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Quake Outage Shows Weakness of Underwater Data-Cable System
Thursday, December 28, 2006
SEOUL, South Korea — The earthquakes that hit Taiwan on Tuesday rocked communications in Asia and underscored the vulnerabilities of a system where huge amounts of data speed through the region in cables laid deep beneath the sea.
Banks and brokerages from Seoul to Sydney were affected by the outage, with analysts saying that even though a single glitch can trigger global problems, there is little choice but to rely on the underwater cable network.
"Right now, there's no other network that can compete with submarine fiber-optic cables in terms of reliability," said Jin Chang-whan, an analyst at CJ Investment & Securities in Seoul.
The cables, which for the most part lie unprotected on the ocean floor, can be damaged by ship anchors, fish nets that scrape the sea bottom and even, in one case, sharks that gnawed on a line apparently due to its electromagnetic pulse, said the policy think tank Rand Corporation in a recent report.
Earthquake Knocks Out Communication Systems in Taiwan Tsunami Danger Said To Be Over After Powerful Quake Near Taiwan Potentially Destructive Tsunami Heads Towards Philippines Goodbye Cable TV, Hello Fiber-Optic Broadband Television The report predicted troubles in Taiwan could lead to major disruptions because it would be difficult to reroute data overland on the island.
Experts said there should be few problems in the cable systems as long as there are backup routes and carriers can cooperate in times of crisis.
Analysts said the disruption showed that most of the region's cable networks run along earthquake-prone geographic zones.
"People will start to say we can't let this happen again," said Frank Dzubeck, president of Washington D.C.-based telecoms consultancy Communications Networks Architects. "The issue here is parallelism. You've really got to have multiple paths. You can't lay all the cables in the same place."
Dzubeck added that the Internet bust in 2001 had hit expensive plans by various companies to lay undersea cables along new paths that were less likely to be affected by earthquakes.
Earthquakes occur frequently around Taiwan and Japan, which lie on a seismically active stretch of the Pacific basin.
Undersea fiber-optic cables account for more than 95 percent of international telecommunications thanks to their strength, capacity and connection quality, according to South Korean provider KT Submarine Corp.
One alternative would be satellites, which are costlier and do not provide as much capacity or quality of transmission as fiber-optic cables, analysts said.
Just last week, Verizon Communications Inc. (VZ) and five Asian companies agreed to invest $500 million to build a new cable network to directly link China and the United States.
BETTER THAN PIGEONS
Submarine cables have been around for about 150 years, with the one of the first lines being a well-insulated copper wire running under the English Channel. One alternative used at the time to transmit data was the carrier pigeon.
Now the cables hold a mass of tightly packed, flexible glass lines that can handle millions of telephone calls, which means that any damage can lead to major disruptions.
A country such as South Korea, the world's 11th largest economy, has 10 main undersea cables connecting it to the world, said KT Corp., the country's top fixed-line and broadband service provider. Seven of them were damaged by the quake.
India was highly vulnerable from damage to undersea cable links because it receives 80 percent to 90 percent of its bandwidth from the undersea network, industry officials said.
And neighboring Pakistan's sole undersea fiber-optic cable link with the outside world developed a serious fault in June 2005, virtually crippling data feeds, including the Internet, for 11 days.
"Internet service providers should think like bus companies," said Mohamed Shahril Tarmizi, executive director at Malaysian technology consulting company BinaFikir. "Instead of using just one route to get to a destination, it's more useful to have many routes."
R/S is KISS of DEATH ! imho..eom
Who is the Buyer ?..show the Contract.. where is the Money ?
As of close of business on September 25, 2006 as received from our registered Transfer Agent there were a TOTAL of 905,595,914 common shares outstanding. Of which 393,380,095 are registered to CDS & Co., the Canadian depository for Brokers, and 255,983,132 to CEDE & Co. of New York, the United States Depository for U.S.A Brokers. The remaining 256,232,687 shares are directly registered to private entities and are not presently in broker accounts.
works for me (windows media player)eom
underoath, Thanks for L2. who is your provider ? tyia...eom
WTF !!!
IHDR... Rivera should NOT even be seen in public
( accidents ?.. happen )
westeffer..You 'Da Man ' !
Impressive demo "let's get ready to Rrrrruuummmble !!
go baby ! I'm in...
GZFX4EVER..why aren't your Buys showing on tape ? hmmmmm...
On March 31, 2006, the Company and Sartam Industries ("Sartam") terminated the Exclusive Licensing Agreement date August 22, 2005 (the "Agreement") entered into by and between Sartam and the Company.
I believe the pps was manipulated to scare shareholders into selling(to MMs) BEFORE the NEWS Today.. Watch the re-bound to confirm!
Float: 4,356,417. does'nt take much action to move the pps UP or DOWN !
This is the most AMAZING stock to watch the last (2) days
if you flip it you better be FAST !
Share Data [06.22.04]
Issued: 15,218,352
Fully Diluted: 18,380,852
Est. Float: 4,356,417
www.lexingtonresources.com/kyndal
It appears MMs are covering
Worst manipulation I have EVER seen !
Feb 13, 2004 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) --
City of Industry, CA -- Vodafone Group PLC's (NYSE: VOD) chief executive is preparing to propose to his board that the company bid as much as $35 billion for AT&T Wireless Services Inc. , people close to the situation told The Wall Street Journal. Vodafone's board hasn't given final approval for a bid. But Arun Sarin's intention to present a proposal to the board members shows the British company is very likely to make a bid for AT&T Wireless as early as Friday.
IPVoice Communications, Inc. (OTCBB: IPVO) recently announced entering into a Letter of Intent to acquire fifty-one percent of Digital Integration Corp (DCI). DCI is a fourteen-year-old corporation located in Plano, Texas that specializes in the development of non-standard products for use in the United States and Allied military applications as well as homeland security and public safety applications. Custom solutions have included mission critical command and control computers, emergency vehicle mobile computing solutions and WIFI systems. DCI was recently awarded a $1.5 million contract with L-3 Communications (NASDAQ: LVLT) to provide customized computing systems for the Naval Air Systems Command.
Bug devices track officials at summit
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Officials who attended a world Internet and technology summit in Switzerland last week were unknowingly bugged, said researchers who attended the forum.
Badges assigned to attendees of the World Summit on the Information Society were affixed with radio-frequency identification chips (RFIDs), said Alberto Escudero-Pascual, Stephane Koch and George Danezis in a report issued after the conference ended Friday in Geneva. The badges were handed out to more than 50 prime ministers, presidents and other high-level officials from 174 countries, including the United States.
The trio's report said they were able to obtain the official badges with fraudulent identification only to be stunned when they found RFID chips — a contentious issue among privacy advocates in the United States and Europe — embedded in the tags.
Researchers questioned summit officials about the use of the chips and how long information would be stored but were not given answers.
The three-day WSIS forum focused on Internet governance and access, security, intellectual-property rights and privacy. The United States and other countries defeated an attempt to place the Internet under supervision of the United Nations.
RFID chips track a person's movement in "real time." U.S. groups have called for a voluntary moratorium on using the chips in consumer items until the technology and its effects on privacy and civil liberties are addressed.
Mr. Escudero-Pascual is a researcher in computer security and privacy at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. Miss Koch is the president of Internet Society Geneva, and Mr. Danezis studies privacy-enhancing technologies and computer security at Cambridge University.
"During the course of our investigation, we were able to register for the summit and obtain an official pass by just showing a fake plastic identity card and being photographed via a Web cam with no other document or registration number required to obtain the pass," the researchers said.
The researchers chose names for the fake identification cards from a list printed on the summit's Web site of attendees.
The hidden chips communicate information via radio frequency when close to sensors that can be placed anywhere "from vending machines to the entrance of a specific meeting room, allowing the remote identification and tracking of participants, or groups of participants, attending the event," the report said.
The photograph of the person and other personal details are not stored on the chip but in a centralized database that monitors the movement. Researchers said they are concerned that database will be used for future events, including the next summit to be hosted by Tunisian authorities.
"During the registration process, we requested information about the future use of the picture and other information that was taken, and the built-in functionalities of the seemingly innocent plastic badge. No public information or privacy policy was available upon our demands that could indicate the purpose, processing or retention periods for the data collected. The registration personnel were obviously not properly informed and trained," the report said.
The lack of security procedures violates the Swiss Federal Law on Data Protection of June 1992, the European Union Data Protection Directive, and United Nations' guidelines concerning computerized personal-data files adopted by the General Assembly in 1990, the researchers said.
"The big problem is that system also fails to guarantee the promised high levels of security while introducing the possibility of constant surveillance of the representatives of civil society, many of whom are critical of certain governments and regimes," the report said.
"Sharing this data with any third party would be putting civil-society participants at risk, but this threat is made concrete in the context of WSIS by considering the potential impact of sharing the data collected with the Tunisian government in charge of organizing the event in 2005," it said.
The organization Reporters Without Borders was banned from attending the summit and launched a pirate radio broadcast to protest the ban and detail press-freedom violations by some countries attending the meetings, including Tunisia.
"Our organization defends freedom of expression on the Internet on a daily basis. Our voice should therefore be heard during this event, despite this outrageous ban," said Robert Menard, secretary general of Reporters Without Borders.
Tunisia is among several countries Reporters Without Borders has accused of censoring the Internet, intercepting e-mails and jailing cyber-dissidents.