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The Swedish cabin on the frontline of a possible hybrid war
- vintermann 2y ago> With governments in northern Europe on high alert over hybrid Russian activity, the Guardian was given exclusive access to the Stockholm datacentre site. Yeah, ever thought about why?
- fifilura 2y agoTangential, after reading the description of the archipelago. Sweden is the country with most islands in the world, followed by Norway and Finland. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the-most-islands.html https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the...
- yoavm 2y agoIf you've never visited the Stockholm archipelago, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think it's perhaps the best thing about Stockholm, and one of the most beautiful places in the world in general — if you're into sailing, islands and seas. It's almost too easy to find an island just for yourself for the weekend, and "Allemansrätten", the law that grants people the right to access wilderness, only makes it even more accessible. Going there at the midst of winter or during summer are both very different experiences, but both are very charming.
- casenmgreen 2y agoAlso, the superb torpedo museum!
- yoavm 2y agoA torpedo museum? Where is that?
- spidersenses 2y agoPerhaps they were talking about this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_Museum_(Stockholm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maritime_Museum_(Stockholm)
- Luc 2y agoProbably the Naval Museum (which is different from the Maritime one): https://www.marinmuseum.se/en https://www.marinmuseum.se/en
- casenmgreen 2y agoMm. I can't find it now. I'm pretty sure it was Stockholm. Had a WW2 Mark 14 out front - one of those terrible American torpedoes. I do specifically mean a and only a torpedo museum (which is not huge, and was on a little island), not the Maritime Museum (which is huge).
- pimeys 2y agoSame with Helsinki and Turku archipelago. We've been spending the whole Christmas in my parent's cabins near Helsinki in a small island. It was a bit tricky to come here with a small boat due to the ice, but when we got here, we just heated up the sauna and started enjoying a very quiet island life.
- ionwake 2y agoIs it legal to camp overnight on them? I’m from Europe and when I saw the islands on the ferry to Helsinki’s from Stockholm I have to say I was amazed at the beauty so much so I’d love own property there now. Truly astonishing seeing kids on tiny row boats chilling on random rocks in the estuary
- yoavm 2y agoIt's completely legal, yes. As a matter of fact, it's so legal that sometimes you ask yourself why own land there, since technically you can even camp on private land thanks to allemansrätten.
- pimeys 2y agoWith one caveat: you can't be too close to any houses with your camp. I don't remember how far, but at least they should not be able to see you from their window...
- pastage 2y agoRespect is the actual legal definition.... There is no legal distance and it depends and you need to respect peoples privacy. You can definitely camp where you can be seen, but if you can not be seen you are almost certainly in the clear. It is a tricky subject because you can do a lot on other peoples land as long as you are respectful. I have no problems with people camping on my land especially when they are walking or cycling while car camping is illegal in most instances.
- yencabulator 2y agoOthers mentioned not being too close to any houses. The second part is, you are not allowed to damage anything. Leave it as you found it. No trash, no damaging plant life, and so on. Also, exact rules differ from country to country, but generally the Nordics follow "everyman's rights" something like this: You cannot make a campfire, drive off-road, damage agricultural fields, cut down trees or damage trees (even the already fallen ones), go into pastures with cattle in them, and so on. Rule of thumb, don't bother the landowner, don't damage anything, and don't disrupt any of their income sources, including logging, fishing, agriculture etc. You can camp but if you want a campfire I suggest going to one of the designated camping areas; there's plenty of those too, even completely free log lean-tos and benches around a firepit and even free firewood hauled in, if you go remote enough. And then there's protected areas, with stricter rules. For example, if a rare bird is known to nest on some specific island, you might not be allowed to go on that island at all. But yes, if you're smart about it, you can camp almost anywhere.
- eesmith 2y agoDo they use the same methods to define "island"? The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..." While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number. I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide." Clearly these are not using the same definitions. I managed to find the Global Islands data set at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3cda273 https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3c... with an explorer at https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ which should have exactly what I want, except 1) it only lists ocean islands, not inland ones, and 2) I can't figure out how to get the data by country. It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.' I give up.
- Etheryte 2y agoI don't think that quote implies a limit for the definition in any way. It just says that this is the count below a given threshold. It doesn't say anything about that threshold being a standard or anything of that sort.
- eesmith 2y ago> below a given threshold Is the threshold the same for all listed countries, or does it use each country's specific definition of "island"? Is it all islands, or only ocean islands?
- LtWorf 2y ago
- tester756 2y agoWhy write about it then? Even if you assume that enemies' intelligence already knows about it, then doesnt it just show that it doesn't work? Or maybe it is just fake cabin?
- smokeless2272 2y ago[flagged]
- tokioyoyo 2y agoOh, you’d have to criticize the entire humanity, not just the west. Plenty of that happens in the east, and south as well. People just don’t care much about it, because everyone loves the western drama.
- LtWorf 2y agoYou realise how easy it is to cut power lines or disrupt trains? Literally everybody knows where they are located and can just walk and cause the service to be interrupted for a couple of days. I assure you that foreign powers are aware of infrastructure.
- 23B1 2y agoThere's no mystery to infra being both vulnerable and accessible, especially to belligerent world powers. It's all just degrees of consequence for attacking those components. Additionally, a journalist would probably (reasonably) argue that writing about it exposes just how little consideration governments give to protecting this infra.
- mrbluecoat 2y agoGood thing they have a giant neon green spindle of fiber optic cable right next to the discreet cabin to help it blend in..
- LtWorf 2y agoI'd bet it's done this way to blend with the landscape, not to be a big secret.
- ninalanyon 2y agoWhy doe it need to blend in? It's not a secret installation. The cabin is discreet simply because the red paint is the traditional colour for pretty much all rural plank clad non-residential buildings in Scandinavia. I doubt that any thought went into the colour scheme.
- unwind 2y agoIt's called Falu red [1], btw. Made from mining residual products and originally liked because it resembled luxurious brick. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falu_red
- ninalanyon 2y agoNo one (well almost no one) in Norway would call that luxurious, it's what you paint the cowshed or other agricultural buoldings with. Almost no one here would paint a residential building that colour not even a hytte (cabin) in the mountains. It's one of the few class related behaviours that I can think of in Norway. Once white paint became available wooden residential buildings (that's most residential buildings) of any quality would be painted white and south of Drammen mostly still are. Cabins are normally beiset (originally a kind of two component grey or brown stain, now more properly a varnish).
- wildzzz 2y agoAlso common in early farm structures in America too which could likely be due to large immigration from Scandinavia. The iron oxide acts as an anti-fungal as well.
- a0-prw 2y ago[flagged]
- mistrial9 2y agoyes, drumbeats of war take so many forms!
- throwaway12317 2y ago[flagged]
- llamaimperative 2y agoI remember seeing similar comments in January of 2022. Curious!
- johanneskanybal 2y agoExpand please. Last site of democracy (eu) under attack. Kind of important.
- leobg 2y ago> [T]he Guardian was given exclusive access to the Stockholm datacentre site. […] Daniel Aldstam, the chief security officer at GlobalConnect, which transports 50% of the internet capacity of the Nordics and runs the centre, described the approach to its location and ordinary outward appearance as “security through obscurity”. How do you do that facepalm emoji on HN?
- lostlogin 2y agoThis is a good point.
- ttlahsg 2y ago[flagged]
- askonomm 2y agoProbably a stupid question, but why don't we encase the (undersea) cable in some metal container or something so that it would not be so easy to break? Is it due to economics? Is the constant fixing in the end cheaper than making it hard to break, or perhaps it needs maintenance anyway often enough to make it a hassle?
- sandermvanvliet 2y agoBecause it would need to be pretty beefy in order to stop an anchor dragged by a big(-ish) ship and would be uneconomical. If it does get damaged then repair would also be more expensive than current methods
- chiph 2y agoThey are armored when they get close to land. But at depth they are not because of weight & economics. Even if a cable were armored for the full length - I'm not sure it would withstand an intentional anchor-dragging. Someone needs to do an A/B test. (no not really)
- gruez 2y agoYou have to encase the entire length of the cable, which can be hundreds of miles, but the attacker only needs to attack a single spot. The nordstream pipeline attacks have shown that planting explosives on undersea infrastructure isn't exactly hard, so you end up paying an enormous price to add a knee-high barrier for a would-be attacker.
- efnx 2y agoThey mention at the end that it makes it heavier and harder to deploy, as well as how rare it is that they get damaged. But I think this is the point of the article - that we start thinking with “a wartime mindset”. Which is a shame, but maybe necessary given the state of the world.
- nradov 2y agoThe other approach that can work in some areas is to use a plough to bury the undersea cable in a trench. This is much slower, more expensive, and damaging to the marine environment. https://www.royalihc.com/offshore-energy/offshore-equipment/subsea-vehicles/power-cable-plough https://www.royalihc.com/offshore-energy/offshore-equipment/...
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- bookofjoe 2y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42498928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42498928
- pvaldes 2y agoI wonder if sea cables could be designed with some mechanism that could stand being dragged and even crossed somewhere but returning later to its position automatically with a click. Something like a giant karabiner.
- rajamaka 2y agoI'm sure it could, but whether it's cheaper than the existing cable and repairs is probably the question mark
- pvaldes 2y agoThe main expenses aren't so much the value of the cable as the disruption in communication and intelligence that could be sensible. Arranging the cable like a V ending in a karabiner in the angle could catch the anchors on a big area and redirect it toward the point of breaking and release anchor at the angle. If the ship would take a long detour from the shortest path to attack the cable in a different area, that would coast then gas money, so a possible boycott is not free anymore making the process less desirable. That also would eliminate the plausible deniability of the ship that moved out of its main route, and could reduce the cut of communications to hours or minutes (instead days or weeks). Just speculating
- gotts 2y agoIt doesn't matter whether it can resist dragging or not, if they could blow up large concrete reinforced NS pipeline.. a tiny optical cable is much easier to destroy.
- wasmitnetzen 2y agoLooking at the sea charts[1] of the archipelago and following a few undersea cables, I think it might be this cabin[2], which roughly matches with a map on GlobalConnects website[3]. Funnily enough, it's right next to a base of the Swedish military. [1]: https://geokatalog.sjofartsverket.se/kartvisarefyren/ https://geokatalog.sjofartsverket.se/kartvisarefyren/ [2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/6mYHFhaUp7Jzx1X69 https://maps.app.goo.gl/6mYHFhaUp7Jzx1X69 [3]: https://globalconnectcarrier.com/our-network/ https://globalconnectcarrier.com/our-network/
- sourcecodeplz 2y agoGeo-Guesser future champ right here
- bikamonki 2y ago1bn concurrent streams is a lot. Can satellites handle the same or more?
- kjrefh 2y ago[flagged]
- oriettaxx 2y agobe aware that the term 'terrorist' can be applied today to somebody that one day can win the Nobel prize for peace, and then become bad again. It is a label
- brookst 2y agoSure, but it is an appropriate label for Russia today.
- tolaya7263owube 2y ago[dead]
- Qwertious 2y agoDestroying infrastructure isn't automatically terrorism. If Russia bombed people (or e.g. caved in a building where civilians could be expected to inhabit and thereby die in the collapse) then it would be terrorism. Cable bombing isn't terrorism, it's just sparkling warfare.
- questinthrow 2y agoRussia also bombs people though.
- wiseowise 2y ago> If Russia bombed people (or e.g. caved in a building where civilians could be expected to inhabit and thereby die in the collapse) then it would be terrorism. Cable bombing isn't terrorism, it's just sparkling warfare. > If You probably meant "when", friend.
- aguaviva 2y agoIf Russia bombed people (or e.g. caved in a building where civilians could be expected to inhabit and thereby die in the collapse) then it would be terrorism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol_theatre_airstrike https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariupol_theatre_airstrike
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ashoeafoot 2y agoThere is no hybrid war. just war and a useless generation of politicians unable to deal with a return of the ugly old world of colonial powers, starved up ans carved up nations all scrambling to get nukes. The dictators all told us to our face what they would do in their propaganda . Nothing overt, hidden or hybrid . We need the hawks back that won the cold war and we need those doves caged in their own delusions gone.
- redmajor12 2y agoWhat about the chicken hawks?
- CarpetBombGaza 2y ago[dead]
- ksec 2y ago“security through obscurity” and then go on a publish it in a news paper? Can someone provide some context here because I dont understand what is going on here.
- tokai 2y agoIt's only baffling if you believe press is controlled and not writing what they want.
- gus_massa 2y agoThey interview a few of the guys working there and posted a few photos of the racks inside it. It looks like they have official authorization to publish this. Just remove all that stuf and the article would be so boring that it would not be worth publishing. It looks like a PR from the facility to ensure nobody forget to send more fundings next year. Perhaps the "security through obscurity" was only a tonge in cheek remark and the area is full of hidden bear traps or something.
- ksec 2y ago>It looks like a PR from the facility to ensure nobody forget to send more fundings next year. Thanks that makes a lot more sense. It is sad that is the way how government funding are worked around the world.
- MisterTea 2y ago> “security through obscurity” and then go on a publish it in a news paper? It's obscure to people like you and me who aren't interested in undersea cable sabotage. For a government entity they either already have this knowledge or have the means to obtain it quite easily.
- kakoni 2y agoSo perhaps for Finland its not the wisest strategical move to push critical IT services into Azure?
- gotts 2y agoI don't know about Finland but I read about Ukraine partnered with AWS in 2022 to move all of its digital infrastructure(government and banks) abroad and it worked surprisingly well.
- syvanen 2y agoIs Azure somehow impacted by this? Or any other of the big providers like AWS or Google Cloud? Maybe there’s something that Finland and Finnish ISPs could learn from the big providers? And from Ukraine how they moved everything critical into cloud? The big cloud operators and service providers with their own backbones have redundancies on their network on multiple levels. Not just IP level but also on light path level. Giving them enough bandwidth that even with failure they don’t get congestion. Finnish ISPs could build more connectivity even inland or higher up in the Gulf of Bothnia. But many of them haven’t as they have optimized for latency and not for redundancy. Even Finnish government networks were shown during the COVID to be under provisioned, the. pan gateways didn’t handle remote work. And then one roadwork cut a cable next to the road it was shown that the redundant cables were in the same ditch. Service owner has just bought “redundant” connections and never confirmed it.
- pimeys 2y agoA good timing for this article, because today there was again somebody breaking the cables between Finland and Estonia. https://yle.fi/a/74-20133531 https://yle.fi/a/74-20133531
- mistrial9 2y ago[flagged]
- pimeys 2y agoThis was a Russian ship, the last one was a Chinese ship.
- jakeinspace 2y agoChinese registered, but operated by a russian crew and company I believe.
- guerrilla 2y agoLeaving from a Russian port.
- rrjahg 2y ago"One also running from Helsinki to Tallinn is owned by the Chinese-owned CITIC Telecom." Has Sikorski made a "thank you" tweet to any suspected party?
- yayitswei 2y agoLetting the Guardian publish on article about the cabin is the opposite of security through obscurity.
- jakeinspace 2y agoThat doesn’t have value against nation state actors.
- kodemongos 2y ago[dead]
- sema4hacker 2y agoI looked at submarinecablemap.com and there are 4 cables going from Helsinki Findland to Tallinn Estonia. Is that just for redundancy? I would think it's expensive to add more cables between two points when so many other locations are a dead end.
- sema4hacker 2y agoThen I noticed a single cable from Freeport Texas to Pascagoula Mississippi which seemed surprising, but then visiting the website for the tampnet.com owners of that cable reveals a map showing all kinds of offshoots of wireless coverage (I'm guessing to oil platforms), so what looks like a single cable on the map can often be the root of a wide tree of access.
- AtlasBarfed 2y agoThe russians are pretty much totally dependent on Scandinavia not shutting down / blockading their ocean access like Turkey has somewhat effectively done in the Black Sea. Russia is being really stupid in my opinion. They are antagonizing a far superior military force. The nuclear risk is obvious, but it seems that Europe will have to escalate the conventional conflict in Ukraine with more direct action. Europe has to do some "growing up" militarily. At least it appears that Finland and Poland have their act together
- derelicta 2y agoIf Westerners don't like getting invaded, then they should stop invading or destabilising countries themselves. Might do the trick.