World's greatest hackers meet the world's second greatest hackers

Apr 30, 2007 08:23 GMT  ·  By

The Internet is probably one of the biggest social meeting places for people, and one of the easiest ways to communicate. You don't have to pay for a long distance conversation, you can use an IM service instead; if you want to see the other person, the IM can also provide video calls; want a conference, you got it. Other than that, there is the file sharing opportunity, videos, music, pictures, you name it, anything that you can transform into zeros and ones is sharable. Now the Internet has grown to more than just a meeting place for people; you also have online services, of all kinds, from online shopping (for anything you can think of) to plane tickets reservations, and so on.

But, similar to one person locking the door of their house so that nobody else would get in, the Internet is a double edged sword, in which you can get information from computers, servers, and others can get information from you. Now this goes beyond the file sharing deal, seeing as how there are burglars that can get into your house, there are hackers that can access your computer. In both cases, you can set some sort of protection method, each providing a certain security level, but what has been done, can be undone.

Not having a firewall, a router, a security program of some sort will bring you a set of extra "locks" for getting protected while surfing the Internet, but having a lot of people also connected into one big link, is also a way of attracting some bad influences. One such "big link" is the plan of StarHub, a Singapore-based telecommunications provider, which, alongside 16 other companies, wants to create a $500 million high-bandwidth optical fiber submarine cable system linking Southeast Asia to the United States.

By doing so, they are creating a lot of opportunities between these geographical regions, but they're also allowing the two biggest hacker-spawning countries into the world to interconnect. The cable system will provide up to 1.92 terabits per second of data bandwidth, which means a support for 130,000 high definition television streams to be transmitted simultaneously. That much bandwidth is necessary to fulfill the "downloading needs" of the computer users in those regions, but, like I've said, there is also a big security risk in creating a direct link in between these hotspots. Nevertheless, recent earthquake activities in Taiwan - a 7.1-magnitude earthquake to be exact - have severed the underwater links in the area, which made the new link become a major priority. The Asia-America Gateway (AAG) system is expected to be operational by the fourth quarter of 2008.