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What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

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Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#71

Post by [deleted] »

azalemeth wrote: post #53
mschuster91 wrote: post #33

Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs? Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to…

Fishing as carried out industrially is terrible for the environment as a whole, and really often also exploits those employed in it. The huge army of Asian fishing fleets that skirt the law and the ethics of both sides of this are the worst of the worst, however, and deep sea trawling is particularly awful. Then again, farmed fish isn't exactly ecologically brilliant either...

[deleted]

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#72

Post by YZF »

MeImCounting wrote: post #66
pessimizer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not making a logical argument against the reasoning, you're just saying that a logical argument, ignoring probability at every level, leaves you helpless. Trusting things isn't a solution, it's a cop-out. Instead of a magic formula, you take things on a case-by-case basis, examining sources and possible motives of those sources, looking at past experience with them for hints. This sounds like work because it i…

There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it. For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that…

The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility" (I just made that term up). The refrigerator example seems going a bit too far. Hormones in milk might do the trick though. Cold drinks like Pepsi and Coke definitely have some potential.

Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option.

More seriously, we do live in a complex world, we can't function without trust but we also have to be open to changing our opinions based on new evidence. I'm just reading "How to talk to a science denier" and it's got some interesting takes on these topics.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#73

Post by varenc »

next_xibalba wrote: post #10

> The critically important cable that connects Svalbard to the mainland is no thicker than a pinkie finger This is amazing. I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting. Wikipedia says "Each segment has a speed of 10 gigabits per second (Gb/s), with a future potential capacity of 2,500 Gbit/s." [1] Wikipedia also notes that NASA helped fund this system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sva…

> I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting.

The max throughput of fiber optic cables isn't exactly constant. As fiber optic modem and DSP technology improves you can get much higher speeds on 15+ year-old cables than were ever possible when they were laid.

Recently I saw an article about researchers getting 300,000 Gbit/s over existing fiber optic cables (though I'm sure that's a long way from being a deployable technology): https://www.aston.ac.uk/latest-news/aston-university-researc...

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#74

Post by fragmede »

gravescale wrote: post #69
fbdab103 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.

This is one of those ones where my instinct is "no": not only would you have to not cause an interruption or reflection that the break detection TDR systems could see, and crack any encryption, and sample what you want from the Tbps, all from a small box under the sea, but also you have to somehow get that data out and back to base, again from under the (mostly radio-opaque) sea and halfway around the world, all with…

even the metadata would be valuable though, so you wouldn't need to crack the encryption, and you don't have to have it be real-time, so you can just process and save the relevant data and pick it up later, so my instinct is that it's possible there's something there, but it would be really difficult, and we might hear about it in 50 years, just like we learned about Bletchley Park.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#75

Post by lobochrome »

fbdab103 wrote: post #48
adolph wrote: post #34

This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary: [Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable. At that point, he w…

Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.

Just tap a repeater and deal with encryption later.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#76

Post by luuurker »

jhugo wrote: post #30
defluct wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're thinking about Nord Stream

What would the Russian motivation be for blowing that up? They could have just turned off the gas supply.

I don't know who did it, but it helped to increase gas prices and Russia is a seller.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#78

Post by dekhn »

fbdab103 wrote: post #48
adolph wrote: post #34

This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary: [Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable. At that point, he w…

Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.

It certainly has been the case in the past (when undersea fiber operators were much less careful) that cables have been tapped without the owner getting wise. IIUC the method used in the past was to bring the cable inside a submarine which has a specialized fiber cleaving and joining machine. Some amount of full transmission loss already occurs, so to the operator is just looks like blip.

Here's a description of an early operation (which I think was actually on copper cables): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

When I worked at Google, Snowden and others showed that it was likely the US NSA was spying on Google fiber outside of US, I believe the speculation was that they tapped lines around UK, possibly underwater. There's nothing quite like seeing a packet trace containing an RPC between a frontend and backend and being able to recognize the communicating services, collected by a third party. Google greatly sped up its RPC encryption project after that revelation.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#79

Post by jonathankoren »

YZF wrote: post #72
MeImCounting wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it. For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that…

The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility" (I just made that term up). The refrigerator example seems going a bit too far. Hormones in milk might do the trick though. Cold drinks like Pepsi and Coke definitely have some potential. Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option. More seriously, we do live in a complex wo…

>The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility

We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.

I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.

See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.

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