Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
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.
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.
I am still hoping sometime we could have massive amount of hollow fibre undersea cable to reduce latency between different continents.
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.
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.
But perhaps it is somehow detectable.
Could even see it through clouds using radar.
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://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...
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.
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.
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...
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/utrikes/kina-redo-att-samarbeta-o...
"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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately, that wasn't deep enough since heavy ship anchors which can dig in deeper than that.
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.
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 was just arguing it wasn't unreasonable for telegraph skeptics to believe vandalism would be common.
We still have bikes though.
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 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.
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.
Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they steal the baby Jesus.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Is there any proof of concept in the works that could radically change the equation?
https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
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.
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.
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.
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
Great insight.
(There are all ready guidelines from ICPC on cable protection design, cable crossings etc)
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 really-quite-soundly-grounded consensus is that Russian spies rented this boat. But yes, that's not proven.
[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.
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.
So any country at or below Russia's GDP ranking (11th worldwide) is "irrelevant" and "puny".
Is that what you're saying?