An undersea cable near Egypt in the Mediterranean was cut today, disrupting Internet access for millions:

The main damage through is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal.

It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

The cause of the cut is unknown though there was some seismic activity recorded near Malta. This certainly seems like a pretty serious story:

Jonathan Wright - director of wholesale products at Interoute which manages part of the optical fibre network - told the BBC that the effects of the break would be felt for many days.

"This will grind economies to a halt for a short space of time," he said "If you look at, say, local financial markets who trade with European and US markets, the speed at which they get live data will be compromised." [...]

"We've lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we're looking at a total blackout in the Middle East," said Mr Wright.

"These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we're going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet,"

 

If financial transactions as far away as Singapore were really blocked by a minor undersea earthquake near Malta, it's a pretty sobering reminder of the fragile physical ties that make our virtual world possible.

Amid a slew of piracy stories from Somalia, a fake Bloomberg piece is circulating the 'net today with a report that Wall Street bankers might cringe upon reading:

Somali Pirates in Discussions to Acquire Citigroup

By Andreas Hippin

November 20 (Bloomberg) -- The Somali pirates, renegade Somalis known for hijacking ships for ransom in the Gulf of Aden, are negotiating a purchase of Citigroup.

The pirates would buy Citigroup with new debt and their existing cash stockpiles, earned most recently from hijacking numerous ships, including most recently a $200 million Saudi Arabian oil tanker. The Somali pirates are offering up to $0.10 per share for Citigroup, pirate spokesman Sugule Ali said earlier today. The negotiations have entered the final stage, Ali said. 

"You may not like our price, but we are not in the business of paying for things. Be happy we are in the mood to
offer the shareholders anything," said Ali.

The pirates will finance part of the purchase by selling new Pirate Ransom Backed Securities.  The PRBS's are backed by the cash flows from future ransom payments from hijackings in the Gulf of Aden.  Moody's and S&P have already issued their top investment grade ratings for the PRBS's.

Head pirate, Ubu Kalid Shandu, said: "We need a bank so that we have a place to keep all of our ransom money. Thankfully, the dislocations in the capital markets has allowed us to purchase Citigroup
at an attractive valuation and to take advantage of TARP capital to grow the business even faster."

Shandu added, "We don't call ourselves pirates. We are coastguards and this will just allow us to guard our coasts better."

In real pirate news, the Weekly Piracy Report counted 11 incidents last week. And James Carrol debunks the lessons of piracy in the International Herald Tribune.

(Hat tip: Andrew Willis)

Newsweek is reporting today that both the Obama and McCain campaign Web sites were hacked over the summer by what the FBI called a "foreign entity" looking for information on policy positions:

At the Obama headquarters in midsummer, technology experts detected what they initially thought was a computer virus—a case of "phishing," a form of hacking often employed to steal passwords or credit-card numbers. But by the next day, both the FBI and the Secret Service came to the campaign with an ominous warning: "You have a problem way bigger than what you understand," an agent told Obama's team. "You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system." The following day, Obama campaign chief David Plouffe heard from White House chief of staff Josh Bolten, to the same effect: "You have a real problem ... and you have to deal with it."

The Feds told Obama's aides in late August that the McCain campaign's computer system had been similarly compromised. A top McCain official confirmed to NEWSWEEK that the campaign's computer system had been hacked and that the FBI had become involved.  

Officials at the FBI and the White House told the Obama campaign that they believed a foreign entity or organization sought to gather information on the evolution of both camps' policy positions—information that might be useful in negotiations with a future administration. The Feds assured the Obama team that it had not been hacked by its political opponents. (Obama technical experts later speculated that the hackers were Russian or Chinese.)

In celebration of its 10th birthday, Google is making the Web, circa 2001, available this month. (For technical reasons, 2001 was the earliest version of its index that it could make available.)

Here are some fun findings I came across while playing with the site, which proudly announces "Search 1,326,920,000 web pages":

ForeignPolicy.com. At the time I searched, there was an AIG advertisement at the top of the screen that declared, "The greatest risk is not taking one." (I guess bailed-out AIG took that statement to its extreme.)

Barack Obama. The name gets 672 results, the first to his page at the Illinois Senate.

John McCain. The first link takes you to the "Straight Talk America" site left over from his 2000 presidential campaign.

Iraq war. It gets 17,600 results, with nine of the first 10 referring to the Iran-Iraq War. (No. 10 is to the "Iraq War Drinking Game.")

Facebook. The second link that pops up takes you to a page that says, "The facebook is only accessible to people on the Harvard network."

What kind of antique jewels have you come across while playing with the 2001 Google? Feel free to comment below.

It really is a brave new world. The president of Russia is vlogging:

I must say it's not bad, though hardly surprising from Russia's geek-in-chief, who starts each morning reading international papers online. United Russia deputy Sergei Markov, who we last heard expounding enthusiastically about how sexy Vladimir Putin is, has another choice quote in today's Guardian about the president's cyber-savvy:

For him to use the internet and video is not something extraordinary. It's normal. I would say that Medvedev is very comfortable with the internet in the same way that Putin is comfortable when he's in church."

United States Department of the Treasury

Welcome to the Bad Credit Hotel. You might, at first, be spooked by the Halloween-ish music that greets you like a haunted house -- with an ominous voice-over reading "Don't let your credit put you in a bad place." Or by the hotel receptionist who greets you and asks, "You look lost... come to solve the great mystery of credit?"

But here's the real scary part that I forgot to mention: The Bad Credit Hotel is brought to you by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Really.

Just as the financial crisis was spinning out of control last week, the Treasury announced a joint media campaign geared at educating younger Americans about how to manage their credit. The online Bad Credit Hotel game is part of the campaign. Click on the clock to learn that creditors cannot call you before 8am or after 9pm. Click on a library book and the receptionist will suggest you begin studying "history--credit history that is."

Ok good--this campaign is geared at preventing another credit crisis. The skeptic in me, however, sees a bit of irony in the Treasury's teachings on debunking the "mystery" of credit. Mystery is about the only thing that looks certain in this financial crisis. Meanwhile, the U.S. Treasury is set to become the biggest creditor in history.

Didn't Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson learn on Wall Street that timing is everything? With bailout talks in chaos, and controvery growing over what would be the biggest government injection in history, my favorite scene of the game begins with a "worldly" treasury-dreamed-up character explaining, "I was once young and careless like you, spending my money like a sailor..."

Dear Mr Paulson, not the image of Treasury you want to promote, noble as the intentions may be.

Perhaps the reason Congress is giving Paulson such a hard time these days is that they, too, have checked in to the Bad Credit Hotel, heeding this next character's advice: "It's hard to find your way when things are at their darkest... don't let the smoke get in your eyes."

Finance blogger Barry Ritholtz posts the following brilliant e-mail currently making the rounds on Wall Street:

SUBJECT: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP

DEAR AMERICAN:

I NEED TO ASK YOU TO SUPPORT AN URGENT SECRET BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP WITH A TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF GREAT MAGNITUDE.

I AM MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY OF THE REPUBLIC OF AMERICA. MY COUNTRY HAS HAD CRISIS THAT HAS CAUSED THE NEED FOR LARGE TRANSFER OF FUNDS OF 800 BILLION DOLLARS US. IF YOU WOULD ASSIST ME IN THIS TRANSFER, IT WOULD BE MOST PROFITABLE TO YOU.

I AM WORKING WITH MR. PHIL GRAM, LOBBYIST FOR UBS, WHO WILL BE MY REPLACEMENT AS MINISTRY OF THE TREASURY IN JANUARY. AS A SENATOR, YOU MAY KNOW HIM AS THE LEADER OF THE AMERICAN BANKING DEREGULATION MOVEMENT IN THE 1990S. THIS TRANSACTIN IS 100% SAFE.

THIS IS A MATTER OF GREAT URGENCY. WE NEED A BLANK CHECK. WE NEED THE FUNDS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE. WE CANNOT DIRECTLY TRANSFER THESE FUNDS IN THE NAMES OF OUR CLOSE FRIENDS BECAUSE WE ARE CONSTANTLY UNDER SURVEILLANCE. MY FAMILY LAWYER ADVISED ME THAT I SHOULD LOOK FOR A RELIABLE AND TRUSTWORTHY PERSON WHO WILL ACT AS A NEXT OF KIN SO THE FUNDS CAN BE TRANSFERRED.

PLEASE REPLY WITH ALL OF YOUR BANK ACCOUNT, IRA AND COLLEGE FUND ACCOUNT NUMBERS AND THOSE OF YOUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN TO WALLSTREETBAILOUT@TREASURY.GOV SO THAT WE MAY TRANSFER YOUR COMMISSION FOR THIS TRANSACTION. AFTER I RECEIVE THAT INFORMATION, I WILL RESPOND WITH DETAILED INFORMATION ABOUT SAFEGUARDS THAT WILL BE USED TO PROTECT THE FUNDS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY MINISTER OF TREASURY PAULSON

Whatever gets you through the trading day, I guess.

Passport reader Eric Jon Magnuson sends along the following gem:

Readers of the newest website of Vietnam's government-controlled press can't complain of any hidden bias in reporting. Propaganda magazine, the official organ of Vietnam's Committee for Propaganda and Training, launched its website (www.tuyengiao.vn) Monday, featuring articles about Ho Chi Minh Thought and a visit by representatives of the Russian Communist Party. [...]

[I]n Vietnam, public-service campaigns on everything from HIV prevention to wearing motorbike helmets are termed "propaganda." The division between politics and other kinds of social activism is less clear than in multiparty democracies.

Check out this new piece by Evgeny Morozov on how Russian bloggers have responded to the war in Georgia:

The Kremlin's Virtual Army

Shadowy hackers in Moscow and St. Petersburg? Old news. Get ready for the next generation of Russian cyberwarriors.

Google

As if Georgia didn't have enough to deal with, yesterday the country's cities and transportation routes completely disappeared from Google Maps. Reportedly wanting to keep its cyber territory conflict-neutral, Google removed all of Georgia's details from its maps, making the war-torn nation look like a ghostly white blob flanked by Russia and Turkey. Georgia, though, isn't the only country going blank on Google: neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan--who have their own ongoing terrorital dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region--are coming up empty too.

Some online commenters speculate that the allegiances of Google's Russian-born co-founder Sergey Brin might have something to do with Georgia's disappearance. That's pretty doubtful, but it's possible that Google doesn't want their software used for military purposes.

But Google has helped out Georgia in one major way, providing (albeit "involuntarily") Georgian sites with a "cyber-refuge" from Russian hackers. News service Civil Georgia as well as the country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs have started using the Google-owned site Blogger to post updates and press releases on the conflict.

 Update: Google denies that it has made any changes to the map:

“We do not have local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear.”

Looks like we may have gotten a bit ahead of ourselves, though as NYT's Miguel Helf notes, Google does seem to have plenty of "local data" about Georgia in its Google Earth program.

YouTube and even the more freewheeling LiveLeak have both apparently yanked a video showing a dress rehearsal for the Olympics opening ceremony, citing copyright concerns. It's not clear to me whether that would refer to the South Korean network that originally aired the footage, China, NBC (which bought the rights to broadcast the games), or the International Olympic Committee, but I am trying to find out.

When my colleague Travis posted the video last night, he wrote: "Maybe mighty China doesn't have as much control over the Internet as it would like to believe." Perhaps he was wrong?

UPDATE: Here we go again. Chinese Internet users are enraged at South Korea.

... Reuters reports that SBS pulled the footage off its own Web site Thursday afternoon. So, presumably we can rule the South Korean network out, unless YouTube and LiveLeak pulled their footage earlier in response to a request from SBS and then SBS did so later in response to a demand from China. I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

Walter Pincus reports today on a surprisingly large allocation of U.S. federal funds for cyber security:

A highly classified, multiyear, multibillion-dollar project, CNCI -- or "Cyber Initiative" -- is designed to develop a plan to secure government computer systems against foreign and domestic intruders and prepare for future threats. Any initial plan can later be expanded to cover sensitive civilian systems to protect financial, commercial and other vital infrastructure data."

The cyber security issue is a tricky one. For lack of a better option, the job of protecting government computer systems has fallen to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), although the Air Force is an active player. The Navy and the Army also have their own programs.

I called James Lewis, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to get some insight. He told me that the White House was becoming concerned because "DHS hasn't really done anything" on the issue of cyber security. "Some of it's internal squabbling" he says, "but they just can't seem to get their act together. You hear [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates and [Director of National Intelligence Mike] McConnell talking about it, but you never hear anything from [DHS Secrtary Michael] Chertoff."

So far, CNCI has been criticized for being too secretive, though the initiative is a step forward overall. In fact, it's good news that someone is finally starting to take this seriously. Both presidential candidates have expressed a committment to improving cyber security. Senator Obama has said he will appoint a "national cyber advisor" and will make the issue "the top priority that it should be in the 21st century." Senator McCain has pointed to a need to "invest far more in the federal task of cyber security" in order to protect strategic interests at home.

Knowing just who is supposed to be in charge of cyber security would be a good start. As Lewis points out, "It's not something you can do on an ad hoc basis like we've been doing for the past several years," adding, "We need to be better organized and better at assigning responsibilities."

Olive Riley, an Australian blogger who began posting stories and personal anecdotes at the age of 107, has died. She was 108. Friends had helped the great-great-grandmother master the art of blogging and provided her an outlet to share her experiences, which spanned the entirety of the 20th century. As of this morning, the post announcing her death had already received 100 comments expressing condolences.

Olive, the blogosphere will miss you.

Iran's state media faced the withering scorn of the blogosphere yesterday when online sleuths discovered that Sepah News, the voice of Iran's fearsome Revolutionary Guards, had doctored a photograph of the Islamic Republic's oh-so-scary missile test. Someone had pasted in a fourth missile, perhaps to cover up a dud launch. Top newspapers around the United States, to their chagrin, had given the bogus image frontpage treatment. (By pure luck, we weren't duped.)

Today, Danger Room's Noah Schachtman and Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin round up some hilarious parodies. My favorite, from the blog Are We Lumberjacks?:

Somehow, all the Photoshop fun has made Iran seem a lot less frightening. Almost like a big, friendly kitten.

At least $6.4 billion of new, transoceanic cable lines will be installed in the coming years, according to Technology Review. The chart below, a snapshot of a larger interactive map, shows some of the new cable routes in the works.

The white lines represent preexisting cables, and the colors represent different new underseas fiber cable routes. For instance, cable-laying projects are planned for 2009 to connect Greenland to both Canada and Iceland. The Red Sea, the east coast of Africa, and the Caribbean are the sites of fresh projects, and new fiber will link the West coast of the United States with China and Japan. The new cables will provide greater bandwidth, allowing data to be transferred faster across the globe -- good news for YouTube addicts. And according to Technology Review, damages to existing cables and bad connections have led many poorer countries to rely on pricey satellite connections. With cheaper access for all, could a new Internet boom be on the way?

Monday's ruling by a French court that eBay must pay French luxury goods manufacturer LVMH $60.8 million and do more to prevent counterfeit sales (think: fake Louis Vuitton handbags) raises big questions about globalization and the future of e-commerce.

As International Herald Tribune blogger Daniel Altman puts it, who should police the Internet? There's a potential slippery slope here, Altman points out, if countries are left to their own devices and sue portals such as Amazon for books considered libelous or YouTube for videos considered indecent.

The French, at least, have a history of holding Internet providers accountable for content hosted on sites they own. There's precedent in the United States, too, from the 2001 decision ordering Napster to prevent illegal file sharing between users of its site.

To some, Monday's ruling reeks of protectionism. The ruling condemns eBay's unauthorized sales of certain perfumes, limiting the sale of these luxury items to approved channels such as perfume and department stores, not the open market.

What's the answer? Leaving regulation to national courts may lead to a hodgepodge of different rulings in different countries, making it difficult for multinational firms to navigate.

Altman asks if a "global authority" to help nations and multilationals sort out e-commerce is necessary. Perhaps, but it's hard to imagine what such an authority would look like or how it would operate. I think it's safe to say eBay is on its own for now.

More outsourcing to India. This time, it's homework:

Students studying computing in the UK and US are outsourcing their university coursework to graduates in India and Romania. Work is being contracted out for as little as £5 on contract coding websites usually used by businesses. Students are outsourcing everything from simple coursework to full blown final year dissertations. It's causing a major headache for lecturers who say it is almost impossible to detect."

Slashdot's CmdrTaco cracks,"The irony, of course, is that if they actually get jobs in the sector, this will be how they actually work anyway."

Iran is far from a free and open society, but apparently its control of the Internet is not as pervasive as one might think.

Created by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) -- an Internet surveillance monitoring partnership between the Citizen Lab, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, and the Oxford Internet Institute -- this week's Tuesday Map plots the top 6,000 Persian language blogs according to the links among them, showing both those blocked (left) and visible (right) inside Iran.

Each dot represents a blog, color-coded by content (yellow and green for reformist, secular and expatriate bloggers; purple for Persian poetry; green for popular culture, and red for religious and/or conservative bloggers) and scaled by the number of links to the blog from other sites. 

Although most blocked blogs are "secular/reformist" in nature, ONI notes:

[T]he majority of these [secular/reformist] blogs are not blocked. Also, a handful of blogs from religious, pro-regime parts of the network are blocked as well. A preliminary analysis of these indicates content (like anti-Arab bias and discussion of "temporary marriages") that, while not unfriendly to the Islamic Republic, might nevertheless be embarrassing to it."

For a closer assessment of the Iranian blogosphere, check out this more detailed map and case study from the Internet and Democracy project at the Berkman Center.