Cables can be buried in trenches in the ocean bottom. There are cable plows for this. [1] They're huge and slow. Undersea power cables are routinely buried, but comm cables are only buried near shore.
The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
At the end of the day, buring cable throughout it's way is very expensive while damaging it at one spot, even if it's buried, is not that hard or expensive.
The costs to repair submarine fiber is high regardless of whether they're buried or not; they're already dragged up when they're cut by things like anchors.
It's more about the cost to bury the cable at a particular depth vs. the risk of it being cut (and expected cost to repair and outage cost).
There are guidelines to determine how deep to bury cable based on risk like the Cable Burial Risk Assessment. In shallow waters like the Baltic Sea, communications cables are buried to protect against things like fishing boats snagging them. For example, the C-Lion1 cable that was cut was buried a meter down.
In deeper seas where the risk of accidental cuts is near zero, there is little benefit to burying them.
It’s impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different locations than expect to protect them
Agreed, but at the same time it would also be worthwhile to look at ways to increase our detection and policing of shipping around these cables. I'm no expert but I imagine there are ways to speed up naval reaction times, tighten penalties for ships going dark (transponder off) and set new policy norms enabling rapid investigation.
Basically things that make it harder for bad actors to maintain plausible deniability. So far, a lot of this has been done with relatively low cost and low risk for the perpetrators. The fact this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped before getting too far away was actually pretty lucky. If we formalize new systems and policies to ensure the instant a cable is cut there are navy ships converging on suspect ships - that will shift the cost calculus of the bad guys. If every cable attack requires a special submarine deploying a demolition team underwater near the target, it gets a lot more expensive and if caught there's little deniability.
If these kinds of attacks continue then I expect we'll see some extra-judicial direct action consequences imposed. Like a ship that gets away later having a mysterious accident causing it to slowly sink in deep water (thank goodness another passing ship was nearby to rescue the crew!). While I don't like it, when bad actors figure out a way to repeatedly avoid consequences, sometimes a little rule bending is needed.
On the transponders off point, I imagine soon we will have enough satellites such that we can map every object on the surface of the earth (specially something as large as a boat).
The soviets did exactly that so they can attack large US convoys with long-range Anti-Ship Missiles
They had to use a fission reactor onboard those satellites to power the radar array
It consisted of 2 satellite types. US-A (active) and US-P (passive). US-A used radar and US-P used passive antennas so they can "see" signals from ships.
The usual issue with satellites is they'll see the whole surface of the earth _eventually_, but it takes some time before they're back over the same spot, so tracking moving objects isn't really what they are best at.
I think the broad, practical answer to that is 'almost certainly'. I'm pretty sure if warships hadn't shown up and asked to come over and have a chat, the ship wouldn't still be sitting there. There's also probably a very technical legal answer which may indicate they weren't "stopped" at all based on the precise wording actually communicated and relevant maritime law.
Interestingly, a long time ago I got to experience being on a freighter in the South China Sea and having some sizable Singapore navy warships pull up and ask to have a chat and take a look around. Warships pulling up at sea certainly has a way of commanding your undivided attention. It's like being pulled over by a cop, except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter.
I suspect the only reason the navy hasn't boarded that ship yet is because the captain is being ordered to stonewall by the owners and the government would prefer to avoid breaking maritime law (especially with everyone paying attention). However, if the relevant governments determine there's sufficient value in searching the ship, they'll just have their maritime lawyers come up with the best excuse or "exigent circumstances" pretense they can and board anyway.
The ship I was on was flying a Liberian flag but Indonesian owned. Given that we were in international waters and these guys weren't even customs, police or port authority (who are the dudes who usually pull over freighters), the captain could have technically denied their request but he didn't even consider it. He later told me, basically, if you are not 'the droids they're looking for' then you let them the fuck on board. As a commercial hauler there's simply no upside to making trouble for the Navy, they have a lot of ways to ruin your day and you might someday need their help if you've got an emergency (or pirates chasing you, which is not impossible in those waters). The only freighter captains who insist on exercising their rights under maritime law when facing a naval warship typically have a political motivation or maybe are actually pirates, spies or smugglers (of weapons or people - warships don't give a fuck about that undeclared container of stereos). Naval warships (at least in that area) also don't usually care much about expired paperwork, lapsed passports or even outstanding warrants. They aren't law enforcement and a warship like that costs over a million dollars a day to keep at sea. They are there under national command authority for reasons that are way above a freighter captain's pay grade. The captain and crew are usually just contractors hired to drive the ship. Our captain had been at sea 15 years and that was the first time he'd ever had a naval warship pay any attention to him.
Thank you for your description of your first hand experience - very interesting. Life at sea is rather different to on land!
"except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter."
Apaches don't deploy at sea. They are land based beasties. They don't carry commandos either. Pilot and CPG - two crew. Perhaps you meant a Blackhawk, if you are thinking about an American setup, which I think has a maritime variant or two. Brits will come at you with a Lynx or a Merlin.
You'll probably never see an Apache at sea. Their usual targets will sink without any assistance Anyway, I think you mean marines in a Blackhawk. Commando is also a bit British.
When someone use an analogy they are not saying that something is literally like that. They were not saying they had apaches or whatever, but that it was like being pulled over by a cop in an apache helicopter.
Just the same way that if I say that there was this dude helping me out with carrying a dead tree, and it was like it was a elephant had strolled by and decided to pick up a toot-pick. I am not saying that it was a literal elephant.
I'm aware that Apache helicopters don't carry troops. My analogy was a quick aside and should have been clearer that I wasn't suggesting Apache helicopters deploying troops at sea. I was drawing a parallel to a more familiar circumstance because some might assume that a warship confronting a freighter at sea is similar to a routine law enforcement encounter like a police officer pulling your car over in your home town - where a well-informed citizen might reasonably assert their rights if the officer exceeds their authority.
However, a naval warship isn't typically used for law enforcement like customs, harbor police or immigration. A warship confronting a freighter at sea isn't at all routine, it's extraordinary. It would be more akin to having your car pulled over in your home town by a squad of special forces backed up by attack helicopters and tanks. Any rational person would immediately realize this ain't a routine traffic stop by local cops, it's something very fucking serious. A reasonable person might conclude today may not be the day to quibble over legal technicalities and instead just cooperate, at least until they figure out what the hell is going on. That's certainly what the captain of the freighter I was on decided. And as I stared down all those guns and twitchy locked and loaded sailors on the open sea, I fully agreed with him - despite usually being quite concerned about due process when I'm going about my business in the U.S.
The point being that the captain of that Chinese freighter refusing to cooperate with those warships is not akin to a civil rights enthusiast merely asserting their rights during a routine traffic stop. It's either somebody with a cavalier disregard for their own near-term safety or a person under orders they cannot afford to refuse, possibly reinforced by phone calls from family members suddenly in custody back home. Assuming that captain was being paid to drag his ship's anchor in a certain location, I suspect he now realizes it wasn't nearly enough to become an overnight seagoing celebrity who never captains a ship again. Not to mention being detained, possibly charged and having his ship impounded. Most people who hire freighter captains prefer boring, predictable pros who ensure their owner's ships arrive quickly and safely, not detained by warships on the international news. If he's lucky he'll only lose his license and be blacklisted for life by insurers.
They're creating an analogy saying that getting stopped by a warship at sea is like getting pulled over on the highway by an Apache. Not literally saying an Apache at sea.
As far as I'm aware, the ship still also have to go through the strait between Sweden/Denmark (or through pure Danish territory) to reach the Atlantic ocean, so there are plenty of waters ahead where these governments very well could do more if economic waters it's not enough.
So that probably also helps with not wanting to just escape. Where it's now it can at least escape through international water all the way to Russia if it wants to.
To me it feels like it's stuck between a hard rock and a stone...
It seems you have it backwards: the ship Yi Peng 3 was already allowed to pass through the Denmark-Sweden straits and to the Kattegat sea area before it was stopped. What it cannot do is return through the straits to Baltic Sea and St Petersburg.
I can not find any recent updates, but this one (from 29/11, in Swedish) mentions ongoing discussions with China making progress on reaching an agreement to allow the Swedish navy to board the ship:
Thank you for sharing the story. I’m always fascinated by these industries that exist in international waters. Are there any books you recommend that capture what modern seafaring is like?
Sorry but I don't. This was many decades ago and I wasn't even a sailor. I was a teenager and my dad was able to arrange me spending two months one Summer aboard that freighter as a kind of informal, unofficial intern. I guess he thought it would be kind of like an outward bound experience. I'm not really sure how it even came together and I imagine it couldn't happen today. Things were a lot less structured back then, especially on an Indonesian freighter in the South China Sea. It was a lot of hard work and the conditions on board were rough, especially from the perspective of an American teenager among an all Indonesian crew but I learned an enormous amount about life in the real world.
Yes, there may be no way to avoid it turning into another cycle of measures vs counter-measures. The important thing is to increase the costs and difficulty for the bad guys while decreasing the disruption caused by attacking one cable.
Attaching an explosive to an undersea cable requires trained divers or an ROV, plus at least a little bit of specialized equipment and a few hours to work. It can be done but it's a lot harder than just dragging an anchor.
The seas are vast. If it were that easy to combat bad actors with strong military presence, piracy wouldn’t have been an issue for as long as it has been.
If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden to Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, it is virtually impossible for a ship travelling from St. Petersburg to the Kattegat to avoid passing over it, so redundancy can do only that much there.
> If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden
Well, if you only think about direct links, then yes. But run 5 cables up and down the coasts of Sweden<>Finland, then also for Sweden<>Germany, Denmark<>Sweden and Denmark<>Germany and you start having a lot of redundancy.
Of course, that also adds a lot of ongoing costs for infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance, so not a silver bullet exactly.
Maybe a stupid question, but is it possible to run a power cable next to the internet cables, so any ship dragging its anchor over the cables gets a rude surprise? Or that wouldn't work underwater?
"straight to ground" is not how electricity works, but yes, they'd probably just destroy the cable in that spot, and the anchor would have only a slight scar on it at most
Operational costs (outside of repairing cuts) round to zero in comparison to the capital costs of laying the initial cable. There are OLD cables that are still active, despite relatively low bandwidth, because going and disconnecting everything on either end (even though the cable would remain there) is considered an additional unnecessary cost.
There's already underwater powered trenching/laying equipment they use to bury the cables within X miles from the shore. The Baltic Sea is probably shallow enough to bury it all the way across at a higher cost per mile of course.
I don't know the engineering required but wouldn't a few small exploding drones handle this? (by "handle" I mean break the cable). 20 cables, 20+ drones (send 100 for redundancy). We've had deep sea ROVs since the 80s. Communication is harder but we have autonomous navigation now so fire and forget?
How much more are you willing to pay for your Internet service for this redundancy? Me? Zero. It is not a good idea. To me, it is right up there with having extra aeroplanes waiting in case there is a malfunction, but exactly zero customers want to pay for that privilege.
I remember reading that the early telegram adopters were really surprised that no one destroyed the lines just for fun. They all thought it was a doomed technology cause the masses would sabotage it. TBH we’ve been pretty lucky for the last 2 centuries.
Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.
This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to deter a nutso but insufficiently committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you through the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.
Same, and the story is really of all technology. A suitable amount of friction is the invisible force that holds together much of society. We have to be very careful about what activities and actions we make easy to do, because if destruction is simple, we will be governed by the laziest and most stupid among us who will harness it without thought or care. The same goes in the opposite direction; if everything is hard to do, our dynamism is oppressed.
You need a certain degree of practicality to do proper damage to infrastructure, the trades have it in spades but political types not so much. You have to have some mental model of which parts of the system are hard to replace. Sometimes this is not immediately obvious, e.g. signalling equipment vs track damage or transformers vs line damage.
TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.
I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.
well, a more charitable take on it would be they just don't have the means to achieve what they might want to do. would you be able to charter a boat with the ability of cutting the cables while also ensuring that whatever crew you hired will be complicit with your task? make it more simple you say by finding where the cables come on land and attack them there is more complicated because now you're on foreign soil.
so does that make someone stupid because they're not an evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the world burn?
One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin cities for everyone else is because of the charitable take.
In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying things the majority relies on just for fun.
There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people acting evil and there's zero reason to attribute intelligence where there's typically close to none.
They are thin on the ground, so far I could only find Norman T. Whitaker, who did a lot of insurance fraud and various kinds of swindle and was prison friends with Al Capone.
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA funded IPv4, and for exactly this reason.
Uh... no? The topic is "undersea internet cables", it's right there at the top of the page. It's true this subthread became a digression about telegraphs, and I thought it was important to bring things back to the actual subject being discussed, as it doesn't share the property that made telegraph sabotage a notable idea.
Everyone in the thread up to the point where you commented was talking about telegraph cables. I believe you when you indicate that you thought you had changed the subject back to something else, but you gave no indication that this had happened whatsoever.
The comment you're replying to:
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
Is, in fact, about the telegraph network. Thus your objection to it is bootless, because it isn't true about the telegraph network, which is the topic of that comment. The fact that it's true of other things doesn't really matter, because most wrong statements might be correct if made about some other topic.
Good grief. I can only repeat: the discussion about telegraph sabotage was a senseless digression, unrelated to the subject at hand. And I think pointing that out for the people who might not understand the distinction is important. I'm sorry if you think that's "bootless", but in the real world hijacking discussions for unrelated minutiae is considered bad form. Go post an article about telegraph sabotage. The real internet is very robust.
In the real world it's bad form because audio has 1-2 max "tracks" you can focus on and so people need to focus or lose time as they wait to get back on track.
Here is different, if you don't think a subthread is interesting instead of telling people they are talking about the wrong thing, just scroll down. You can skip it entirely.
It turns out that empirically, in every area, such '1 person' risks are very low, even though theoretically it sometimes seems likely to us.
For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a political/social movement (or set of movements) that require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it is very much against our nature to do such things. We are social creatures that live in groups and work together, and have been for millions of years. That's how we survive and thrive.
It would take '1 person' to drive their car over a busy sidewalk or to push you into traffic, but I don't worry about it when I'm waiting to cross a busy street. It would take one to poison your dinner or push you off a cliff when hiking or set a bear trap in a park ... . You can come up with endless scenarios. (And yes, with 7+ billion people in the world, even with very low odds you can find examples.)
Come to think of it, I can't think of other animals that do such things either, including non-social animals.
Almost everything we do, we do in groups trusting each other. It's deeply ingrained human nature.
It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)
I don't doubt that for critical infrastructure in general, but telecommunication infrastructure in particular seems redundant enough to be resilient against physical layer attacks of that kind.
I mean shooting electricity transformers turns out to be pretty viable, it's just got the basic problem of (1) you probably need that electricity yourself and (2) while it might be hard to prevent, catching the guys who did it is a lot easier and no one wants to do 12+ months in prison.
it’s been 10 years, and you think it’d be easier to catch someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance advances to protect infrastructure assets but there’s really only so much unknown you can protect yourself from.
Vandalism of public phones (when they existed) was pretty common in my city. And garbage bins in public spaces get destroyed all the time for no reason. Everything that isn't nailed down and very robust gets destroyed or stolen.
Infrastructure things related to water pipes (at the buildings level) gets stolen, too (happened in my building recently). Everything that can be resold as raw materials gets stolen.
For a cable at the bottom of the ocean, there is a barrier to entry though. For theft in the city, the thing being stolen is pretty easily accessible, and requires much less thought than getting some kind of submersible and going to the bottom of the ocean
The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible by shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty heavily armored (likely just the same type used to armor against ship anchors)
> The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible by shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty heavily armored
I think the cables are of variable thickness. Thicker at the shore and in areas there is higher risk for damage because of rocks etc, and thinner where it's deeper and flatter.
I think the big thing that separates cables and all the other technology is just how in-your-face power cables and telegram lines are/were. You’re stringing them across people’s windows sometimes, blocking their views at worst and making aesthetic changes to the neighborhood at best. The fact that no one sabotaged these things en masse is a miracle IMO, especially considering how many people had nothing to lose back then.
Ha ha. There could be valuables, you know. Anyway, I wanted to edit it to write, "most people are good, or at least compliant", but now the window has passed :)
Because I had this epiphany about how we lead such passive lives, complying with the rules of the system around us.
NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance.
We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
Are they talking about backups at a bulk backbone level for which we simply don't have enough satellite capacity?
These cables offer enough bandwidth to service an entire country and then some, because they're also passing along data coming from further on. We have no satellites that can offer anything close to that rate.
Starlink is the highest capacity satellite network by far and the entire constellation’s RF capacity would struggle to compete with a single undersea fiber cable.
It’s hard to put into perspective how impressive modern fiber is. Each wavelength carries many gigabits per second so FDM lets you pack terabits/sec onto a single fiber. Undersea cables can easily bundle 50 fibers, with the primary constraint being the repeaters. Confluence-1 is supposed to carry 500 tbps with just 24 pairs.
In comparison, at a generous 50gbps a sat, that’s 1000 satellites of capacity in a single cable. And that’s not even possible logistically due to orbit distributions and inter-sat interference aiming all of their RF beams at one spot.
All that said, starlink is an incredible technology for “last mile access” that will globally eat the market for remote locations with nothing coming close to competing. It’s just that undersea cable is still moving orders of magnitude more volume.
Capacity is the issue. Undersea cables typically have terrabits per second of capacity. Newer cables are hundreds of tbps.
Satellites just don't have that kind of capacity at this point. Certainly, you can aggregate several satellites, and you may get to enough capacity for your needs, but it will be a lot less capacity than a cable and you may need to have significant usage restrictions in one form or another.
I read it like "we're doing proofs of concepts but it'll take some years before it's production ready", not some wishy washy "future tech". It's in the pipeline, just that the pipeline takes some time.
I expect Starlink and other satellite providers can do QOS and prioritise critical traffic so it wouldn't have to compete with the 99.99% of streaming services in an emergency.. But I may be wrong.
I would think for longer run cables, a majority of the run is at a depth, such that anchors don’t even go that deep (except once you get closer to land/shore )
I wonder how far into the seafloor you have to bury a cable such that it’s beyond How deep an anchor can reasonably penetrate (even if the anchor is being dragged).
I’m sure this adds quite a bit of cost to the fiber run anywhere you have to bury it, however, I know I’ve seen systems that use a sled and water jets down on the sea floor to bury the cable as it’s run.
They call it "an anchor", but could it not be a tool designed for purpose that only resembles an anchor in the fact that it connects to the ship while sitting on the ocean floor? We are talking about hostile nation states and not some fishing crew
Why bother when an anchor would work fine and provide plausible deniability?
This is not a fishing boat. A cargo ship the size of the Yi Peng 3 would have an anchor that weighs on the order of 11.5 Mg with 2-3 meter long flukes. With force of such a massive ship underway, it would have little issues destroying the cables.
Would Russia/China not also suffer quite a bit while the US would hardly notice compared to Europe? It seems not as effective as people think as a way to hurt America? Before long everything would be able to run independently/with large breaks anyway.
My impression is there aren't a lot of sites US users go to that are hosted outside the continental US. So in that way, you're right, cable cuts don't hurt that much. (Unless you're in Hawaii or Puerto Rico, or probably Alaska?)
On the other hand, a lot of US based businesses work overseas with connections back to the US. Those businesses would likely be affected if there are major cable cuts, and hurting US businesses hurts the US in general.
I ageee there's ways to make this work, but there would be significant disruption for quite some time as business adapts.
China would likely be fine with fiber cuts. The GFW already limits access to the world at large and encourages local hosting. One of the techniques to discourage use of certain sites is random disruption, which trains the population to look for local sites when foreign sites don't work. Russia is pushing towards a more self-sufficient internet, but I don't think they're as far along, and I haven't heard of as much opaque coerciveness as in China, although I'm sure it's planned.
They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet. Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so that telegram and VPNs were of no help
I guess if undersea cable sabotages were to increase, you would want to be long Starlink. I suppose that's not immune to sabotage either, but you need a rocket programme to do it.
We have the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables from 1884. Doesn't appear to have been needed until now so is relatively untested.
That’s like saying we need a policy where every country agrees to be friends. If cables are cut as part of some clandestine operation by who evers security forces, they aren’t going to stop it because of some treaty.
(There are all ready guidelines from ICPC on cable protection design, cable crossings etc)
It would be literally impossible to get every country to even agree to a declaration that "warm puppies are good." Also, a lot of the shit countries do to each other is already explicitly against agreements they've signed.
Sadly, geopolitics isn't a gentleman's club. It's a brutal dog-eat-dog brawl where those with enough military power pretend rules matter - until they don't. The UN doesn't (and can't) enforce anything. It just proclaims platitudes which are ignored when it comes to anything that matters to those with real power. I mean they let Saudi Arabia chair the humans right committee, so it's clearly a joke.
Many countries ignore the International Criminal Court when it suits them and most of the others who protest, would turn around and do the same if something that really matters to their domestic power centers happens. The ICC is useful for dealing with regional warlords and criminals who don't have (or have lost) nation-state power. The criminals and warlords who do have nation-state power just ignore the ICC and the clever ones use the ICC to deal with domestic enemies when it's convenient. Unfortunately, respecting some ideal of international law or norms is a polite fiction for school children and the gullible.
For some reason people on HN imagine that, but it's not how it works in reality.
There are many, many international agreements - decades and in some cases centuries of them - that are effective, and new ones all the time. The UN Security Council has great power - that is why countries work so hard to promote or defeat Security Council decisions.
The ICC has been effective - warlords know that they can, in many cases in wartime, murder people with impunity, and in the past that was the end of it. But now they know that will be liable forever after, subject to arrest, trial and imprisonment, branded an international criminal, and unable to travel to ICC signatory states or (I think) to do business there.
No law or system of laws is perfect. Everywhere, some escape them, some manipulate them. But it's not 100% or 0%; the standard is not perfection or a complete waste - otherwise everything humanity does is a complete waste.
But everything depends on you (and me). Do we find ways to make it better, or just idly tear it down? Sitting on the sideline and complaining has become a normal behavior, but there is nobody else - nobody is on the field, except some very bad people.
It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-orbit space with satellite fragments", because you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go, but like most simplifying heuristics that make things cleaner to think about, the conclusions this leads you to should be taken with a grain of salt
Worth pointing out that articles like this were the goal of the sabotage. It makes Russia's[1] influence look outsized and threatening and is designed to increase the perceived costs of a strained relationship with Putin.
But... it's shortsighted and wrong. Cables are cheap, as infrastructure goes, and the global internet is extremely robust. Yeah yeah, they cut two cables. How many Finns or Estonians had to go without their Netflix? None, because the network just[2] routed around the damage.
[1] Yes yes, we don't know for sure it was Putin and probably never will. But it's everyone's prior at this point and it will remain so, which is really my point.
[2] Literally! The phrase is a cliche for a reason. It works.
The article says it was likely a Chinese vessel, and a previous series of cable cuts affecting European internet was attributed to a Muslim terrorist organization. It's not just one country cutting cables, and there are multiple motivations geopolitically.
It was a "chinese" vessel in the sense of registration. It wasn't operating at the behest of the PRC government. Nor, obviously, would one expect literal espionage to be carried out only by identifiable government vessels of the nation doing the operation.
The really-quite-soundly-grounded consensus is that Russian spies rented this boat. But yes, that's not proven.
Russia is both a puny country with a GDP the size of Italy and a country that could invade all its neighboring countries if given the tiniest chance.[1] Both of these things are said here in the West.
[1] Of course GDP in terms of international purchasing power isn’t the be-all-end-all for supplying your own military domestically. But people say the part about GDP as if Russia is nothing.
Except they're not. No one says Russia is a "puny country", or that it could "invade all its neighboring countries" (which would have to include, for example, China).
You're definitely making some weird exaggerations here.
Economically Russia is irrelevant (a.k.a puny). The only damage to the global economy from the war and sanctions was energy pricing pain in Europe.
If the same thing happens with China it’s going to be significant economic pain for the entire world for years due to its prominence as a manufacturing and electronics hub.
Cables can be buried in trenches in the ocean bottom. There are cable plows for this. [1] They're huge and slow. Undersea power cables are routinely buried, but comm cables are only buried near shore.
The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
[1] https://www.smd.co.uk/category/trenching/
There isn't a significant upside either.
At the end of the day, buring cable throughout it's way is very expensive while damaging it at one spot, even if it's buried, is not that hard or expensive.
Presumably this protects against accidental damage only. Protecting a literal globe-wrapping supply line from intentional damage is an insane concept.
[dead]
The costs to repair submarine fiber is high regardless of whether they're buried or not; they're already dragged up when they're cut by things like anchors.
It's more about the cost to bury the cable at a particular depth vs. the risk of it being cut (and expected cost to repair and outage cost).
There are guidelines to determine how deep to bury cable based on risk like the Cable Burial Risk Assessment. In shallow waters like the Baltic Sea, communications cables are buried to protect against things like fishing boats snagging them. For example, the C-Lion1 cable that was cut was buried a meter down.
In deeper seas where the risk of accidental cuts is near zero, there is little benefit to burying them.
It’s impossible to protect these cables so the only thing you can do is build in massive redundancy. Strategically it is probably cheaper to lay down many dozens of these cables in different locations than expect to protect them
Agreed, but at the same time it would also be worthwhile to look at ways to increase our detection and policing of shipping around these cables. I'm no expert but I imagine there are ways to speed up naval reaction times, tighten penalties for ships going dark (transponder off) and set new policy norms enabling rapid investigation.
Basically things that make it harder for bad actors to maintain plausible deniability. So far, a lot of this has been done with relatively low cost and low risk for the perpetrators. The fact this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped before getting too far away was actually pretty lucky. If we formalize new systems and policies to ensure the instant a cable is cut there are navy ships converging on suspect ships - that will shift the cost calculus of the bad guys. If every cable attack requires a special submarine deploying a demolition team underwater near the target, it gets a lot more expensive and if caught there's little deniability.
If these kinds of attacks continue then I expect we'll see some extra-judicial direct action consequences imposed. Like a ship that gets away later having a mysterious accident causing it to slowly sink in deep water (thank goodness another passing ship was nearby to rescue the crew!). While I don't like it, when bad actors figure out a way to repeatedly avoid consequences, sometimes a little rule bending is needed.
On the transponders off point, I imagine soon we will have enough satellites such that we can map every object on the surface of the earth (specially something as large as a boat).
Could even see it through clouds using radar.
The soviets did exactly that so they can attack large US convoys with long-range Anti-Ship Missiles
They had to use a fission reactor onboard those satellites to power the radar array
It consisted of 2 satellite types. US-A (active) and US-P (passive). US-A used radar and US-P used passive antennas so they can "see" signals from ships.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A
Late Cold War AShM's (SS-N-19 Shipwrecks) could use those satellites directly to update the target location in-flight
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legenda_(satellite_system)
The usual issue with satellites is they'll see the whole surface of the earth _eventually_, but it takes some time before they're back over the same spot, so tracking moving objects isn't really what they are best at.
This changes with Starlink-style constellations, and US spy industry is already doing that with SpaceX.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
>The fact this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped before getting too far away was actually pretty lucky.
Were they actually stopped? The linked Reuters article only says:
"The ship now sits idle in international waters but inside Denmark's exclusive economic zone, closely watched by Danish military vessels."
which makes it sound like it stopped of its own accord. It's also uncertain what, if anything Denmark or Sweden could do if it decided to bail.
> Were they actually stopped?
I think the broad, practical answer to that is 'almost certainly'. I'm pretty sure if warships hadn't shown up and asked to come over and have a chat, the ship wouldn't still be sitting there. There's also probably a very technical legal answer which may indicate they weren't "stopped" at all based on the precise wording actually communicated and relevant maritime law.
Interestingly, a long time ago I got to experience being on a freighter in the South China Sea and having some sizable Singapore navy warships pull up and ask to have a chat and take a look around. Warships pulling up at sea certainly has a way of commanding your undivided attention. It's like being pulled over by a cop, except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter.
I suspect the only reason the navy hasn't boarded that ship yet is because the captain is being ordered to stonewall by the owners and the government would prefer to avoid breaking maritime law (especially with everyone paying attention). However, if the relevant governments determine there's sufficient value in searching the ship, they'll just have their maritime lawyers come up with the best excuse or "exigent circumstances" pretense they can and board anyway.
The ship I was on was flying a Liberian flag but Indonesian owned. Given that we were in international waters and these guys weren't even customs, police or port authority (who are the dudes who usually pull over freighters), the captain could have technically denied their request but he didn't even consider it. He later told me, basically, if you are not 'the droids they're looking for' then you let them the fuck on board. As a commercial hauler there's simply no upside to making trouble for the Navy, they have a lot of ways to ruin your day and you might someday need their help if you've got an emergency (or pirates chasing you, which is not impossible in those waters). The only freighter captains who insist on exercising their rights under maritime law when facing a naval warship typically have a political motivation or maybe are actually pirates, spies or smugglers (of weapons or people - warships don't give a fuck about that undeclared container of stereos). Naval warships (at least in that area) also don't usually care much about expired paperwork, lapsed passports or even outstanding warrants. They aren't law enforcement and a warship like that costs over a million dollars a day to keep at sea. They are there under national command authority for reasons that are way above a freighter captain's pay grade. The captain and crew are usually just contractors hired to drive the ship. Our captain had been at sea 15 years and that was the first time he'd ever had a naval warship pay any attention to him.
Thank you for your description of your first hand experience - very interesting. Life at sea is rather different to on land!
"except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter."
Apaches don't deploy at sea. They are land based beasties. They don't carry commandos either. Pilot and CPG - two crew. Perhaps you meant a Blackhawk, if you are thinking about an American setup, which I think has a maritime variant or two. Brits will come at you with a Lynx or a Merlin.
You'll probably never see an Apache at sea. Their usual targets will sink without any assistance Anyway, I think you mean marines in a Blackhawk. Commando is also a bit British.
When someone use an analogy they are not saying that something is literally like that. They were not saying they had apaches or whatever, but that it was like being pulled over by a cop in an apache helicopter.
Just the same way that if I say that there was this dude helping me out with carrying a dead tree, and it was like it was a elephant had strolled by and decided to pick up a toot-pick. I am not saying that it was a literal elephant.
> Apaches don't deploy at sea.
I'm aware that Apache helicopters don't carry troops. My analogy was a quick aside and should have been clearer that I wasn't suggesting Apache helicopters deploying troops at sea. I was drawing a parallel to a more familiar circumstance because some might assume that a warship confronting a freighter at sea is similar to a routine law enforcement encounter like a police officer pulling your car over in your home town - where a well-informed citizen might reasonably assert their rights if the officer exceeds their authority.
However, a naval warship isn't typically used for law enforcement like customs, harbor police or immigration. A warship confronting a freighter at sea isn't at all routine, it's extraordinary. It would be more akin to having your car pulled over in your home town by a squad of special forces backed up by attack helicopters and tanks. Any rational person would immediately realize this ain't a routine traffic stop by local cops, it's something very fucking serious. A reasonable person might conclude today may not be the day to quibble over legal technicalities and instead just cooperate, at least until they figure out what the hell is going on. That's certainly what the captain of the freighter I was on decided. And as I stared down all those guns and twitchy locked and loaded sailors on the open sea, I fully agreed with him - despite usually being quite concerned about due process when I'm going about my business in the U.S.
The point being that the captain of that Chinese freighter refusing to cooperate with those warships is not akin to a civil rights enthusiast merely asserting their rights during a routine traffic stop. It's either somebody with a cavalier disregard for their own near-term safety or a person under orders they cannot afford to refuse, possibly reinforced by phone calls from family members suddenly in custody back home. Assuming that captain was being paid to drag his ship's anchor in a certain location, I suspect he now realizes it wasn't nearly enough to become an overnight seagoing celebrity who never captains a ship again. Not to mention being detained, possibly charged and having his ship impounded. Most people who hire freighter captains prefer boring, predictable pros who ensure their owner's ships arrive quickly and safely, not detained by warships on the international news. If he's lucky he'll only lose his license and be blacklisted for life by insurers.
They're creating an analogy saying that getting stopped by a warship at sea is like getting pulled over on the highway by an Apache. Not literally saying an Apache at sea.
As far as I'm aware, the ship still also have to go through the strait between Sweden/Denmark (or through pure Danish territory) to reach the Atlantic ocean, so there are plenty of waters ahead where these governments very well could do more if economic waters it's not enough.
So that probably also helps with not wanting to just escape. Where it's now it can at least escape through international water all the way to Russia if it wants to.
To me it feels like it's stuck between a hard rock and a stone...
It seems you have it backwards: the ship Yi Peng 3 was already allowed to pass through the Denmark-Sweden straits and to the Kattegat sea area before it was stopped. What it cannot do is return through the straits to Baltic Sea and St Petersburg.
I can not find any recent updates, but this one (from 29/11, in Swedish) mentions ongoing discussions with China making progress on reaching an agreement to allow the Swedish navy to board the ship:
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/kina-redo-att-samarbeta-o...
Thank you for sharing the story. I’m always fascinated by these industries that exist in international waters. Are there any books you recommend that capture what modern seafaring is like?
Sorry but I don't. This was many decades ago and I wasn't even a sailor. I was a teenager and my dad was able to arrange me spending two months one Summer aboard that freighter as a kind of informal, unofficial intern. I guess he thought it would be kind of like an outward bound experience. I'm not really sure how it even came together and I imagine it couldn't happen today. Things were a lot less structured back then, especially on an Indonesian freighter in the South China Sea. It was a lot of hard work and the conditions on board were rough, especially from the perspective of an American teenager among an all Indonesian crew but I learned an enormous amount about life in the real world.
I suspect the reaction time loses importance if the enemy can just attach an explosive payload with a timer.
But perhaps it is somehow detectable.
Yes, there may be no way to avoid it turning into another cycle of measures vs counter-measures. The important thing is to increase the costs and difficulty for the bad guys while decreasing the disruption caused by attacking one cable.
Attaching an explosive to an undersea cable requires trained divers or an ROV, plus at least a little bit of specialized equipment and a few hours to work. It can be done but it's a lot harder than just dragging an anchor.
The seas are vast. If it were that easy to combat bad actors with strong military presence, piracy wouldn’t have been an issue for as long as it has been.
If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden to Lithuania in the Baltic Sea, it is virtually impossible for a ship travelling from St. Petersburg to the Kattegat to avoid passing over it, so redundancy can do only that much there.
> If you consider an underwater cable running from Finland to Germany or Sweden
Well, if you only think about direct links, then yes. But run 5 cables up and down the coasts of Sweden<>Finland, then also for Sweden<>Germany, Denmark<>Sweden and Denmark<>Germany and you start having a lot of redundancy.
Of course, that also adds a lot of ongoing costs for infrastructure, monitoring and maintenance, so not a silver bullet exactly.
Maybe a stupid question, but is it possible to run a power cable next to the internet cables, so any ship dragging its anchor over the cables gets a rude surprise? Or that wouldn't work underwater?
That wouldn't do anything, you'd just be sending it straight to ground.
"straight to ground" is not how electricity works, but yes, they'd probably just destroy the cable in that spot, and the anchor would have only a slight scar on it at most
Undersea cables already have electric cables to power the embedded repeaters
A big problem with that in general is that there is an accidental cable cut from a ship about every 3 days on average. Deliberate cable cuts are rare.
But I assume layering cable is not a one time cost right? There should be some operation cost involved? Such as maintenance?
I am still hoping sometime we could have massive amount of hollow fibre undersea cable to reduce latency between different continents.
Operational costs (outside of repairing cuts) round to zero in comparison to the capital costs of laying the initial cable. There are OLD cables that are still active, despite relatively low bandwidth, because going and disconnecting everything on either end (even though the cable would remain there) is considered an additional unnecessary cost.
No, you don’t do maintenance on them. They are designed to be laid and forgotten.
One ship with an anchor on the bottom can destroy 100 cables just as well as one.
You can also do the extra work to bury the cable.
The C-Lion1 cable that was cut was reported buried 1 meter below the seabed.
Unfortunately, that wasn't deep enough since heavy ship anchors which can dig in deeper than that.
Probably impractical. Digging underwater is much harder than carefully lowering something on the floor.
They have a handy tool for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pipe-and-cable-laying_plough
There's already underwater powered trenching/laying equipment they use to bury the cables within X miles from the shore. The Baltic Sea is probably shallow enough to bury it all the way across at a higher cost per mile of course.
Plus it could cause damage to environmental ecosystems.
I don't know the engineering required but wouldn't a few small exploding drones handle this? (by "handle" I mean break the cable). 20 cables, 20+ drones (send 100 for redundancy). We've had deep sea ROVs since the 80s. Communication is harder but we have autonomous navigation now so fire and forget?
Are the downvotes because this wouldn't work to sabotage the cables or because it would work?
I wonder if the cable could be enclosed in some sort of container whose shape would make an anchor glance off its surface.
The cables are a lot thinner than you think. Such casing would vastly add to their bulk - and their cost.
How much more are you willing to pay for your Internet service for this redundancy? Me? Zero. It is not a good idea. To me, it is right up there with having extra aeroplanes waiting in case there is a malfunction, but exactly zero customers want to pay for that privilege.
I remember reading that the early telegram adopters were really surprised that no one destroyed the lines just for fun. They all thought it was a doomed technology cause the masses would sabotage it. TBH we’ve been pretty lucky for the last 2 centuries.
Why was it so surprising? Society as a whole is only functional because most people are uninterested in causing mayhem for no reason.
Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.
Fortunately the people wanting to do that are often to stupid to realize what's vulnerable.
This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to deter a nutso but insufficiently committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you through the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.
Same, and the story is really of all technology. A suitable amount of friction is the invisible force that holds together much of society. We have to be very careful about what activities and actions we make easy to do, because if destruction is simple, we will be governed by the laziest and most stupid among us who will harness it without thought or care. The same goes in the opposite direction; if everything is hard to do, our dynamism is oppressed.
You need a certain degree of practicality to do proper damage to infrastructure, the trades have it in spades but political types not so much. You have to have some mental model of which parts of the system are hard to replace. Sometimes this is not immediately obvious, e.g. signalling equipment vs track damage or transformers vs line damage.
TBH most people's threat models haven't really caught up with the reality of battery powered tools and carbide / bimetal blades. A small number of organised protesters could quickly disable a lot of infrastructure with a few k of milwaukee, some wrecking bars & utility keys. It's been interesting to watch the "blade runners" in London solo this, still haven't seen a coordinated group do it on a large scale.
You don't need AI for that, just look it up on Reddit
The chatbot can't even give me a code sample which doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily machine-verifiable.
Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.
I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.
well, a more charitable take on it would be they just don't have the means to achieve what they might want to do. would you be able to charter a boat with the ability of cutting the cables while also ensuring that whatever crew you hired will be complicit with your task? make it more simple you say by finding where the cables come on land and attack them there is more complicated because now you're on foreign soil.
so does that make someone stupid because they're not an evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the world burn?
> well, a more charitable take ...
One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin cities for everyone else is because of the charitable take.
In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying things the majority relies on just for fun.
There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people acting evil and there's zero reason to attribute intelligence where there's typically close to none.
They are thin on the ground, so far I could only find Norman T. Whitaker, who did a lot of insurance fraud and various kinds of swindle and was prison friends with Al Capone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_T._Whitaker
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA funded IPv4, and for exactly this reason.
The topic was the telegraph network, which did not have that property.
Uh... no? The topic is "undersea internet cables", it's right there at the top of the page. It's true this subthread became a digression about telegraphs, and I thought it was important to bring things back to the actual subject being discussed, as it doesn't share the property that made telegraph sabotage a notable idea.
Everyone in the thread up to the point where you commented was talking about telegraph cables. I believe you when you indicate that you thought you had changed the subject back to something else, but you gave no indication that this had happened whatsoever.
The comment you're replying to:
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
Is, in fact, about the telegraph network. Thus your objection to it is bootless, because it isn't true about the telegraph network, which is the topic of that comment. The fact that it's true of other things doesn't really matter, because most wrong statements might be correct if made about some other topic.
Good grief. I can only repeat: the discussion about telegraph sabotage was a senseless digression, unrelated to the subject at hand. And I think pointing that out for the people who might not understand the distinction is important. I'm sorry if you think that's "bootless", but in the real world hijacking discussions for unrelated minutiae is considered bad form. Go post an article about telegraph sabotage. The real internet is very robust.
In the real world it's bad form because audio has 1-2 max "tracks" you can focus on and so people need to focus or lose time as they wait to get back on track.
Here is different, if you don't think a subthread is interesting instead of telling people they are talking about the wrong thing, just scroll down. You can skip it entirely.
> Because it takes 1 person ...
It turns out that empirically, in every area, such '1 person' risks are very low, even though theoretically it sometimes seems likely to us.
For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a political/social movement (or set of movements) that require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it is very much against our nature to do such things. We are social creatures that live in groups and work together, and have been for millions of years. That's how we survive and thrive.
It would take '1 person' to drive their car over a busy sidewalk or to push you into traffic, but I don't worry about it when I'm waiting to cross a busy street. It would take one to poison your dinner or push you off a cliff when hiking or set a bear trap in a park ... . You can come up with endless scenarios. (And yes, with 7+ billion people in the world, even with very low odds you can find examples.)
Come to think of it, I can't think of other animals that do such things either, including non-social animals.
Almost everything we do, we do in groups trusting each other. It's deeply ingrained human nature.
The book kiosk in my town had a leave-one take-one program that was suspended because a local stole all 40+ books to sell on Amazon.
Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they steal the baby Jesus.
Things happen, but there are still nativity scenes and book kiosks all over the place that work fine.
> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network.
If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage.
> If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage
It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)
I don't doubt that for critical infrastructure in general, but telecommunication infrastructure in particular seems redundant enough to be resilient against physical layer attacks of that kind.
The last mile usually isn't, but recent events have shown that even cutting several cables doesn't have any noticeable impact on international traffic patterns: https://blog.cloudflare.com/resilient-internet-connectivity-...
I'm actually much more concerned about e.g. a logical attack against Cloudflare, which could actually bring down tons of services globally.
I mean shooting electricity transformers turns out to be pretty viable, it's just got the basic problem of (1) you probably need that electricity yourself and (2) while it might be hard to prevent, catching the guys who did it is a lot easier and no one wants to do 12+ months in prison.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalf_sniper_attack
it’s been 10 years, and you think it’d be easier to catch someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance advances to protect infrastructure assets but there’s really only so much unknown you can protect yourself from.
Vandalism of public phones (when they existed) was pretty common in my city. And garbage bins in public spaces get destroyed all the time for no reason. Everything that isn't nailed down and very robust gets destroyed or stolen.
Infrastructure things related to water pipes (at the buildings level) gets stolen, too (happened in my building recently). Everything that can be resold as raw materials gets stolen.
For a cable at the bottom of the ocean, there is a barrier to entry though. For theft in the city, the thing being stolen is pretty easily accessible, and requires much less thought than getting some kind of submersible and going to the bottom of the ocean
The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible by shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty heavily armored (likely just the same type used to armor against ship anchors)
> The egress/ingress points can sometimes be accessible by shore, but the cables I have seen there are pretty heavily armored
I think the cables are of variable thickness. Thicker at the shore and in areas there is higher risk for damage because of rocks etc, and thinner where it's deeper and flatter.
Definitely. I was only discussing the telegraph and its skeptics.
Does your city have those scooters that people ride without helmets at great speeds?
We used to, briefly. It was a failed experiment (not sure if they stole them, though I guess some were stolen).
We still have bikes though.
this is cultural. not every city is as you describe
Oh, I'm aware it's cultural.
I was just arguing it wasn't unreasonable for telegraph skeptics to believe vandalism would be common.
The second statement is true; the first is not necessarily the reason.
Seems tautologically true to me. Culture covers a lot of ground. Like saying "cities have a lot of people for urban reasons".
I think the big thing that separates cables and all the other technology is just how in-your-face power cables and telegram lines are/were. You’re stringing them across people’s windows sometimes, blocking their views at worst and making aesthetic changes to the neighborhood at best. The fact that no one sabotaged these things en masse is a miracle IMO, especially considering how many people had nothing to lose back then.
[dead]
Just look at the airport luggage belt. Runs on reciprocal altruism. Most people are not good (and this was true even before CCTV, for the cynics :) )
That’s not altruism, more like because a bag of someone else’s used clothes and underwear isn’t very useful or valuable.
Ha ha. There could be valuables, you know. Anyway, I wanted to edit it to write, "most people are good, or at least compliant", but now the window has passed :)
Because I had this epiphany about how we lead such passive lives, complying with the rules of the system around us.
Can someone explain this excerpt to me?
NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance.
We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
Are they talking about backups at a bulk backbone level for which we simply don't have enough satellite capacity?
These cables offer enough bandwidth to service an entire country and then some, because they're also passing along data coming from further on. We have no satellites that can offer anything close to that rate.
IIRC starlink might try
Starlink is the highest capacity satellite network by far and the entire constellation’s RF capacity would struggle to compete with a single undersea fiber cable.
It’s hard to put into perspective how impressive modern fiber is. Each wavelength carries many gigabits per second so FDM lets you pack terabits/sec onto a single fiber. Undersea cables can easily bundle 50 fibers, with the primary constraint being the repeaters. Confluence-1 is supposed to carry 500 tbps with just 24 pairs.
In comparison, at a generous 50gbps a sat, that’s 1000 satellites of capacity in a single cable. And that’s not even possible logistically due to orbit distributions and inter-sat interference aiming all of their RF beams at one spot.
All that said, starlink is an incredible technology for “last mile access” that will globally eat the market for remote locations with nothing coming close to competing. It’s just that undersea cable is still moving orders of magnitude more volume.
Ok that makes sense, and jives with what I thought.
Is there any proof of concept in the works that could radically change the equation?
Probably challenging to sufficiently harden the links and ground equipment, and to guarantee QoS for military applications
Capacity is the issue. Undersea cables typically have terrabits per second of capacity. Newer cables are hundreds of tbps.
Satellites just don't have that kind of capacity at this point. Certainly, you can aggregate several satellites, and you may get to enough capacity for your needs, but it will be a lot less capacity than a cable and you may need to have significant usage restrictions in one form or another.
> Why are they saying this is "future tech"?
I read it like "we're doing proofs of concepts but it'll take some years before it's production ready", not some wishy washy "future tech". It's in the pipeline, just that the pipeline takes some time.
I expect Starlink and other satellite providers can do QOS and prioritise critical traffic so it wouldn't have to compete with the 99.99% of streaming services in an emergency.. But I may be wrong.
Awesome long read about cable repairs. Ships, stories and people:
https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
I would think for longer run cables, a majority of the run is at a depth, such that anchors don’t even go that deep (except once you get closer to land/shore ) I wonder how far into the seafloor you have to bury a cable such that it’s beyond How deep an anchor can reasonably penetrate (even if the anchor is being dragged). I’m sure this adds quite a bit of cost to the fiber run anywhere you have to bury it, however, I know I’ve seen systems that use a sled and water jets down on the sea floor to bury the cable as it’s run.
They call it "an anchor", but could it not be a tool designed for purpose that only resembles an anchor in the fact that it connects to the ship while sitting on the ocean floor? We are talking about hostile nation states and not some fishing crew
Why bother when an anchor would work fine and provide plausible deniability?
This is not a fishing boat. A cargo ship the size of the Yi Peng 3 would have an anchor that weighs on the order of 11.5 Mg with 2-3 meter long flukes. With force of such a massive ship underway, it would have little issues destroying the cables.
Maybe Europe just needs a bunch of tunnels like the Channel tunnel, and then add some fiber to it.
Would Russia/China not also suffer quite a bit while the US would hardly notice compared to Europe? It seems not as effective as people think as a way to hurt America? Before long everything would be able to run independently/with large breaks anyway.
My impression is there aren't a lot of sites US users go to that are hosted outside the continental US. So in that way, you're right, cable cuts don't hurt that much. (Unless you're in Hawaii or Puerto Rico, or probably Alaska?)
On the other hand, a lot of US based businesses work overseas with connections back to the US. Those businesses would likely be affected if there are major cable cuts, and hurting US businesses hurts the US in general.
I ageee there's ways to make this work, but there would be significant disruption for quite some time as business adapts.
China would likely be fine with fiber cuts. The GFW already limits access to the world at large and encourages local hosting. One of the techniques to discourage use of certain sites is random disruption, which trains the population to look for local sites when foreign sites don't work. Russia is pushing towards a more self-sufficient internet, but I don't think they're as far along, and I haven't heard of as much opaque coerciveness as in China, although I'm sure it's planned.
They have their own more or less isolated segments of internet. Last week Russian agency regulating internet did a test in south areas and fully blocked the traffic to outside world so that telegram and VPNs were of no help
I wonder what the backbone capacity of Starlink is.
There is no way a Starlink connection has the bandwidth of fiber. It's not backbone material.
The trillions in daily financial transactions that cross the Atlantic via undersea cable is the main concern.
I guess if undersea cable sabotages were to increase, you would want to be long Starlink. I suppose that's not immune to sabotage either, but you need a rocket programme to do it.
Hopefully, they won’t become a relic of globalism. When goods stop crossing borders, usually soldiers takes their place.
We need a new global policy that is signed by every country (if it is possible) to protect undersea internet cables.
Like the ICC? Doesn't work if some countries think it does not apply to them when it's inconvenient.
We have the Convention for the Protection of Submarine Telegraph Cables from 1884. Doesn't appear to have been needed until now so is relatively untested.
That’s like saying we need a policy where every country agrees to be friends. If cables are cut as part of some clandestine operation by who evers security forces, they aren’t going to stop it because of some treaty.
(There are all ready guidelines from ICPC on cable protection design, cable crossings etc)
It's not already a policy to not break other peoples things?
It would be literally impossible to get every country to even agree to a declaration that "warm puppies are good." Also, a lot of the shit countries do to each other is already explicitly against agreements they've signed.
Sadly, geopolitics isn't a gentleman's club. It's a brutal dog-eat-dog brawl where those with enough military power pretend rules matter - until they don't. The UN doesn't (and can't) enforce anything. It just proclaims platitudes which are ignored when it comes to anything that matters to those with real power. I mean they let Saudi Arabia chair the humans right committee, so it's clearly a joke.
Many countries ignore the International Criminal Court when it suits them and most of the others who protest, would turn around and do the same if something that really matters to their domestic power centers happens. The ICC is useful for dealing with regional warlords and criminals who don't have (or have lost) nation-state power. The criminals and warlords who do have nation-state power just ignore the ICC and the clever ones use the ICC to deal with domestic enemies when it's convenient. Unfortunately, respecting some ideal of international law or norms is a polite fiction for school children and the gullible.
For some reason people on HN imagine that, but it's not how it works in reality.
There are many, many international agreements - decades and in some cases centuries of them - that are effective, and new ones all the time. The UN Security Council has great power - that is why countries work so hard to promote or defeat Security Council decisions.
The ICC has been effective - warlords know that they can, in many cases in wartime, murder people with impunity, and in the past that was the end of it. But now they know that will be liable forever after, subject to arrest, trial and imprisonment, branded an international criminal, and unable to travel to ICC signatory states or (I think) to do business there.
No law or system of laws is perfect. Everywhere, some escape them, some manipulate them. But it's not 100% or 0%; the standard is not perfection or a complete waste - otherwise everything humanity does is a complete waste.
But everything depends on you (and me). Do we find ways to make it better, or just idly tear it down? Sitting on the sideline and complaining has become a normal behavior, but there is nobody else - nobody is on the field, except some very bad people.
> For some reason people on HN imagine that
It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-orbit space with satellite fragments", because you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go, but like most simplifying heuristics that make things cleaner to think about, the conclusions this leads you to should be taken with a grain of salt
> you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go
Great insight.
That’s why there isn’t a technology solution, but rather a human institution solution.
Is there a way as a north american business to check if your site or tools have any non north american dependencies reliant on undersea cables?
Worth pointing out that articles like this were the goal of the sabotage. It makes Russia's[1] influence look outsized and threatening and is designed to increase the perceived costs of a strained relationship with Putin.
But... it's shortsighted and wrong. Cables are cheap, as infrastructure goes, and the global internet is extremely robust. Yeah yeah, they cut two cables. How many Finns or Estonians had to go without their Netflix? None, because the network just[2] routed around the damage.
[1] Yes yes, we don't know for sure it was Putin and probably never will. But it's everyone's prior at this point and it will remain so, which is really my point.
[2] Literally! The phrase is a cliche for a reason. It works.
The article says it was likely a Chinese vessel, and a previous series of cable cuts affecting European internet was attributed to a Muslim terrorist organization. It's not just one country cutting cables, and there are multiple motivations geopolitically.
It was a "chinese" vessel in the sense of registration. It wasn't operating at the behest of the PRC government. Nor, obviously, would one expect literal espionage to be carried out only by identifiable government vessels of the nation doing the operation.
The really-quite-soundly-grounded consensus is that Russian spies rented this boat. But yes, that's not proven.
Russia is both a puny country with a GDP the size of Italy and a country that could invade all its neighboring countries if given the tiniest chance.[1] Both of these things are said here in the West.
[1] Of course GDP in terms of international purchasing power isn’t the be-all-end-all for supplying your own military domestically. But people say the part about GDP as if Russia is nothing.
Both of these things are said here in the West.
Except they're not. No one says Russia is a "puny country", or that it could "invade all its neighboring countries" (which would have to include, for example, China).
You're definitely making some weird exaggerations here.
Economically Russia is irrelevant (a.k.a puny). The only damage to the global economy from the war and sanctions was energy pricing pain in Europe.
If the same thing happens with China it’s going to be significant economic pain for the entire world for years due to its prominence as a manufacturing and electronics hub.
Economically Russia is irrelevant (a.k.a puny).
So any country at or below Russia's GDP ranking (11th worldwide) is "irrelevant" and "puny".
Is that what you're saying?
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]