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Fifth Cable Cut To Middle East
You may have noticed a number of stories recently about undersea cables getting cut around the world. Apparently the total is now up to 5, but the scariest part of this is that Iran is now offline. You can also read Schneier's comments on this coincidence. Update: 02/06 17:42 GMT by Z : As a commenter notes, though the country of Iran is obviously experiencing some networking difficulties, it is not offline.
I remember last time a cable cut was reported they said Iran was offline that time as well. I'm not so sure Iran is really offline now either. I have been clicking into the websites of various Iranian universities and all of the ones I've checked so far are up, although some are kind of slow. While I guess it's possible some of them are hosting their main websites offshore, I doubt all of them are. Unfortunately, the routers here block outgoing traceroute for some dumb reason, so I can't verify for sure, but it seems like Iran is not as offline as we might think.
Iran has shown a connection of 0 for the past week or so. That doesn't mean a cable was cut does it? Just means that you cannot ping that one router. Last time I checked Iran had more than 1 router.
Also look at this.
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm
Does that mean Florida is offline? No it just means you cannot communicate with one of their routers.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I thought we were better than this...one router goes down and suddenly "OMG IRAN HAS NO INTARWEBS!"
Ok, so if Iran has _no_ intarwebs, I shouldn't be able to hit a server in Tehran right?
http://www.iust.ac.ir/
Wah Sig!
Whether the cables are being cut by ship anchors, Navy Seals or lasersharks, there are slower alternate routes. In a pinch most Gulf-region ISPs can route the other way, through Asia, under the Pacific Ocean to America. Obviously that degrades connection quality. Backup routes were contracted after the tsunami damaged so many of the undersea cables at once.
The BBC has a decent article on the issue, at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7228315.stm
The cables (at least two of them) are owned by http://www.flagtelecom.com/, they have updates on repairs on their news page and a nice map of the cables. Their Gulf-region cables are described as a "Self healing Gulf loop, providing maximum design capacity of 1.28 Tbps. Initial launch capacity 50 Gbps.
Four fibre pair route linking the Gulf to Egypt and India. Design capacity of 2.56 Tbps, with initial launch at 90 Gbps.
Approx. length 10,300 km."
The Iran Institute of Science and Technology ( http://www.iust.ac.ir/ ) is online, and their servers are physically in Iran, but a traceroute from Roadrunner in New York, NY shows traffic going the wrong way around the world.
Tracing route to www.iust.ac.ir [194.225.228.25]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms 194.225.228.25
2 8 ms 9 ms 11 ms 10.39.192.1
3 12 ms 8 ms 7 ms gig-4-3-nycmnyg-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.29.98.109]
4 8 ms 9 ms 8 ms pos-3-2-nycmnya-rtr1.nyc.rr.com [24.29.130.129]
5 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms tenge-3-0-0-nwrknjmd-rtr.nyc.rr.com [24.29.119.106]
6 10 ms 9 ms 10 ms 4.79.188.37
7 23 ms 18 ms 17 ms ae-32-54.ebr2.Newark1.Level3.net [4.68.99.126]
8 29 ms 18 ms 14 ms ae-4.ebr2.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.132.101]
9 20 ms 16 ms 19 ms ae-92-92.csw4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.158]
10 14 ms 18 ms 13 ms ae-94-94.ebr4.Washington1.Level3.net [4.69.134.189]
11 89 ms 91 ms 89 ms ae-4.ebr3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.69.132.81]
12 84 ms * 84 ms ae-93-93.csw4.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.69.137.46]
13 84 ms 81 ms 86 ms ae-4-99.edge3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.68.20.201]
14 84 ms 85 ms 83 ms SINGAPORE-T.edge3.LosAngeles1.Level3.net [4.78.195.202]
15 118 ms 84 ms 83 ms ge-7-1-0-0.laxow-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.183.81]
16 85 ms 274 ms 84 ms ge-4-1-0-0.laxow-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.183.90]
17 276 ms 265 ms 282 ms so-3-0-1-0.sngc3-cr2.ix.singtel.com [203.208.149.185]
18 338 ms 253 ms 269 ms ge-0-0-0-0.sngtp-dr1.ix.singtel.com [203.208.149.78]
19 254 ms 272 ms 264 ms GigabitEthernet1-1-1.sngtp-ar4.ix.singtel.com [203.208.183.114]
20 284 ms 287 ms 303 ms 203.208.192.226
21 298 ms 286 ms 290 ms 217.218.155.201
22 301 ms 299 ms 292 ms 217.218.163.252
23 328 ms 319 ms 292 ms 194.225.239.254
24 298 ms 294 ms 303 ms 194.225.228.25
Trace complete.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.
The word you were searching for is "intact". It's one word, not two.
And I'm sure that it is. They are also not offline, as my buddy with a plain home connection is still chatting with me, so they obviously aren't feeling too hurt by it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
And Israel's beef with Asia is?
And India, who is on pretty decent terms with Israel...I mean Israel wants the data lines cut why?
I'd give more respect to aliens planning an Independence Day attack credence than some of the bologne on Slashdot comments at the moment.
The OPPRESSED people as posting online and relaying information to people in other countries. The best way to control a mass of people is to control the information they see -- you can't do that with a connection to the internet.
Unfortunately the same can't be said about their military and Islamist government that profits greatly from that wonderful connection.
I can't believe that people are *still* protecting the Iranian government (note I'm not talking about their citizens) after all the crap they've pulled during the last two decades. Just because the US media has tuned into Iran in the last five years doesn't mean this story came out of the blue. Iran has been funding and training terrorist groups and publicly boasting about it for over 20 years now. We've been waiting for their population to overthrow the Islamist government for years yet that hasn't happened either. Just take a look at the kind of things coming out of their government-controlled media: http://memritv.org/
Yes, most Iranians dislike their government but no this won't be happening anytime soon. In the meantime, thousands upon thousands of people die every year because of direct funding by the Iranians to terrorists. Ironically most of the victims are Muslim.
If you want to avoid war with Iran then you should be in favor of diplomatic action to prevent them from obtaining nuclear weapons which could be a pretext for such a war. By preventing economic sanctions from going through you leave the world no choice but turn to the military option. Also it is worth noting that we've held toothless diplomatic talk with Iran for decades now and that didn't work (if anything, their government got more radical). They need to feel the heat for there to be any change.
As several people here have pointed out, Iran is not disconnected from the Internet. Users in Iran have been able to connect to the internet without any atypical problem... this rumor has been swirling about for a few days. I manage a Persian-language website with many readers in Iran, so I have both the motivation and the resources to check into this... we've seen no decrease in traffic from within Iran. I've also been able to find no source for this that doesn't trace back to the Internet Traffic Report, which as other has pointed out has a somewhat inexact methodology. This is the second time this has been mentioned in Slashdot, and everytime it is posted, it gives me a heart-attack... there might be a need to post a correction or at the very least to stop asserting that Iran has no connectivity without better confirmation.
... Step 3: Have everyone ping Iranian servers to death to prove story wrong ...
;-)
Heh. I read that while having a few traceroutes running in other windows, testing times to a few sites in Iran. All of them do pretty well from here (Boston) as far as the sites in New York, Amsterdam, and Turkey, with ping times mostly under 200 ms. Then the packets go to numbered machines without DNS addresses, and the ping times jump to over 500 ms. I'd thought that this was probably a sign of satellite hops, but now I wonder. Maybe it's just that we've slashdotted all the routers. Ya think?
The government site at www.iran.ir doesn't repond to pings, but it does respond on port 80 in the usual manner. It is sorta slow, but firefox doesn't time it out.
I don't read Farsi, so I can't tell much about what it says. There are some familiar faces at the upper left, though.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I had no idea until now (I've never even seen a .ir URL before), but one of the images on the Iranian government's Web site features the GNU and Linux mascots. Clicking on that link brings you to http://it.iran.ir/ which features instructions on how to add Iran's CentOS mirror to your yum repos. I think this article would've been much more interesting if it had featured the government of Iran's involvement in the free software community. For one, it would have been true. A government that distributes a free operating system can't be that oppressive, can it?
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
psst.. http://visualroute.visualware.com/ and paste this IP 194.225.228.25 Where does it go? No one knows!
Why is the immediately prior reference being ignored - that at least two of the four cables were not cut, but taken offline due to power issues? No biggy, just curious.
Iran is an Islamic Republic, meaning its government is half democratic and half unelected asshats.
"Our government claims it wants democracy and freedom for others, but doesn't seem to value that too much here at home either."
There, fixed that for you..
which is totally what she said
If the US Military wants to cut off your internet, they're not going to give you a lead time of several days; they're going to cut off all your links within minutes, possibly seconds of each other.
Agreed. There's basically no military advantage to this. Neither is there any logic in the claims that this has something to do with Iran selling oil in Euros. As if the Iranians are so dumb that they can't colo their servers in Europe (they probably already do).
Are extremist Middle Eastern groups cutting off the cables to cut off Western influences? They would lack the capabilities to cut all cables at once, but I also suspect they'd know this was a brutally short-term situation.
The thing about terrorist groups is that there are so damn many of them, and they all want to make a name for themselves. If one of them figured out a way to grab a cable and hoist it to the surface to be cut, they'd probably do it, just because they can. It's not like there's one guy who's the king of terrorists and gets to set policy for all the rest, and would say, "wait guys, don't do this. We like Iran." Rather, for any level of extremism, there is *always* a group of people at that level. So I promise you, there is one or two or three groups out there who think that Allah is withholding his blessing because his chosen people have polluted themselves with Internet access.
So there's a motivation that seems a lot more likely than the "omfg its Bush" conspiracy theory du joir.
Hypothesis 3: Something is more likely to break when its older than when it is new
I know it may be difficult to see anything past your tinfoil hat, but really your two examples do not even come close to Occam's razor. In fact, they are so far off the bend that you begin to head in Tom Cruise terrain.
or maybe this one...
Hypothesis 4: Iran really is not offline - only a single router used for test.
I know that one is a bit of a stretch, but just try it out and I am sure that you may begin to see the light. Not everything is driven by some evil conspiracy, sometimes old things break. Sometimes Slashdot summaries are wrong. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Programming: Its not just a job - its an indenture.
Iran is an Islamic Republic, meaning its government is half democratic and half unelected asshats.
Iran WAS a democracy, until the CIA and the British military intelligence organized a coup and replaced their democracy with a subservient monarchy.You can't take the sky from me...
José Padilla. Glad to be of service.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Iran had a perfectly fine, democratically elected leader in the person of Mohamed Mossadegh in 1953.
He had the outrecuidance to nationalize the oil industry, so the CIA fomented a coup against him and put the Shah in charge. The US then supported this asshole for close to 30 years, until iranians revolted in 1979.
The revolution didn't end so swell, the mullahs took the helm eventually. But the country wouldn't be there if it wasn't for the sick US meddling. Sure, that was back in 1953, but the pattern continued in other countries over the world in the 55 years that followed. So yeah, the US is responsible, and the dumbass in chief you still have for 11 more months is apparently hell-bent on meddling still some more with Iran.
Not very many decades. Here in east-ish Asia we depend on transpacific cables quite a bit. At least once a year, and sometimes more, some cable will take a hit, causing congestion on the alternate routes and making net access sucky for days or weeks.
But definitely centidecades go by without incident.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Iran is a net exporter of crude oil and a net importer of refined motor gasoline. The USA is a net importer of crude oil and a net exporter of refined motor gasoline. Iran has no refineries. They subsidize the cost of gasoline based of the exports of oil. Gasoline is really really cheap in Iran. Some of the data is a little old that I found.. so things could be slightly different now. sources: http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_exp_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_a.htm http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_imp_dc_NUS-Z00_mbblpd_a.htm http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/03/AR2005070301042_2.html
Let me see if I can find the citation for him. I searched for "undersea cable atlantic repairs" and got this in the text of the 4th result:
Undersea cable damage is hardly rare--indeed, more than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair...
And if you click the link, the secondary source is ABC News, the primary source they give is "marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems."
There's your citation, now go back to Wikiusenet, I hear them calling you "irc to an/i: pov sock in action--checkuser confirmed by userbox. inform arbcom of rfar."
I know some people who emigrated from Iran and eventually moved back. Why? They thought that life in "the west" was just like it was in Hollywood movies. When they ended up working part time in a gas station and found themselves getting deeper and deeper in debt (Iran doesn't accept credit... it's a cash-based society), they faced their disillusionment, cut their losses, and moved back to Iran where they felt they had half a chance at getting ahead in life.
Iranians (to generalize profusely) aren't going to get the impression that Americans are similar to them from our popular fiction. It's the fictions (lies) that make them hate "the west" when they think about life outside of their own personal circles.