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."
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)
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?
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.
They have these things called boats.
Ships.
Now, the Navies they have these people called soliders.
Sailors.
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.
Go somewhere random
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).