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."

Comments

Get your tinfoil hats here

[BWJones]

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....

Re:Get your tinfoil hats here

[Exodious]

I've read stuff about that sort of thing before. I can't find the exact article but I did find this which is along the same thread. If I recall correctly, the one I had read basically said the main problem with tapping the cables is making sense of the HUGE amount of data you get.

Re:Get your tinfoil hats here

[Bendy Chief]

Source: CNN

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The USS Jimmy Carter, set to join the nation's submarine fleet Saturday, will have some special capabilities, intelligence experts say: It will be able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on the communications passing through them.

The Navy does not acknowledge that the $3.2 billion submarine, the third and last of the Seawolf class of attack subs, has this capability.

"There are limits to what I can say on the sub's capabilities, but let's just say the Jimmy Carter is uniquely capable to perform missions vitally important to the war on terror," said Rep. Rob Simmons, a Republican and former CIA officer whose district includes Groton, Connecticut, where the sub was built.

But intelligence community watchdogs have little doubt: The previous submarine that performed the mission, the USS Parche, was retired last fall. That would happen only if a new one was on the way.

Like the Parche, the Jimmy Carter was extensively modified from its basic design, given a $923 million hull extension that allows it to house technicians and gear to perform the cable-tapping and other secret missions, experts say. The boat's hull, at 453 feet, is 100 feet longer than the other two subs in the Seawolf class.

Re:Get your tinfoil hats here

[BWJones]

Stop pretending to be a super spy who just for cover has a shitty post-doc at some lesser US school. I know most Slashdotters have delusions of grandeur, but almost all of them, like yourself, have nothing to back it up. Unfortunately, being able to use whois does not count.

You really have me laughing out loud here. I know its you because I am watching you..... The last time you hit my site you got there from 80.43.109.70.

No, I am not a super spy or pretending to be a super spy. For your information, I am no longer a post-doc, but am a simple research assistant professor, but thanks for reminding me to update my C.V. As far as our institution, the Moran Eye Center, we are one of the largest vision research institutes around. So successful that we are now embarking on completing a second building twice the size of our current one due to the number of researchers and clinicians we have working here now. This is almost unheard of in the vision community, two buildings within a ten year time frame. My work here has revolutionized the study of retinal degenerative diseases and refocused the vision rescue communities work on what is really happening with the biology. I am pretty happy with that and am now applying the same techniques we developed for the study of the retina (based off the remote sensing technologies developed by the NRO (often associated with the CIA) and NASA for satellite imagery) to other systems and the study of metabolomics.

As for my background, I did at one time enlist in the USMC with the idea of flying Harriers, but my vision got just bad enough during organic chemistry that it disqualified me from fast jet status. As an undergraduate, I was recruited by a certain federal TLA, but decided not to take that option on advice from my grandfather who was in fact, in the precursor to the CIA, the OSS. He had other suggestions for me and I went back to school.

Re:Weird...

[StupidHelpDeskGuy]

I wonder what effect this will have on our connection to India, etc. A lot of companies are going to have a very bad day if they have to take down circuits to India to fix the problem in Pakistan. Too bad we'll never know for sure what happened. How'd you like to be the Navy Seal that slashdotted an entire country?

Cut to scene

[AtariAmarok]

Cut to scene of Gilligan walking out to the lagoon the morning after a huge storm. He sees end of an undersea cable washed up on the beach.

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!".

Colombia and Ecuador

[Micah]

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. :)

Re:Dammit

[h4rm0ny]

Hold on a second - how hard would it be for Al Quaeda to send down a diver with a charge? You'd need some diving equipment and a boat with some sonar. Diving to depth is a skilled task, but so is flying a plane.

And it would be a target that cost billions of dollars without any loss of life. That would really be targeting the interests of US power-brokers.

Does the US have any major undersea pipes?

Slashdotters Screwed Up

[Hoi Polloi]

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?

But what's the effect on zombie networks?

[0star]

And in another related story, the amount of zombie infections and attacks dropped dramatically worldwide as well!

Re:That's pretty stupid

[DeepRedux]

One of the first English actions in WWI was cutting the German undersea cables. This did not cut off Germany, but it made English interception of German communications much easier. Eventually the British intercepted, and shared with the US, the "Zimmermn Telegraph" in which Germany proposed to help Mexico attack the US. This was one of the reasons the US entered the war.

Re:That's pretty stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

How can you post this if the story is about you being offline? :)

Heres what I've found

[bryz]

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.

How can they be "off the Internet?"

[pclminion]

Surely the network continues to function within the country, no? Basically, it sounds like the entire country has a single upstream connection to the 'net, and that got severed. Well, I work in an office with a TCP/IP based LAN, and if our uplink goes down, we can still use the LAN. Not everything grinds to a halt.

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.)

hmmm where did .PK go?

[mnmn]

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.

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 /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.

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.

Re:Weird...

[bheer]

Or maybe those companies knew that India has multiple redundant links: multiple transatlantic and transpacific cables, and satellite. An Indian telco owns FLAG. I doubt they'll lose much sleep over this.

Re:Undersea cable?

[gooogle]

Actually, Pakistan's best political ties are probably with China and I would assume China has good bandwidth capacity which is why that option doesn't sound so bad.

If the cables can be strategically routed through the unstable regions in the north (Gilgit?) with a hub in the capital city of Islamabad it would work out very nicely.

1) The cities in the north are currently linked through Karachi so routing through China would balance the northern and southern parts of Pakistan in terms of capacity and infrastructure.

2) The silicon valley equivalent in Pakistan is in Islamabad so this makes total sense. They could use a direct connection through China and branch out to other regions.

3) At the same time the infrastructure would be very solid in terms of backup and capacity planning: existing cable running through the Arabian Sea, Karachi; One from Lahore to Amritsar, India which is under development; And one through Islamabad into China. It would cover all the three major metropolitan cities.

4) It also makes sense from a defense standpoint since China poses no threat (economic or otherwise) to Pakistan as does India.

Submarine cable landings are pretty diverse

[billstewart]

While many of the transatlantic cable systems are near each other, and some of them do share cable heads landing sites, there's also a lot of diversity, put in there specifically to prevent single events from taking out redundant systems all at once, and they're designed in self-repairing rings and meshes for most networks. The Pacific and Caribbean cable systems are pretty much the same way - it takes a lot of time and money to get diversity, and it's done because otherwise you can lose all your connectivity too easily. In India, there are at least three major cable landing locations, and systems like SMW-3 and FLAG use at least two of them, with land and water connections between the landings, to avoid getting disconnected. But Pakistan only has one spur off of SMW-3, and there are other small countries with similar problems along the Persian Gulf.

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.