Yet again, one of the undersea cables that carry so much of the world's Internet and telephone traffic has been severed, resulting in lost connections for Europe, Asia, and Africa. According to the AP, the damage was done somewhere between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean, although what did the damage is unclear.

Many of us are now highly dependent on the Internet in our daily lives. I know it's essential for my job, and if reports in the medical literature are to be believed, more than a few of us might even be psychologically addicted to that steady stream of digital information.

Despite the Internet's beginnings as a decentralized, nuclear war-proof data network, its global nature and the infrastructure that pipes it from continent to continent actually makes the whole thing fairly fragile; a well placed fishing net or anchor and whole countries or even regions can be left back in the 1950s, when e-mail sounded like a guy's name.

In 2007, Vietnam found this out the hard way when some fishermen severed an undersea cable. Earlier this year, internet cables feeding the Middle East were cut several times by cargo ships, although at the time the region's press, which has always tended towards paranoia and conspiracy theories, seemed content to lay the blame at the feet of some undefined saboteurs.

Several cables were affected, namely FLAG FEA, SMW4 and SMW3 near Alexandria, Egypt, along with damage reported to the GO cable off the Sicilian coast. France Telecom will be repairing the damage, but full service might not be reestablished until the beginning of the new year.

No ship has yet been identified as the culprit of this latest break, but given the increasing frequency of these cable accidents, perhaps it's time that we started laying them away from busy shipping routes?