Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
The idea is, you cut the cable at point 'A', and make it look like it was an accident (ship anchor, etc). Then, before they fix the cable, you trot on down the cable a few (tens of) miles to point 'B' and cut the cable there, too. But now you splice in a repeater that copies everything sent over that cable and sends it ...to you! When the cable is fixed at the original spot, comm traffic starts up, and no one is the wiser.
Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.