3 Net cables broken by coincidence

On 4-Feb-2008, at 07:52, George Wade wrote:
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm> What a
> coincidence ! And not reported in the west too much ?
>
> Until they are inspected the cause of breakage, undersea, will not be
> very clear; at the moment it is thought it was by ships anchoring in
> the wrong places.

Yes, but did your read the whole article? Or did they update with more
info?

"The ministry's maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering
the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut
and no ships sailed the area," a statement said.

--
I can't die, I haven't seen The Jolson Story
   - Jetboy

George Wade wrote:
> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm> What a
> coincidence ! And not reported in the west too much ?
>
> Until they are inspected the cause of breakage, undersea, will not be
> very clear; at the moment it is thought it was by ships anchoring in
> the wrong places.

Actually given the number of cables under the oceans these days, I'm surprised they aren't broken more often.

Usually with anchors it's the dragging that causes the break.

David Ross

At 6:52 AM -0800 2/4/08, George Wade wrote:
><http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm> What a
>coincidence ! And not reported in the west too much ?
>
>Until they are inspected the cause of breakage, undersea, will not be
>very clear; at the moment it is thought it was by ships anchoring in
>the wrong places.
>

        Slashdot has some links reporting that a 4th cable near Qatar got
broken on Friday. And the link George posted (and others) claims that there
was no shipping traffic in the regions.

<http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/04/0158249>

        This is starting to seem like the plot to some movie where the
cables get cut in order that some bank vault security system will not work and
the evil mastermind could steal a "million dollars", or something like that.

        Clearly my feelings are not isolated, since Flag Communications
which owns two of the cables says that it is unlikely the damage was
intentional.

<http://www.arabianbusiness.com/510232-flag-plays-down-net-blackout-conspiracy-theories?ln=en>

        Having just watched the Enron documentary "The Smartest Guys in the
Room", maybe the satellite Internet folks cut the cables to drive up their
profits in the mid-east?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron:_The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room>


--
* Johann Beda - contact link: <http://xri.net/=j-beda> *
* Johann's MostlyMac Computer Consulting - <http://mmcc.beda.ca/> *

>Actually given the number of cables under the oceans these days,
>I'm surprised they aren't broken more often.

Actually they are broken, quite often... it just rarely, if ever,
makes the news. Why this series of cuts made the news is beyond me...
perhaps all the Hollywood socialites slept in that day?

While I am not in the long-haul fiber business, I am in a related
industry and as such probably a bit more "tapped into" (if you'll
pardon the pun) the biz than most folks here on TidBITs-Talk. This
note drifted across an operational mailing list I am on earlier today:

At 3:11 AM -0800 2/5/08, BG forwarded:
>+ Notice that there are more issues than what is reported in the
>popular press.
>+ Notice that there are issues with more submarine systems (APCN),
>but they are not "news."
>
>As has been pointed out before, there are always issues with
>submarine systems. That is why we have so many repair ships in the
>global fleet:
>
>http://www.iscpc.org/information/Cableships_1.htm
>http://www.iscpc.org/information/Cableships_2.htm


As such, everyone can put down the tinfoil hats and get back to work.
There is nothing to see here. Just another day with something broken
somewhere. Like with DNS, with cables something somewhere is always
broken, usually in multiple places. Unlike DNS, however that doesn't
mean that something is broken everywhere.

If an entire country is "offline" that usually has NOTHING directly
to do with cables, and everything specifically to do with local
government control of access to everywhere else. If a government
wants to firewall a whole country, they have to build it with a
single point of failure. In these cases, they did, and a cable cut
took them down. Period. These sorts of wounds are self-inflicted.


Regards,

Chuck Goolsbee V.P. Technical Operations
digital.forest Seattle, WA, USA

On Feb 5, 2008, at 6:04 AM, David Ross wrote:

> George Wade wrote:
>> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm> What a
>> coincidence ! And not reported in the west too much ?
>>
>> Until they are inspected the cause of breakage, undersea, will not be
>> very clear; at the moment it is thought it was by ships anchoring in
>> the wrong places.
>
> Actually given the number of cables under the oceans these days, I'm
> surprised they aren't broken more often.
>
> Usually with anchors it's the dragging that causes the break.

The early report--before the third cut and before the bloggers started
spinning their usual traffic-driving conspiracy nonsense
theories--noted that the first two cut cables were located together.
And that the then-firmly-reported ship had anchored in the unusual
place due to extreme weather.

The third cut--not on the same path seemingly--does indeed make one
wonder. But the weather was still bad.

   --John

David Ross wrote:
> George Wade wrote:
>> <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7222536.stm> What a
>> coincidence ! And not reported in the west too much ?
>>
>> Until they are inspected the cause of breakage, undersea, will not be
>> very clear; at the moment it is thought it was by ships anchoring in
>> the wrong places.
>
> Actually given the number of cables under the oceans these days, I'm
> surprised they aren't broken more often.
>
> Usually with anchors it's the dragging that causes the break.

Replying to myself, here's an interesting PDF file.
<http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/World_Map_LR.pdf>
plus some history
http://atlantic-cable.com/Maps/index.htm

and an article about the repairs.

http://www.news.com/Repairs-start-on-Mideast-undersea-cable/2100-1033_3-6229222.html?tag=item

David Ross

David Ross wrote:
 
> Replying to myself, here's an interesting PDF file.
> <http://www1.alcatel-lucent.com/submarine/refs/World_Map_LR.pdf> plus
> some history http://atlantic-cable.com/Maps/index.htm

Also, if you want to know more about undersea cables, I'd recommend this
essay:
<http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html>
Written by SF author Neal Stephenson, it's a tour of the FLAG cable (one
of the cables currently in the news), interspersed with lots of
information on the industry.


Harro de Jong

Conspiracy theories and undersea cables:

<http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech/2008/02/06/conspiracy-theories-behind-those-cut-undersea-cables/>

D A V I D E M E R I C K

On 10/02/2008 9:54 AM, "dnemerick428" <dnemericksmcm.edu> spake thus:

> Conspiracy theories and undersea cables:

Heh, funny :) Sometimes everything does go wrong all at the same time. It's
surprising the number of otherwise quite intelligent people who seem to
think such a thing isn't possible (perhaps from a poor understanding of
probability), and so try to attribute such events to malicious causes.

We had a wonderful example of "everything goes wrong at once" a few years
ago when our Oracle server developed weird internal issues that caused
significant problems with logging in. Then to cap it off, an unrelated disk
in the RAID died. This of course all happened during the week that we were
running our student practical exams. That week was Not Fun :(

--
Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
http://xri.net/=nigel.stanger