by David Steven | Feb 1, 2008 | Conflict and security
A third underwater data cable has now been severed:
A submarine cable in the Middle East has been snapped, adding to global net problems caused by breaks in two lines under the Mediterranean on Wednesday.
The Falcon cable, owned by a firm that operates one of the previously damaged cables, was snapped on Friday morning.
The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom.
Following the earlier break internet services were severely disrupted in Egypt, the Middle East and India.
There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.
One’s tempted to quote Goldfinger: “”They have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”
It’s probably just an accident, but repairs will will take a week or more and Richard Stiennon, who points out that “anchors have an uncanny way of finding cables just as backhoes are the bane of terrestrial fiber”, warns of possible cascading failure:
What if US oil and gas companies that have operations in the Mideast put some back up services there? What if another coincidence shuts down a data center in the US and the backups cannot occur in time because of unreachable storage devices? What about all the “Business Process Outsourcing” handled in India? Try telling Dell, or Microsoft, both companies that rely on Indian support services, that “most of our content is here”.
The US has had its own problems. Backhoes have taken out big chunks of the Internet. Routing flaps, bad route announcements, attacks on Cisco vulnerabilities could all impair our beloved Internet.
It’s one ‘Net now. Anyone relying on the Internet for their business has to be concerned about its inherent vulnerability and prepare for it as best they may.
Further reading: As I recall Space Wars: The First Hours of World War III starts out with a few severed undersea cables… things then get a lot worse.
by Alex Evans | Feb 1, 2008 | Influence and networks, South Asia
Sha Zukang, the smooth-dressing, tough-talking USG in charge of the dedicated men and women of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, is in The Onion…
From the moment I showed up at the General Assembly, the other countries knew I was trouble. They took one look at my three- button navy suit jacket and my dark, searing eyes, and prayed to whatever God they knew up there to keep their daughters safe from me. I guess it was the way I just waltzed right in, pulled my collar up, looked Ol’ Ban Ki-moon dead in the eyes and asked if we were gonna sit around talking like a bunch of nancies all day or do something about child slavery in Burma. “Just what are you the U.N. Undersecretary of?” they asked. “Well,” I said, stubbing out a cigarette on my wingtips. “What do you got?”
See, I’m not like those other public servants who are dedicated to saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war and promoting social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom. I’m dangerous. I play by my own set of detailed bureaucratic procedures. I’m a rebel. A rogue. And I make the ladies swoon from sub-Saharan Africa to the shantytowns of the Mekong River Delta.
So don’t call me Undersecretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs Sha Zukang. Call me Daddy.
by David Steven | Feb 1, 2008 | North America
US democrats are trying to take out John McCain by suggesting that, underneath all the Republican bluster, he’s really one of them…
by Alex Evans | Feb 1, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
John Robb’s thinking about resilient communities over at Global Guerrillas:
It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows. In short, we’ve lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral system that is operating in ways that we don’t fully understand (nor will we).
The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won’t work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I’ve latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.
This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list): energy, food, security (both active and passive), communications and transportation.
C.f. my recent post here on top-down versus bottom-up resilience.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 1, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
I’ll have more to say on this soon, but the fact that the French EU deployment in Chad seems to be coinciding with, maybe even stimulating, an increase in violence there raises some interesting possibilities. Like the EU having a war on.
