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How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage
Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."
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This ought to be tagged as coming from the "Lack of Redundancy Department".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
All those virus writers struggling so hard, and then a simple ship gets all the bragging rights.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
So far they found 3 cable cuts. According to this BBC article http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm - A third submarine internet cable is severed in the Middle East, compounding global net problems.
The important thing is not to stop questioning --Albert Einstein.
Obviously this is the result of U2 manager Paul McGuinness calling on ISP's to disconnect the evil file sharers of the world..
;)
"To great applause from the audience of music managers, McGuinness insisted that disconnection enforcement would work."
How right he was!
> I'd like to see those slashbots apologize for undermining the US at every turn and being so unpatriotic.
Not all Slashdotters are *from* the US, you insensitive clod! I, for one, am posting from Teheran University and don't see why I should have to
*NO CARRIER*
Go somewhere random
They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Sure you can see from the map they pulled the cables way too tight, but given the line width those things must be like 2 to 5 miles wide. :-)
Seriously as previous slashdot postings, one or two accidents may be a coincidence but three within a few weeks sounds more like a pattern.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I thought we had agreed that it was George Bush that cut the cables. Did everyone change conspiracy theories while I was away?
The image linked from the summary does not depict the physical locations of cables, but is a schematic of existing connections between points on the globe. The lines in that image have not much to do with where the cables actually are. A more realistic representation of (a subset of) the world's submarine cable networks would e.g. be this big PDF or, in a more comprehensive view, that one (sold for a mere $350 :-| ).
But the Internet has become too centralized for even basic self-healing envisioned by TCP/IP researchers. Egypt is not an island and should have had many smaller capacity links to it's neighbors as well as satellite connections run by different companies. Every ISP and phone company in the world should have an agreement to provide emergency routing outside the usual patterns.
I was hoping the news would be "cable cut, millions of surfers notice a slowdown in streaming video".
Think of all the 1's and 0's flowing into the ocean right now?! The cost to the environment here is appalling. Someone turn the valves on that internet backbone, stat! Think about the animals!
Caused by politics and telco monopolies created a network without redundancy. A combination of the infeasibility, due to the political situation, of overland links through the middle east and central Asia, and the hidebound Indian telco not providing sufficient redundancy in connections out of the country, never mind the total misallocation of resources inside it, are the cause of this. TCP/IP is specifically designed to recover from link outages, if it doesn't, you've got an improperly designed and/or operated (statically, as opposed to dynamically, routed) network.
Good news for US and European IT workers though: that buffoon who offshored your jobs has to explain why the IT department has been down for a few days. I guarantee the CEO/CFO is not amused that he can't get to SAP, or that the stores can't upload, or that whatever other mission critical system is off-line isn't working.
Not me. The whole stupid article was a whole stupid article. One ship hit all three cables? Which ship? TFA attests that a ship's anchor hit hit the cable(s). No affirmation. Nothing. No wonder we don't read the damn articles.
IIRC, the first two cables cut were 22 km apart. That's a pretty good anchor drag. Not saying it's impossible - it's a big, wide ocean with lots of aging freighters run by crews that likely had to be brought on ship via the crane.
I would still like to see the money here.
For the record, I still think Bush did it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?
Looking at the east coast of the US of the linked picture, it appears as though every single underseas line is going into New York City, with only a few also extending to Miami. Why is the east coast so non-redundant? Especially given NYC's recent history of being a prime target for terrorism, it seems as though you'd want lines also going into other major urban centers on the east coast, such as Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.
Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?
I've definitely noticed a drop in sales calls from indian call centres over the past few days. I normally suffer from a few a day, maybe 2 or 3, but it's been wonderfully quiet for aq couple of days now - bliss!
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. "People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do," said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.
And here's a big difference with the US. If the US were in the situation of limited bandwidth, we would all be encouraged to stop sending email to give priority to those shopping on iTunes.
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
My suspicions were correct. The cross-section clearly shows that the outer layer of the cable is actually a TUBE!
The "World cable capacity" plot at the bottom of the map is misleading. Total capacity is 7.1 tbps and used capacity is 2.1 tbps. They visualized the values as circles, so the ratio of areas should be 7.1:2.1. But instead they set the diameters to that ratio. The result is that capacity appears 9% used when it is actually 30% used (and 80% purchased).
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
i will answer that. I am a half ass colombian(colombian pop) . I grew up in the states, but lived and worked in Colombia for a time, and know, or at least knew their infrastructure fairly well. Colombia at one point in time had two internet companies. EPM(emtelsa) which is state run and owned. And Telesat, which is privately owned, Enrique Biaz I think was the CEO, offered me job around 2002 when I was running around there. I just didnt want to move to Cali. I liked Manizales. Anyway Telesat in Colombia is the link that is down, so one provider is down, not the entire country, because most people use the Emtelsa, or whatever the have evolved into. So while telesat link is down(I think they have changed their name) the country is still online for most everyone else.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
There's only a single cable on that map connecting Ireland to the Internet. The English Channel has lots of shipping. That seems like something the Irish government would want to get fixed right away. Maybe another cable to Britain.
Or better yet, a cable to France, for not just geographical diversity but also geopolitical diversity. A cable to the Netherlands would give even better interconnectedness.
And of course it would be even better if that connection landed somewhere else than Dublin, so there's no failure bottleneck point.
Any extra cables would also increase Ireland's overall Internet bandwidth. As that country climbs out of the Industrial Age (and really the Farming Age), it'll need more than one cable. Especially if it doesn't want to get squeezed by some "bottleneck master".
--
make install -not war
Seems like under Maritime Law, items abandoned/sunk/lost on the sea floor in International Waters are subject to being recoverable and salvageable?
These cables DO contain valuable metals in them like copper, aluminum, and steel (probably stainless)? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
(I do realize that some of the recent cable cuts are not in international waters, but is still is an interesting query.)
I am not endorsing any harm of, nor the "salvaging" of any undersea cabling.
However, there are many, many others in the world who do not have the same sense of right and wrong (and virtually all of these examples are NOT in International Waters.)
http://www.google.com/search?num=50&hl=en&safe=off&q=wire+theft+copper+aluminum&btnG=Search
The article has this to say on the cause of the damage:
"According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday."
According to whose reports? Published where? What was the name of the ship? How was it discovered that it caused all the damage? Is the same ship also responsible for the third cable cut, which did not occur in the Mediterranean, and later than Wednesday?
This what you refer to as "facts". I sure hope you intended sarcasm.
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
Nobody needs to splice an undersea cable if they can go to AT&T and every other telco company and get what they want by idnetifying thnselves as the government and kindly asking, on dry land. For the US, the telco immunity bill seems to be a done deal: http://firedoglake.com/2008/02/01/dems-capitulate-on-fisa/
"Only the small secrets need to be protected. The big ones are kept secret by public incredulity." - Marshall McLuhan
They have a survey on that page: "Have you been affected by the disruption to internet services? You can tell us your experiences using the form below:"
Something tells me such a survey would not be very scientific.
Table-ized A.I.
The InterNet's parent, the military ArpaNet, was designed with no head or center, in order to survive a major war. Root name servers are a bit of a weeakness. But wayward ships and elementary school hackers seem have a good shot too.
I thought it was CIA or whatever name they are doing their secret operations under now screwing up major:
1) existing splices rerouted thru existing infrastructure
2) one of links fail
3) splices give up and sever connection as it cannot be reliably copied anymore...
Why do so many of those transatlantic cables seem to land in New York?
Two Reasons: Geography and Routing
1) Geography: First, the Guardian's map is a little oversimplified. Most of those cables come ashore in Eastern Long Island or along a relatively narrow stretch of New Jersey coastline, about 50 miles south of NYC proper. They're in those places because of submarine geography. The sea floor isn't flat- there are mountains and canyons, etc. Ever tried to run network cable through a crowded office? Pain in the neck, right? Now imagine doing it with six-foot long tweezers and a blindfold...for 3,000 miles. The cable-layers pick the flattest, least cluttered path they can. In the mid-1950s, we started to get good sonar maps of the North Atlantic sea floor. Laying undersea cable is *expensive*, and there was a big burst of it as those maps started to take the guesswork (and a lot of the risk) out of the equation. And once a company found a good route, they tended to keep using it.
Seafloor mapping:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03fire/background/mapping/mapping.html
Timeline of transatlantic cables, 1951-2000:
http://www.atlantic-cable.com/Cables/CableTimeLine/index1951.htm
2) Routing. A *lot* of information passes through those cables. It's compressed (Hoffman encoding, anyone?), and at each end you have to decompress it and then route it back into the land line system. This is a big, complicated operation (Much more so in the '50s and '60s when so many of the US-Europe cables were laid), and it's cheaper to add capacity by laying more cables between existing terminals than to build new ones.
Overview of cable topography & operations for one big cable operator, Apollo Systems:
http://www.apollo-scs.com/networktopology/
Note that some companies (including Apollo) are starting to build new routes- the economics for doing that are getting better as cable gets cheaper and data traffic grows (shame on all the Americans downloading video files from peers in Sweden).
So yes, the undersea cable system *should* have much more redundancy, but it *won't* until somebody can make money building and selling that redundant capacity. And actually, these events will speed up that process; According to the Guardian, 50% of India's bandwidth is cut off. The people who own the pipes for the 50% that still works are having a *very* profitable week.
Is that since the cable cut my spam folders and inbox have been blessedly free of spam! I always say, you want to cut the crap with email and phishing, cutoff the net connections to Africa and Asia.
This explains why I haven't heard back from my Nigerian banker.
Have gnu, will travel.