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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."
No, because of physics, geology, geography and politics.
I liked the conspiracy theories better. Rational thought isn't all that much fun sometimes.
I liked the coincidence theories better. Rational thought isn't all that much fun sometimes.
The only "proof" that these lines weren't cut intentionally was that two ships were detained in Dubai (of all places) and forced to pay $10,000 to be allowed to leave.
It didn't cover the fact that the Egyptian government sent out a press release saying that they had video footage of an area where the cable was cut and it showed no ships.
Questioning the official version of events isn't a "conspiracy theory." Conspiracy happens all the time. The government is the biggest conspiracy theorist out there. They have laws against conspiring to commit just about any crime out there.
For all I know the company that owns the cables cut them on purpose so they could later get public funds to pay for infrastructure upgrades.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
What if you put the cables floating with 10k millions of balloons?
Fuck 'em.
:) Have a nice day.
That'll teach companies to move their jobs overseas. Those companies(and their overpaid executives) can cry a river to the employees they laid off only to give their jobs to India. Mods: I ask you to think about this before you mod me down, but if you want to waste your points, I don't give a fuck!
It's not "just a coincidence". It's common occurance. Cable cuts happen. All the time. It's just gotten a lot of attention lately because of the attached conspiracy theorists looking to "prove" that Bush was going to attack Iran (he didn't).
If it was an attack of some sort, don't you think they'd have cut all four?
This definition sets us up for a long argument trying to classify edge cases, which may or may not result in me demonstrating a nice clean example of something that you class as a conspiracy theory later being shown to be factual. That would be an interesting point to make, but not one that I'm willing to spend a bunch of time researching right now.
I'm much more interested in cases where things that do not meet that definition - because they are well documented - get classified as conspiracy theories and dismissed. A good example is Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model and the associated claim that the US mainstream media act - to a very large extent - as propaganda outlets for the US DOD. This claim doesn't fit your definition at all. It doesn't even involve a conspiracy. But it still tends to get reflexively categorized and dismissed.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
The US government funding mind control research using LSD would probably qualify. The CIA publicly admitted it in the 70's.
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
Well, to be fair, India and China can always choose not to outsource to the U.S. 20 years from now when they're rich and mighty.
It works both ways as long as so much depends on some little string threaded through the Ocean. Companies could stay rooted in one nation and deal with the ups and downs(with the benefits of academia and defense employment), or they could constantly go in circles chasing the cheap through constant relocation.
I'm still not quite sure what is more amusing.
Your sig itself, or the spelling of Genius.
I considered modding you down, but decided to comment instead.
I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool. This punishes the citizens of those countries more than it does the execs of the major corporations that exploit them.
This story is about an international communications issue. If you want to talk about labor issues I would say this:
There are many powerful people trying to make protectionism a dirty word, if we want to fight them we have to be specific in our demands on who deserves Free Trade agreements or gets Preferred Trade Status. Protecting workers rights "over there" means increasing labor costs "over there" and makes them less appealing than local workers when you factor in communications and shipping costs (environmental protections should also figure into that equation). When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.
The problem is that we've spotted our competitors a huge advantage by not holding them to any of the standards we hold ourselves to. Which means we tied our own hands, or maybe slit our own throats.
I understand your sentiment, but what you're ultimately suggesting is that we eliminate access to the internet for any country with a cheap labor pool.
I heard it as a complaint that the CEOs are looking to short-term gains and not counting the very real risk that network connectivity from the US to India may be impaired at some points. If they didn't examine and account for that risk in their calculations, then they are incompetent or liars (or both).
When they can treat their employees humanely, pay them a living wage, stop tainting the local water supply and still afford to send products to our markets cheaper than we can, then they deserve those jobs and we don't.
Which is why the US should have tarrifs on a per-country basis related to worker conditions and environmental care. If they "externalize" industry cost by dumping toxins rather than cleaning or storing them, then we should increase the cost here by that amount. They can pay for good practices or we will charge them so that they would be making the same if they did.
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