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Egyptian Forces Capture 3 Divers Trying To Cut Undersea Internet Cable
Egypt's Naval forces claim they have captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean. Col. Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement that the divers were caught while “cutting the undersea cable” of Telecom Egypt. Internet services have been disrupted since March 22 in Egypt. From the article: "The statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not have further details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable."
Yes, they cut into the cable but not all the way through it. It resulted in slower Internet traffic in the region fed by those cables.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Why? It's not like you can use it for anything. Kevlar needs to be purpose made for specific uses. You can't melt it down and reuse it like metal. You can buy sheets of Kevlar fabric for very little. It's mostly the labor and skill that it takes to make stuff that adds the value. Not the material itself.
Fiber has a kevlar sheating which should worth something.
Worth what, exactly? The stuff is woven about the plastic sheathed glass fibers, some insulated copper wires that carry power to the repeaters, and encased in a waterproof coating. If you cut it open and empty the useless crap out you'll destroy the integrity of the fibers. It's not like you can knit yourself a bulletproof Kevlar sweater out of it.
The copper will be worth a few farthings per furlong, but that's likely to be it for value.
John
"Cable contains no copper, Steal it will put you in jail". Chinese print this slogan everywhere in China.
With modern cable ships, it's actually pretty routine work. They get damaged by ship anchors on regular basis.
Doubtful. The Muslim Brotherhood isn't isolationist like, e.g., the Taliban, nor do they have anything in particular against the West, as with Wahhabism. In other words, they don't necessarily see a conflict between modern institutions and Islamic life. They just have a really, really, really conservative opinion about how to live as a Muslim within a modern, technologically progressive nation-state.
They're more like what you'd get with Pat Robertson and his ultra-conservative compatriots controlling all three branches of the government. You could kiss the Constitution goodbye, but you'd still have some semblance of federalism, a free market, free-ish speech, etc.
Photos are included on The Register's coverage of the story.
The East African SEACOM cable has been having outages lately; they posted an outage notification due to a cable break off the Egyptian coast at 08:40 UTC yesterday (March 27th, 2013). Of course, this has been having knock-on effects: for instance, many South African ISPs use this cable as their primary international link, and have had to fall over to secondary links resulting in significant service degradation.
Co-incidence? Perhaps, perhaps not...
Here's an amazing article that gives all kinds of historical telecom cable information, including the internet exchange in Alexandria Egypt. It also discusses repair ships and some inherent physics problems having to do with the pressures placed on the spindles (of the undersea cables) on-deck.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
Sadly, I can't locate a version of the article with the wonderful photos of the original printed piece.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.