Sing Along Now: It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like….
…Sabotage. Yet another undersea internet cable has been cut off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.
For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable has apparently been cut (or "failed due to a power outage," as some sources suggest), and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious. Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week — a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).
This hardly ever happens and it suddenly hits four cables in a week? That's a bit too hard to attribute to coincidence. For all it's recent growth, the internet is still a very fragile structure and one hopes governments and financial institutions have backup plans in place - because this may be an actual assault or just a proof of concept for a bigger attack on the system. Enigineers better be thinking of ways to head this kind of weakness off, too. This could be a real problem, very quickly.
UPDATE: Lawhawk from A Blog For All notes that a fifth cable has now been cut or damaged. Could it be material defects in the cables? Even if the cables came from the same lot, that is, I think, very unlikely. If the cables did come from the same manufacturer and all had some shared structural defect, the odds of them all failing at the same time are basically nil. That just does not happen in the real world. I'm afraid we are all going to be guessing about this. I suspect that they simply will not release any information on what really happened. Regardless of the cause, it shows a weakness in the system that they will not talk about in public.
Geek Stuff | Gaius Tuesday, 5 February , 2008
By NortonPete, Tuesday, 5 February , 2008 @ 5:37 pm
I find this unusual. I have no answer. But it is strange.
By NortonPete, Tuesday, 5 February , 2008 @ 5:39 pm
It cuts off India, perhaps a plan.
By plantlady, Tuesday, 5 February , 2008 @ 6:22 pm
Revenge for all the times we tried calling Hewlett-Packard or Microsoft “technical support,” getting put on hold for thirty minutes, then trying to understand the thick accent?
By conspiracy theorist, Tuesday, 5 February , 2008 @ 6:27 pm
I think it is john edwards supporters trying to create two worlds.
By Maggie, Tuesday, 5 February , 2008 @ 9:24 pm
plantlady -
LMAO! I was going to write pretty much the same idea!
By OldeForce, Wednesday, 6 February , 2008 @ 1:24 am
Whales, cable-chomping whales.
By lawhawk, Wednesday, 6 February , 2008 @ 10:30 am
There’s actually reports that a total of five cables have been cut in the past month, which is surely more than mere coincidence. Material defect or something more sinister? No one knows or is saying.
http://lawhawk.blogspot.com/2008/02/clipped.html