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.
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
[Citation Needed] --NT
-- My Weblog.
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.
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..
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.
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.
... 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. . . .
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.
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
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.
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.
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/
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.
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
Or a very competent, rogue state that happens to reside in the general region, which decided to go it alone because the U.S. got wet feet (pardon the pun).
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
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.
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.
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