Fourth Undersea Cable Taken Offline In Less Than a Week 499
An anonymous reader writes "Another undersea cable was taken offline on Friday, this one connecting Qatar and UAE. 'The [outage] caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission. It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE.' In related news it's been confirmed that the two cables near Egypt were not cut by ship anchors." Update: 02/04 07:13 GMT by Z : A commenter notes that despite the language in the article indicated a break or malfunction, the cable wasn't cut. It was taken offline due to power issues.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sangloth
I'd appreciate any comment with a logical basis... it doesn't even have to agree with me.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
It would be political suicide indeed, for a politician to start a war shortly before an election -- in which he was running. Bush isn't.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cable Not Cut; Cable Merely 'Damaged' (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to run against the whole "this could mean only one thing" meme, but I think it's just as likely that some old hardware sitting at the ends of that cable got stressed past its breaking point because having the other links down finally pushed it past its limits.
Re:Testing the system.. (Score:2, Insightful)
New tricks by AT&T ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Tests in preparation for a US government invasion? (Score:2, Insightful)
I hope that U.S. citizens and people everywhere in the world will begin to realize that a few oil and weapons investors and others have taken control over the U.S. government, and that those who have control are becoming more and more mentally unbalanced, as is usually true of people who emphasize control and money in their lives.
Another influence toward unbalance are Jews in the U.S. who support Israel against the interests of the country in which they live, and, frankly, against the long-term interests of Israel. Israelis feel threatened by some of the surrounding Muslim countries, and want U.S. taxpayers to pay for Israeli security. But more violence will never create more security. There are only approximately 14,000,000 Jews in the world, and getting into gun battles with 1.2 billion Muslims does not enhance the security or quality of life of Jews.
A further unbalancing influence is many of those in the U.S. who call themselves evangelists; they believe they are superior to the rest of us, and that their particular preferred killing is the "work of God". Karl Rove manipulated the evangelists by having George W. Bush pretend to be Christian. An evangelist associated with the Bush administration wrote a book about that which I read, but I don't have the title readily available.
What is required to fix this situation is an understanding that the problem at the top of the U.S. government is an outbreak of mental illness, and should be treated as such. More violence is not the answer.
Those who run the U.S. government, apparently Cheney and others, may be hastening their activities, because they need to do some of what they want to do before George W. Bush is out of office.
Re:The cable was not cut - Bad summary, bad! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Nah... if bombs were about to start falling, their internal communications would be the targets--not their international connections. What are they doing to do, send an email to call for help to repel an attack? Plus the communications would be attacked pretty much simultaneously to an attack--not days ahead of the attack.
I'd agree that someone is deliberately doing this, but I don't think it's the U.S. and I don't think it's a precursor to an attack on Iran. There's just very little military value in doing so--especially days ahead of an attack which, if anything, would tip the enemy off and allow them to prepare.
No, something interesting is afoot. And as much as people want to blame everything on Bush, I don't think he's responsible for this. Someone is, though.
War is never straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Also in terms of any intelligence related action (Score:5, Insightful)
What you don't do is send in some guy to much with it, take their communications down, then do nothing, then still do nothing as they fix it and start to work on alleviating the problem in the future. That is even less useful than just leaving it alone.
As a precursor to military action, something like this makes sense only if idiots are running the show. Not only is it going to do no real good (who gives a shit if civilians can't get on the Internet? It is the internal military links that are the issue) but it makes it less likely that any sort of complete blackout would be achieved. I guarantee the companies involved in this aren't just going to fix the cable and go "Ok well that'll probably never happen again." They are going to try and figure out why this happened, and what can be done to prevent it.
Re:Tests in preparation for a US government invasi (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh please (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Politicians rarely tell you their point of view, or what they are really going to do. They tell you what you want to hear. Can you point me to any Iranian actions that support a "threat" scenario? I don't care for politicians' words anymore, usually it's opinion making and swaying, but little if any substance.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Operation Desert Storm [wikipedia.org]
Operation Urgent Fury [wikipedia.org]
History rarely remembers the successful campaigns. Mostly, we remember the screw-ups. Unfortunately, the brass remembers it the other way around.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Four Reasons No TAP (Score:5, Insightful)
They could someone reroute some of the data on the cable and even use stolen or leased lines on the existing cable for their purpose... but they couldn't steal all of the signal without a way of back hauling home (to their office).
England has always spied on all the data it could get its hands on and the US and every other country that can, probably does as well..
My guess if these cuts are connected it's more to force the data to route through specific nodes that anything else, and as I have said elsewhere since phone calls run on these same cables, they might not be even after internet data. Perhaps someone wants to catch someone calling home...
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Just as ironic is the fact that even though they didn't fight in Gulf War II, Iran won the war.
The U.S. has lost because we have failed to achieve our major strategic objectives -to create a stable, Western-style democracy in Iraq and beat back Islamic terrorism- and instead we have been left weaker in every single way. We have no credibility and no allies, so we're weak on the diplomatic front. Our military is overextended and its readiness to fight another war has been reduced. We're poorer, by about a trillion dollars.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved: the threat of Iraq and the threat of the U.S. have both been neutralized. Iraq is no longer a threat, because Saddam has been deposed, the military is destroyed, and the new government is Shiite, and too weak to stand up to Iran. The United States is no longer a threat: we can't use diplomacy against Iran, because even if we had proof they were up to something, no one will believe us, and few of our allies will back us up because we're so unpopular abroad. We can't use military force, because we don't have the troops to spare, and again it's unlikely we could get any other countries to assist in a military effort. We do have aircraft and cruise missiles, so in theory we could use airstrikes. But if we try anything, they can use the Shiite militias to attack our forces in Iraq and stir up the civil war there, so even a limited air war with Iran would be tough. Finally, any major conflict with Iran would threaten the oil supply, and with it, the world economy.
So we won't attack Iran, because we can't. And Iran knows it. Their president is a belligerent idiot, they harass our destroyers with their gunboats, they kidnap British seamen, and they send arms to Iraqi insurgents, and they continue to pursue nuclear weapons, all because they know there's not a god damn thing the U.S. can do about it. These are not the actions of a country that is afraid of imminent invasion.
Re:Cue... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, but even Israel would be pushed to attack Iran right now. They have enough domestic problems anyway, but the reason they can bomb Syria and Lebanon with impunity is because a) they have a much stronger military and b) their enemy's presumption that the US will back them up. Neither of these are the case with Iran and geographically it's much more complicated. I suspect one of the reasons Iran continues to fund Hezbollah is to keep Israel busy in its own backyard.
As to nuclear weapons, even if they do have them (after all having everyone believe you have them is as good as actually having them), they would very soon lose all of their allies if they started posturing around them. In Israel's case they are strictly for self-defence only.
Re:Also in terms of any intelligence related actio (Score:3, Insightful)
The enemy thinks the problem is gone and is even less likely to audit the communications system.
Both strategies have their place, but you get much more information if the enemy thinks their communications are secure than you do by blowing everything up.
Re:Cue... (Score:4, Insightful)
Here are the ways in which we lost:
1. We didn't stabilize the country.
- This assumes we didn't want a never-ending civil war in Iraq. Not necessarily the case.
2. We didn't get a Western-style democracy installed.
- When have we ever executed regime-change and actually let the people decide who the new leader was? I don't think there is any precedent to believe that's what we really wanted.
3. We didn't fight terrorism.
- I thought it was common knowledge that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Saddam didn't like Al Queda, nor did he like their radical Islamic influence on his secular government. They were enemies.
4. We didn't prevent additional radicals from becoming terrorists.
- Assumes we don't want a never-ending War on Terror. I thought people like McCain have declared we are destined to have one anyway. Relates to number 5.
5. We spent loads of money.
- Only a problem to those that spent it. Not to those that received it. People heavily invested in the defense industry profit from war. People like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and most of the rest of this administration. All made big profits from the war. Also, preventing these uncontrolled dictators like Saddam from doing something outrageous like nationalizing the oil fields can be prevented, enhancing oil profits. Most of the same people profit.
6. We will need to occupy Iraq for decades.
- Perhaps we wanted to build those bases in a very strategic oil-heavy region.
7. We lost many soldier's lives.
- Only matters if they're your children. I don't see many Bush-Jr.'s in Iraq, do you?
From that perspective, we are winning.
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Iran rattles it's sabers from time to time (subjecting British soldiers to games of ping-pong, for instance), but it hasn't gained the nation the negotiation position that even North Korea enjoys. And Iran's oil supply has always been their bargaining chip, their ticket to being a country with any money or power. Claiming it's a by-product of the recent war is silly.
escalation? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cue... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obama is never going to be nominated, for reasons I posted eight years ago on another forum. He is being advised in foreign affairs by Zbignew Brzezinski (if I spelled that right, w00t!) and even if he is nominated and wins will be pro-war. Hillary! must prove she has a bigger strap-on than any of her peers with real ones. Mccain, of course, has publicly stated that he will keep the war going in Iraq for a hundred years. Who knows what Romney thinks? He changes his mind so often it's difficult to keep up with him. Bah.
I would vote for Hillary! solely on the basis that I think she can do the least damage as President because she's a devisive personality (gridlock is Good!), except that I'm afraid that she'll be more likely to go to war than any other candidate.
Bad and difficult times ahead for anyone with a blue passport. Take great care when traveling.
[citation needed] (Score:3, Insightful)
Now how do you know that? Has the NSA, CIA, or DOD ever wrote an article or given an interview on the trials and tribulations of tapping undersea lines? Or are you just confidently bullshiting on how you think it might work based upon your simplistic understanding of the matter?
Well, let me tell you how I think it works, based upon mine. I think that the providers localize the spot of the outage by communicating to the series of regenerators both sides of the cut. Then they further estimate where the outage is by sending bursts of light down each side of the broken fiberoptic line and measuring how long it takes to get it back (the cut ends effectively acting like mirrors), using an instrument called an optical time-domain reflectometer [wikipedia.org].
So, cutting a line to splice somewhere else would be absolutely pointless, because it would be detectable and would even be more dangerous for any kind of clandestine operation because it would attract undue attention. There are thousands of undersea cables and we're all talking about these four. If this was some kind of CIA or NSA mission it was the biggest clusterfuck ever.
-Grym
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:3, Insightful)
The US certainly has the necessary resources to carry out this attack. Many first-world countries do. If you could steal a rich first-world university's underwater gear and had people who figure out how it works, you could probably manage it, but getting to Iran, Egypt, and Qatar in a few days and cutting their cables -- well, you'd need several teams working on it.
I don't see the relationship between these countries, but that's more betraying my ignorance.
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:3, Insightful)
They are the perfect asymetrical target.
Given a man, a saw, a speedboat, a scuba suit and time (to search for the cable), this seems trivial. From what I've heard, one cable leaves out of a particular town (which I know but will leave out here) in california that serves most of india.
And it is not like these are heavily armored cables. You are basically looking at the same problem as the pipelines in south america. Something easy to destroy that goes across hundreds of miles of unguarded wilderness.
Re:[Citation Needed] --NT (Score:5, Insightful)
The vast majority of the respective populations are not irrational, psychotic and unstable.
Re:Fun with Bayes (Score:4, Insightful)
All of them. But since you're asking me specifically, let's go through it:
But let's talk about the rationale for his analysis for a second. First of all, he assumes that cable failures are independent events and are randomly distributed. But is there a good reason to do this? What if they aren't. What if failures in one cables increase the likelihood of failures in other cables a la the New York City Blackout of 2006. Furthermore, what about seismic events? In 2006, six Asian undersea cables were disabled in a two-day period. He could have similarly made some bullshit analysis then--coming up with an even more "certain" result, making it seem as if a conspiracy was afoot--despite the fact that the failures were, in fact, the result of natural phenomenon, the Hengchun earthquake [wikipedia.org].
Quite simply, in the absence of objective data, I wouldn't. Computing a probability based upon made-up numbers usually just gives you the answer that you assumed to be true all along. You might as well follow your intuition, at that point, and not kid yourself with fake probabilities and statistics.
I don't disagree with Bayes' theorem (or Occam's Razor), jackass. I disagree with using it incorrectly in an intellectually lazy way to try and "prove" a half-baked notion. My spam filter uses hundreds of thousands of objective datapoints to accurately identify spam. It's programmers didn't just program four datapoints of what they thought spam would look like and then call it a day. How effective do you think it would be if they had? Then why are you giving so much credence to this guy's "work."
-Grym