Got your tinfoil hats on, gentlemen? Then let’s get down to business.

• January 23, an undersea high-speed link near Bandar Abbas (Iran) was cut.
• January 30, an undersea high-speed link from Alexandria (Egypt) to Italy was cut.
• February 1, an undersea high-speed link between Dubai (UAE) and Oman was cut.
• February 3, an undersea high-speed link between Haloul (Qatar) and Das (UAE) was cut.
• Yesterday we find out that there’s another cut on a link out of Alexandria, apparently on the same line that went out on the 30th.

Lots of very important and knowledgeable people are bending themselves in pretzels to keep from prompting the press into any wild speculation. Of course they are, transit providers and government security officials don’t want panic. More curiously, the press has been rather quiet about it. Since when did journalists avoid rumormongering that might lead to widespread fear and panic? Particularly in regards to this region of the world? Any word on this on the nightly news?

My personal theory is that somebody (the CIA, Mossad, MI-6, whomever) is working a NSA-style dragnet on data crossing through somewhere in that area, and are taking steps to increase the portion of middle eastern communications that are passing through their sniffers.

The fine folks at Torrent Freak have been all puffed up with righteous indignation that companies like Comcast have taken to undermining their file-swarming activities. They’re active participants in the inevitable arms race that followed: users try to maximize their throughput, the ISP tries to minimize congestion, users bypass the ISP’s mechanism, ISP implements new mechanism, etc. That’s fine. It’s the invisible hand of the market and all that good stuff. Friday, one of their contributors took the high road and posted a list of proposed solutions to the Bittorrent problem. A heavily-snipped summary:

1. Ask for voluntary cooperation.
2. Keep connections within the providers network.
3. Usage based quotas.
4. Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.
5. Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.
6. Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges.

The author has the presence of mind to present downsides for each of these, but missed the major downside for each. I suspect that Torrent Freak as a whole is blinded by its own bias. People expect to get whatever it was they felt they paid for, and if you tell them that there is some limitation on what they’re paying for and your competitor doesn’t tell you (or denies the existence of the limitation), you lose business. tl;dr follows:

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