Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet 171
judebx writes "Powerful quakes measuring 7 on the Richter scale have struck southern Taiwan and caused damage to undersea communication cables, disrupting telephone and internet services in several parts of Asia. The quake comes on the second anniversary of the Indian Ocean Tsunami, and triggered tsunami warnings. Human casualties, however, have been low so far."
Let's wait and see (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Let's wait and see (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let's wait and see (Score:5, Funny)
I vote for axe handles. Or, tie them to a bed, and smash thier ankles with a sledge hammer. That worked for Cathy Bates.
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I vote for axe handles. Or, tie them to a bed, and smash thier ankles with a sledge hammer. That worked for Cathy Bates.
Now what sort of logic does that make? James Caan spent the rest of the movie [wikipedia.org] in a wheelchair with a typewritter!. The spammers would still be able to spam, but not much else.
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Oh, and gouge out their eyes for good measure; God knows we don't need a blink-typing system available.
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I think there used to be a lot of Taiwanese spam, but you're right, it's been cleared up...
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Re:Let's wait and see (Score:5, Informative)
Here in Malaysia, the internet pretty much disappeared around 2am yesterday (26 hours ago). I went to sleep, figuring it was just a local outage.
The next morning, it still wasn't really working, which is unusual. Most internet users here are English speakers and US content is in high demand, so all most people care about is connectivity to American servers. Some traceroutes showed that the normal crystal-clear 300ms transpacific route from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles had become a 2000ms epic voyage via west Asia, London, and the Atlantic, with 75% packet loss. This is apparently the only backup option that the national ISP has arrangements for.
Later in the day, people started to realize that routes to Thailand and Australia (and from those countries onward) were unaffected by this, so many in Malaysia have begun using public HTTP proxy servers in those two countries. Web site performance thay way is pretty much as good as before the outage. That's no help for SSH, VoIP, SMTP, and the like, though. And I imagine it'll start to get blocked by the proxy operators if it continues for a few more days - Malaysians are a nerdy and bandwidth-ravenous bunch.
It's now 4:30am, and the situation via London is considerably better - 700ms pings and 20% packet loss. But I imagine that when everyone wakes up in a few hours, the link will once again be clogged and we will all return to mourning the loss of the Taiwan cable.
Singapore is in the same boat as Malaysia, though they are - as usual - a bit more on the ball and were able to come up with better-performing alternate links more quickly.
Indonesia is also affected, though I understand there are formalised arrangements via Australia.
Nobody knows or cares about Brunei, but if I had to guess, I'd say they are probably completely dependent on Malaysia for IP connectivity.
North of here (Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam) connectivity does not seem to be significantly impacted.
No idea about the Philippines, but it's usually safe to assume they have gotten the worst of any unpleasant situation.
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How wrong I was. We now have a route via Hong Kong and Japan on NTT. 500ms pings to USA, 0% packet loss.
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>> situation.
I'm an American living in Manila (fil-a-peens) for the geographically challenged. 80% of all ISP's are down or experiencing issues (major) except for one
PLDT (The Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company) http://www.pldt.com.ph/ [pldt.com.ph]
I don't know *HOW* they did it, but they put humpty dumpty back together again quickly. Its amazing, I don't expect a solid BGP multi honed netwo
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Wow, so this isn't just a nightmare. I thought
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I think it really depends on where you are. I'm still in awe that I haven't had so much as a hiccup. The net cafe's down the street that I pass on the way to the store have their gates shut and locked (Globe) so my guess is they're down too.
I had Bayantel for a while, every time it rained my connection went out and from what I saw on the news they're totally down too.
Down for Destiny is a
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X.
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X. (not an American)
quake cripples internet (Score:5, Funny)
am I the only one who read this and thought "wow, these id games are really hitting it off in taiwan" ?
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It wasn't until I read an e-mail from work that the Hong Kong office was experience connectivity problems due to the earthquake in Taiwan that I was like, "Why the hell wasn't that on Slashdot?"
Then I went back to my RSS feed to check, and saw that the story was there. I read the story, started reading the comments, and then saw your comment and re
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am I the only one who read this and thought "wow, these id games are really hitting it off in taiwan" ?
No. Actually everyone here immediately tought of it. Except maybe those too young to know Quake.
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quake (the game) cripples internet (Score:2, Interesting)
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What is the sound of one spam clapping? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping? (Score:5, Interesting)
I speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and say, fuck off and die.
95% of the world's spam is paid for by American spammers. (See the ROKSO list.) I get flooded by American spam and then get blocked by racist assholes like you.
I've been offline all day and while my email (hosted by Yahoo) is still dead somehow I can access Slashdot.
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Please do me a favor, since you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and see about the other little problem (aside from the ocean of spam that does come from your neighborhood). The vast majority of the more sophisticated crack attempts that I see pounding on all sorts of systems that I touch come from Asia, and most of that from China and Korea. There are plenty from Romania, Russia, and elsewhere, too, but because of the types of systems that I work with (and the businesses
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Look at a map. I'm as responsible for what happens in Korea as you are for Brazil. And China is still in most ways a separate country. Telecom companies in particula
Re:What is the sound of one spam clapping? (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, I don't care what color you, or anyone else is. I care what they do. The systems I deal with have nothing whatsoever to do with your daily life (especially since you use a Yahoo account). I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped. I'm injecting network geography, not race into this. You're the one that's got race stuck in your head. Packets have no color to me, they just carry the intent of the person sending them, or the carelessness of the person using an unpatched, pirated O/S that's being a slave to the person sending them.
You are the one that said you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and I replied in a way to point out how ridiculous that sounds. You can't have it both ways.
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Yet still missing how prejudinced you are in your blaming the whole of Asia for the actions of some spammers msotly IN THE PAY OF AMERICANS.
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Yet still missing how prejudinced you are in your blaming the whole of Asia for the actions of some spammers msotly IN THE PAY OF AMERICANS.
WOW! Easy there, I think what he is saying is that he has seen lots of crack attempts, lots of spam (from his observations) coming from those IP groups for those countries. He decided to use a brute force method of simply just nullifying any
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Hey, I've got users that DO need their little part of the world exposed to those other trans-Pacific chunks of the 'net, and we deal with different problems (and audiences) in different ways. Things like web-services machines that are only there to serve domestic business partners, etc., don't mind the null route one little bit. Quick and simple. E-mail is touchier, but if you'
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You are completely missing the point. There are spammers in Germany, too. Same story. Just like in South America, India, Australia, and Canada. But from those other places, more of the traffic is legitimate. If virtually none of the traffic from a particular class C (or B) address block is legitimate, then I'm often inclined to block it. I get spam and crack attempts
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If it's your own personal mail, fine. If you're doing it for an ISP or a large company without gettng the users to sign off on you preventing them communicating with half the world's population, not fine. I know for insta
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You know why, right? Because millions of people who use AOL keep clicking the "this is spam" button on the junk in their mailboxes, and the system starts picking up on patterns. And one of those patterns includes the huge number of Asian IP addresses that are sending it out. AOL doesn't block because they like to, they block because otherwise certain sources completely overwhelm them and their customers with spam.
There i
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I don't send spam. Some asshole blocks me because somoene in the same IP block as me did. I have no way of knowing who spammed who. I can't do anything about anonymous spammers. I get hundreds every week. AND MOST OF THE SPAM I GET OBVIOUSLY ORIGINATES IN THE USA.
You clean up your act. How many Americans have been prosecuted for sending billions of spam emails -- two or three perhaps. You know who they are and and where they live. Blaming
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I think it's worth considering the reasons for this.
While there's a lot of bandwidth over here in Asia, there are a lot of people who prefer Asian-language content. S
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As I mentioned to the annoyed guy from Hong Kong (who speaks for everyone in Hong Kong, but can't get them to patch their machines!), I think that unpatched pirated desktops really are the main problem. The pervasive notion, in that part of the world, that only chumps
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As long as a copy of Windows costs more than someone earns in a month (6 months in some countries), piracy is not going away.
Microsoft have stood their ground and refused to employ market-sensitive pricing, and I think this will remain the sticking point. I understand concerns about arbitrage... at least for countries like Malaysia where they'd be selling an English-language version; I wouldn't expect a Thai version of XP to be a big grey market imp
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Like maintaining a significant military presence in the region to deter mainland China from invading Taiwan? Like keeping the lunatic Kim Jong Il from attacking South Korea, Japan, and others? Yeah, that is idiotic, protecting ingrates at great expense, which is why we probably aren't going to do it much longer.
I know that you are pissed off because you can't have all of your Internet today, but you really need to calm down. Scent
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How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water, making cable damage difficult. And I would not think that plate movement would be enough to bend or stretch the cable to the point of breaking. So how does the cable get damaged?
Surely someone here knows more about the hazards to these cables...
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Funny)
I suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Funny)
I suddenly had this deja vu feeling where I'm hearing my ex-wife talk on the phone with her girlfriends.
Hans, is that you?
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How do undersea cables get damaged? (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.
I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.
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Yeah, I think so too. Though, one guy I've talked to says that they try to have some slack and adequate tensil strength to allow for that sort of thing - but if you've ever seen some of those really shocking fenceline jumps along the San Andreas, you're right - things just plain get re-arranged.
Maps of currently in-use undersea cables (Score:5, Interesting)
Although the layout of this page is awful (and they beg for click-fraud abuse), it does show a few really good maps of the current undersea cable infrastructure. Pretty neat stuff.
http://eyeball-series.org/cable-eyeball.htm [eyeball-series.org]
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> the current undersea cable infrastructure. Pretty neat stuff.
I'm surprised this much information is available in the information restriction age.
Version? (Score:5, Funny)
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Given
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Re:Version? (Score:4, Funny)
Quake 7 according to one Mr Richter.
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Multiplayer Quake (Score:1, Funny)
Sure... (Score:1)
Priorities (Score:3, Funny)
So, wait.
People were injured and died in this quake, and the headline is Quake in Taiwan Cripples Internet ? You insensitive clods.
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Get off your moral high-horse and stop trying to tell us that you actually give a shit. No one believes you.
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People die every day. But I don't think that means that we should mention when a telephone wire goes down 5 sentences before we mention "oh yeah, someone got hurt, too."
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Using your logic, if you step into very hot water, then get used to it, then suddenly the water is no longer hot? It's the same temperature. Or, you walk into a room and smell something horrible. 5 minutes later you don't smell anything. The chemicals producing the smell have disappeared? No, they're still there.
Sensitization is a human perception issue. The fact that we get sensitized to other humans
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When is a body count required? (Score:2)
So should people have to look up the latest estimates of casualties related to Operation Iraqi Freedom/TELIC whenever mentioning Iraq?
Spam (Score:1)
So what? (Score:2)
Hmmm... (Score:1, Redundant)
You'd think with so many people running around with Rail Guns and Rocket Launchers in DM3, there'd be plenty of dead space marines...
tragic, but (Score:1)
You know you're on a nerd website when.... (Score:2)
when.... the disruption of the internet trumps the part about human casualties!
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Only Quake? (Score:1)
Follow the traffic... (Score:4, Interesting)
On the Internet Traffic Report website [internettr...report.com] you can click on Asia [internettr...report.com] and see where the current congestion and outages are. Scroll down to the bottom and you can see these graphs, too:
These plots give a 24-hour window on the situation. It it's easy to see when things started getting shaken up (bad pun intended).
In Soviet America... (Score:2)
The game (Score:1)
China achieves goal of becoming LAN (Score:4, Informative)
Internet access was practically dead, but I spotted "7.1 Taiwan earthquake" in an RSS feed from Google. Google was the only thing that I use, that worked since the server was inside China.
Chinese sites were not affected and load at full speed, but anything outside mostly times out.
I doubt the strategy to route everything though a few key points for censorship purposes helps much with making the net robust against just this sorts of disaster.
Also for the poster near the top talking about spam, Taiwan isn't a major source of spam, but China is, and China was just as badly affected by the damage to the undersea cables.
Each wave created more landslides (Score:3, Interesting)
The company I am currently employed by has a lot of affected circuits in the APAC region (a colo in Honk Kong and many offices in China, India, Singapore and Australia). The circuits belong to Sprint and OnReach, and they have both been able to determine that the earthquake itself and at least 2 of the aftershocks each created undersea landslides, and it is the detritus from the landslides that actually damaged the cables.
There's been a lot of ups and downs on the affected circuits as latent capacity is brought on-line, various peering agreements are created and/or reworked, etc. It's not going to get much better anytime soon, either, due to there being at least 7 affected undersea cables and only 2 repair ships available to perform the repairs (which, of course, requires digging the cables out from underneath all of the detritus before the repairs and redeployments can even begin).
In the immortal words of the writers of Full Metal Jacket, "It's a giant shit sandwich and we've all got to take a bite."
A communications disruption... (Score:2)
Dont expect this to be fixed soon (Score:4, Informative)
Richter schmichter... (Score:2, Informative)
Sensationalist News (Score:3, Informative)
There were actually 2 distinct quakes, one magnitude 7.1, one 7.0, that occurred about 7 minutes apart, and so far have been 3 aftershocks measuring from 5.4 to 5.6 (the 5.6 being just yesterday morning). All of the quakes were very shallow (7 miles deep and less).
You can get specific information on the quakes from the USGS: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Ma ps/10/120_25.php [usgs.gov]
Really slow transfers from Israel (Score:2)
affected (Score:2)
i am concerned about what happened here's why.
the earthquake happened dec. 26, 8:26pm local time (same time zone with taiwan.) during that time, the internet connectivity was still working ok (i accessed the net at around 10pm and surprised to see at tsunami alerts in my country.) there was no increased latency or packet loss. it was only until the morning of the fo
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Earthquakes are so common in Asia, I don't know why they didn't do this!
Tornados are common in mid-USA, earthquakes are common in California, blackouts are common in the tri-state area.
What is not common is knowing exactly when, or where, they will strike. Not everyone has travelled back to 5 November 1955 [wikipedia.org] and knows the exact such details about a lightning strike!
The cost of laying an undersea cable is HUGE. It is impractical to maintain a thick sheath the entire undersea length. It is only on the ends where the cable comes ashore that much thicker and sturdier sheathing
just like their reliable dvd players (Score:2)
In reference to cheap dvd players that die when get too hot, they should just make them properly shutdown/power off when too hot, not
just blow a capacitor.
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Call me crazy, but wasn't that what {*cough*algore*cough*) DARPA designed it for? The fact that it still WORKS - just slower - means it's working JUST as it should.
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