Listen to the Alex Jones Show on the Internet

 

 

 

Now there are even more ways to listen to the Alex Jones Show on the Internet!

Listen to the Alex Jones Show now

Listen to the low bandwidth stream

Some more cables were cut!? Perhaps it was an accident ? LOL :)

Cable breaks cut Internet in Mideast, South Asia

 

By Jonathan Wright

CAIRO, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Breaks in three submarine cables which link Europe and the Middle East have disrupted Internet and international telephone services in parts of the Middle East and South Asia, officials said on Saturday.

The disruption reduced Egypt's Internet capacity by about 80 percent. Technicians were restoring some capacity by diverting communications traffic through the Red Sea, said a Communications Ministry official, who asked not to be named.

Residents said Internet service was either non-existent or very slow. The gravity of the outage, caused by breaks in cables in the Mediterranean off Italy, varied from area to area and according to the service provider.

In Pakistan, Internet service provider Micronet Broadband said its customers were facing degraded Internet services because of "issues" on the SMW-3, SMW-4 and FLAG lines.

In January, breaks in undersea cables off the Egyptian coast disrupted Internet access in Egypt, the Gulf region and south Asia, forcing service providers to reroute traffic and disrupting some businesses and financial dealings.

Several Egyptian residents said late on Friday that it was impossible to call the United States but calls to Europe appeared to be going through.

In Pakistan, Micronet engineer Wajahat Basharat said on Saturday Internet traffic was congested and slow and some of it was being diverted to other routes.

"SIGNIFICANT OUTAGE"

The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of submarine cable operators, said it was "aware of multiple submarine cable failures in the Eastern Mediterranean area that may be affecting the speed of Internet communications on some routes."

It said in a statement on its website it did not know what had caused the problem.

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with the U.S.-based telecommunications market research firm TeleGeography, said the three affected cables were the most direct route for moving traffic between Western Europe and the Middle East.

"If those three cables were cut and are completely out, it would be a fairly significant outage," he said.

"It is going to cause problems for some customers. It's certainly going to slow things down," Beckert said, adding that he did not believe financial institutions would be hit hard.

"Generally speaking we find that they are extremely painstaking about making sure that they have redundant capacity," he said.

Officials with AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications, the two largest U.S.-based carriers, said that some customers in the Middle East had lost all service, while others were experiencing partial disruptions on Internet connections.

Verizon had rerouted some of its traffic by sending it across the Atlantic, then the United States, across the Pacific, and on to the Middle East.

A New York Stock Exchange spokesman said he was unaware of any disruptions in trading. Exchanges CME Group, and IntercontinentalExchange said they had no disruption in their trading on Friday.

(Additional reporting by Jim Finkle in Boston, Juan Lagorio and Elinor Comlay in New York, Robert Birsel in Islamabad; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

China Internet cafes switching to Chinese OS

BEIJING (AP) — Requirements that Internet cafes in a southern Chinese city install Chinese-developed operating systems are raising new concerns over cyber snooping by authorities, a U.S. government-funded radio station reported Wednesday.

The new rules that went into effect Nov. 5 are aimed at cracking down on the use of pirated software, said Hu Shenghua, a spokesman for the Culture Bureau in the city of Nanchang.

Internet cafe operators are required to remove unlicensed software and replace it with legitimate copies of either Microsoft Windows or China's homegrown Red Flag Linux operating system while paying a fee, he said.

However, Radio Free Asia said cafes were being required to install Red Flag Linux even if they were using authorized copies of Windows. It quoted Xiao Qiang, director of the California-based China Internet Project, as saying the new rules would help authorities regulate Internet cafes that now operate on the margins of the law, and allow them to undertake heightened surveillance.

Chinese who access the Web at Internet cafes are already required to register with their identification cards. Whether accessed from home or an Internet cafe, the Web within China is regularly patrolled by specially trained monitors looking for content deemed politically subversive or related to gambling, pornography, or illegal business dealings.

Large numbers of Web sites are blocked and dozens of Chinese citizens have been arrested for accessing or sending politically sensitive information over the Web. They include a former Shanghai university librarian imprisoned for three and a half years last month for downloading and distributing information about the banned Falun Gong spiritual group.

Despite such prosecutions, China has the world's largest population of Internet users with 253 million, and authorities are eager to encourage Internet usage as a driver for commerce. Internet cafes are patronized mainly by migrant workers, the rural poor and online gaming enthusiasts.

A woman reached by phone at Nanchang's Junlin Internet Cafe said officials came last month to replace the pirated software they were using. The woman, who gave only her surname, Wang, declined to identify the new operating system but said the new regulations had increased costs "dramatically," while customers had been pleased by the improved performance.

Fan Hongguan, a spokesman for Beijing-based Red Flag Software company said the company had been marketing a version of the operating system with chat functions to Internet cafes for three years. Fan declined to comment on the surveillance allegations.

"It makes sense for Internet cafes to use (Red Flag) because of their high user traffic and the system's safeguards against viruses," Fan said.

Associated Press writer Chi Chi Zhang contributed to this report.

Volunteers Make Kimchi

Volunteers make kimchi, traditional pungent vegetable, to donate to needy neighbors for winter preparation in front of the Seoul City Hall Thursday, Nov. 20, 2008. About 2,200 housewives made 130 tons (117 metric tons) of kimchi. Made with cabbage, other vegetables and chili sauce, kimchi is the most popular traditional food in Korea.

(AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)