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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" ?
Quake 1, 2 ,3 or 4?
-Tolerate my intolerance
Unfortunately, all it takes is a large rock weighing a few tons with a sharp edge to fall and cleave a cable that's laying against a flat rock on the bottom. I don't know precisely how the transcontinental cables are built, but the smaller ones I've dealt with for river and lake crossings are quite vulnerable. They're stiff as hell (don't react well to bending), somewhat brittle (don't react well to bending or crushing), and designed to be laid and buried, and never move again (don't react well to general movement). A sharp vertical motion could crack them, or a rolling motion could set them up to be crushed by flying debris (quakes can be very fast, even underwater, hence tsunami generation). There's lots of ways for a cable to die.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
Well, the tubes are often made of glass, and vigorous shaking will crack them. Then, water rushes into the tubes and the poker chips float up while the racing horses drown, clogging up the internets. It's pandemonium, I tell ya. If only the internet was a big truck...
I speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and say, fuck off and die.
95% of the world's spam is paid for by American spammers. (See the ROKSO list.) I get flooded by American spam and then get blocked by racist assholes like you.
I've been offline all day and while my email (hosted by Yahoo) is still dead somehow I can access Slashdot.
I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water
Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.
I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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.
People were injured and died in this quake
Get off your moral high-horse and stop trying to tell us that you actually give a shit. No one believes you.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
stiff as hell (don't react well to bending), somewhat brittle (don't react well to bending or crushing), and designed to be laid and buried, and never move again (don't react well to general movement).
I suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.
And even worse, having white skin, I get blamed for what you idiots do.
Look, I don't care what color you, or anyone else is. I care what they do. The systems I deal with have nothing whatsoever to do with your daily life (especially since you use a Yahoo account). I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped. I'm injecting network geography, not race into this. You're the one that's got race stuck in your head. Packets have no color to me, they just carry the intent of the person sending them, or the carelessness of the person using an unpatched, pirated O/S that's being a slave to the person sending them.
You are the one that said you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and I replied in a way to point out how ridiculous that sounds. You can't have it both ways.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
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).
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."
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 suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.
Hans, is that you?