Earthquake knocks out Asian communications

The earthquake, which measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, occurred off the southern coastline of Taiwan on Tuesday night. As well as shaking buildings across Taiwan, the quake damaged a major underwater communications link called the Asia Pacific cable network 2 submarine cable (APCN2).

APCN2 is a ring that connects China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan. It is linked to Europe and the US by other ultra high-speed connections.

Several telecommunications companies across Asia have reported that their connectivity has been badly disrupted by the damage caused to APCN2. According to reports, Internet access slowed to a crawl in some parts of Asia after the earthquake.

A spokesperson at Singaporean ISP StarHub told ZDNet Asia that the damage resulted in "slower Internet access" for its customers. "Since yesterday, we have started re-routing the affected traffic to other undersea cables," he said. "Our engineers have been working round-the-clock and are doing their best to rectify the matter as soon as possible."

No wonder morning in the office, internet was so slow.

Full story via ZDNet Asia

Gmail Disaster

Many users over at the Google Groups forums are reporting their all of their Gmail emails and contacts were auto deleted.

The first message, posted on the Google Groups forum on December 19, stated “Found my account clean..nothing in Inbox, contacts ,sent mail..How can all these information residing in different folders disappear? ..How to write to gmail help team to restore the account..is it possible?..Where to report this abuse?.Any help ..Welcome..Thanks in advance ps101″

Other Gmail users then added to the conversation, saying that their emails had been deleted as well. Most of the users reported using Firefox 2.0 and that Gmail was open in their browser when the deletions occured.

On December 22, four days after the initial incident was reported, a Google representative posted this message on the thread:

Thank you all for reporting this issue. We apologize for the scare and inconvenience that it’s causing. We’re actively investigating as we speak, and we’ll follow up individually with users in this thread as we get to the bottom of the problem.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

[Via TechCrunch]

Third DVD Format

First DVD, next came HD-DVD, Blu-ray.
Now the sleeping giant of Asia, China creates a new DVD format known as Enhanced Versatile Disc (EVD), as part of a bid to promote a Chinese alternative to foreign technology.

EVD first appeared in 2003, but was dropped two years ago after there was a fight about licensing fees.

However Chinese electronics makers have revived the format and are saying they plan to switch completely to EVD by 2008 and stop producing DVD players.

The move will shut the competing second-generation formats from the Chinese markets and will also kill off DVD by 2008.

Read more about EVD