f13.net

On Wednesday, two subsea cables, FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 4 were severed by cause unknown, suspected to be by use of a ship's anchor in stormy weather. The two cables are presumed to pass close enough together for a single incident to damage them. This morning, a third cable was severed:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm

At the moment, the cause of the third break is also unknown but being presumed to be because of a ship's anchor. What Middle East Internet capacity do you lose before you wonder about the statistical likelihood of multiple ships having the same sort of accident at the same time, and start looking at the possibility of malicious intent?

It's a clever ploy by the Scientology Naval Arm (Yes, they have a navy!!!) to disrupt Anonymous.   















Please Mr. Scientologist Assasin, the above was said entirely in jest and I meant no harm to your wonderful religion.

Could be Cthulhu, no?

Nah, Remo has that situation well in hand.

I was thinking the same thing Righ, especially considering the location.

One cable is an accident. Two is a really bad accident. Three... that just cannot be coincidental. Thing is, who would benefit from the Middle East, Asia and Africa being cut off? American businesses who outsource IT and CS to India and the like would be well fucked.

Could be a way to lure repair crews in for an ambush? Or maybe Sharia has decided that teh interwebz is evil since you can see pictures of women's ankles and wrists (and labias, but who's counting)?

Maybe one of the dot com billionaires finally had to experience outsourced tech support and is seeking revenge.  Certainly this guys Private Fleet (http://www.yachtcrew-cv.com/paulallen.htm) is capable of trolling for the interwebs with an anchor. 

Anyway since my career has been hurt by outsourcing AND since I have had the negative experience of dealing with outsourced tech support all I can say is I am fucking thrilled. 

viva la revolution!

Hrm.

IMO and MARPOL regulations require that these areas are expressly stated on charts, and ships are NOT to anchor in these areas, even in storm conditions.  It's best to power through or around those anyway.  No ship owner is going to take the risk of anchoring their ship in adverse storm conditions.  Too many bad things can happen, despite the cost of IFO or MDO - which is significantly cheaper than the cost of a ship breaking up.

So, one of two things:
1)  It's a huge conspiracy
2)  A bad batch of updated charts neglected this info

But even still, I'd be very surprised if a ships anchor did this.  A propeller, yes. Anchor?  Not so much.  I'd be very surprised if the anchor could lift the cable up even part of the way.  Any idea of the circumference or weight of the line?

If they cut off the Australia->America link there will be killings. Many killings.

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a propeller?

That was a beautiful use of ascii art and smileys.

Consider this instead, because its what is happening - who would benefit from all of the Middle East's Internet and telephone traffic to Europe transiting through operators audited by the UKUSA signals intelligence community?

Very interesting.

My tinfoil hat must fit well, because I am finding that a little too plausible. Of course, we ARE dealing with the gang that couldn't shoot straight...are they really bright enough to pull this off?

A modern armored fiber-optic submarine cable is typically around two inches (50mm) in diameter. I'll let you do the not tremendously difficult sums to work out the circumference. They are known to have been broken by anchors in the past. They are usually sufficiently deeply sunk and buried that neither surface nor submarine vessel are likely to foul their propellers on a cable. Another reasonably common cause of accidental damage includes deep trawling from fishing vessels or dredging.

I wonder if you connected the things together, would you get a line pointing towards the Statue of Liberty?   I expect a giant, metallic,  severed head to come crashing into New York any day now, followed imminently by a giant pissed off reptilian monster thingie.

Make it four now...

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break?ln=en (http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break?ln=en)

My tin-foil hat might be going on...

Definately not terrorism.

Hell, I had to call and cancel my free month of freecreditreport.com the other day, I thought about cutting some cables after that shit too, I'm sure it's just a disgruntled dell customer who got tired of being on hold after 9 hours or so.

Agreed. It's not called terrorism when it's governments doing it.  :grin:

The thing is, it's only gonna take a couple of weeks to repair from that article, so I'm not sure what would be accomplished by this.

1) Cut undersea fibre-optic cables.
2) Get covops team to splice in taps/bugs/whatever 'upstream' while cable is dark.
3) Repeat.
4) Wait for cables to be fixed.

I'd imagine that it's much simpler to just grab whatever data you want out of the guts of the data stream rather than having to strongarm the telecoms companies...especially non-American companies.

You don't need the cables cut forever. If the UKUSA community feels that there is communication about something that they need to listen to happening on the Internet, they just need traffic flowing through their routers for however long those conversations take. A few days may be what's needed. Chop chop.

Oh Come On.

4 is no way an accident.  Confusing !

 :uhrr:

This is definitely suspicious, can't be a pure coincidence, but Jesus people, your getting a little to far out there with the conspiracy theories.

An interesting article on sea cables…
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

I don't think that if there are suspicions that Middle Eastern terrorist groups are planning a major attack in coordination with European cells that it would be 'too far out there' to force traffic through peerings that can be monitored. That would just be prudent. Breaking the cables so that nobody would notice you splicing in a monitoring repeater elsewhere is a bit 'out there' because you do that to avert suspicion - and four breaks in rapid succession doesn't avert suspicion terribly well.

Well, as Way said, it's not like the folks in charge of US "Intelligence" are Mensa members.

What does Mensa have to do with stopping terrorists attacks? If only we knew they were the experts earlier!

and the fifth one gone:

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/06/1431206

Iran now oficially without internet access

More that just that one test router is dead in the water right now.  Iran is not entirely isolated.

It's self inflicted the middle east is trying to protect the flock from Wikipedia's illustrations of Muhammad.

In a totally unrelated development: http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23167213-5005961,00.html

I wonder how Haliburton's new Dubai headquarters is handling this.

Strangely, my parents in Lebanon still have full DSL access.

...at the moment.  :grin:

Good point.

It's still reachable. Response times are pretty slow - some of the routers in the AP region are dropping packets, but the 'net is doing its job and routing around the damage. I suppose we don't have long to wait to rule out one particular theory - new moon is on the 8th.

That's the same goddamn story they've been trying to pedal to the US Intel agencies since Bush got in office. The only people who believe it are the people who want an excuse to bomb Iran.

It doesn't matter how hard they pedal that story.  It's not going anywhere.

(http://www.fitnessx.co.uk/shop/images/X-Bike-animated.gif)

Goddamnit, I got hit by the grammer bike.

Pretty sure today is the new moon.

You can dodge easily enough.  He'll never catch you. ;D

I hope you got his insurance information.

(http://www.aolcdn.com/wireimage/E/2007-06-08/WI14245409_kelsey-grammer-fox-upfront-may.jpg)

Apparently everyone still has internet access.  Tales of outages seem to be highly exaggerated.

Also tomorrow brings a solar eclipse to Antarctica.  Should be somewhat visible from NZ and AU, I think.

http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEplot/SEplot2001/SE2008Feb07A.GIF

This is totally related to the cable cuts.

Irans much delayed Euro/non USD based Oil Bourse (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Oil_Bourse) was meant to go online this week. It won't now 5 cables have been cut. A coincidence, I'm sure.

So how exactly do you explain Irans fearless leader announcing "WE WILL HAVE THE BOMB!! DEATH TO THE ZIONISTS!" oh, every other fucking week?
Or is he in on the conspiracy?

Propaganda.

Are we on five now? Maybe someone is just stress testing the internet. :)

I used to be the internet guy for a major computer magazine in the 1990s (i.e. the guy who wrote about the internet, as opposed to today where everyone writes about the internet). A guy in our testing labs was an early P2P downloader, somethingawful forums goon, and internet underground type.

He quit his life and became a seismic navigator in Asia. He works on ships in rooms full of computers, monitors and satellite broadband - I've seen photos, it's a wall of technology like some kind of Bond villain's setup. He could probably drop the anchor a few times ...

How hard are these things to break?  Like could someone with a medium sized boat just drag their anchor along the bottom until one of the hooks snags a cable and then go to full power to snap them?

Because if my job ever gets offshored to India I think I would be tempted to take a nice vacation in the Mediterranean sea :tinfoil:.

No!  It was a propeller from a cruise liner! 

Owned twice.  You're on fire.

maybe it's the scientologists striking back at the internets.

Maybe 10cm across, plastic coating, steel wire 'armour', and glass fibre core. Tougher than co-ax, but not that much tougher.

Just a note - one of the cable failures is not due to a cut  - it's because of a power problem.

If you really want to discuss this, take it over into politics, because this will only be the 50th time I've talked about Iran in there. If I talk about it in here, this thread will likely disappear into politics anyway.