Slashdot Mirror
Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again
miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."
Besides the nefarious reasons, there is the simple matter of cost -- transit in the US is cheaper.
Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.
The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.
Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
You mean subs can go past 20,000 and not crush like eggs?
Subs don't have to, the Mediterranean Sea is 5150m at its deepest point (~16900 feet) and averages 1500m deep.
Arr.
It be Sammy the Sea Sucker, a giant whale that has been legend for hundreds of years. He can sink down to the bottom of the ocean, and when Ol' Sammy sees something he don't like, he eats right through it.
And let me tell ya', Sammy don't like cable.
The Internet is generally stupid
It's hardly a big secret. There have been the USS Parche and the USS Jimmy Carter to name just two.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Do you seriously doubt that Iran has serious economic difficulties, and is proping itself up with oil money? Here's a recent cite; Google finds dozens.
Do you seriously doubt that the demographic shift in Iran threatens the party in power? Most of the links I could find had an axe to grind in American politics, but this one has lots of actual data.
Do you seriously think Iran's government could benefit by starting a war with America by attacking Iraq right now? It's not like we have a tripwire base there, like we did in Korea for so many years: we have most of our armed forces mobilized in Iraq, and regime change in Iran is still official US policy.
I'm sorry to puncture your conspiracy theory so thoroughly, but the idea that the US would be cutting data cables used by a large chunk of the world just to mess with Iran is simply not rational.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Umm... just how deep do you think the Mediterranean Sea is?
Apparently 20,000 leagues.
20k leagues under the sea is not referring to the actual depth but to the distance covered during the trip.
-- Put crudely, the world is an extremely large problem instance. (Russel/Norvig Artificial Intelligence)
At current oil prices the current Iranian government is certain to collapse.
They once had a parliamentary democracy of course, but the leader, Mossadegh, committed the heinous crime of trying to get a better oil deal for his country. This resulted in the US and UK backing a coup which installed the Shah of Iran, a dictator who would rule with an Iron fist for decades. His CIA-trained secret police (the SAVAK) tortured and murdered thousands. The inevitable backlash unfortunately resulted in a theocracy rather than the democracy the people we hoping for.
Iran's demographics favor a serious culture shift soon. The ruling theocracy has dealt with this [b]repeatedly in the past by going to war[/b], often wars so nasty that they killed off the majority of males in their 20s, directly changing the demographics.
Iran has not attacked another country for centuries. Iraq started the war with Iran and was supported by the US, UK and others. It was a devastating war but rather than trying to stop it, we poured fuel on the fire hoping that Saddam would win. The support for Iraq was so great that the US even tried to blame the Iranians for Saddam's chemical attack on Halabja. So we wreck one democracy and install a dictator. Then when he is overthrown we back the neighbouring dictator in a devastating war.
Did you think that the fiber is one long piece stretching right across the ocean ? Because it isn't. There are repeater modules every kilometre (IIRC) which boost the signal and send it on. If a few of those are more than just repeaters (ie splitters) then it becomes trivial to grab a copy of all data that runs through that fibre. If there is redundant fibre in the cable, then conceivably, every fibre carrying data has a copy which runs right to where the govt. wants it.
I used to work for Nortel, making these repeaters by the thousand. They don't have to splice anything into the cable because the taps were already put in during the construction phase.