Back to the phish story

As you may recall but probably prefer not to, on Monday March 24 my Skype account was phished, and subsequently so was my old faustaw@yahoo.com email account.

Skype resolved the problem within three days.

Yahoo, however, never did, because the account is so old the security information AND the second email address I used when I registered have disappeared, so I changed my email accounts - one Yahoo, one Gmail. I also changed every password of basically every account that I could remember having used that faustaw@yahoo.

The problem remains that my account at MyBlogLog can only be accessed through the old Yahoo account. I used MyBlogLog to see information on my blog traffic. It served me well in at least two occasions where I had to re verify my stats for business purposes.

So yesterday I was talking to my friend Richard Fernandez, who suggested that I email the following:

Hello,
Last month my old yahoo email account, faustaw@yahoo.com was phished and I have not been able to use it. Since my MyBlogLog account for my blog, http://faustasblog.com is tied to that address, I can't access the account.

I now have this new yahoo email address and would like to continue your service.

Therefore, I am going to post this number [random 12-digit number out of a book] at http://faustasblog.com as soon as you acknowledge receipt of this email. That way you can verify that I am the owner of that blog.

If you agree, I will email you the link to the post so you can easily find it.
Thank you,
Fausta Wertz
http://faustasblog.com

As soon as they acknowledged receiving my request, of course I posted the number, much to the amusement of several readers. A couple of them left humorous comments. Another one Skyped called me to ask if her dog looked sick, while reading that post.

About an hour or two later I get the first form letter I received on March 24. I removed the post with the 12-digit number. Then I called Yahoo's service number, 866-562-7219, which I received from my other friend Mamacita, and that was a waste of an otherwise perfectly good half hour.

If any of you have any suggestions for straightening this out, please let me know. For the foreseeable future, I give up.

Thank you for your forbearance.
PS, yes, you can call this a rant.



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Now it's five broken cables

As I posted earlier, last week three undersea cables were cut in three consecutive days.

Now I find at Belmont Club that it's five cables.

Albawaba:

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Of course, as Wretchard points out, the Jews are being blamed because they weren't affected. The real reason they weren't affected is that Israel uses a different cable since other Middle East countries refused to share theirs.

Never mind that undersea cable damage is an everyday thing.

In other cable news, Obi's Sister says that this would make a great geek wedding cake design



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Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast

Remember that massive internet failure I posted about on Thursday?

It's happened again. For three days in a row.

Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast

An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.

This time it appears ships' anchors are to blame,

Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues, said the cables off Egypt were likely damaged by ships' anchors.

Since ships don't sail with the anchor down, is it possible to locate what ships were anchored in those locations?

But

Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's FALCON cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.

This is hardly coincidental: as Defense Tech points out,

The abiguity in previous news reporting about whether one or two fiber optic cables were cut in the Med on Tuesday, and whether they were cut in the same place 8 miles off Alexandria or at opposite ends of the Med at the same time, has been replaced by a much worse conundrum. It’s not at all ambiguous now that at least two distinct cables were cut about 250 miles apart, on opposite sides of the huge Arabian Peninsula landmass.

Of course this is the sort of news that lends itself to the wildest speculation. Jules Crittenden has the best theory:

I think it might be someone who has a beef with a credit card company or an airline or a car rental agency

If they experienced as many delays as J (one of my readers who's been stuck in the Chicago Airport several times in the past 3 months), I fully sympathize.

Time to feed your inner geek: This is what an undersea cable looks like inside:

The Beeb has the details.

Via USA Today: The internet's undersea world.

UPDATE
J emails to say that his life has become a cheap remake of Trains, Planes and Automobiles, only with him trying to get out of Chicago.



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Huge internet failure affects India, ME, and parts of Africa

Internet failure hits two continents

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (CNN) -- Large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled Thursday following a widespread Internet failure which brought many businesses to a standstill and left others struggling to cope.

One major telecommunications provider blamed the outage, which started Wednesday, on a major undersea cable failure in the Mediterranean.

(h/t Jazz)