Guest post by 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?
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.
When those lines went down last time it immediately impacted financial trading. I am watching the bank communications right now and we are not impacted. I find it unlikely that traffic is significantly affected in anyway.
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.
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”.
There were various sources that said between North America and Asia, and then other sources that said between Italy and Egypt… so I stuck to one source that seemed reliable enough. Sorry about that.
Merry Christmas
Free Christmas Gifts:
http://video-converter-for-mac.blogspot.com/2008/12/chrismas-gifts-…
I’d say it’s too soon to start coming up with such inflammatory deductions until there’s more evidence. Right now it’s: “We don’t know how it happened, but sometimes it’s anchors.” I think I’ll stick with that answer until something else comes up.
At least that explains why the amount of spam I get has dropped to 0. Can we keep those lines down please??
You get spam?! My god, man, are you living in the dark ages? For the past few years, I’ve been using Gmail and Thunderbird, and not once has any spam actually appeared on my computer – sure, if I go to the gmail web interface, the spam folder is full of it, but it’s a total non-issue to me since I only ever use Thunderbird.
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.
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
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’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.
From a ISP standpoint it has not decreased, however it would be nice to block the IP blocks from Asia and Africa and I bet it would drop by 85% at least.
Nothing good comes from asia anyway except for black market software, and infected web sites. Keep the link to Japan up, the rest of asia can go back to the 19th century.
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…
Why would one think that? Has it escaped you that a large percentage of technical people are also extremely childish and outwardly emotional drama queens?
Ideally. I’ve found that that using SpamBayes as a POP3 proxy works fairly well too.
please do NOT use spf, but use dkim for this. this has all of the advantages of spf but none of the disadvantages. but i’m getting off topic here.
I agree, the Asians are all spammers and illiterates..
http://engrishfunny.com/
Let’s keep the lines severed.. kthxbia.
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):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_spam#Origin_of_spam
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.
Due to the global financial crisis, there is no trading going on anyway. Couldn’t have happened at a better time!
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
Ignorant comments, no? I mean, you’d deny the whole of Asia and Africa from Internet, just because you can’t set your spam filters correctly?
That would mean I would get cut too :/
You didn’t ask us for permission to access the Internet.
Gee, are you the Internet Parents or something?
Assuming you were trying to be funny, it didn’t work.
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
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).