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Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
Seriously, is there anyone who doesn't think this is either a precursor to military action, or a direct attack on Iran's about-to-launch Euro-based oil market?
4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. I literally expect to turn on the TV and see bombs falling any day now. Economy down, turn up the war machine. It really is a common historical sequence.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sounds like a concerted effort to isolate muslim nations, to me. Singapore, Pakistan, Qatar, UAE. We're looking for airplanes aiming for buildings and they're attacking the world under the sea with a pair of clippers and a web cam.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloop
[Citation Needed] --NT
-- My Weblog.
!coincidence
RTFA: The cable was not cut, it was taken offline due to power problems.
> the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.
Nature journal lied in Britannica vs Wikipedia Ask to retrac
Underwater backhoes.
The last safe spot for the network admin has been found - and destroyed.
I really doubt the U.S. is behind these cable failures. Cutting off their internets doesn't really mean a damn, not only that but it appears to be highly ineffective as these countries are simply routing their internet connections through land cables. The U.S. government wouldn't just cut these cables without any planning, they would have realized it wouldn't work before they even attempted it.
That said, it is suspicious that four cables have been severed in so short a time, but if it's a deliberate action, it's not the U.S. government behind it. It would more likely be some incompetent, rogue group that doesn't know what it's doing.
If you think about it long-term.
If you are a terrorist and you want to cause mass chaos. How would you do it?
You'd most likely want to create some form of confusion or distraction before hitting your main target.
I'd think this a precursor to a bigger plot. If I was thinking along these lines I'd be cutting them and seeing what the end results are. If I could label and see which ones do what and invoke certain responses then I'd wait before doing it again. The next time I'd probably create something that acted via a timer. This way I could attack, destroy communications, then attack again creating chaos and confusion. Through a very specific set time.
However, the counter arguement here is that anything they can do to the LAN cables we could easily counter-act with wireless transmission as Satellites are more than capable of carrying the necessary data for communication. This pretty much only isolates the European world from the internet, which isn't going to do much on the grand scheme of things.
The Plot is probably thicker but not much by my guess. Unless the NSA is using the downtime to break the cable elsewhere and run off thier own data spying cable via the lines. I doubt it..
Seriously, can anybody explain what's going on?
Another possibility is mere cyber warfare (without escalation to a hot war) -- to prevent the much-feared electronic transactions conducted by Iran in Euros rather than dollars.
Finally, don't discount the possibility of a combination of these. Powerful interests rarely do something for a single purpose. E.g., the communications disruption could facilitate a false flag now (perhaps Super Tuesday/Fat Tuesday), which would lead to a U.S. attack on Iran made easier by the same communications blackout -- all coincidentally happening just in time to stop the Iranian Oil Burse.
I wish I did know what was going on -- I'm spooked.
From Sun Tzu (IIRC):
1. Attack the plan - Futility
2. Attack the alliances - Division
3. Attack the resources - Frustration
4. Attack the army in the field - Attrition
5. Attack the cities - Destruction
The costs increase with each step, which is why the cities are last. Good, proactive intellegence and operatives can prevent things from happening. If not, they can foul things up so they can't happen. Communications is a resource, so it looks like step 3 is on the table.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
They are demonstrating it to Middle Eastern states. "We can isolate you just like that". Now, who would want to do that? The West could do it without resorting to destroying valuable assets. Just block the countries. This has to be someone who can't do that but wants the power to do so.
I know that every time there's an internet outage at our university it's usually a backhoe. Backhoes are the natural enemy of the Internet. Anyway, this is disturbing and fascinating at the same time. The reason why the Internet was design the way it was so that it could survive an nuclear war even if the networks became fragmented. In a way this is an interesting test of the design, but it does have disturbing overtones given that it's happening in the Middle East. That being said I think there are three possibilities as to who or what is responsible: Mossad, CIA, or underwater backhoes. Which do you think is the most plausible and least paranoid?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Dude, the Patriots lost! How's that for a hitch?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Iran's enemies are currently all more Internet-savvy than Iran.
Severing Iran's connections would hinder Iran's enemies' surveillance activities more than Iran.
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=438002&cid=22258696
I don't guess people will be as derogatory this time. There is a reason to post some things on anonymous coward. This isn't about interception of specific data/tapping -- this is about, byte-for-byte, copying everything that goes through those cables without causing any detectable interference. They MUST bring down the cables to install the new system. New cables will not be "cut" because they will have the hardware installed before the cables are brought online.
Instead their people have no choice but watch this. (Not safe for work in red states).
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
... and the NSA to wiretape the Intarweb from internaional waters. Sounds crazy, I know, but no more so than 4 "accidents" in a week. Mark my words, there are black-ops undersea stations anchored to the bottom ocean. Damn, there's a book in there somewhere...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Why not them? I can see them railing against all the infidel ideas that are carried thru the web/T.V./etc, but then again, they also use the internet heavily to recruit, and communicate with their future recruits.
Any other players looking to make a hit? Countries vs groups?
China - they need oil, and are thinking of themselves as a, if not the superpower.
Russia looking to exert more influence?
Which countries are most affected by the black outs. Do they benefit Iran, or maybe Israel
Coincidence (probably not)
Can't see the USA doing it - except for the CIA, since public perception of new war activities are really, really not popular with the general citizen right now.
..........FULL STOP.
Give it another couple of days and it will still turn out to be ship's anchors that caused the problem.
To me, cutting cables seems like something some people in the U.S. government would do, testing its control over communications before invading a Muslim country. In the past few months, the U.S. government has been trying to get people excited about invading Iran, for example. I've taught Iranian students English as a volunteer, and people from other countries, too, and I can tell you from personal experience that many Iranians are very good people. I think the attempt to demonize them is extremely dishonest.
I hope that U.S. citizens and people everywhere in the world will begin to realize that a few oil and weapons investors and others have taken control over the U.S. government, and that those who have control are becoming more and more mentally unbalanced, as is usually true of people who emphasize control and money in their lives.
Another influence toward unbalance are Jews in the U.S. who support Israel against the interests of the country in which they live, and, frankly, against the long-term interests of Israel. Israelis feel threatened by some of the surrounding Muslim countries, and want U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israeli security. But more violence will never create more security. There are only approximately 14,000,000 Jews in the world, and getting into gun battles with 1.2 billion Muslims does not enhance the security or quality of life of Jews.
A further unbalancing influence is many of those in the U.S. who call themselves evangelists; they believe they are superior to the rest of us, and that their particular preferred killing is the "work of God". Karl Rove manipulated the evangelists by having George W. Bush pretend to be Christian. An evangelist associated with the Bush administration wrote a book about that which I read, but I don't have the title readily available.
What is required to fix this situation is an understanding that the problem at the top of the U.S. government is an outbreak of mental illness, and should be treated as such. More violence is not the answer.
Those who run the U.S. government, apparently Cheney and others, may be hastening their activities, because they need to do some of what they want to do before George W. Bush is out of office.
Conspiracy theories emerge after internet cables cut
The countries most affected by the damaged cables are Egypt, India and the Middle East (in particular Iran). Israel and Iraq, as far as we can tell, were not affected by this problem as they use an alternative route for this service.
It could be a coincidence that four cables got cut. It could also be a coincidence that we see a clear increase in the propaganda from the "coalition" right now that the connectivity for the "enemy" is poor...
...that the Old Ones are finally stirring. Must be part of that Cthulhu For President 2008 campaign.
Advice: on VPS providers
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And if there is someone trying to wiretap those fiber cables, why would they raise an alarm by cutting so many cables in such a short period of time? Unless there is some VERY urgent intelligence they're expecting, it simply doesn't make sense. The enemy would be alerted and would:
a) know that previous communications over the cut fiber's were most likely not being tapped yet
b) be able to send fake information/intelligence down certain fiber's knowing that there is a greater chance it'll be read
c) double check their systems to ensure they're using strong cryptography for all their communications
Have you even considered the problem of how to process and send data back to the USA from somewhere underneath the ocean on the other side of world? You'd need to have some form of parallel optical fiber or a submarine sitting on top of the cable with an inbuilt mini-datacentre. We're talking about a lot of internet backbone bandwidth. 4 cuts, as far as I am concerned, is no co-incidence. What historical data on undersea cable cuts do you have to support your claim?
Could this simply be a case of undersea cable cuts being the focus of media attention at the moment (especially because it is in the Middle East)?
Increased tectonic plate movement in that part of the world?
Another, also likely reason is to prevent Saudis from accessing the SWIFT network (read the link about the why.) This, however, is just delaying the inevitable.
It's not an overly elaborate promotional thing for a Middle-East release of Cloverfield is it?
I mean, we're all getting bored of the alternate reality web thingies these films do to hype themselves before release, so it sort of makes sense to kick it up a notch (bam!)
The last thing you want to do is alert the enemy that they have a potential problem and give them time to fix it. For example suppose you discovered that all military telephones were routed through a single building in a country you were going to attack. The system was supposed to have some redundancy, but they didn't know that it ends up all relying on the one centre. So what you do then is hit it coinciding with the start of your attack. Suddenly, all their communications are down and they are being attacked. Makes it hard to deal with either.
What you don't do is send in some guy to much with it, take their communications down, then do nothing, then still do nothing as they fix it and start to work on alleviating the problem in the future. That is even less useful than just leaving it alone.
As a precursor to military action, something like this makes sense only if idiots are running the show. Not only is it going to do no real good (who gives a shit if civilians can't get on the Internet? It is the internal military links that are the issue) but it makes it less likely that any sort of complete blackout would be achieved. I guarantee the companies involved in this aren't just going to fix the cable and go "Ok well that'll probably never happen again." They are going to try and figure out why this happened, and what can be done to prevent it.
fiber is glass, glass is relatively useless unless you pull up a significant portion of the cable, sure there is some copper but not enough to get a boat and go pull it up.
Foul play? sure but what reason do the western cultures have for doing it you paranoid bastards? The internet is a great western indoctrination tool, brings our culture and beliefs to all corners of the world, seems counter productive to cut the lines that spread our message.
Summary of above post: "With my tinfoil hat properly secured, I will begin demonstrating the true extent of my bigotry."
Most people here on Slashdot are smart enough to do a simple Google query before they ask for citations. Doing otherwise decreases the signal-to-noise ratio. This isn't Wikipedia. We don't need to cite our comments if a simple search will pull up the results. If you can't find the information with a simple search only then is it ok to ask for a citation.
This is the way it has to be on a technical discussion board. If somebody is talking bullshit it will be quickly found as this board is filled with technical experts. If you don't understand, then it is only up to you to fix your problem.
I would think it of something like a false-flag operation against iran.
The Industry knows that whoever comes to power in 2008 would pullout troops from Iraq. This essentially leaves Iran as a free power.
Secondly, with the Housing crisis unfolding, the economy is going to tailspin.
To prevent 1929-1933 depression, the only way is to fund a new war.
To fund it requires support of an increasingly reluctant US citizens who are loathe to fund a war.
So, what to do?
I would not be surprised if an enemy-agent is caught in act of cutting and that agent speaks arabic, especially Persian.
That would give US a convenient way to say Iran is delibrately disrupting communications, because it is testing nukes.
Strenous protests by Iran would be of no use.
And who gets to benefit when Iran is wiped out, removing 2 out of 2 major military powers of the middle-east?
By september '08, war is certain.
The hastily signed laws that republicans voted for will come to bite the citizens, when liberties are suspended, and people forced to vote for Cheney (who will reluctantly stand for election).
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
Whoever keeps tagging this "andnothingofvaluewaslost" please stop. The cut connection may have had no value to you, but I bet there's some people in the UAE who would like to use the Net. There might even be slashdotters there!
"Anonymous could not immediately be reached for further comment." - International Business Times
According to Wikipedia, Its Oil Bourse is going live on 1-11 February after delays.
Is it a coincidence?
I think not.
It's those damn sharks with lasers strapped to their heads - I told the Dr they needed some kind of targeting system!
Cutting internet links as a prelude to invasion doesn't make sense, though. It doesn't gain any strategic or tactical value because the systems that will matter in an invasion are internally controlled, and if properly designed, don't touch the global Internet.
My Sysadmin Blog
It's almost as if it's been scripted to build tension. Not a natural occurence that has tension as a side effect, but like a prop. A hollywood effect. It doesn't matter if there's no reason to cut the wires, or that they can repair them. Cut them and everybody will start to wonder.
1, 2, 3, 4....??? And the tension builds.
What's coming next?
When Iran announced that "all" the internet was cut to their country, I thought, "How convenient..." The other "breaks" in the news makes a break that cuts all Iranians from outside influence (and the ability to talk about what is going on in their country) could easily be explained away to the citizens... without affecting any "recruiting efforts" outside Iran. In fact, it would be an aid; "Look what they did! They cut us off from the outside world, to prevent us from presenting the truth!"
So, yes, there are people who have much to gain by cutting cables to Arab countries, besides George Bush and the CIA.
I wonder how much longer it will take to "repair" access for Iran than the other countries?
And in the grand scheme of things, how important would you think 750 million people with some of the highest standards of living in the world would be to US exports. (Yes, there are about 3 times as many people in Europe as in USA).
Please, if you know absolutely nothing about the world you live in, at least don't pretend you do. And for pete's sake don't get modded up!!!
Someone may in fact benefit. There is a fourth cut now, as reported here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/02/04/0158249.shtml. Who gave a go-ahead to that one? People from Lesotho, Nepal, Sarkozy, Abkhazia, or Honduras?
Do you really think thieves would bother buying submarines to dig up fiber cable (and no, there isn't a great amount of expensive metal) from great depths under the ocean? Once you've got the stolen cable, you'd then have to melt it down and separate the metal you want from it. So the thieves are losing money at well over 10x the cost of the original cable.
I think it'd make far more sense for them to stick to stealing bridges. And even stealing 200,000kg of steel isn't the most lucrative crime in the world.
There are four very clear reasons why no nation would want to tap into four high speed data cables.. namely to get access to the data they would need 4 more cables to bring the data back to their "office."
They could someone reroute some of the data on the cable and even use stolen or leased lines on the existing cable for their purpose... but they couldn't steal all of the signal without a way of back hauling home (to their office).
England has always spied on all the data it could get its hands on and the US and every other country that can, probably does as well..
My guess if these cuts are connected it's more to force the data to route through specific nodes that anything else, and as I have said elsewhere since phone calls run on these same cables, they might not be even after internet data. Perhaps someone wants to catch someone calling home...
http://www.hawknest.com/
Sometimes it helps to source when your reply consists of a topic that could very easily be part of some conspiracy theory.
Not to mention that with the lower capacity from all of the cable cuts needless searching just helps clog the remaining pipes.
The U.S. has a history of being able to do so successfully.
Four cables in the matter of a week or two? That's far too obvious and very, very sloppy. It would be an unprecedented, massive, and very public screw up. One screw up? Sure. Two? Possible, but only just. Three? That's just asking for it. Four? Expect a major shuffling of the deck in the DNI's office for this outrage.
Intelligence agencies tend to move slowly, carefully, and methodically on this sort of thing. They will spend untold hours and millions training for tiny details. A single screw up is one thing - it can be covered for, and agencies can fall back and figure out what went wrong. Rushing forward and screwing it up three more times smacks of incredible recklessness. Sure, American intelligence agencies have screwed things up in the past - quite often, actually. But something like this is approaching beyond the pale for stupid. Maybe one or two were targeted, but I doubt all 4 were if the targeting screwed it up.
Option B would be that the NSA had previously successfully done the job only to have it discovered by the locals who shut off the cables/screwed them up in order to remove the devices. This seems a bit more likely to me - information could spread through "friendly" intelligence officers to country to country on this. But this would beg the question - why not expose the U.S. involvement in them? Why claim it was something else? Iran in particular would have an incentive to do this. Egypt can be bought. But Iran... why no exposure, if this were the case?
That's part of what's been bugging me about it. Most sources of military action can be guessed outright if you have an understanding of who the players are. But this? It simply doesn't make any sense. Which drives the apprehension level through the roof with each cable cut. Everyone is sitting on pins and needles waiting for the other shoe to drop.
What's the bloody point? How could this possibly benefit any power with the capabilities necessary to pull off this operation? It doesn't even seem likely that it's a coordinated terrorist attack. It's only terrorizing while we don't know who did it. Once someone claims responsibility, a target is brought into focus and fear turns into determination.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
If the US is losing jobs to out sourcing because lets says India / Middle East can do some task more economically thanks to the Internet why not just make the service unreliable? Big business then see India outsourcing as a possible risk jobs go back to the States.
Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, but three times is enemy action, Mr Bond.
If all the cables were cut at once a superpower would obviously be suspected. By taking them out one at a time it can be blamed on the Iranian terrorists once the Bush administration sets off the dirty or nuclear bomb that more than a year ago a retired Air Force Pentagon general, Dr. Bob Bowman confirmed the administration was planning to do before the next president takes office. http://www.infowars.com/articles/us/former_head_of_star_wars_say_cheney_main_911_suspect.htm
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
I see that you have real inside knowledge about the cultural and ethnic structure of the region.
if i read your comment correctly you are saying that having two different sets of people in a nation creates unbalance. if it's true, then we've absolutely got to keep the internet intact so that these different sets of people can interact without these explosive consequences. whatever happened to settling international disputes via online deathmatch anyway.
In statistics, outliers happen. There's always a data point that just wants to be waaay out there. Nothing you can do but apply the various methods to screen them out.
But when the data points start jumping off together, you know that there's another source of causation in the system.
Four cables in less than two weeks, all affecting the Middle East, is not random. Speculating about who might be doing it and why without more evidence remains speculation, however entertaining.
But the data trend clearly leads dispassionate observers to the conclusion that someone is doing it. So it's time to shelve the flippant remarks about 'tinfoil hats' and start digging to turn up evidence of who and why.
First, figure who has it in for Iran and the Middle East. Second, figure who has submarine capabilities. Third, check maps of the sea floor to determine how deep the water was where the cables were cut to see what the capabilities of the boat orchestrating the cut would need to be. Fourth, check to see if anyone's doing marine research with sonar in the area who might have been listening when the cables where cut; A tearing/shearing cable makes a different noise than a cut one. Also the deployment of the implement used might cause interesting sounds.
Just off the top of my head, anyway. Cutting off Iranian men's access to porn doesn't exactly make sense from a military or strategic point of view, but neither does causing Castro's beard to fall out either, and that was tried by the geniuses at the CIA.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Although the fiber itself is glass, the undersea cables are not simply bare fibers. The glass fibers (usually 2-12 fibers) are bundled with electrical cables used to power optical repeaters, steel cable for tensile strength, then wrapped in armor plating to protect against most of the common undersea hazards.
Satellite operator are behind it. Just to get companies to buy and hold satellite bandwidth in reserve.
Maybe even the Chinese, trying to drum up business for an upcoming telco satellite launch.
Why, yes, I am making all this up as I go. Aren't you?
"Piter, too, is dead."
In an age of SEO, domain squatters, and conspiracy kooks it can be difficult to construct a search that successfully separates the wheat from the chaff. Luckily, the architects of the Internet provided us with hyperlinks capable of pointing directly to the source. This has the added bonus of leading the technically competent to analyze the article behind the link--increasing the fact finding and chaff filtering capability of the community as a whole.
Or, to make a long story short, stuff it.
Obviously it's the Church of Scientology trying to stop Project Chanology.
I can't believe you're all so sheepish.
kill all the fucking niggers
I don't know the limits of the length that it's capable of measuring, but it's possible to use a technique called "optical time domain reflectometry" to measure the length of a piece of fiber optic cable. It works, basically, the way you'd expect from the name: you put a signal in the fiber, and you see how long it takes for it to reflect off of the broken end.
You could do this at both ends of the cable to see how much cabling there is between you and the break. Repeaters or splices in the way would probably cause reflections at known times, and if you find two different unknown reflections at the two different ends, well, you've just found your second break. I'd imagine that it's not much of a problem that the cables are long, since light is fast: you NEED a long length of cable for your electronics to be able to measure the time gap.
Yeah, glass is in short supply.
Wow! The CAPTCHA for this post is "bosoms"! Geekgasm!
Once, happenstance. Two, coincidence. Three, enemy action.
I cannot imagine what Goldfinger would say about FOUR.
Possibly "Own incompetence", or something equally evil.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Where have I heard of this before? Ah, here we are: James Follett's "Ice"! ;-)
http://jamesfollett.dswilliams.co.uk/Ice%20novel.html
(except of course this 4th one is for maintenance...)
"Good news, everyone!"
These are fiber optic cable - scrap value essentially zero. Less once you account for the nontrivial amount of machinery needed to haul the cable up and spool it.
This reminds me of something that happens in the newspapers every few years in my country. In a slow news cycle, the newspapers will begin to report every incident where a child catches meningococcal disease. By simple statistics, during the winter months you can almost guarentee a spike of such incidents. The disease is unfortunately sometimes fatal in children which makes it particularly newsworthy. Within a matter of weeks, you'll see headlines screaming about an epidemic outbreak as the sixth child gets infected - selling more newspapers than ever as concerned parents rush to read the latest news.
I've seen the map of the world's undersea cables and there are a whole bunch of them. It seems to me that for all we know, the average failure rate is only 50% of the incidence we're currently seeing - this is just a random spike of events which is only twice the background rate of regular mishaps, for example.
The previous "worst week" for cable cuttings might have easily been, say, 2 cables. So, now we have 4 (and not all were cut) so we're only running at double the previous peak, and that probably happened a few years ago when there was, say, 20-30% less thousands of kilometers of cable laid.
Does anyone have any info that might help for this? I cut code for a livin', not crunch numbers.
-M
# grep slashdot access.log | grep html | sort | uniq | wc -l 2604
That makes one of us. I still don't understand what the big deal about it was supposed to be and I watched the whole thing. It's like Carter's killer rabbit attack.
For those of you who have not read this tome, one of the major themes revolves around the politics and power struggles of moving data through undersea internet cables. I found this interesting enough, but then about twenty minutes ago I just finished reading the following passage where two of the main characters are discussing the vulnerability of undersea cables to sabotage. .
It would also make sense if they cut the lines to install taps elsewhere on the lines.
The enemy thinks the problem is gone and is even less likely to audit the communications system.
Both strategies have their place, but you get much more information if the enemy thinks their communications are secure than you do by blowing everything up.
Si Hoc Legere Scis Nimium Eruditionis Habes
I wonder how long before someone starts a rumour that it was caused by anchors belonging to Isreali registered boats...
That should spice up life in the dull, boring, mild-mannered Mid-East
"As we see it, a single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy country's exchange rates or exposes the leaders of an enemy country on the Internet, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons. A new concept of weapons provides direction for new-concept weapons, while the new-concept weapons give fixed forms to the new concept of weapons."
From the book "Unrestricted Warfare: China's Master Plan to Destroy America", 2002
http://books.google.com/books?q=isbn:0971680728
Full book download: http://www.c4i.org/unrestricted.pdf
1 cable: 1 in 100?
...
2 cables simultaneously : 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100. 1 in 10,000
3 cables simultanously: 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100. 1 in 1,000,000
This is why we use redundant systems. The chances of 3 simultaneous accidental cable cuts is minuscule. Add a 4th offline and
4 cables offline simultaneously: 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100 multiplied by 1 in 100. 1 in 100,000,000...
1 in a hundred million, even assuming a 1 in 100 chance of a cable cut. I'd be willing to bet that the real chance of a single cable cut in any one week is something like 1 in 10,000.
That is. This is not simple coincidence.
Deleted
Ok, I don't know how paranoid you are but give me a break!!! FOUR times!!! That's simply beyond probabilities as a natural occurence. It's even beyond a specific occurance four times!!! It's gotta be planned? Don't you think?
The probabilities of four, 4, FOUR, cables being taken out is astronomical. It's like a determined force did it or an exteresterial landing in the ocean did it, but we all know that the likelyhood of that happening is beyond nilch since it would take any space faring civilization billions of kilo-year-quads of energy and material and time to reach our pathetic world across the stars. Barly enought for reality to be created by the one and holy jc.
For get it you're hoplelessly lost in the notion that your non-real phantasies are really reality rather than being stupid kirk based nonsense generated from religioso based crap beliefs intelligently designed to have you be the idiot. Thank nothingness that you got the last sentense and that you've given up all beliefs whatso ever!!!
All the best,
Peter
live free of religous nonsense crap beliefs or just kill oneself NOW.
Thank you.
Of the four you listed, the most successful outcome was Korea, and that is a 53 year and growing occupation...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
"A communications disruption can only mean one thing."
I'd be informing the rest of the world that the lines went offline - at least potentially - due to a power issue too, but that would be propoganda. Iran's government is probably just saying this in order to keep a good face in front of the rest of the world, but we can all see the situation has potential to be so much worse than they make it out to be. I would not be surprised in the least that this were some kind of attack by our (or some other) country to tap the information, as was said in other threads.
I'm not much for conspiracy theories, but this is ridiculous. I am failing to see how all of these cables, which have been fine for the most part, suddenly all fail within a week of one another. Does anyone have any data regarding the MTBF for a typical undersea internet fiber cable?
Quite possibly this is a deliberate attempt to cut off internet traffic to the middle east, by intelligence agencies and countries in the neighbourhood to thwart, isolate or detect some suspected terrorist plot, and a pretty serious one at that to have this happen in a rather unbelievable way, first accidents, then power problems. Nop don't buy that.
Why? Because I was pro-Jew, or because I was pro-Iranian, or because I say that violence is not Christian?
Are they CTHULHU-proof?
Today we are going to use Bayes's theorem to determine the likelihood that all of this disabling of cables is malicious. We are not calculating the likelihood of conspiracy, just how likely it is that someone out there is disabling cables with ill purpose. (Of course, how many people does it take to disable or cut a cable with malicious intent? One? Two? More than one is by definition a conspiracy.)
First, we need a prior. Lets assume that the likelihood that someone is out there was planning to maliciously disable a cable before this latest round of disabling was about 0.0001. That's going to be our prior, 0.0001. Not very likely, and hopefully not too contentious. At this point, it doesn't really matter too much what the prior is, just that we have one. We'll see that after a few rounds of calculations, this prior washes out pretty quickly.
Now, lets assume that any time a cable is disabled, it is only about a 1% chance that said cable was disabled with malicious intent. Considering that historically these cables are cut or disabled only once a year, this assumption means that every 100 years, some asshole (or some assholes, for the tin foil hat crowd) is going to go out there and maliciously disable a cable. I don't think this is an unreasonable expectation. I mean, every hundred years, someone burns a church, or knocks over a skyscraper with a plane, or invades a country for no good reason whatsoever. Could these cables be special in that regard? For the sake of argument, lets assume they are not special and are subject to the once-in-a-hundred-year rule.
Now, we need to guess how likely it is that, if someone (or some people, for the conspiracy theorists) is indeed disabling cables maliciously, how many cables could he (or they, for the conspiracy theorists), cut per day? I'm thinking 0.5. In other words, every other day this person or people could cut a cable. The 0.5 number means that it is easy for a properly motivated entity who also has the proper means to cut cables.
Remember, there is only a 1/365 chance that a cable will be cut on any given day due to an accident. We'll need to remember this to calculate the posteriors after a cable wasn't disabled back on Day 3.
Okay, if we are all on agreement on the numbers so far, we are ready to do some Bayesian arithmetic to determine the likelihood of malicious intent.
Day 0 (before any cables disabled): 0.0001 likelihood
Day 1 (cable disabled): 0.0476644 likelihood
Day 2 (cable disabled): 0.7144896 likelihood
Day 3 (NO disabling): 0.5444762 likelihood
Day 4 (cable disabled): 0.9835428 likelihood
Day 5 (cable disabled): 0.9996654 likelihood
In conclusion, the same math that runs your spam filter predicts (99.967% likely) that someone is up to something disabling all of these cables. Conversely, we have only a 0.033% expectation that all this disabling is coincidental.
Just callin' it like I see it.
That sounded very good and was well thought out until the last sentence
good try but you still have an enormous pro US bias (as in a pro GWB bias)
Slashdot is interesting, Wikipedia is boring misinformation. Why do you bother posting here?
Not by any definition? Not even a definition as outrageous as "members of the republican party"?
Or did you refer to the definition of "neocon"? Because if you don't consider any past or present members of the Bush administration to be neocons, I'm kinda interested in what your definition is.
Just pointing out that this is one of the more bizarre denials I've seen since Comical Ali.
You guys can apologize to the CIA and NSA for blaming them. Of course, you won't... jerks.
It's the ISPs slicing competitor cables, if the providers can be the only backbone out of the country, then they can make a killing on bandwith.
:p
It's probably just a bunch of pissed fishermen, but you never know
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
Opppsss... Bad for Qatariiis
Iran war would bring oil to $200 and double or triple the record profits of Exxon and other oil corporations.
As Mussolini put it:
"Fascism should more properly be called Corporatism." --Benito Mussolini, the founder of Fascism.
It is a trivial matter for Exxon and other Neocon corporations to hire Blackwater or any number of other mercenary military corporations to kickstart a war with some provocations targeting Iran. These could be part of such.
"To initiate a war of aggression, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." In stating this guiding principle of international law, the US judges at Nuremberg specifically rejected German arguments of the "necessity" for pre-emptive attacks against other countries.
General: Operation complete, we cut the cable. .. time passes .. .. time passes .. .. time passes ..
Techie: I'm still showing... what cable did you cut?
General: Second cable has been cut
Techie: Let me see here.... no, sir, still online.
General: Third cable down.
Techie: no, sir, you've still got the wrong cable
General: Fourth cable.
Techie: You've got to be kidding me!
i remember reading an article written by neal stephenson for wired in the late 90s. somewhere in it he addressed the issue of a 'fiber war' where nations and other actors would begin cutting undersea cables. it's an old article, but i remember some expert referring to it as 'mutually assured destruction'. (like nuclear war.) meaning that once a couple of cables are cut, it's so easy to cut more quickly, and pretty soon all the cables are cut relatively no time at all. an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind; or disconnected in this case.
i work in qatar, not only the internet if gone atm but also the connection to make long distance phone calls is gone
SEA-ME-WE 4?
I just KNOW there's a joke in there SOMEWHERE!
This is not offtopic...RTFA
In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors."
we DID ask, does anyone remember cutting a cable and doing $350 million worth of damage last week? no one?
see? must have been an accident.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
1. Cut underseas telecommunications cables.
2. ???
3. Profit!
We're all worried because someone else seems to have figured out step 2.
As a precursor to military action, something like this makes sense only if idiots are running the show.
What if it was a group with limited resources aiming to elevate international tensions? Some group that wants a war, but without directly involving themselves
Who would benefit and how though?
Who would want to cut off the internet?
...
Yeah, the porn wasn't that bad?
How could you make jokes at a time like this?
It's my defense mechanism.
If I was the U.S I'd bomb you next... if, I said if.
Communism was just a red herring.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
So best is, if you claim something outlandish, to supply your own citations, rather than let your readers do your work.
Regardless if this fourth breakdown is caused just by faulty equipment, Iran is now almost totally cut off from the net. Bad for their business but excellent for clampdown.
I've seen some reports of student unrest in university of Teheran. At current situation they can't communicate so easily to outside world what's happening. As I see it, they might get crushed anytime and there will be no live feeds this time as we did have from tiananmen.
At this rate, "the internets" won't be a misnomer.
You're not the only one, I didn't see it as anything major either. It seemed to turn into a beltway/media meme, without any apparent basis. This is what I said at the time.
Still, people disagreed with me. Either they were part of the mob mentality, or there was something to it (you and) I didn't "get".
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
One could argue that the Iraq invasion was done to bail us out of the small recession from '02-'03. Look where that's gotten us.
Insert Sig Here
Maybe whoever is doing this is testing the waters to see how much damage a cable cut can inflict. Once the cable is found, would it be hard to find it again?
Now how do you know that? Has the NSA, CIA, or DOD ever wrote an article or given an interview on the trials and tribulations of tapping undersea lines? Or are you just confidently bullshiting on how you think it might work based upon your simplistic understanding of the matter?
Well, let me tell you how I think it works, based upon mine. I think that the providers localize the spot of the outage by communicating to the series of regenerators both sides of the cut. Then they further estimate where the outage is by sending bursts of light down each side of the broken fiberoptic line and measuring how long it takes to get it back (the cut ends effectively acting like mirrors), using an instrument called an optical time-domain reflectometer.
So, cutting a line to splice somewhere else would be absolutely pointless, because it would be detectable and would even be more dangerous for any kind of clandestine operation because it would attract undue attention. There are thousands of undersea cables and we're all talking about these four. If this was some kind of CIA or NSA mission it was the biggest clusterfuck ever.
-Grym
Are you actually insinuating that Al Quaeda managed to cut four undersea internet cables? I'd just like to be clear.
The Romulans.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
That is the first completely different possibility I have read. Good job.
you know its the type of crazy retaliation they would try
I've already taken four shits today instead of my usual one per day. By your math that means there's a 0.9995835 chance that this is the result of malicious intent. Oh my god, what has the U.S. government done to my ass!?!
Funny, Al Caida sounds just like the Christian fighters in the Left Behind series usign the InterNet to coordinate activity. I think its soemone else than Al Caida *intentionally* cutting the cables.
Ok, I'm starting to lean towards the "we were told it was supposed to be wrong/creepy and we believed it" theory. My suspicion is that a bunch of people were looking for an excuse to dislike Dean after his loss and this happened to be what bubbled to the top.
Fry: What's happening?
Dr. Zoidberg: All 6,000 hulls have been breached!
Fry: Oh, the fools! If only they'd built it with 6,001 hulls! When will they learn?
"Don't fundamentalist branches of all religions believe this?"
True, it seems. Good point. That is destabilizing for every country in which it happens. Extremism is not religion, it is mental imbalance.
You other answers merely try to find a way to misunderstand what I was saying, instead of understand it.
It wouldn't surprise that some radical muzzy group was doing it. They are going to protect the Islamic world from the evil influences of the godless, heathen internet of the western world.
I'm not into conspiracy stuff, but I do think Occham's Razer applies here. The timing and location of the cable cuts; the fact that the communications company that experienced two of the outages is calling them "cuts" despite the news media originally claiming otherwise, makes it seem reasonable that this was some sort of deliberate act. To what end, who knows, but there's no doubt that America's economists power players are deathly afraid of the oil trading system using another currency other than the dollar.
The easiest way to cut the cable would be a fairly powerful boat and a modified anchor (not even sure if that's necessary).
Just drag the anchor for a few km across the path where the cable is likely to be. If you don't get the cable try again maybe in a slightly different area.
Fishing boats trawling for fish allegedly break cables too.
I don't think it's necessary to use stuff like bombs or divers at all...
Once the second one was cut, I had my suspicions that this wasn't entirely coincidental. Then a third was cut. I figured, okay, something is probably up. But a -fourth- cable has been cut? And it's no longer dropped anchors doing it? Either some really strange undersea geological event is occurring, or internet connectivity to the middle east is purposefully being removed. Personally, I'm more inclined to think that Iran is the more likely culprit. With the current ramp up in Israel, as well as the general tactic of hiding information and micromanaging the specifics of the lives of its people, they stand to gain far more from a regional knockout of information infrastructure. While I'm not overly fond or trusting of the United States government, this doesn't seem to be the style we adopt. Of course, this is all purely conjecture and speculation, at this point. I'm open for criticism.
If you're the CIA/NSA/KGB/Mossad/HagbardCeline, you can use your fancy submarine to do the wiretap job.
Or you might could just hire Bubba the Backhoe Driver's cousin Bubba the Fishing Boat Captain, or their second cousins Jean-Robe'rt Bubba' or Mustapha-ibn-Bubba to show you where the good tuna fishin' spots are, which is a lot cheaper.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Al Cuttah. (Sorry, couldn't resist.)
No, I think you were so accused because the typical knee-jerk responder only has so many labels as his disposal and as none of them is logically sound anyway, it hardly matters which one is used to patch the leak you poked in in his bubble reality. When one is hissing 'delirium gas', the sticky back of the label is more important than whatever happens to be printed on the front.
-FL
But wouldn't encryption be an effective solution to that? Assuming someone does tap the lines, wouldn't the important stuff be unreadable?
Then what sense would it make to alert your enemy like this? Seems to me all liability and no benefits, that is if your only goal is surveillance. But of course, someone must be benefiting, as this can't be explained by coincidence.
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
...where he got this idea, but Ian Fleming's Goldfinger was arranged in three parts, according to an old proverb:
Once is happenstance,
Twice is coincidence,
Three times is enemy action.
I guess a fourth time is surrender?
http://news.google.com/news?oe=utf-8&um=1&tab=wn&hl=en&q=UAE+dollar&btnG=Search+News
I don't really know what to think about this one (I'd be lying if I said I did). I can't readily assume it is sabotage. There is the update in the article which claims the UAE is relatively unaffected. However, the Iraq war is historical precedence for the currency policies of oil-exporting nations being related to major events.
For those who care to look: Iraq, euros
Billy Brown rides on. Yolanda Green bypasses Gary White.
I understand the need to pin these kinds of events on the back of some dark conspiracy concocted by the US government. What I do not understand is how so very many people seem to think that the US is the ONLY government capable of dirty deeds. Who gains to benefit from a war with Iran? Everyone knows that we are spread way to thin to take on another front, the GOP would also suffer greatly if GW were to dive into Iran, and Iran has only a drop of oil in the oil bucket. So again who would benefit? IRAN certainly would. Why not? Make the GOP look bad, swaying an election further towards the dems, who when punched, stabbed, shot, hung and disemboweled would still want to talk and find a reason that we angered our sand dwelling 'friends' who want nukes, but not for war, and want rockets but not for attacking, and want nations removed from the map but in a friend nonviolent, violent way. These are all very very blatantly obvious details.
It is easy to blame the US, the administration, the way of life, etc. could it be that foreign powers and administrations. The far left has been doing that for years. Natural disasters occur, its the govn'ment's fault; oil prices are up, govn'ment's fault; we are 'unliked' by foreigners, govn'ment's fault; I could go on but you get the point.
When will we learn that there are some people who have a skewed perspective. They are damaged mentally by a blind faith in a belief contrary to ours (in general) and they will stop at nothing to remove us from the planet (please recall that one of the last bombing was carried out by mentally handicap victims). So I would not put it past the jihadis to cut the cables themselves either in a effort to sway our election, or to stop news from leaving/entering their sunbaked homes. I say leave them cut.
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
Just a simple question or 2 for the readers and conspiracy theorists: Does this show a need for a better infrastructure? Who profits from increasing the infrastructure? Perhaps the cables have not been damaged due to political reasons, but capitalist ones instead. The timing is simply convenient. In my opinion, allowing potential politics to obscure the truth would be right inline with the MO of big corporations, expecially thone in communications and oil.
How amazed would you be to suddenly find that you just forgot what I wrote and you needed to reread my post.... again.
According to this link, Iran is incommunicado:
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm
It could simply be that the administration does not want the lay persian man to stream the invasion on the net, and wait for the MSM to put its spin on it.
I agree that invasion is really unlikely. But some form of attack is increasingly likely. Iran was scheduled to open their Oil Bourse very soon, but will be delaying it because of internet outages. The oil trading exchange is planned to trade in oil in NON-DOLLAR currencies. If the dollar ceases to be the petro-currency then nations all over the planet have little reason to hold onto their stockpiles of dollars. Widespread trade of oil in Euros or Yen or whatever could trigger uncontrollable inflation in the dollar as nations trade in bucks for better currencies.
I really think that an attack on Iran by us, the US, or Israel in the next week or so is a pretty high probability. I hope I am wrong. God I hope I am wrong.
-- QED
There, fixed that for you. Because Islam, as written, is the culprit for the current outbreak of violent superstitious insanity, just as Christianity was the culprit for the crusades, witch burnings, and so forth.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.