First this as relates to the original notion:
FL also shows Zero.
http://www.internettrafficreport.com/namerica.htm
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboa...
says
"Go to the FAQ! A rating of O means slow connectivity, not zero traffic.
It also has to do with where servers are based to host websites. The site also does not track all routers. In fact, they are asking for more to provide a more robust and accurate picture of global internet traffic."
I don't trust this gvt to not attack Iran, but seems to still be connected with cable breakage issues.
Then beginning here Tinoire responds to above post:
I looked at the FAQ before posting that. I'm not looking at traffic index but at the the ping rates. The packet loss is what concerns me. X number of packets sent out and 0 returning means there's no traffic going in or out on that particular router. And that particular router is a major one.
As you hinted, it's not the only router in Iran.
Since I posted that from work a few hours ago, I've been home and doing some pinging...
The router in question belongs to the Iran University of Science & Technology. I think it's affected by the Marseille cut cable because it died right after hitting
te10-2.passe1.paris.opentransit.net.
There appears to be a firewall at (hop 13) that blocks ICMP (ping) packets.
There appears to be a firewall at (hop 13) that blocks unwanted UDP packets.
Pinging 194.225.239.1 <194.225.239.1>:
Ping #1: *
Ping #2: *
Ping #3: *
Ping #4: *
Done pinging 194.225.239.1
Pinging 194.225.239.1 <194.225.239.1> with 32 bytes of data...
Results
count ttl (hops) rtt (ms) from
1 Timed out
2 Timed out
3 Timed out
4 Timed out
5 Timed out
packets sent 30
received 0 0%
lost 30 100%
-
http://centralops.net/asp/co/Ping.vbs.asp
The Florida router they're tracking is down.
What's important to consider here is that Iran's doesn't have as many reroute options as US traffic does. Then they have the added bonus of having many of their reroutes choked up.
I pinged what seems to be their two largest Connectivity Providers. Neither is accepting packets.
Text
Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics & Mathematics (IPM) - 193.189.122.16 7 193.189.122.16
No response...
Neda Rayaneh institute 217.66.196.20
No response...
The only Iranian providers I can ping are the ones, like mahnet.com, located in North America or bnlsat.com (Some of our customers are: US Army Personnel, USAF, European Commission ), located in Ukraine. Or Data Communication Company of Iran, 204.187.100.54, out of Ontario, on which Google has slapped a big "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!"
I find this worrisome. There were 3 cables cut (4 really but who's counting since the fourth is pretty short from Dubai to Muskat).
According to the papers net traffic in the region and India was severely disrupted Tuesday and still hasn't been restored.
THE 17,400 mile cable cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East was cut.
FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.
SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.
The firm said the cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the stretch of network between India and Europe by 75% percent.
As a result, carriers in Egypt and the Middle East re-routed their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7222536.stm
This was Wednesday before the 3rd cable, "the opposite ends of the Arabian Peninsula" was cut. Bingo. A main reroute gone. And they were already severely congested before that.
The situation is critical for us in terms of congestion," Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai's ISP DU, told The Associated Press, following the most recent break.
Wednesday's incident caused disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7222536.stm
Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the FALCON cable is designed on a "ring system," taking it on a circuit around the Persian Gulf and enabling traffic to be more easily routed around damage.
Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.
Without the use of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, some carriers were forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, which could cause delays, Beckert said.
(snip)
Most of the major Internet service providers in India, like Reliance and VSNL, were starting to use backup lines Friday, allowing service to slowly come back, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Services Providers Association of India.
The Indian ISPs were still alerting customers to slowdowns over the next few days with service quality delays of 50 percent to 60 percent, he said.
(snip)
Madhu Vohra, who lives in the city of Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, said she uses Internet phone service Skype to call her son in the United States, but she hasn't been able to reach him since the slowdown.
"We keep trying for a long time and the message comes up, 'This page can't display,' so finally we just turn the computer off and give up," Vohra said.
(snip)
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/01/internet...
Two of the most important cables carrying internet traffic from Europe to South Asia were cut by a ship's anchor off the coast of Alexandria on Wednesday, disrupting internet traffic and phone services in Egypt, Kuwait and as far away as Pakistan.
In Kuwait, one internet service provider (ISP) experienced a 100 per cent outage of its network, while in Egypt and Pakistan several lost more than 70 per cent of their coverage, forcing operators to to redirect traffic along other routes.
"Everyone is trying to absorb the shock," Joseph Metry, a network supervisor at Orascom Telecom Holding SAE, one of the largest phone companies in the Middle East and North Africa, was quoted as saying.
The two cables, known as the Flag and SEA-ME-WEA-4 respectively, carry approximately 70 per cent of the internet traffic between Europe and the Middle East, but despite their importance are only just over a centimetre thick each.
Today there were reports that a third cable had been cut, compounding internet providers' woes, though the cause was unknown.
(snip)
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_...
That was all Wednesday.
Come Friday we have:
... an undersea cable had been cut early Friday in the Persian Gulf, causing severe phone line disruptions here and compounding an already existing Internet outage across large parts of the Middle East and Asia after two other undersea cables were damaged earlier this week north of Egypt.
(snip)
The U.K. company is also the owner of one of the undersea cables that were sliced Wednesday in the Mediterranean Sea. That damage triggered wide Internet outages, hampering businesses and private usage across the Mideast and Asia.
(snip)
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/02/01/africa/M...
So I checked out Renesys Corporation:
http://www.renesys.com/about/
As you can see from the above map, there are several cable systems that connect Europe, the Middle East and Asia, via the Suez Canal. The countries highlighted in red are those whose Internet connectivity is being disrupted the most by this event. At Renesys, we geo-locate all routed networks and observe their reachability from over 250 locations around the globe. In the case of disasters like this, we will suddenly see a large percentage and/or a large number of country-specific networks disappear from the Internet. As the following charts show, Egypt and Pakistan lost the highest percentage of their networks, while India lost the least. However, India had the third highest total number of networks disappear. Looking at the cable map, it is not surprising that the Indian subcontinent was impacted by events off the coast of Egypt. There are essentially two ways to get to this part of the world: via the Suez Canal or via Southeast Asia.
http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/01/med ... ak_1.shtml
Though Iran is in red, Renesys isn't giving any figures for them. That chart by the way dates to before the third cable was cut.
Egypt's Ministry of Telecommunications ``has formed an emergency team to bring back the service quickly through several alternative paths such as the Suez Canal and satellite links,'' according to a statement broadcast on Egyptian television.
The cables are not easily broken so there must have been a ``huge hit,'' Orascom's Metry said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid= ... fer=europe
Disrupting communications is a very important first step and let's face it, the neocons don't have much time left. Hillary is getting trounced and I think Obama's going to prefer a neoliberal approach not wanting to go down in history as a child-killer.
The main reason I view this thing with alarm is because
1. Egypt and Iran are having a rapprochement over the Gaza Blockade that the Axis of Evil (US, UK, Israel) doesn't like one bit. They've already been planting stories in the papers about escaped Palestinian terrorists. Palestine is the spark that can light the entire Middle East. The Axis and their elite collaborators there don't need ordinary people communicating and rising against them. Nor do they need all this chlamoring for "justice" at a time when
Hamas is being seen as legitimate by more and more people waking from their slumber. The US and Israel have been dragging out of the closet lately. I'm extemely sensitive to the demonization of the Palestinians so I pay close attention. The beats are getting louder as the two sputtering fools angrily continue their demonization campaign.
Although nukes and Iraq have been the main focus of the Bush Administration's pressure campaign against Iran, US officials also seek to tar Iran as the world's leading sponsor of terrorism. And Team Bush's latest tactic is to play up a thirteen-year-old accusation that Iran was responsible for the notorious Buenos Aires bombing that destroyed the city's Jewish Community Center, known as AMIA, killing eighty-six and injuring 300, in 1994. Unnamed senior Administration officials told the Wall Street Journal January 15 that the bombing in Argentina "serves as a model for how Tehran has used its overseas embassies and relationship with foreign militant groups, in particular Hezbollah, to strike at its enemies."
2. They're rerouting communications. To what purpose? To hack and frame? Possibly for more manufactured terror? Much of their traffic is now passing through the UK and US where it can be closely monitored and and manipulated at will by the same countries that had indisputable proof of Nigerian Uranium and created Washington-Tel Aviv OSP offices to manufacture it.
from ATT Labs:
Attacks on the routing system, with the goal of diverting traffic past an enemy-controlled point for purposes of eavesdropping or connection-hijacking, have long been known. In principle, at least, these attacks can be countered by use of appropriate authentication techniques. We demonstrate a new attack, based on link-cutting, that cannot be countered in this fashion. Armed with a topology map and a
list of already-compromised links and routers, an attacker can calculate which links to disable, in order to force selected traffic to pass the compromised elements.
http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/reroute.pdf
DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--A third undersea fibre optic cable running through the Suez to Sri Lanka was cut Friday, said a Flag official.
Two other fiber optic cables owned by Flag Telecom and consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 located near Alexandria, Egypt, were damaged Wednesday leading to a slowdown in Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and South Asia.
"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.
The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/t ... 0DC16D9%7D
