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."
Weird, I didn't notice it at all!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
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)
They're a crabby lot.
thank god I still have access to Tech Support services in India...
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.
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.
Osama Bin Lobster did it!
"...Internet Attacks from the Middle East seemed to grind to a halt today..."
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.
Wouldn't that be "Shark"?
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
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.
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.
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
I feel a great disturbance in the Internet. As if millions of Pakistani nerds cried out in terror, and were suddenly silienced.
Well, I don't really see them as having many choices. They are on-again off-again at war with India. Afghanistan can't keep its lights on, never mind provide internet connections.
Iran? China? Wow. Who other sets of political issues. (See pretty map here.)
Not to mention that a large part of Pakistan's borders are extremely inhospitable mountain regions. The Arabian Sea actually makes sense.
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!
So you know nothing about international intelligence or undersea cables, and yet you feel qualified to comment... If you don't understand what you're talking about - don't comment on it.
:-)
You should not talk without knowing about people's backgrounds and if you had any balls, you would not post things like that as Anonymous Coward. You might be surprised at the backgrounds of many folks in various careers. How they got there is often a convoluted path.
By the way, even though you are an anonymous coward...... Your IP address is 80.43.97.222. You run Mozilla 5.0 as a browser in X11 on Linux. You run Intel hardware. Your ISP is Tiscali UK Limited out of London England. You are in your mid 20s, unemployed though intelligent and you feel just a little disenfranchised.
P.S. The use of yeah? at the end of sentences is common to those in the south of England, and in particular London. Also common in New Zealand. That helped narrow down the IPs associated with hits on the site. There's more, but I've got work to do.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
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
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.
They have these things called boats.
Ships.
Now, the Navies they have these people called soliders.
Sailors.
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. :-)
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).
I just copied the list and emailed it to everyone in my address book so they could be informed, too. Hang on, there's someone at the door...