Software as a Service (SaaS)

What’s Happening with Internet Cables?
Posted by Ben Worthen

Four undersea telecommunications cables have been cut in the last week, disrupting Internet service in the Middle East and parts of Asia. Cable damage is rare, and the sudden epidemic raises the question: What the heck is happening?

You know this guy has a wild theory

We wrote last week about the first such incident, which disrupted Internet connectivity in Egypt, India and several Persian Gulf states, calling it a stark reminder

Technorati Tags: Internet cables telecommunications cable damage

that the world is still round. Sure, it’s now possible to send information anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds, but that ability is dependent on tubes and wires several miles beneath the ocean. An incident there can disrupt global business, at least for small and medium-sized businesses in these countries that depend on the public Internet. That’s been the case this week, the Washington Post reports. The largest businesses appear to be unscathed: S. Ramadorai, CEO of Tata Consultancy Services, India’s largest outsourcing firm, tells the Business Technology Blog that the cut cables haven’t had any impact on TCS, which owns its own backup connections.

Meanwhile, questions remain about what’s causing the recent cable problems. Initial reports suggested that the first two cables, both located in the Mediterranean, were damaged by errant ship anchors. Egyptian officials dispute this. No one has any idea what damaged the third cable, located off the coast of Dubai, and a fourth cable, which runs between Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Let’s put on our tinfoil hats, hop on the bus and start throwing out conspiracy theories. Is the CIA cutting the cables in an attempt to knock Iran offline or in a wiretapping attempt gone wrong? Are well-funded protectionists lashing out against globalization? Are the dolphins, or worse Mermen, finally rising up against humans and asserting their dominance of the sea? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Business Technology : What’s Happening with Internet Cables?

The Ten Worst Data Mishaps of 2007

Posted by Ben Worthen

Each year, Ontrack, a company that helps people recover data they’ve damaged or erased, releases a list of the ten most unusual data-loss cases their engineers have encountered. The company says it was able to recover the data in each of the cases below. Sure, it’s blatant promotion, but the list is too fun not to pass along.

10. A woman couldn’t get the data off of her USB memory stick after she put it through the washing machine.

9. Proving that USB sticks are an accident waiting to happen, one of the devices fell out of a new dad’s pocket and into his baby daughter’s bowl of apple puree.

8. A fisherman brought his laptop with him on his boat so he could play computer games while he fished. No surprise: The laptop ended up at the bottom of the lake.

7. A photographer accidentally wrote over the photos he took at a wedding with photos from another event. Ontrack says he didn’t call for help until two days before the couple returned from their honeymoon.

6. During an experiment, a scientist spilled acid on his hard drive.

5. A USB stick containing important documents shattered when an Australian businessman threw it at his partner as part of an argument.

4. A fire destroyed an office, leaving only a few melted CDs worth of data that had melted to their cases.

3. A British scientist tried to quiet a squeaky hard drive by drilling a hole in and pouring in oil. As Ontrack says, “the squeaking stopped, and so did the hard drive.”

2. A parachute that was supposed to deliver a camera gently to earth failed to open, and of course the camera shattered on impact. But engineers were able to recover video of the drop.

1. A photographer in Thailand found a colony of ants living in his hard drive so he sprayed it with insect repellant, killing his drive along with the ants.

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