I got a call from our branch in India at 09:15 AM . “We don’t have internet”, they said.

“Cannot be”, I replied. “Restart your computer”.

But the word started spreading around noon. Two under water cables were cut. The internet in the middle east and India severely damaged. It was official.

48 hours later, a third cable is gone. Speculations as for the reason started arising. Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography asserted:

“…A preliminary investigation links the cuts to a ship’s anchor that dragged and ripped into the two fiber optic undersea cables.”

But a quick investigation conducted by the Egypt’s Ministry of Communications concluded:

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time“.

24 hours passed and a forth cable is gone. This got me curious so I started an investigation of my own.

I managed to put my hands on some under water cable maps and pinpointed the location of the break down (circled):

I used these coordinates, pulled some strings with friends in the army and managed to get this satellite image, taken at the exact time the cables were torn (I circled the location):

I noticed something funny. There was something there. A dot out of place. Thought it might have been a glitch in the picture, a satellite malfunction of sort, so I asked for a close up image. Again, location circled:

Still unable to understand what I was looking at, I reverted to Flickr, searching for images uploaded via mobile, from proximate locations. I found this one. Fishing vacation it appears:

Nothing out of place. Kept on looking and found another. Again – fishing at sea:

Again – nothing.

I’m still trying to contact the people taking the pictures. I know they have mobiles with them, since that’s where the images came from, but there’s no answer. Probably forget packing battery chargers.

So there. Nothing.

Suppose it was an anchor after all. Greek Maybe?

Update: It seems there’s no end to this story. A fifth cable is gone. I called the Operations Dept. in FLAG Telecom, the company who owns the cables. It seems they have cameras along the line. They sent me a photo (below) taken around 17:30 yesterday (Wednesday). Funny looking fish are swimming there, but I guess that’s how it is in the deep.

But heck. This smells so bad, I had to share what I think.

For a stealth website, NotchUp are doing a hell of a job. I got something like five invitations in the last 12 hours. Some from people I hardly know, and some from people having little to do with the web. The site is going viral like crazy. And for a reason. People are greedy.

The idea is simple. You’re a qualified professional, right? You’re not really looking for a job, but are willing to hear interesting offers? You’re not really being interviewed, it’s YOU interviewing prospect employers? So why not get paid for it? If you’re such a hot shot (which of course you are), make them pay just for meeting you! I’m so good actually, They’ll actually LEARN from interviewing me. It’s like consulting.

So here comes NotchUp. A job site (novel idea, no doubt), where you set a rate for just being interviewed. The default payment stands on $500 but why not make it $1,000? Now that’s new. How come I never thought of that? Why did I agree to be interviewed for free all my life? Darn. Not anymore! I’m going to charge from now on!

Oh. Small problem. It will never work. No employer with little brains to spear (and little experience) will pay. Trust me. I’m a recruiter. That’s (part of) what we do for a living (but don’t just trust my word on that).

Little math: For every open position we have, we’re getting potential candidates in the hundreds (qualifying for the job requirements). Sometimes thousands. We filter and interview tens. Double that by aprox. $500 per interview and you get tens of thousands of dollars paid just for recruiting. Add the first months drop-rate (not fitting after all, or found a better job), and you end up with astronomical recruiting expenses.

So where’s the catch? I’m guessing NotchIn are not at all a job site. They’re aiming to compete against LinkedIn. And they found a way of migrating all of LinkedIn’s database. Using the greedy mob itself.

In the NotchUp signup process you’re offered, for the sake of comfort of course (who has the patience to retype one’s CV?), to enter your LinkedIn user name and password and Voila! All your data is “comfortably” imported to NotchUp, ready to be searched by the stupid, yet rich, employers.

Oh, and of course, if you invite friends (using our comfortable “send to all your LinkedIn contacts” feature) you’ll be getting 10% of every interview they will be paid for (Oops. Now we also have all your friend’s emails. Oh sorry. We had it at hello. When you gave us your LinkedIn user name and password. Did anyone hear “selling your friends”?).

Right.

Ladies and Gentlemen. The king is naked. It’s a hoax. There’s no way any employer will use this service. They are ripping your LinkedIn information.

Nice UI though.

P.S.

I might be missing something here. Please tell me if you think I have. I’ll be more than happy to discuss.