Though the cause is still unknown, three of the four undersea Internet cables that run from North America to Asia were cut, causing outages in Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and a dozen or so other countries. That is a lot of angry World of Warcraft players. It's supposed to have been from ships' anchors, though even two downed cables at one time is very rare, so who's to say it wasn't sabotage?
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Member since:
2006-03-23
The cables that have been cut, SeMeWe3, SeMeWe4, and FLAG are all asian-eu cables, NOT asian-na cables. Those cables run across the pacific. What has been cut is most of the asia-eu traffic. From eastern asia, most traffic is being re-routed through the US (where quite a bit of eu-asia traffic flows anyway). The folks in the med basin, and western asia are in much worse shape, some loosing over 60% of their bandwidth.
These are the same cables that were cut by a ship anchor early this year, in about the same area.
Member since:2008-12-20
Member since:2005-07-12
Most likely because that same set were cut once before, the infrastructure to reroute it should it happen again was already in place, lessening the damage.
A lot of times that's the only way backup plans get implemented, to have a major accident that was not planned as a possibility.
Since it was so recent, those new safeguards were probably well maintained. Give it five to ten years where everyone gets relaxed, then you have the disasters that cause major impacts across the board.
Member since:2005-07-06
If that's true (and I don't doubt that it is) then the government & trading houses who rely on those cables need to shape up and start to treat them as the priority they clearly are I.e. funding dedicated repair ships and patrolling the length of the cable to look for potential problems before they happen.
If you rely on the Internet you can't continue to treat it as a magical place where data "just happens".
Member since:2008-12-06
Member since:2008-12-25
Merry Christmas
Free Christmas Gifts:
http://video-converter-for-mac.blogspot.com/2008/12/chrismas-gifts-...
Member since:
2006-01-20
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2005-12-02
Member since:2006-11-30
Great, cover up the problem or pretend it doesn't exist because it doesn't affect you. That's like saying, "well my cable modem works well and I'm in Asia, so that fiber transit must not be important". Meanwhile all the data is being rerouted through the US at much higher cost.
There is a whole world a lot bigger than most PC users can comprehend when it comes to planning and running large systems they've come to rely on.
For those of us that administer mail servers, Spam is and will always be a problem no different than a DDoS attack. Bayesian, RBLs, OCR of images - they use a lot of computing resources that aren't free, not to mention bandwidth sucked up by this crap. Last I saw, over 90% of email was spam.
Member since:2008-04-10
I didn't mean it wasn't a problem at all, I meant it wasn't a problem to me. My comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek. There's no reason any home user should have to deal with spam these days thanks to well-run mail servers, yet so many still insist on using Outlook Express with their ISP's mail server and plunging cash into ineffective client-side anti-spam software.
Edited 2008-12-20 04:04 UTC
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-12-02
"I've never found Thunderbird's spam filter to be all that effective - E.g., it's common for spam to make it into my inbox even after I've marked previous messages (with identical content & subject lines) as spam."
I agree. The best spam fighting mechanism is a well configured mailserver with spamassassin, and make sure to use the SPF record.
Wow..did not realize a joking comment about keeping them down would go this far.
Member since:2008-11-16
Member since:2008-11-16
I agree however since it was not politically correct on here so you get negative numbers on here...
Imagine that, we know Spam and viruses, hacking ect 99% comes from Asia but being politically correctness is what the world runs on today.
Being a technology forum one would think commonsense would prevail with all of the brute force ssh port 22 attacks that start within a day of opening the port up on the internet...
I have blocked entire IP ranges from Asia, Africa, and Europe namely Amsterdam seems to be ripe with misconduct. And my problems go away, I will be blocking a lot of Asia, Africa and some of Europe...
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2007-04-29
Member since:2005-07-08
It is a myth that Asia and the third world would be most guilty for spam when the western world, and especially the USA, is as big if not often bigger source for spam. Besides, people guilty for spam seem to be a relatively small bunch of criminals on only.
Origin of spam (according to Wikipedia):
In terms of volume of spam the major sources of spam in the third quarter of 2008 were:
* The United States (18.9%)
* Russia (8.3%)
* Turkey (8.2%)
* China (5.4%)
* Brazil (4.5%)
When grouped by continents, spam comes mostly from:
* Asia (39.8%)
* Europe (23.9%)
* North America (21.8%)
* South America (13.2%)
In terms of number of IP addresses the biggest spammer countries are: the United States, China, and Russia, followed by Japan, Canada, and South Korea.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam#Origin_of_spam
Member since:
2008-12-20
I highly doubt that there is anything significant going on. Major undersea cables do not get cut and not make it into any major media outlets. Also, as everyone has pointed out, every report of this issue, as few as there are, are full of inaccuracies and are clearly not being written by people with detailed information.
I work in technology for a major global financial firm in an area that is current supporting those trades that they claim they are trying to close between North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia and we have seen no change in traffic whatsoever and no alerts have been raised. If financial traffic was being impacted to us or to other banks we would know immediately especially as Friday night is one of the busiest times of the week for trading technology usage.
Member since:2006-12-16
Member since:2006-03-23
Interesting view point there - if you were a major financial trading house, and were actually responsible for network transit, I would hope (for your employers sake) that you would actually subscribe to mailing lists like nanog, and outages. If you were, you would see that there was a whole bunch of traffic on the lists from around the world as those links went dark.
If you can't hear anything, I suggest you take your fingers out of your ears. If you rely on CNN (or, for you, maybe Fox) to tell you something bad has happened in global transit, you are about as big a dufus as you sound.
In case you can't find your way around the net, here's a lightreading article on the cut, and it has links to folks who run the cables (reliance), FT who are all on record regarding the issue. It also quotes bloomberg news covering the cut - but then again, I guess bloomberg isn't a major media news outlet for the "financial" world....
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=169580
http://www.mail.com/Article.aspx?articlepath=APNews\General-World-...
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aBa0lTN.dcoQ&re...
Edited 2008-12-22 07:40 UTC
Member since:
2007-07-26
That would mean I would get cut too :/
Member since:2007-03-14
Member since:2005-07-22
Member since:2005-07-07
If you counted spam amounts by country, you'd have to disconnect the entire USA since they're the country that sends out the most spam. (http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2008/10/spamreport....) However, since Asia is so huge what with at least half the world living there, it ends up being the continent that generates the largest amount of spam.
The good news is, Africa is fine since they contribute about 1% towards the global spam count 
Edited 2008-12-21 08:02 UTC
Member since:2005-07-24
As a resident of Oklahoma, USA, I'm curious. How much would that affect the world community? It actually *would* make a certain amount of sense to block us. Not saying that I am advocating that. But I'm interested in what the rest of the world might think about the consequences (if any).
