Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
I disagree... I think information warfare tactic could easily be terrorism, though I can't see why this particular event could/would be terrorism. Disrupting a major network like the Internet WITHIN the US could definitely be a form of terrorism... I think anything which maliciously disrupts a huge portions of a nation's day-to-day activities would be cause for concern for many folk, especially the telecommunications infrastructure. However, I'm not sure what the mindset of the terrorist would be even if they fully succeeded what is proposed would be the terrorist's plan - even if we lost totally connectivity with the middle east, or even what's considered friendly countries... as long as the information is flowing at home, nobody's going to be filling their swimming pools full of drinking water. I imagine the mindset would be different if you were a small country loosing a substantial portion of it's communication channels with the outside world... -Patrick - Original Message - From: Mark Newton [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Martin Hannigan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Sean Donelan [EMAIL PROTECTED], nanog@merit.edu Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2008 11:12:46 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles Subject: Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On 04/02/2008, at 4:38 PM, Martin Hannigan wrote: I agree with Rod Beck as far as the speculations go. It could be terror, Well, no, it couldn't be. Nobody is being terrorized by this. How can it possibly be a terrorist incident? If it's deliberate, it might be described as an information warfare tactic. But not terrorism. (visions of some guy sitting a in cave with a pair of wet boltcutters laughing maniacally to himself, cackling, Ha-ha! Now their daytraders will get upset, and teenagers will get their porn _slower_! Die American scum! Doesn't really work, does it?) Politicians have succeeded in watering down the definition of the word terrorism to the point where it no longer has any meaning. But we're rational adults, not politicians, right? If we can't get it right, who will? - mark -- Mark Newton Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (W) Network Engineer Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 Network Man - Anagram of Mark Newton Mobile: +61-416-202-223
[admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. -alex [NANOG MLC Chair] On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Patrick Clochesy wrote: I disagree... I think information warfare tactic could easily be terrorism, though I can't see why this particular event could/would be terrorism. Disrupting a major network like the Internet WITHIN the US could definitely be a form of terrorism... I think anything which maliciously disrupts a huge portions of a nation's day-to-day activities would be cause for concern for many folk, especially the telecommunications infrastructure. However, I'm not sure what the mindset of the terrorist would be even if they fully succeeded what is proposed would be the terrorist's plan - even if we lost totally connectivity with the middle east, or even what's considered friendly countries... as long as the information is flowing at home, nobody's going to be filling their swimming pools full of drinking water. I imagine the mindset would be different if you were a small country loosing a substantial portion of it's communication channels with the outside world... -Patrick - Original Message - From: Mark Newton [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Martin Hannigan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Sean Donelan [EMAIL PROTECTED], nanog@merit.edu Sent: Sunday, February 3, 2008 11:12:46 PM (GMT-0800) America/Los_Angeles Subject: Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On 04/02/2008, at 4:38 PM, Martin Hannigan wrote: I agree with Rod Beck as far as the speculations go. It could be terror, Well, no, it couldn't be. Nobody is being terrorized by this. How can it possibly be a terrorist incident? If it's deliberate, it might be described as an information warfare tactic. But not terrorism. (visions of some guy sitting a in cave with a pair of wet boltcutters laughing maniacally to himself, cackling, Ha-ha! Now their daytraders will get upset, and teenagers will get their porn _slower_! Die American scum! Doesn't really work, does it?) Politicians have succeeded in watering down the definition of the word terrorism to the point where it no longer has any meaning. But we're rational adults, not politicians, right? If we can't get it right, who will? - mark
Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Two days from Alexandria to the Gulf? Pull the other one. And you can't go through the Suez Canal submerged. On Mon, Feb 4, 2008 at 2:25 PM, Frank Coluccio [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This will be my only post on this subject after biting my tongue for several days:) Some members will appreciate this item I came across earlier, I'm sure. As always, caveat emptor. Where is the USS Jimmy Carter? By Dave | February 3, 2008 http://tinyurl.com/3y7zgu List members -- and lurking students, in particular, should NOT take much of what's been posted _on _this _topic _ too seriously or regard everything written as factual. This cautionary note applies equally to the article I've posted above, as well. 73s,
Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
This will be my only post on this subject after biting my tongue for several days:) Some members will appreciate this item I came across earlier, I'm sure. As always, caveat emptor. Where is the USS Jimmy Carter? By Dave | February 3, 2008 http://tinyurl.com/3y7zgu List members -- and lurking students, in particular, should NOT take much of what's been posted _on _this _topic _ too seriously or regard everything written as factual. This cautionary note applies equally to the article I've posted above, as well. 73s,
Re: Jeanette Symons (1962-2008) a commerical Internet Pioneer
From the local paper, Life of Achievement Cut Short on Icy Night. What the article does not say, I assume because it is for local consumption, is the weather Friday was pretty bad. Icy and very blustery: http://www.sunjournal.com/story/250275-3/LewistonAuburn/Life_of_achievement_cut_short_on_icy_night/ Very sad. regards, fletcher -- Fletcher Kittredge GWI 8 Pomerleau Street Biddeford, ME 04005 (207)-602-1134
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Feb 4, 2008, at 4:29 AM, Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. In all the fuss about terrorism, people may be forgetting that the terrorists have goals *other* than terrorism, and one of those is reducing the influence of the West over the Middle East. Removing internet connections certainly is an effective (and probably necessary) step in that direction. Even if this was accidental, it will have made them more aware of the possibility. Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq?
Increasing cable theft and outages
While the conspiracy folks go crazy, cable outages are pretty much normal and increasing around the world as the price of copper increases and thieves get confused about what cables contain copper. http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20080203-1044-wst-coppercrime.html Thieves hacked up and hauled away three miles of telephone and Internet cable along the twisting mountain road leading to the remote location, apparently to sell on the thriving scrap market for copper. Burying a new cable will cost an estimated $3.2 million, so monument Supervisor Craig Ackerman is working on a microwave link. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004141330_webphonetheft23m.html?syndication=rss Qwest workers spent most of Friday repairing vandalism to about 6,200 feet of fiber-optic cable that was cut in Kelso, and as they were headed home about 12:30 a.m. Saturday they were dispatched to handle another outage that cut long-distance service to 20,000 customers in Pacific and western Wahkiakum counties in Washington and Clatsop County, Ore. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/7184010.stm Network Rail said there had been more than 1,000 incidents of copper cable theft in the last year, costing more than #4m. http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/07/vietnam_fishermen_vs_cables/ Vietnam telecom officials estimate it will take at least a month and cost over $5.84m to fix damaged undersea fiber-optic cables stolen by fishermen for salvage.
Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Mon, Feb 04, 2008 at 08:25:44AM -0600, Frank Coluccio wrote: This will be my only post on this subject after biting my tongue for several days:) Some members will appreciate this item I came across earlier, I'm sure. As always, caveat emptor. Another paranoid suggestion I have seen is that the cuts were intended to force traffic rerouting so that the traffic might pass through one or more 'compromised' nodes for inspection. No mention of little green people yet. Where is the USS Jimmy Carter? By Dave | February 3, 2008 http://tinyurl.com/3y7zgu List members -- and lurking students, in particular, should NOT take much of what's been posted _on _this _topic _ too seriously or regard everything written as factual. This cautionary note applies equally to the article I've posted above, as well. 73s, -- -=[L]=- Honorable Factotem
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
I have not looked at a map. My guess is that most of these cables are linear - point-to-point. Obviously a more robust architecture is a ring. All TransAtlantic cables are rings, but can you justify the economic cost of a ring architecture to serve relatively small countries? Hmm ... Despite the needless worrying about terrorism, the single most important factor is how well a cable is buried. Deeper is better and more expensive. To bury a cable, you dig a deep trench, drop the cable in it, and let Nature cover it. Nature is very good at doing so ... Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On 2/4/08, Kee Hinckley [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? While reading the hacker tourist article someone posted from Wired many years ago, it mentioned that as the FO cable comes closer to shore, more extreme measures are taken to protect it, including fluidizing the sand underneath the cable to cause the cable to sink under, and then stopping the fluidizing process so the sand compacts above it. I'm unsure how practical this would be along a substantial link of cable though. (Although, burying the cable under compact sand seems like it would protect it from a whole host of dangers). -brandon
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. -alex [NANOG MLC Chair] Agreed. In December of 2005, for reasons entirely personal, I read every paper available at the Dudley Knox (Naval Post Graduate School) and the Air University (Maxwell AFB) Libraries mentioned in Greta Marlatt's 06/00 IO bibliography -- Information Warfare Information Operations (IW/IO). A Bibliography, Documents, Theses Technical Reports. This is a snap-shot of where IO was five year ago. People who want to flesh out a modern IO reading list please mail me (off-list) your URLs. In a nutshell, there were many, many operationally unsophisticated and more-dangerous-to-self-then-other ideas in these papers, in addition to alot of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) Wonder-Cruft, and a lot of it was blatent fund-me stuff. My two beads worth, Eric
Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Feb 4, 2008 9:33 AM, Rod Beck [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It's obviously the KGB, which wants the world to be dependent on Russia for oil :-) On a more serious note... who benefits from repairing of these lines? -Jim P.
RE: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
It's obviously the KGB, which wants the world to be dependent on Russia for oil All Russians please report to their nearest FBI office for execution and subsequent interrogation ... Regards, Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
The US Navy will deploy their killer ninja dolphins to bottlenose any wrong doers :@) -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Kee Hinckley Sent: 04 February 2008 17:08 To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On Feb 4, 2008, at 4:29 AM, Alex Pilosov wrote: This conversation is quickly spinning into discussion of politics and terrorism. Reminder to all, please stick to the *operational* aspects of this thread. In all the fuss about terrorism, people may be forgetting that the terrorists have goals *other* than terrorism, and one of those is reducing the influence of the West over the Middle East. Removing internet connections certainly is an effective (and probably necessary) step in that direction. Even if this was accidental, it will have made them more aware of the possibility. Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq?
RE: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Generally speaking, it is the undersea cable maintence folks who benefit since they do the repairs. Alcatel, Global Marine, Tyco Submarine, to name a few. It is common practice to use the same company that laid the cable, but it is not an obligation. Contracts are structured as an annual charge with a per incident fee. Right now these charges are going up as fuel costs rise. Regards, Roderick S. Beck Director of European Sales Hibernia Atlantic 1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Brandon Galbraith wrote: While reading the hacker tourist article someone posted from Wired many years ago, it mentioned that as the FO cable comes closer to shore, more extreme measures are taken to protect it, including fluidizing the sand underneath the cable to cause the cable to sink under, and then stopping the fluidizing process so the sand compacts above it. I'm unsure how practical this would be along a substantial link of cable though. (Although, burying the cable under compact sand seems like it would protect it from a whole host of dangers). -brandon I have spent a few hours on a cable repair ship in the Med. Fascinating - highly recommended. This ship was sent to repair multiple spots of a cable that was cut about 1km from the shore. There was a gas pipeline that was laid across it and they built special concrete bridges in the water that were laid on top the fiber cable so that the fiber cable would be in the tunnel under the mini-bridge and the pipeline was laid on top. Worked well for the first few months. But the weight kept bearing down and the concrete bridge sunk deeper and deeper into the sand - and eventually the bridge tunnel acted as a guillotine and severed the underlying fiber. So much for the best laid plans of fish and men. -Hank
Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Sun, 3 Feb 2008 22:56:39 -0500 (EST) Sean Donelan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Caution: upon further research it appears there may be some language misscommunication in some of the reports; and some of the outages may be multiple reports of the same incidents. http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February115.xmlsection=theuae Confirming international media reports, an Etisalat official yesterday told Khaleej Times that the cable network was not completely severed, though the damage slowed down the already affected system. He did not give any further details regarding the cause of damage. [...] This is the third incident of its kind in the area since January 30 since the cables were first damaged in the Mediterranean and then off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and south Asia. FLAG restoration update information: http://www.flagtelecom.com/media/PDF_files/Submarine%20Cable%20Cut%20Update%20Bulletin%20Release%20030208.pdf http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=21567email=html is probably as authoritative a source as one can find for what happened. It says there were two cuts in the Mediterranean (SEA-ME-WE 4 near Marseille) and Flag Telecom's Europe-Asia cable near Alexandria. The Flag Telecom Falcon cable was cut between UAE and Oman, and the Qatar-UAE cable failed due to a power issue. --Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
Re: Aggregation for IPv4-compatible IPv6 address space
On 4-Feb-2008, at 00:19, Scott Morris wrote: You mean do you have to express it in hex? There are two related things here: (a) the ability to represent a 32- bit word in an IPv6 address in the form of a dotted-quad, and (b) the legitimacy of an IPv6 address of the form ::A.B.C.D, where A.B.C.D is an IPv4 address. (a) is a question about the presentation of IPv6 addresses. (b) is a question about the construction of IPv6 addresses to be used in packet headers. I believe (a) is still allowed. However, (b) is not allowed. Since (b) is not allowed, (a) is arguably not very useful. Joe
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote: Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables. Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't. E-mailing or VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be able to be done locally, without dependence on international infrastructure. Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of Internet and long distance telephone networks, implying that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've been trying to replace. The report from Renesys (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break_part.shtml) looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. I'll assume that those areas probably did keep some local connectivity. India has its NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not as well used as one might hope. Saudi Arabia has a monopoly international transit provider, which should have the effect of keeping local traffic local. Egypt has an exchange point. I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait. Unfortunately, little else works without DNS. Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK ccTLD is served entirely from the US. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not have local root DNS servers. Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD hosted locally. And then there's the rest of the services people use. Being able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail services in far away places, for instance. -Steve
Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
Hey, me next! Or it could be a US (or other) attempt to disrupt some terrorist operation in progress which was designed to be coordinated over the internet. I think all this speculation, at best, just reveals the limitations of peoples' imaginations. Is there any triangulation of disruption for the cable cuts? Just curious, but that's a bit more operational in nature. -- -Barry Shein The World | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 800-THE-WRLD| Login: Nationwide Software Tool Die| Public Access Internet | SINCE 1989 *oo*
RE: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)
My experience is that a lot of the BB providers route through NAPs/MAEs when they have local peering. The Internet IS more brittle than it needs to be, because routing seems to be a lot more static than it should be. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Gibbard Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 12:39 PM To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE) On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote: Which leads me to my operational question. If you know that someone wants to cut your cables. What defense do you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect an oceanic cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy? A non-physical solution involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq? The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables. Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't. E-mailing or VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be able to be done locally, without dependence on international infrastructure. Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of Internet and long distance telephone networks, implying that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've been trying to replace. The report from Renesys (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break _part.shtml) looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt. I'll assume that those areas probably did keep some local connectivity. India has its NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not as well used as one might hope. Saudi Arabia has a monopoly international transit provider, which should have the effect of keeping local traffic local. Egypt has an exchange point. I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait. Unfortunately, little else works without DNS. Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK ccTLD is served entirely from the US. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not have local root DNS servers. Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD hosted locally. And then there's the rest of the services people use. Being able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail services in far away places, for instance. -Steve
Re: Repotting report
In article [EMAIL PROTECTED] you write: On 4-Feb-2008, at 16:05, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote: And the new named.root has arrived: ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root I seem to think it has become fairly widespread practice for people to refresh their named.root files (or whatever they decide to call it) using something like this: $ dig . NS named.root This worked before today. From today, it still works (in the sense that it will still result in a named.root file which is sufficiently complete in most situations for a nameserver to be able to send a priming query) but it won't contain a complete set of glue. So, if you're in the habit of doing dig . NS named.root you would ideally change that habit to something like curl -O ftp://rs.internic.net/domain/named.root Why? dig is quite capable of coping. Depending apon dig's age and firewall configuration one or more of these will work. dig +edns=0 . NS @a.root-servers.net named.root dig +bufsize=1200 . NS @a.root-servers.net named.root dig +vc . NS @a.root-servers.net named.root As none of these sets DO, they should suffice for the foreseeable future. When DNSSEC is deployed for the root and root-servers.net you will want to do crypto checks. Even then the above queries won't break. Mark instead. (Incidentally, for me, rs.internic.net is giving 530 Login incorrect after PASS when logging in using ftp Joe
F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET IPv6 address has changed.
With the official deployment of IPv6 addresses for the root servers, F.ROOT-SERVERS.NET IPv6 address changed. The old address, 2001:500::1035, is no longer valid and will be turn off at some point. The new address is 2001:500:2f::f. This will only affect users that have deliberately overridden the responses returned by the root servers. Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
