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.
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...
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)
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.
They're a crabby lot.
thank god I still have access to Tech Support services in India...
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.
At least, they can't blame the rats this time. I wonder if they have the same provider.
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.
I felt a great disturbance in the Internet, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced...
Osama Bin Lobster did it!
"...Internet Attacks from the Middle East seemed to grind to a halt today..."
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.
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?
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
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!
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
Damn, where is Aquaman when you need him?
*** 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.
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!
is a very very bad man...
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.
We don't need no stinkin' backup! What could possibly happen to our
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 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!
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.)
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
Pakistan isn't exactly known for having hospitable terrain.
Have you been there? Or are you just believing the same media which hyped up the Iraq war?
You mean that the rugged terrain and nearly impassable mountain peaks are a media fabrication? That damned National Geographic and their lying maps anyway. I'll bet that K2 is just a little hump of a hill.
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. :-)
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.
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
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).