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Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet
judebx writes "Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia. The quake comes on the second anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and triggered tsunami warnings. Human casualties, however, have been low so far."
what the effect on the incoming spam will be...
I hope all is well with them over there..
am I the only one who read this and thought "wow, these id games are really hitting it off in taiwan" ?
Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway. I feel for the cable repair guys, but...
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Invasion
My brother is living over there right now. He IM'd me a short while ago to ask if I'd heard about the quake... but a lot of our messages were being dropped, and the one's that did come through were sent in spurts.
Yes, the Internet does work around breakages. It doesn't necessarily work that well.
Since Reuters' service used for trading is disrupted in Japan Korea and HK?
Seriously- I am just curious. Is it possible that they were damaged by magma flow? I just find it hard to "fathom" (ba dum dum) that undersea cables could get damaged by an earthquake.
I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water, making cable damage difficult. And I would not think that plate movement would be enough to bend or stretch the cable to the point of breaking. So how does the cable get damaged?
Surely someone here knows more about the hazards to these cables...
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Quake 1, 2 ,3 or 4?
-Tolerate my intolerance
They only have themselves to blame... they should have built REINFORCED tubes. Earthquakes are so common in Asia, I don't know why they didn't do this!
did always have inefficient network code, it was only a matter of time...
"Human casualties, however, have been low so far." Wait until all those gold farmers can't get into World of Warcraft... we'll see some human casualties then.
It is as bad as you think and they really are out to get you.
Well, my internet is working fine.
Perhaps the article should say "Cripples Taiwanese ISPs".
So, wait.
People were injured and died in this quake, and the headline is Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet ? You insensitive clods.
My Spam levels just dropped in half! SpamAssassin is not working near as hard as it was before Christmas. I feel for the guys out there fixing all the broken fiber.
When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. - Jefferson
I don't think why I should care. Power systems break down all the time. Telephone systems less often. A decentral net is the best of all worlds. So the solution is to identify national strategic dependencies and seek alternatives.
So I went about researching this myself (thanks for the input so far) and found a few good links...
Although the layout of this page is awful (and they beg for click-fraud abuse), it does show a few really good maps of the current undersea cable infrastructure. Pretty neat stuff.
http://eyeball-series.org/cable-eyeball.htm
Repant. Thy end is sheer.
Title and summary contradict one another: "Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet" and "Human casualties, however, have been low so far."?
You'd think with so many people running around with Rail Guns and Rocket Launchers in DM3, there'd be plenty of dead space marines...
Anyone else think the comments just weren't rendering right before they turned off ABP and saw ads?
where will I get my cia1i5 now?
It's only a model.
"Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia.... Human casualties, however, have been low so far."
when.... the disruption of the internet trumps the part about human casualties!
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm
Their Internet was crippled by Quake? What the hell is gonna happen when they start playing Q3A?
Work smarter, not harder.
Strange, the spam level in my inbox is as high as usual. All coming from the US and Russia.
On the Internet Traffic Report website you can click on Asia and see where the current congestion and outages are. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see these graphs, too:
These plots give a 24-hour window on the situation. It it's easy to see when things started getting shaken up (bad pun intended).
Ah, you must be in Asia and think no spam comes from there. It's strange, my web logs and my email show that almost all website attacks and spam are generated from APNIC and RIPE. Some come from Africa and less than 1% come from North or South America.
In Soviet America Quake 4 cripples Internet 2
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Was I the only one who that it the title was referring to the id game "Quake", not an earthquake?
I got up today and the net was borked. My first and immediate assumption was that some students had gone out protesting again and got massacred, and the Chinese gov. tried to shut down the internet completely to try and suppress the news.
Internet access was practically dead, but I spotted "7.1 Taiwan earthquake" in an RSS feed from Google. Google was the only thing that I use, that worked since the server was inside China.
Chinese sites were not affected and load at full speed, but anything outside mostly times out.
I doubt the strategy to route everything though a few key points for censorship purposes helps much with making the net robust against just this sorts of disaster.
Also for the poster near the top talking about spam, Taiwan isn't a major source of spam, but China is, and China was just as badly affected by the damage to the undersea cables.
This outage has been labeled the largest ever in the Pacific Rim region (as relayed to us by a Sprint rep).
The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.
There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).
In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."
Speaking as someone from South East Asia, my internet has been a littke slow since yesterday. It's still ok for viewing web pages and stuff, but whenever I try and play WoW I get disconnected within minutes. They say the cables won't be fully repaired for a few weeks, which means no WoW for quite some time for me. And I had just renewed my subscription the very day the quake hit...
Better get Al Gore off his ranch to go fix his love child.
Prices of WoW gold skyrocket 300 fold.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
I wonder how many overseas outsourced operations will be affected by this. Probably not a good time to be calling your major branded PC manufacterer for support.
that the internet had a very robust Department of Redundancy Department. Shouldn't this be a wake up call to all of us that if you want reliable internet, you have to break it free from the corporate mono culture that it and all of our present day communication infrastructure suffers from? Start with good wireless, perhaps? If we don't, you will soon see intentional shutdowns. And on another note, the people who make all of the equipment that makes the internet work and all of your computers and such belong to a pretty exclusive club. They can shut you down PDQ also. As far as expanding our freedoms, the whole internet thing is turning out to be one big disappointment. It is almost as tightly controlled as all the other mass communication technologies we have. Unless your machine gets smashed by falling debris, you should be able to network to other computers no matter where they are. Maybe the internet works just fine for DoD, but for the rest of us, it's no better than Ma Bell's phone service.
What?
A communications disruption can mean only one thing: Invasion!
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
>> Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet
They must really love first person shooters in Taiwan!
I work for a MAJOR telecom provider and this wont be fixed anytime soon. I have inside information that cable ships have been dispatched to fix the fiber cut but there is no ETA. Last time this sort of thing happened was when the sea-me-we cable was cut a couple years ago during an earthquake and effectively isolated greece for 3 1/2 weeks. Due to a lack of non sea cable bandwidth, there is no re-route possible. Affected routes are: Tokyo/Hong Kong Seoul/Hong Kong Taipei/Hong Kong Singapore/Osaka Kuala Lumpur/Tokyo Los Angeles/Hong Kong
I feel for them and hope for a quick recovery.
Around this house,It's Quake III crippling the internet connection.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No need to wait for quakes to knock out the spammers and hackers
in the far east. A couple of hundred lines in iptables silently
rejects incoming packets from APNIC. End of problem. Once implemented
I saw an orders-of-magnitude reduction in spam and hack attempts.
Pffft. Gone.
Loss-of-life not required.
mike
-- Karma whore? You betcha. --
I knew Korea was into gaming but I didn't think it was so big in Taiwan that it could cripple the internet.
So should people have to look up the latest estimates of casualties related to Operation Iraqi Freedom/TELIC whenever mentioning Iraq?
It seems like a lot of people on this thread are rejoicing that the spammers will be hurt. Well, as others have already said, the true source of spam is not Taiwan.
And instead of "Yay, no spam" you should really be saying "Oh shit, where will we get our graphics cards from?" (Or really, "Wow, I hope no one was injured or killed" -- but is that asking too much?) If Taiwan gets seriously hurt, prices for processors of all sorts, and especially graphics processors, will go through the roof. Open your computer case sometime and check where all those components were designed and built... And hey, why not try to be a little less racist, too?
http://www.cybergeography.org/atlas/alcatel_large. gif
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
A word to the wise... The Richter scale of Magnitude is not frequently used any longer in today's geological sciences. It is outdated, primarily because it has an inherent saturation point around 8.5. This scale was replaced in the scientific community by a much more meaningful Moment Magnitude scale, which is the number that is generally given to the media by scientists (and is referred to simply as magnitude; e.g. the quake was a magnitude 7.1). Other measurements are also meaningful for those doing the science, but the "magnitude" number is the one that is thrown to the media. Unfortunately, the media are quick to attach buzzwords to anything, and in these cases, it is often "Richter". Though the Richter measurement is likely close in value to the actual Moment Magnitude, it is a different calculation altogether, and I'm doubtful any journalist has taken the time to do the Richter calculations themselves. Though this misrepresentation may have little to do with the outages that occured, I think it wise to be aware. If you see the word "Richter" in a media story, be wary of what other words have been added that may change the meaning!
Interesting...though my website's (primarily Chinese) traffic has slowed to a trickle since yesterday, I have gotten a few hits from Hong Kong, Malaysia, Guangdong and Jilin. I wonder if they're not connected through Taiwan?
Adventures in Shaanxi
Packets have no color to me
That has got to be the best computer-age M.L. King quote I've ever heard.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
There were actually 2 distinct quakes, one magnitude 7.1, one 7.0, that occurred about 7 minutes apart, and so far have been 3 aftershocks measuring from 5.4 to 5.6 (the 5.6 being just yesterday morning). All of the quakes were very shallow (7 miles deep and less).
You can get specific information on the quakes from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Ma ps/10/120_25.php
The ones that die when the fans stop spining to cool them down because they get increased friction.
In reference to cheap dvd players that die when get too hot, they should just make them properly shutdown/power off when too hot, not
just blow a capacitor.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
When I first read the headline, I thought it was the GAME Quake.... aarrgg..
I've noticed that most people seem to be talking about the impact to the internet. However, there is alot of business critical stuff (not directly internet related) that flows along these lines (just take a look at the major Orange/SITA customers). A good example is the number of flight delays attributed to this fault here in Australia.
/. is loading under the current circumstances (compared to other major sites)
Without getting into the complexities of who I work for, the impact is widespread for the aviation industry as well.
PS - And still funny how well
Downloading a movie from Israel is going at 19kB/sec. Amazing how an earthquake in Silicon Valley affects Silicon Valley but an earthquake in Taiwan affects everyone.
i'm from the philippines and the connection right now is horrible. it is spotty and i am able to access slashdot right now albeit very slow.
i am concerned about what happened here's why.
the earthquake happened dec. 26, 8:26pm local time (same time zone with taiwan.) during that time, the internet connectivity was still working ok (i accessed the net at around 10pm and surprised to see at tsunami alerts in my country.) there was no increased latency or packet loss. it was only until the morning of the following day that the connectivity started failing. my questions are:
1. did the cables break sometime during the night after debris may have loosed and damaged the cables?
2. did governments shut down commercial internet services in order to allocate remaining capacity for themselves? or did carriers cut out other customers to give preference to some?
3. why is it that asia is affected? if ever the entire landing station in taiwan is offline and cables are cut from there, the cables are operating in protected ring configurations and should have rerouted automatically.
4. if it failed, do telcos remove the protection and instead just increase their bandwidth usage (for pure profits?)
5. do all the cable systems pass through the same physical path (which is unlikely but with what happened, it makes me think so?)
6. it has been reported that china, korea and japan are among those affected but a lot of cable systems land on their countries going to us directly. how do they configure their network that something so far affects them? (i would assume that majority of southeast asian countries will be affected and will spare china, japan, korea.)
it just frustrates me that with all the technologies available today, the carriers' networks are still very frail. in addition, i would like for carriers that they not drop packets during congestion as it makes it almost impossible to access hosts. the added latency will be much welcome for me (my thinking that connections will be congested not because of new traffic but because of retransmissions.)
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
I noticed that quake 4 reintroduced the nail gun. In the original quake, the nail gun was able to bring down whole subnets. (The game would generate a packet for each round fired.)
Crap. What did the new CSS do with the "Post anonymously" option??
And here I thought they were all playing WoW. Good to hear they're burning up teh internets with good old Quake for once, go Taiwan go, frag some shit.
You can't take the sky from me.
Millions of Asian people... Quake 3... tubes being clogged... IT ALL ADDS UP!
*pSig = NULL;