. This is not a copper phone line that services Vladivostok, and James Bond doesn't really order shaken martinis.
I cannot believe this kind of thing gets modded up.
I have no need to put the tinfoil on for Pakistan.
Why not? Assuming for one moment that it was brought down by an *unnamed* government, surely this is serious enough to warrent serious concern, even if it is only Pakistan. The world relies on the internet in a major way, almost to the point where we are dependent on it. If governments can bring down other government's internet access, this is a major problem
I'm not stressed. I'm just terribly, terribly alert.
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
Well, generally speaking, if you completely disable the target's ability to communicate when attempting to tap his communications, the odds that you're going to intercept anything go down significantly. That seems to fall under the generally accepted definition of "faulty" to me.
Proud neuron in the Slashdot hivemind since 2002.
But it's so much fun to speculate! What amazes me is that an entire Nation has one pipe in and out of the country. Most companies get nervous about a single point of failure like that, but I guess when the resources aren't there you live with a precarious situation.
I have nothing to hide. So, why are you spying on me?
Regardless of what you think about the man's politics or the success (or lack thereof) of his administration, there's no denying that Jimmy Carter is one of the smartest and most well-educated men to occupy the Oval Office in recent memory. Jimmy Carter has a master's degree in Nuclear Physics and used to design nuclear submarines. In contrast, GWB can't even pronounce "Nuclear".
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
With keywords like "a" and "the", this list would return close to 100% of all data communications. Obviously BS.
#!
Diving to depth is a skilled task, but so is flying a plane.
I'm gonna assume this is a 9/11 reference.
Flying a plane is trivial. Landing a plane is a skilled task. Hell, taking off is pretty tough too, but the 9/11 hijackers didn't even have to do that. They simply took over the controls of an already-flying craft, and manipulated the stick and throttle controls.
"If these things had happened to one of the Bush presidents there would have been a bunch of dead Mullahs lieing around."
And hundreds of thousands of civilians, too. And probably one or two thousand dead US soldiers. Wait, that sounds vaguely familiar..