Cable Break Causes Wide Internet Outage
Jan 31, 2008
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
NEW DELHI (AP) - At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp. (SYMC), a security software maker based in California. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the scope was wide: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labor for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by Friday, the state news agency reported.
The snapped cables - which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb - caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.
There was concern for millions of South Asians who send money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards - but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi's UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.
The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company's 53 branches to send money home.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.
Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well - but smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.
"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If something happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry will suffer."
Many larger U.S. companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were intact.
Citigroup Inc. spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company's customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."
Intel Corp. (INTC) said its Indian operation, which employs about 3,000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.
"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel's South Asia business operations.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.
Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism - but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Finger-Thin Cables Tie Internet Together
Jan 31, 2008
By PETER SVENSSON
NEW YORK (AP) - The lines that tie the globe together by carrying phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick where they lie on the ocean floor.
The foundation for a connected world seems quite fragile, an impression reinforced this week when a break in two cables in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted communications across the Middle East and into India and neighboring countries.
Yet the network itself is fairly resilient. In fact, cables are broken all the time, usually by fishing lines and ship anchors, and few of us notice. It takes a confluence of factors for a cable break to cause an outage.
"Most telecom companies have capacity at multiple systems, so if one goes out, they simply reroute to a different system," said Stephan Beckert, analyst at research firm TeleGeography in Washington. "It's just that in this case, both the main route and the backup route got cut for a lot of companies."
The two cables - FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 - were cut on the ocean floor just north of Alexandria, Egypt.
By an accident of geography and global politics, Egypt is a choke point in the global communications network, just as it is with global shipping. The reasons are the same: The country touches both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which flows into the India Ocean.
The slim fiber-optic cables that carry the world's communications are much like ships, in that they're the cheapest way for carrying things over long distances. Pulling cable overland is much more expensive and requires negotiation with landowners and governments.
So fiber-optic cables that go from Europe to India take the sea route via Egypt's Suez Canal, just as ships do.
Another Mediterranean cable makes land not far away, in Israel.
But there's no cable overland from Israel into Jordan and to the Persian Gulf, which could have provided a redundant connection for the Gulf States and India. Going overland would have been more expensive and politically difficult - Israel and Arab countries would have to cooperate.
There is also no route that goes through Russia, Iran and Pakistan to India. The terrain is rugged, Pakistan is politically unstable, and India and Pakistan are not on good terms.
With two of the three cables passing through Suez cut, traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to route eastward, around most of the globe.
The main route goes through Japan and the United States, crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. According to Beckert, this is normally the cheap way to go for Indian traffic, since capacity is high. However, the distance means more time required to reach Europe and get a response.
The other route from India to Europe goes over China into Russia and along the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Egypt is not the only check point in the global network. The ocean just south of Taiwan proved to be one in December 2006, when an earthquake cut seven of eight cables passing through the area, slowing down communications in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia for months.
Another possible vulnerability is the U.S. island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. It is the spider at the center of a web cables from the United States, Japan, Australia, the Philippines and China.
Both cables that connect the United States to Australia and New Zealand run over Hawaii, creating another choke point.
These bottlenecks are likely to go away, however, as telecoms build more and more lines. Another U.S.-Australia line is scheduled to be completed soon, according to Beckert, and a U.S.-China line that bypasses Japan is also in the works.
But it will be years before the network across Asia is as resilient as the trans-Atlantic network, where multiple high-capacity lines over different routes provide a connection that's almost impossible to disrupt. And the factors that make the Suez Canal a vulnerable point now will likely remain.
Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" communications networks, he said.
Yet the owners of the undersea cables aren't very concerned with terrorism, according to Beckert. They're too busy worrying about fishing boats.
"They want to publish maps of their cables as widely as possible, so fishing crews know where they are," Beckert said. "The risk of accidental cuts is much, much greater than the risk of deliberate cuts."
It's a series of cables, not tubes!
Jan 31, 2008
WHEATLAND, Wis. (AP) -- Having a tornado demolish her home was bad enough. But when Ann Beam received a $2,000 cable bill a few weeks later, she was floored. "I just couldn't believe it," Beam said. "I was like, 'What are they thinking?'"
Time Warner Cable billed a number of Wheatland residents for equipment destroyed in the Jan. 7 twister that struck the southeast corner of the state. Beam's bill covered five cable boxes and five remote controls.
She immediately called the cable company, but a man who identified himself as a manager said there was nothing the company could do.
"They said I would have to take the bill and turn it in to my insurance company," Beam said.
But her cable equipment was nine years old, and the insurance company would pay only a depreciated value that wouldn't cover her bill, she said.
Time Warner Cable spokeswoman Celeste Flynn said Beam's case was simply a misunderstanding. An unspecified number of customers were charged for unreturned equipment, but only because they canceled or transferred their service without mentioning their requests were tornado-related, she said.
"We understand this is an unusual situation," Flynn said. "All they will need to do is call and we will take the equipment off their account."
Time Warner Cable has tried to contact affected customers but privacy laws have impeded those efforts, she said. [Ed. Note: Pfui! a routine lie.]
Rare winter tornadoes that destroyed more than two dozen homes and damaged nearly 80 others in Kenosha County on Jan. 7. The damage was estimated at $18 million.
Telegraph dot co dot Uk
By Lucy Cockcroft
Last Updated: 2:11am GMT 28/01/2008
Criminal gangs are using dwarves in a ruse to steal from the luggage holds of long-distance coaches, by hiding them inside suitcases, according to police.
The bizarre crime is on the rise in Sweden and officers say thieves have got away with thousands of pounds in cash, jewellery and other valuables in recent months.
Gangs are said to sneak the dwarves into the luggage hold, hidden inside baggage.
Then, once the journey has begun, the stowaways are free to rifle through the bags of other passengers without fear of being apprehended.
Before the coach arrives at its destination the dwarves take their loot back into their suitcase, zip themselves inside and wait to be collected by their partners in crime.
Swebus, which takes thousands of British tourists on holiday across Sweden, is among the coach firms targeted.
A spokesman said: “We have had reports about several thefts by dwarves on the stretch between Vasteras and Stockholm.
“We’re thinking of installing video cameras.”
Police in Stockholm have warned the scam is becoming a problem.
A spokesman said: “We are looking at our records to identify criminals of limited stature.”
Thursday, January 24, 2008
SANDY SPRINGS, Ga. (AP) -- A bank robbery suspect was arrested while waiting at a bus stop to make her getaway, police said. Channel Monae Gaskin, 22, was arrested Wednesday after a police officer saw her waiting for a bus and matched her to the description of the robbery suspect. She has been charged with robbery.
"That just wasn't too bright," Sandy Springs police Lt. Steve Rose said of the escape plan.
A woman went into a bank shortly after 1 p.m. Wednesday and demanded money, police said. She did not show a weapon.
After being given a bag of cash, she ran across a parking lot to a restaurant, where a dye bomb exploded and sprayed orange-colored ink on her and the money, police said.
She left the restaurant and then tried to stash the dye-stained clothes and money in a bathroom at a nearby grocery store, Rose said.
The woman apparently changed clothes and went to a bus stop behind the grocery store, Rose said.
But what made Gaskin think she could escape on public transportation? Police say she told them she had done it before.
Gaskin admitted that on Jan. 15, she robbed a bank in DeKalb County and then got on a bus, police said.
The woman was taken Wednesday to the Fulton County Jail and likely will be turned over to DeKalb County authorities and charged with the Jan. 15 robbery, police said.
I guess no one told Channel Monae Gaskin's mom it's actually spelt 'Chanel.'
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
SYDNEY, Australia -- An Australian retiree won a $1.8 million lottery prize, then lost it, and then won it again Wednesday through a court ruling.
Werner Reinhold bought the lottery ticket at a newsstand in Australia's largest city of Sydney on Sept. 19, 1995. His original ticket did not print correctly, so he asked for a new one, which turned out to be the winner.
But when Reinhold, now 73, went back to claim the $1.8 million jackpot, he discovered that the replacement ticket had been canceled, not the misprinted original, and was unable to claim the prize.
He sued NSW Lotteries, which oversees lottery tickets in New South Wales state, and the newsstand which sold him the ticket.
Supreme Court Judge Reginald Barrett awarded Reinhold $1.8 million in damages, citing negligence and breach of contract by the newsstand and the state lottery company. Barrett had not yet ruled on what portion of the award each party should pay.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) -- A gang of Swedish criminals was seconds away from completing a digital bank heist when an alert employee literally pulled the plug on their brazen scam, investigators said Wednesday.
The would be bank robbers had placed "advanced technical equipment" under the employee's desk that allowed them to take control of his computer remotely, prosecutor Thomas Balter Nordenman said in a statement.
The employee discovered the device shortly after he realized his computer had started an operation to transfer "millions" from the bank into another account, Nordenman said.
"By pulling out the cable to the device, the employee managed to stop the intended transfer at the last second," he said.
The foiled heist happened in August at a bank in Uppland county, north of Stockholm, police said. They announced it only Wednesday after seven suspects, all from the Stockholm region, were arrested this week while allegedly preparing another heist.
Police did not name the suspects, but said many of them have prior fraud and theft convictions. Investigators did not give other details on the device, or how it was placed under the desk.
That's simple - a dwarf was stashed in a hockey-gear bag and smuggled into the bank; the dwarf sneaked out, crawled under the desk and placed the device.
That, or a charwoman or "security" guard done it, but I much prefer the dwarf-in-a-hockey-gear-bag trick.
by Rory Raven
What evil lurks beneath the streets of Providence?
If you find yourself strolling down Benefit Street on an autumn afternoon, preferably around sunset, stop for a moment to admire #135. A fine yellow clapboard house set up on and built partway into a little hill, it has a good-sized yard where the current inhabitant grows roses. This is the Stephen Harris House, built in 1763. It is also known as "The Shunned House," from the H.P. Lovecraft story of the same name. But the Harris House's sad history begins long before Lovecraft wrote the tale.
The House in History
Benefit is one of the oldest streets in Providence; it was originally much narrower and called Back Street. None of the original houses are left; all the houses you see are built on the sites of older houses, dating from the original settlement.
Because of its policy of religious tolerance, early Providence had no common burying ground, no single place where everyone agreed to bury their dead. So, in accordance with the practice of the day, each family had a plot on their own land which served as a family graveyard. To us, this might seem a bit ghoulish, but it was just business as usual in colonial America.
Around the time of the Revolution, Back Street was widened and straightened and renamed Benefit Street, to relieve the heavy traffic along the Towne Street (now South Main) and to be "a Benefit for All." The remains in all those little family plots were removed to North Burial Ground, then just recently opened. Allegedly, though, some of the bodies were left behind, and still remain buried here to this day. And, according to local legend, a Huguenot couple lived, died, and was buried on the site of #135, and were among the bodies that were missed.
When Stephen Harris built this house, his family fell on hard times. Harris was a well-to-do merchant in Providence, and owned several merchant vessels; it is said that a few of those vessels were lost at sea shortly after the completion of the house. This led to other financial problems. Mrs. Harris also had a hard time—several of her children died, and others were stillborn. (I was told by the current resident, who has done her own research into the house's history, that there was never a live birth in the house.) Probably the most (melo)dramatic part of the legend, however, is Mrs. Harris's descent into madness, and her confinement to an upstairs room. She was occasionally heard to shriek out the window of this room, but in French—a language she didn't know. Where could she have picked it up? Dead Huguenots, anyone?
The house had a bad reputation for years, and stayed in the Harris family for generations because they were unable to sell it. It subsequently fell into a state of general disrepair and decrepitude. This may have had as much to do with its history as with the fact that Benefit Street became a slum around the 1920s. Finally, during the revival of the 1970s, the current inhabitants of the house bought it from Harris's descendants and restored it beautifully. You may notice some signs on the gatepost, in French—clearly they have a sense of humor about the unusual history and reputation of their home.
The House in Fiction
H.P. Lovecraft was a noted horror writer who (aside from a short time spent in New York City) lived in Providence his entire life, from 1890 to 1937, and he frequently wrote for pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. (Interestingly, when Lovecraft submitted "The Shunned House" to Weird Tales in 1924, it was rejected by the editor, Farnsworth Wright, as being too wordy and slow. It was finally bought by the pulp's subsequent editor, after both Wright and Lovecraft had died.) Lovecraft often incorporated actual historical events and bits of local folklore into his stories to add verisimilitude to the fantastic events he described, as he does in "The Shunned House," even though he changed the name Stephen Harris to William Harris.
The story begins with its narrator informing us that "From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent." He then describes Edgar Allen Poe's frequent strolls along Benefit Street, a route which took him by the Shunned House.
Now the irony is this: In this walk, so many times repeated, the world's greatest master of the terrible and the bizarre was obliged to pass a particular house on the eastern side of the street; a dingy, antiquated structure perched on the abruptly rising side hill, with a great unkempt yard dating from a time when the region was partly open country. It does not appear that he ever wrote or spoke of it, nor is there any evidence that he even noticed it. And yet that house, to the two persons in possession of certain information, equals or outranks in horror the wildest phantasy of the genius who so often passed it unknowingly, and stands starkly leering as a symbol of all that is unutterably hideous.
At another point, Lovecraft mentions that the Harris family hired a servant by the name of Ann White, "a morose woman" from rural Exeter, where folks had some pretty "uncomfortable" superstitions.
There are other references and bits of lore along the way, but I won't spoil them for you. Go read the story.
Ideas to Ponder
Lovecraft was an incredibly prolific letter-writer, as can be seen in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters (edited by S. T. Joshi & David E. Schultz, Ohio University Press, 2000). The collection groups Lovecraft's letters loosely by subject, but there is one section, entitled "The Blank Period" (1908-1913), when Lovecraft apparently wrote no letters at all. He was evidently very reluctant to speak of this period of his life, and makes only vague mention of it in his later letters. Joshi and Schultz, along with other scholars, suspect that Lovecraft may have suffered some kind of nervous breakdown during this time; the letters have passages such as "my health completely gave way," and mention "shadowy depressions."
The woman who now lives at #135 Benefit Street told me that, in researching the house, she found that Dr. Bates's Electropathic Sanatorium stood next door. (You can still see the outline of the former building on the wall of the next house: On the site is now a vest-pocket park.) She speculated that Lovecraft may have been a guest of Dr. Bates's during his blank period. After all, madness did run in his family—both his parents died at Butler Hospital—and his characters go mad regularly. And, Lovecraft was in his late teens and early twenties then, which is the time that many mental illnesses manifest themselves. So perhaps he got the idea about the Shunned House when receiving treatment next door, or perhaps he wasn't a patient and the mere proximity of the Shunned House to the Sanatorium got him thinking.
There's also another possible Lovecraft connection to the Shunned House. In L. Sprague de Camp's Lovecraft: A Biography (Doubleday, 1974) there's a mention of Lillian Clark, one of Lovecraft's aunts, living in the house for a time shortly before the death of Lovecraft's mother. She may have rented there for a time; no one knows.
So obviously, the Shunned House has a few mysteries in it yet...
http://www.quahog.org/attractions/index.php?id=139
January 31, 2008
BEIJING (AP) -- Chinese export safety authorities said Thursday they were investigating a company that made insecticide-tainted dumplings that sickened 10 people in Japan.
The frozen dumplings made by Tianyang Food Processing were contaminated with traces of an organic phosphorus insecticide called methamidophos, which caused severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarrhea, Japanese officials said.
China's General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which oversees export safety, said it had heard the news and was "paying great attention to it."
"We have quickly gotten in touch with the Japanese side to get a detailed understanding of the situation," the AQSIQ said in a statement posted on its Web site. "We have already started an investigation and will release the results in a timely manner."
Telephone calls to Tianyang and its parent company, Hebei Foodstuffs Import & Export Group, were not answered on Thursday.
The reputation of China's exports have suffered the past year after a number of potentially deadly chemicals were found in goods ranging from toothpaste to toys to a pet food ingredient.
It declared a four-month quality and safety improvement campaign which ended in December a success.
Japanese health officials said they suspended imports of all products from Tianyang and were conducting a nationwide survey of any additional dumplings-related health problems.
Japan's Health Ministry has also ordered the dumplings' importer and distributor, JT Foods Co. Ltd. - an affiliate of Japan's largest tobacco company - to recall the tainted dumplings. JT Foods had distributed 13 tons of dumplings each in the prefectures (states) of Chiba and Hyogo, the ministry said.
"I'm afraid that there was a rather loose safety awareness on the Chinese side," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said at a regular news conference Thursday. "Now the problems have occurred, we urge China to closely investigate what exactly is going on."
Three people in Hyogo and seven in Chiba near Tokyo were sickened, some of the seriously including a 5-year-old girl who regained consciousness after falling into a coma, the ministry said.
Traces of methamidophos were found in the dumplings, their containers and the patients' vomit, it said.
Japan has in recent months been hit with its own slew of domestic food safety scandals involving recycled red bean filling, mislabeled meat and the use of out-of-date milk, cream and eggs in a popular brand of cream puffs.
In 2000, Snow Brand Milk Products Co. shipped old milk and sickened more than 14,000 people, the country's worst-ever outbreak of food poisoning.
