I don’t tend to think of myself as a tech dependent guy. I’m probably fooling myself, of course. I use my computer and iPad a ton. I watch television and listen to digital music.  But the big thing for me is that I don’t have a smartphone. What I have may not even rank as a feature phone: a $14.99 special on a pay-as-you go plan. There’s not much to check on it, so I tend not to pull it out. So I’m not addicted, right?

But last week my email was acting up, probably because of distributed denial of service attack on Spamhaus.  That reminded me really quickly of how much I need email, especially for communication with students.

But it could be worse. As David Meyer wrote on March 28 at Gigaom:

According to the Associated Press, on Wednesday the Egyptian Navy detained three scuba divers in a dinghy near Alexandria, who were “cutting the undersea cable” of local telco Telecom Egypt. This was confirmed on the Navy’s Facebook page. Egyptian news agency MENA identified the affected cable as SMW4: the same one whose cutting caused an internet slowdown in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia…

Incidentally, the SMW4 cable more properly known as South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 or SEA-ME-WE 4 was also involved in a very serious outage five years ago, which cut the capacity of the main Europe-Middle East connection by 75 percent. This one appears to have been less drastic.

So, we are literally hanging by a thread. A thick thread, but a thread nonetheless.

On the upside, both the digital and analog hacking incidents have passed and systems seem to be back to normal.

Maybe I should just stick to my feature phone.

(For more coverage, check out Om Malik’s piece as well.)