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Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare
- andy_ppp 2y agoWould 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.
- zihotki 2y agoThey 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
- toast0 2y agoMy 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.
- WillyWonkaJr 2y agoThe trillions in daily financial transactions that cross the Atlantic via undersea cable is the main concern.
- Brianna4962598 2y ago[flagged]
- blindriver 2y agoIt’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
- ksec 2y agoBut 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.
- haneefmubarak 2y agoOperational 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.
- kortilla 2y agoNo, you don’t do maintenance on them. They are designed to be laid and forgotten.
- anttihaapala 2y agoIf 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.
- logicchains 2y agoMaybe 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?
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- lnvycd 2y ago[flagged]
- kouru225 2y agoI 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.
- ronsor 2y agoWhy was it so surprising? Society as a whole is only functional because most people are uninterested in causing mayhem for no reason.
- the_af 2y agoVandalism 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.
- compootr 2y agoFor 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_af 2y agoDefinitely. I was only discussing the telegraph and its skeptics.
- grapesodaaaaa 2y agoThe 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)
- shahzaibmushtaq 2y agoWe need a new global policy that is signed by every country (if it is possible) to protect undersea internet cables.
- sschueller 2y agoLike the ICC? Doesn't work if some countries think it does not apply to them when it's inconvenient.
- from-nibly 2y agoIt's not already a policy to not break other peoples things?
- drsim 2y agoWe 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.
- mrandish 2y agoIt 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.
- 2y ago
- ajross 2y agoWorth 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.
- gradientsrneat 2y agoThe 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.
- ajross 2y agoIt 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.
- keybored 2y agoRussia 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.
- aguaviva 2y ago
- rkagerer 2y agoCan 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?
- jballer 2y agoProbably challenging to sufficiently harden the links and ground equipment, and to guarantee QoS for military applications
- Etheryte 2y agoThese 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.
- vitiral 2y agoIIRC starlink might try
- diggan 2y ago> 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.
- toast0 2y agoCapacity 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.
- bobbob1921 2y agoI 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.
- dylan604 2y agoThey 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
- Aloisius 2y agoWhy 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.
- amelius 2y agoMaybe Europe just needs a bunch of tunnels like the Channel tunnel, and then add some fiber to it.
- graeme 2y agoIs 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?
- Animats 2y agoCables 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/ https://www.smd.co.uk/category/trenching/
- alsodumb 2y agoThere 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.
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoPresumably this protects against accidental damage only. Protecting a literal globe-wrapping supply line from intentional damage is an insane concept.
- Aloisius 2y agoThe 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.
- nuker 2y agoAwesome long read about cable repairs. Ships, stories and people: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea-deep-repair-ships https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...
- chaostheory 2y agoHopefully, they won’t become a relic of globalism. When goods stop crossing borders, usually soldiers takes their place.
- seertaak 2y agoI 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.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoThat’s why there isn’t a technology solution, but rather a human institution solution.