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A ship dropped anchor off Mombasa, Kenya, and cut the Internet to six African countries earlier this week.

It will take three weeks to repair the damage. In the meantime, the Internet in Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Juba, the capital of South Sudan, is functioning at a reduced speed. It will impede the normal flow by about 20 percent, according to the BBC's Nairobi correspondent, Noel Mwakugu.

The Indian Ocean East Africa Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable, which connects East Africa to the United Arab Emirates, was severed when a ship dropped anchor in a restricted area restricted because of the presence of the sea cabling. (See here for an interactive cable map.) The Teams cable was carrying redirected traffic from the earlier cutting of three other cables in the Red Sea, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The outage comes at a time when Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, has assumed a much greater profile as a center of technological innovation and entrepreneurship, largely due to the recent availability of fast, reliable broadband connections. These undersea fiber-optic cables, laid in 2009 and which connect Africa to the world, have kicked off Kenya's high-tech industry and prompted an increase in Kenyan Internet users from 1.8 million to 3.1 million in the first year.

RELATED: Think you know Africa? Take our geography quiz.

Bitenge Ndemo, Kenya's permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communications, says that the cost of the internet outage could reach $500 million by the time repairs are finished.

"We do not have the cost yet but it runs into millions of dollars sinceTEAMS and EASSY carry almost 70 percent of the traffic from the East AfricanRegion," Mr. Ndemo told the Monitor. "Most providers had cut off satelite thinking we have sufficientredundany," Ndemo adds, and the Kenyan government has urged other new cable lines to land elsewhere to prevent future line cuts in the high-traffic sea-lanes outside Mombasa.

In the meantime, Kenya's losses have been significant. "There have been major disruptions and loss of revenue in the past fewdays," Ndemo says. "In my estimation we shall have lost up to $500 million by the timewe are reconnected."

Jessica Colao, the manager of iHub, a high-tech incubator in Nairobi, estimates that the cut in Internet service will affect an estimated 10,000 people in Nairobi who work in the tech industry. All of those people, along with larger companies who have started to locate in the city -- such as Google, Microsoft, and Samsung -- will suffer the frustration of a substantial slow-down until the cable is repaired.

In addition to work taking longer, and therefore costing more, a slowing in the rate of information carried online could also cause multiple websites and online services to "time out. A time out is a limit on the duration allowed for an online instruction to be followed and is configured on a server-by-server or client-by-client basis. A time out will require a user to begin the process of retrieval again (and again). In many cases, users will never access the information at all, bringing work to a standstill for the duration of the repair.

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Ship's anchor cuts Internet access to six East African countries

Will constant access to the Internet make today's young people brilliant multitaskers or shallow, screen-bound hermits? A new opinion poll finds that technology experts believe the answer is "all of the above."

According to a new survey of 1,021 technology experts and critics, hyperconnectivity is a mixed bag. Fifty-five percent of those surveyed agreed that the Internet has wired the under-35 crowd differently, and that this rewiring is a good thing, stimulating multitasking talent and an ability to find relevant information fast online. But 42 percent of experts believe that the hyperconnected brain is shallow, with an unhealthy dependence on the Internet and mobile devices.

"Short attention spans resulting from quick interactions will be detrimental to focusing on the harder problems, and we will probably see a stagnation in many areas: technology, even social venues such as literature," Alvaro Retana, a technologist at HP, responded in the survey. "The people who will strive and lead the charge will be the ones able to disconnect themselves to focus."

Dire predictions

According to the Elon University Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Internet Project, which conducted the survey, the technology expert split is closer to 50-50 on whether the rise of the Internet is a boon or a bane. Many people who responded that Internet-savvy Generation Y is at a mental advantage tempered that opinion with warnings about the dark side of connectedness. [10 Facts About the Teen Brain]

"While they said access to people and information is intensely improved in the mobile Internet age, they added that they are already witnessing deficiencies in younger people's abilities to focus their attention, be patient and think deeply," Janna Anderson, director of Elon's Imagining the Internet Center and a co-author of the report detailing the findings, said in a statement. "Some expressed concerns that trends are leading to a future in which most people are shallow consumers of information, and several mentioned Orwell's '1984.'"

George Orwell's 1949 book described a dystopian society where information was strictly controlled. One respondent who mentioned the book was Paul Gardner-Stephen, a telecommunications fellow at Flinders University.

"[C]entralized powers that can control access to the Internet will be able to significantly control future generations," Gardner-Stephen wrote. "It will be much as in Orwell's '1984', where control was achieved by using language to shape and limit thought, so future regimes may use control of access to the Internet to shape and limit thought."

Online optimism

Many experts praised the talents needed to navigate the Internet, however, and suggested that people who have grown up connected will blossom.

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Expert Poll: Internet Makes Us Smarter & Stupider

We've now seen two Internet marriage proposals in just a few weeks, one onMashableanother onBuzzFeed. Is this an acceptable way to ask for someone's hand in marriage? We discuss.

RELATED: Words With Friends Is Basically a Dating App

Yes! Stop judging. Accept it. Move on.

RELATED: Old People Are Getting Better at Dating

It's sweet and thoughtful.Future husband(s): This is not my ideal proposal. But for some women out there, it is! It took Drake Martinet, who Internet-proposed to his now fiancee Stacey Green, more time and brain neurons to createthis infographicthan it takes to buy an engagement ring, go to a fancy restaurant, and ask "the question." Points for effort. Plus, I bet a lot of these online declarations represent some sort of cute personalized moment between these couples. Maybe Martinet and Green have some infographic inside (sex) joke? That makes it a little bit sweeter, right? And, even if zero inside jokes are involved, the Internet proposer goes into it knowing that this type of thing is not yet socially acceptable and most definitely embarrassing, yet, still goes through it anyway! Now that's true love.

RELATED: The People You Didn't Expect to Be Talking Like Pirates Today

Internet proposals are not any more absurd than real life ones.There are lots of over-the-top ways to propose to someone in real life, too. Like,ordering a 7 ounce steak branded with "Will You Marry Me?"making a proposal trailer and playing it in a movie theater, orvia flash mob, just to give some examples.Internet or not, cringe worthy proposals happen.

RELATED: 8.4 Percent of All Marriages Are Interracial Now

Just accept it, we live on the Internet these days.We date online. We socialize online. We watch TV online. We read online. We work online. And, some even have sex, or facilitate something like it, online. The Internet isn't just some B-list society for computer nerds and freaks. It's a world we, the normals, inhabit. If it's totally acceptable to live the rest of our lives on this here web, marriage proposals can happen online, too. In fact, with the rest of our lives here, the cyber world is the most natural place to get proposed to now-a-days -- the Internet is our modern village. A proposal is supposed to be the public declaration of that union. Back in the olden-days that meant a community celebration, these days, the Internet is our public arena, thus the most logical place to tell the world how much you love that special someone. And, the entire world will indeed hear, because, well, this is the Internet.

RELATED: The Secrets of Matt Drudge's Long Success

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Cocktail Crossfire: Are Internet Marriage Proposals Acceptable?

I recently tested out the software SEO SpyGlass which is part of the SEO Powersuite. SEO SpyGlass is a simple-to-use backlink checker. If you want to do well in SEO you have to understand the importance of keeping track of your competitors back-linking strategies. SEO SpyGlass can help you do that and also help you find high-quality links for your website.

SEO SpyGlass helps you see, on your own computer, what strategies your competitors have employed and this data is what you need to create a winning strategy of your own. This important information is for you to keep private and wont be published online for others to see. This is a plus.

SEO SpyGlass answers some pretty serious questions:

SEO SpyGlass Software Key Features:

Background Data on Software

Step one of the process, add a URL of a competitor. If you chose next without the show expert options checked you were given some basic information to start. I chose to not check it for test one.

The software then asked if I wanted to update search engine data.

I, of course, said yes and was given many options to choose from. I was also given the chance to add more backlink factors of my own. Some factors you dont see in the image below:

Continued here:
Review of SEO SpyGlass 5.0.3

29 February 2012

The Isle of Man has no intention of introducing taxes on capital gains, the island's Treasury Minister, Eddie Teare has confirmed, clarifying the situation following the removal of the island's deemed distribution regime.

Following an investigation by the European Union Code of Conduct Group on Business Taxation, the Isle of Man agreed to remove its Attribution Regime for Individuals from April 2012 to ensure that the territory meets international standards.

Teare said that the abolition of the attribution regime had removed provisions deemed 'harmful', allowing the territory to retain its zero/ten corporate tax regime. Due to the changes, company profits can only be taxed when paid out as dividends received by Isle of Man shareholders rather than on a deemed distribution basis, ie. with tax chargeable regardless of whether a distribution is made, based on the shareholders' cut of the company's profits in a given year.

Teare said that, to combat tax avoidance as a result of the regime's removal, Practice Note 174/12 was released to outline changes to make more strict the tax treatment of an income distribution to prevent individuals from employing tax planning to avoid the payment of income taxes. However the government has clarified that, contrary to erroneous reports, a charge to income tax will not arise to shareholders when capital gains made by a company are distributed.

Teare said: "It has come to my attention that unacceptable tax planning was being contemplated and I had to take steps to ensure that tax due on income, not capital gains, was paid. This is not an attempt to introduce a form of capital gains tax; nothing is further from my mind, the minister confirmed.

The Isle of Man's attribution regime was introduced in 2008 under The Income Tax (Attributed Profits) Temporary Taxation Order 2007 (Statutory Document 928/07), following approval by the island's legislative assembly the Tynwald in December 2007.

The removal of the regime was announced in Budget 2011, and is effective from April 2012.

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IoM Intends No Tax On Capital Gains