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Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel
An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."
Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel
Becuase Radia Perlman held the Internet by the Mediterranean when she dipped it into the river Styx?
My work here is dung.
Three of four sub-cables connecting Asia-North America have been cut.
This is getting a little crazy, and pardon the tinfoil hat that I'm wearing, how many 'undamaged' cables does this leave?
I think this is really starting to become hard to blame on 'coincidence.'
http://blogs.zdnet.com/gadgetreviews/?p=669
Why why did did you you write write the the word word "really" "really" twice twice?
New policy: for every error found in the summary, $100 will be deduced from the editor's paycheck.
no mystery who cuts a cable when they sink at the same time, is there? a few of those, the marked cable routes will be avoided.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
In the 90s it was backhoes. Now it's giant cable-eating squid. What next, volcanic eruptions? Really, the problem is two-fold -- first, cables break. Hey, it's several thousand miles long and several thousand feet down, and it's just laying there. Of course it's going to break. You could make the cables out of Unobtainium and they will still wither and break eventually. It's a fact of life. The real problem isn't that they fail, the problem is that the telecommunications companies don't have redundant links because of the expense. So, in summary, the problem is economics. And Cthulu. But you can't stop one of the great old ones, so let's focus on redundant links instead. -_-
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I never had any issues any of the times this happened. I was able to do all the stuff I normally do and visit all the sites I normally visits. This leads me to conclude that the solution is rather simple. The people who are affected by these outages should do something.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I thought of something that should be a pretty simple fix. Why don't they just string the wires over the Mediterranean?
This guy's the limit!
The article seems a little alarmist. For instance, this line: "The 2008 outages hit local economies hard and a stronger quake could plausibly bring Mediterranean economies to their knees, by denying them access to crucial global markets for days or weeks. A 2005 study at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich calculated that a nationwide internet blackout would cost Switzerland 1% of its GDP per week." But of course a cut in the Mediterranean will not be a "nationwide internet blackout" for Switzerland much at all. In fact, if India and the mid-east gets cut off from the rest of the Internet, the rest of the world won't care all that much.
Redundant routes duh
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Arrrrgggghhhh! From Bartleby.com:
A gauntlet is "a heavy glove, often armored" or "a glove with a heavy cuff covering part of the arm." To throw down the gauntlet is to challenge someone; to pick up the gauntlet is to accept someone's challenge.
A gantlet is "a lane between two lines of people armed with staves or whips, through which someone being punished is forced to run while being clubbed or whipped by the people on either side" (run the gantlet) and, figuratively, "any series of trials and difficulties."
Grumble grumble ...
Instead of cables, which can be broken, they could use optical links.
Due to the distance and bandwidth needed, powerful lasers would be needed.
Since vast stretches of open water need to be covered, an aquatic platform would be needed, one that could be repositioned for optimal spacing or to avoid obstacles.
Unlike other gratuitous mentions, this really is a case were we could use some frikin sharks, with frikin lasers mounted on their heads.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
"The team found that removing links that connect two nodes each with a large number of connections has a disproportionately large effect on a network's performance." Did we need a researcher to perform experiments to figure this out?
Mod points: Guaranteed to remove your sense of humor.
Side effects may include gullibility and temporary retardation
Don't worry, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Asia! I know your Internet access hangs rather perilously, but calm yourself! I've written a song about it!
(somber, drum beat a la "Ballad of the Green Berets")
O Brave Achilles
Your packets spill
Through the Black Sea
and the Dardanelles
A hero bold
So proud and true
The finest bits
Traverse his tubes
But when the Fates
Judge the big wet
Will their fell looms
Cut the Internet?
(LUTE SOLO)
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Because I'm sure as hell not going to tell him.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Torn between being happy knowing how to use the word properly, but having (yet) ANOTHER thing about which to be a grammar nazi.
So thank you, but only a little bit. No, slightly less than that.
ceci n'est pas un sig.
Though there is abviously no excuse for the cables that have been there for a while with newer cables you often find that they have been layed straight through what was once an anchorage as they get closer to shore and nobody has "gotten around" to updating any of the charts yet. I had this situation in the Azores a while back when we anchored in what was shown in all charts and publications to be the only anchorage available only to be met on the dock by a not so friendly police man shouting something in Portuguese along the lines of we just laid a load of fiber optic cables through there and your anchor is on top of them... of course we moved immediately into the port which was what we planed to do in the afternoon but when we asked the Harbour Master why there had been no notice to mariners about the new cabled a shrug of the shoulders was the most informative answer we could get.
What if you put the cables floating with 10k millions of balloons?
Maybe Cthulhu will quit trashing the lines if we offer to set him up a frame r'lyeh switch back at his pad. You know he's all about pirating the tentacle pr0n.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Hi USA. It's nice that you're writing about the Mediterranean, but please, don't call it "the Med". We know you like to shorting words (it seems there are many pedophiles crossings [ped xing] in the USA). But we really like to call the our beloved sea "Mediterranean".
Thanks
Mediterraneans
Why should we be trying to get a federal system for socialized healthcare? I mean I just think it's a step in the wrong direction. If you think about it, do you really expect a system run by the US Federal system won't be horribly inefficient and prone to massive amounts of corruption? Also where is this money going to come from. No doubt it will come as yet another increase in taxes that will basically subsidize the poor and just shift the bill from insurance companies to a middle class payroll tax.
Government regulation and meddling in the Healthcare industry is what got the United States in this HMO nightmare and you're saying that more Government intervention is going to solve it? Perhaps we need less Government interference and let the companies do their job. Healthcare probably wouldn't be as horrible if it wasn't for the mandates on the insurance company providing everything and the emphasis on having healthcare tied to an employer we would all have affordable healthcare.
Please keep in mind that this Universal Healthcare will be truly free only to the unemployeed and extremely poor. Your hard earned tax dollars will go into a mandatory pool of money to pay for this possibly inefficient system. I would rather the States take it upon themselves, with some Federal assistance, to provide healthcare for their citizens. It's a hell of a lot easier to jump State than to apply for a Visa to another country and stick it out there. If Massechusetts wasn't government paid for healthcare for everyone while Utah doesn't then so be it. Let the local Governments, a truer representation of the local populations, decide it out rather than the ivory tower that is Washington D.C. Haven't we spent enough money already?
I really think people (especially hardline Democrats) should stop relying on their Government for every single thing. It's still going to be your money paying for the thing, might be better to reform the system and actually be able to have a real choice.
Personally I don't see the problem - split the world, we don't much care about them or they about us.
It's always fun to get to use a pompous, self-indulgent know-it-all's own "sources" against him.
http://www.bartleby.com/68/95/2695.html
I think that the US govt should just provide Europe and Asia a free, high speed satellite link for all their traffic to route thru instead of thru undersea cables. The traffic will be all safe and reliable, and of course would be 100% snoopage free.
Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages.
I call bullshit...
Smarter, and fiscally responsible ship's captains are needed to prevent future outages like 2008's...
>> Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages." ...Except I seem to recall that it appeared to be deliberate sabotage, as in both big cases of the Mediterranean outages, multiple key cables all went down within hours of each other after years of no problems.
Just laying stronger cables obviously won't make much of a difference if it was indeed sabotage.
Because somebody keeps cutting the cables and blaming it on ship anchors?
Does Italy being shaped like a boot have anything to do with the Achilles' Heel?
Partially tongue-in-cheek, partially serious....but my Internet in the US works just fine to connect to other US destinations likely without passing through the Mediterranean. 99.9% of my destinations are US-based and hosted - I know the US isn't the center of the world, but this sounds like an Achilles' Heel for the *other* side of the world :-P
I could still contact my favourite servers in Japan from the Netherlands, so as far as I'm concerned the outages didn't happen.
Seems to me if they had more landings (eg multiple landings per country per cable) then it would be more robust. Probably most of the breaks happen close-ist to shore so have a backbone in the middle (or 10 miles out) at a landing every so often.
And software that can route around a land-10-mile break.
Given the Holocaust Israel is committing right now in Gaza
Spoken by a true student of... er, no, not history that's for sure. This isn't a holocaust, it's a mere reconnaissance in force. Call me when they start burning over 20,000 people a day for the crime of "Not Being Israeli". THEN you'll have your holocaust.
Why do people scream "war crimes", "genocide" and "holocaust" all the time since the war in the Balkans? War is ugly. Chuck rockets at your neighbor and what do you expect? I'm sure Canada wouldn't tolerate it from the US. We'd have to invade them and burn down their White House again.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Europe and Asia are connected by land. While it might have to divert around a few non-cooperative countries, you'd think that sufficient backbone could be laid down over land routes to all necessary countries. It seems like underwater cables would be used only when absolutely necessary (such as from North America to Europe or Austrialia to Asia - and even then satellite is available (though with higher latency and lower bandwidth).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I'm sure Canada wouldn't tolerate it from the US. We'd have to invade them and burn down their White House again.
You'll run out of ice to skate on, Mountie!
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
That's all that is needed to stop the dozeoids dragging their anchors across the cables.
Whatever happened to the idea that the Internet routes around damage? I can no longer connect to vesti.ru because the route from my ISP to Moscow goes through Telia's routers and they no longer peer with Russia either through design, damage, or poor maintenance. Shouldn't the packets get rerouted if a particular link is down?
The current model is that most providers lease space from a competitor for the time it takes to repair their own link. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than laying extra cable, or allowing your service to go completely dead. Ownership of the cable (like terrestrial lines) is a web of consortiums and leaseholds that make the cost of providing some redundancy a lot less than 2X.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Why these cables can't be buried? Of course if you just plop them down on the seabed then you're going to run into trouble.
...am I the only one here who thinks that the time for satellite data links is pretty much upon us? If stringing data cables under the Med. (or anywhere else for that matter) is such a gawdawful issue then perhaps we need to think more about punting a few more data sats up into orbit as a solution. Granted, the Great Old ones could re-hatch and eat them but that's what we have Hellboy for.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
There just need to be more point-to-point routes between major cities and across country borders. Yes, it is also a good idea to run cables underwater, but the more routes exist, the more likely it is that when a cable is cut somewhere (whether deliberately, accidentally, or due to an act of God), the traffic will automatically be routed around the damaged area.
What if your favorite DNS server happens to use a multicast address, and for some strange routing reasons, your queries get routed to the other side of the world... perhaps through the Med, every now and then? Or if you even happend to be an mDNS early adopter/tester/developer/..., and the same happens? And even if you didn't look so far, network links get congested, and traffic could easily overflow to peering networks, and this could very well mean, that ISP A and ISP B, both in the US, transmit packets through Asia or Europe as a congestion-avoidance measure. As a matter of fact, it happens quite frequently (and the other way around too).
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
We'd have to invade them and burn down their White House again.
You mean you'd have to get your British friends to do it for you? ;)
Besides, we all know the US and Canada will never come to blows. In the worst case scenario it will just be decided by a winner-take-all game of ice hockey. If the Americans win you'll see millions of people screaming "USA! USA! USA!" If we lose we'll just go back to watching football (no, not that "football") because who gives a shit about ice hockey anyway? ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Guess who else uses white phosphorus? That's right, the good old US of A.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4417024.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4442988.stm
PS: I'm an American.
www.isoHunt.com
The problem, as TFA itself says is that the non-Mediterranean routes would be through politically-unstable countries or regions, like eastern Turkey (site of a long-running conflict between the Kurdish minority and the government), Iraq, Iran, etc.
Are you adequate?
If performance to half way round the world was comparable to performance locally, oh what a world it would be! We might see breakthroughs in international co-operation, from the grassroots popular level up. Nationalist isolationism would be relegated to the old farts (defined as one who has never twittered. Shit that's me.)
Yes I know there are unavoidable speed of light related latency issues with distance, but I'm saying that efforts should be made to make raw throughput (bandwidth) comparable from arbitrary point to arbitrary point on the Internet, and that work should be done to keep latency to the bare minimum mandated by physics.
Seriously, there should be an international standards organisation with teeth mandating highly redundant, high-performance interconnectivity worldwide. It's a matter of
life and death.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The US is behind the IDF in smoke operations, even the non-controversial sort.
WP is the most effective obscurant. Note the burn times in the FAS link and consider how an advancing force needs to reduce enemy vision.If the IDF wanted to target civilians instead of merely accept the risk of injuring a few they'd have set the fuzes for ground burst.
Fun fact:
The media like to show photos of airburst WP rounds (note the WP-impregnated felt sprinkling downwards) but generally does NOT show the thick clouds of smoke they produce.
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/smoke.htm
Typical airburst pic, usually shown without related images, but there are more here:
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/84166551/Getty-Images-News
If you scroll down and click on the "similar images" link, then check "boom" "shell" "Gaza Strip" "horizontal", you'll see the clouds of smoke produced!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"I'm sure Canada wouldn't tolerate it from the US. We'd have to invade them and burn down their White House again."
Don't think you need to wait for an excuse!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
But, if the route's down, wouldn't another route be tried?
After all, that's the original purpose of the Internet - to route around points of failure if possible.
The scenario you mention of course happens all the time, but if a massive link goes down somewhere on the other side of the world, and mDNS can't deal with that, then that seems like a bug that needs to be fixed in mDNS, not a problem with the network itself. Of course, your latency may be higher and your connection may have less bandwidth, if you can't route around congestion, but it's better than trying to send your packets through India when the link doesn't exist.
Yep I'm American too and I've seen the twisted burned bodies in Falluja.
I've never seen what white phosphor does to peopl,e so first I thought they tested some
new microwave weapon on them.. then somebody told me it's WP.
I know, I know, we all tend to blow things out of proportion. You're right of course
this is just a friendly neighborly knock on the door to check if everybody is okay,
just like the Nazi humanitarian mission in Poland was.
"Why do people scream "war crimes", "genocide" and "holocaust" all the time since the war in the Balkans?"
Hmmm... maybe because of all the death and destruction? And ethnic cleansing that's going on?
Who knows? I mean that's just my personal half-baked theory.
I don't know much about the physical topology of the internet, but how come there isn't any redundancy the other way? String a few cables to Russia, to Asia through them. It seems to me like the Bering Strait would be a much shorter and simpler hop than the Mediterranean.
http://www.tenjou.net/
"Yep I'm American too and I've seen the twisted burned bodies in Falluja."
In person? Details?
Desert heat and decay make for propaganda-genic corpses. There are lots of such photos for the Googling.
Of course WP is legal to use against combatant personnel (so is napalm), but there aren't many WP casualties to show for it. Many bodies are "twisted" due to being killed in combat.
Some famous Gulf War examples of generic non-WP casualties.
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_index.html
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Nothing really like what you're showing me here. It kind of looked like they had
melted, limbs bloated and contorted. I didn't poke any but I'm pretty sure
they were dry as sticks more like mummies which was why I first thought some energy
weapon got used on them. And would I really know? There have been reports of microwave
weapon tests on the Iraqi population.
The footage was shown to the European parliament in Strasbourg. Two MPs attended, one
guy was reading a newspaper the other working on his laptop.
"bottleneck" makes it sound like a negative. maybe Thermopylae 2.0 is a better term.
...we have to have cables under the med? If they haven't noticed, you can go from Portugal in Western Europe down to the southern tip of South Africa all the way to the North Eastern tip of Russia by land.
Sure you still have the earthquake issue but you don't have the boat issue and it's not as if gas and oil pipelines don't already have to deal with these problems along these routes.
Is it really easier and cheaper to run cables undersea than over land? even when maintenance is taken into account?
I can understand the pacific/atlantic cables, but the EMEA region and Asia? Is it just down to wanting to have cables that take the most direct route to drop latency as much as possible?
For anyone interested in cable laying, this lengthy article is well worth a read.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
BTW, I'm disappointed at the lack of conspiracy theory posts. Where's the USS Jimmy Carter nowdays?
Mediterranean isn't just at threat from ships cutting cables with their anchors, politics, wars, earthquakes, and volcanoes, but also from asteroids as powerful as two Little Boys. I guess there is no good cable defence against a big asteroid, is there?
Has anyone (other than the repairmen themselves) actually _seen_ one of these broken / damaged cables? It should be pretty obvious how they were damaged, at least discriminating between anchor cuts and crushings, tool marks from big honking cable cutters wielded by evil Special Ops types, and the "stretch until it breaks" scenario (presumably what happens when an earthquake occurs).
So let's see some photos, folks, of the actual damaged cables. Or is someone just making all this crap up?
A lot of people was hanged after the Nuremberg trials for doing precisely the same thing the israelis do: kicking people out of their houses at gunpoint, killing them if necessary, and then settling their land.