Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web -- Updated

Will we be able to find Menka on Sunday? So interesting, and relevant to our discussion of security of information and over-dependence on the internet for achieving our goals. I need to look in to this more....

 

 

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Undersea Cables Cut; 14 Countries Lose Web -- Updated

via Wired: Threat Level by Kim Zetter on 12/19/08

Reports from the Mediterranean indicate that two of the undersea cables severed and repaired earlier this year have been cut again, disrupting internet access and phone service between the Middle East, Europe, and parts of Asia. An additional third cable is down in the same region.

The cuts are causing traffic to be re-routed through the United States and elsewhere.

Egypt's communications ministry tells the Associated Press that the outage has almost completely killed internet services throughout Egypt.

A second report indicates that the three cables that are out include the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable (also known as SMW4), which went out at 7:28 a.m. local time Friday morning; SEA-ME-WE 3, which went down at 7:33 a.m.; and the FLAG EA cable, which went out at 8:06 a.m. The cables were cut in the region where they run under the sea between Egypt and Italy. They carry an estimated 90 percent of all data traffic between Europe and the Middle East. SMW 3 and SMW 4 are owned by groups of phone companies; FLAG is owned by Reliance Globalcom.

The SMW 4 and FLAG cables were among five undersea cables damaged earlier this year in January and February in the Mediterranean, launching a flurry of conspiracy theories before investigations revealed that at least one of the cuts was caused by a ship's anchor. When those cables went down, SMW 3 was used to re-route traffic. But this time, SMW 3 is reportedly involved in the outage as well.

A France Telecom report listed 14 countries affected by the current problem. The Maldives are 100 percent down, followed by India, which has 82 percent disruption. Qatar, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates were the next most widely affected areas with about 70 percent service interrupted. Disruptions for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan range from 51 percent to 55 percent.

UPDATE: As reader Julian Borg Barthet notes in the comments section, a fourth undersea cable went out Thursday evening in the same region. The cable, the Seabone, is operated by GO and runs between Malta and Sicily. According to the Times of Malta, GO transferred traffic to a second cable operated by Vodafone. It was the second time in four months that the Seabone cable had failed.

 

See Also:

• Five Ton Anchor Caused Cable Cut
• Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web
• Fiber Optic Cable Cuts Isolate Millions From Internet, Future Cuts ...
• Vietnamese Fishermen Charged With Harvesting Fiber Optic Cable

 

 

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You have received a YouTube video!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tN00_v7gpbo

can thank Dave for this one. More of the same, but more of an
academic grounding. Seeing as I love academics, I love it.... I'm
adding him to our contact list.

Wired magazine- great blogs

Just signed up for 2 of these blogs (free web, business tech) and I could share every article with you.  They are very, very relevant- so to save the time and frustration of me posting obsessively from wired- maybe we can all keep an eye on it?  Not sure, maybe it's no big deal to post them all... Let me know your thoughts.

Joost Abandons Desktop Software, Peer-to-Peer Video Model

peer 2 peer as a business model, cutting out the producer all together, but not quite right....

 

 

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Joost Abandons Desktop Software, Peer-to-Peer Video Model

via Epicenter by Scott Gilbertson on 12/18/08

The online video service Joost has killed off its desktop software client, telling users to instead access the service through the website — much the way Hulu, Tv.com and others are doing.

The demise of the Joost desktop client (which will officially shut down Friday, Dec 19) is in many ways very predictable, after all, why require a separate download when the very same video can be seen the in the browser elsewhere?

But part of the buzz surrounding Joost's launch (aside from the fact that it involved the creator of Skype) was that the company planned to use peer-to-peer networks to distribute video, rather than the client-peer network it has switched to now.

So what does that mean for peer-to-peer (P2P) distribution? While many have been quick to seize on Joost's move as a sign that P2P distribution will ultimately fail, the concept is still quite healthy.

It's the ability to make money off of a P2P business that, thus far anyway, is not quite as healthy.

While the darknet of bittorrent file swapping continues largely unabated, and many large open source software manufacturers rely on P2P distribution, so far, outside of Skype, there aren't many financial success stories to be found in P2P technologies.

That said, don't count P2P out just yet, its real success might be exactly where Joost is headed — in the browser.

Adobe has already taken some preliminary steps to build P2P capabilities into its Flash Player. With a new developer framework called Real-Time Media Flow Protocol (RTMFP) Adobe is enabling developers to use P2P tools inside Flash. At the moment RTMFP isn't intended for large scale streaming (think video conferencing, not YouTube), but there's nothing to stop Adobe from moving it in that direction.

The only problem with P2P video in the browser is that it's unlikely to ever be a complete solution — sites will still need to host all those videos that currently have no peers available. In other words, P2P would make a nice fallback scenario, a way for companies to cut costs on the top 5 percent of their content — the most popular videos.

Given that Joost was very vocal about its early P2P model, it's possible will the company be offering some sort of P2P distribution through a browser plugin or the like, but so far Joost hasn't given users any indications of what to expect, save that now Joost looks a lot more like Hulu.

See Also:

• The New, Easier Joost Is Up
• Joost Raises $45 Million, But Still Not Quite Right
• Joost Beta Turns 1.0

 

 

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The ‘free’ business model

Yes I am addicted to RvB now, and yes I am addicted to the wikinomics blog. But this 'free' business model raises the question: if the only way to make money from the free sharing of ideas and creativity is through the selling of 'stuff' does this really address the sustainability problem?

 

 

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The ‘free’ business model

via Wikinomics by Ming Kwan on 12/18/08

The inspiration behind this blog post came when I was thinking of doing some Christmas shopping for my sister. (Hopefully she doesn't read this post…) I was looking to buy her the DVD Boxset of the first five seasons of Red vs. Blue – The Blood Gulch Chronicles. The Box set price is $69 USD which is reasonable considering you're getting five seasons, unfortunately for me I live in Canada so I also have to worry about shipping costs, duty & customs, and the exchange rate difference. (But that has nothing to do with my blog post). [Btw, if anyone knows where I can buy this in Canada, please let me know!]

For those of you who haven't heard of Red vs. Blue, it's a machinima series (imagine a movie or tv show, but filmed within a video game) based on the popular Xbox 360 game – Halo. I first came across Red vs. Blue when doing some research for work; I watched a few episodes and immediately fell in love with the show. I was also lucky enough to get an interview with Burnie Burns, Co-Founder of the Roosterteeth (RT) community – and producer of the Red vs. Blue episodes.
Burnie Burns and partners, Gustavo Sorola and Geoff Fink chose machinima because it's an efficient way to produce animation – 3 people can produce around five minutes/ week. They then immediately post the video on the Web – for free.

Some people may not immediately see the value in this business model – but in this case (and many others) it has proven to be very successful. Burnie and his team are able to do something they love full time, and still give it away for free free. The revenues they make just come from other, non-traditional or unconventional sources (so to speak).

This wired magazine article talks about 'How T-Shirts keep online content free'. According to the article Burnie started selling shirts and caps online (based on the show). "Within months, he was filling hundreds of orders a week, generating enough revenue to pay everyone a salary." – Pretty impressive. Now if you go on the RT community they've expanded their offering to include the aforementioned DVD box sets, calendars, books, music and accessories like mugs and messenger bags. You may think: 'why would someone buy something they can get online for free?' Well, I'm a perfect example.

After learning about Red vs. Blue I told my younger sister about the show. She loved it so much that, (no exaggeration) she has literally watched the entire series (all 6 seasons) at least five times over. The addiction to the show, quality of the video, the experience of watching it in your living room on your tv, the fact that you don't have to click on another link to watch the next episode are all good reasons (to me) to justify the purchase of the DVD box set. To prove that I'm not the only person willing to shell out some $$ to purchase 'value added' merchandise this blog post (Dec 17 - titled: Still Time to Shop) proves that the 'free' model is a viable business model and that many others are looking to buy the RvB DVD sets for the holidays.

One final note: T-shirts and DVDs aren't the only way the RT guys make money. They've gotten so good at creating machinima that other video game companies have approached them to create machinima TV commercials or promotional spots for them. So although they don't make money directly off of the product they spend all their time creating, revenue has come to them in myriad ways.
Here's the first episode of RvB – The Blood Gulch Chronicles to get you started. But please don't blame me if you get addicted!

for more please go here or here. I heart RvB!

 

 

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Bulgarian President Chooses CC BY ND

interesting post about creative commons and politics. Checking how the e-mailing works....

 

 

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Bulgarian President Chooses CC BY ND

via Creative Commons » CC News by Michelle Thorne on 12/4/08

The official website of the Bulgarian President Georgi Parvanov is now available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.5 Bulgarian license. Bulgaria's Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been releasing its material under the same license since 2006, but ordinarily, these websites would be under full copyright, explains CC Bulgaria Project Lead Veni Markovski.

"Bulgaria has taken a step in the right direction to complete its image as a country where the politicians are aware of the most advanced technologies and use them for the good of the society," Veni adds.

Government leaders in other countries are also choosing similar paths. The Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan licenses his official website under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, and governments in Australia and Mexico (pdf) use and recommend CC. Another licensing decision already bearing fruit is Change.gov, the website of US president-elect Barack Obama's transition team, which is published under the most permissive of Creative Commons copyright licenses - CC Attribution 3.0 Unported.

For a listing of more governmental uses of CC, please visit our wiki page: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Government_use_of_CC_licenses.

 

 

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How will RAR change the face of sustainability?

In my mind, Rong Fei, Alice Marie Archer, and Rebecca Petzel are a power trio known as RAR. RAR is single handedly tackling the question, how can the FSSD be relevant to the challenges of the Net Generation.  The generation that thinks, shares, collaborates instantaneously around the globe.  Won't take no for an answer.  Sees no boundaries... How will the FSSD help them (us) shape a world our parents generation couldn't imagine.

Just thought I'd play around with a blog format to see if this was one we wanted to use...  Not attached to RAR, or the Net Gen, just attached to finding away for us to share with each other, and the world.