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What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

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Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#81

Post by lazide »

cma wrote: post #60
resolutebat wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR of the court cases: the fisherman was guilty of damages to the tune of $1.2M, and his insurance cover was voided because his act was so reckless. Funnily enough, the cable owners (Telus) tried to thread the needle of making the owner liable, but not so badly that insurance wouldn't pay for it. The judge didn't buy this, and obviously a sole operator crab boat can't pay over a million in damages (although he did…

Seems like the insurance would still pay but he loses his boat to the insurance company at that point, assuming carrying insurance was part of his fishing license.

Due to problems with moral hazard, insurance generally doesn’t cover anything illegal done intentionally or due to extreme (willful) recklessness/negligence.

Hard to argue that wasn’t what the fisherman was doing at the point he was sawing a cable in half using a saw he’s already dredged up several times.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#82

Post by generj »

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.

The argument I remember goes something like this (and I could be remembering it wrong).

They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.

The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#83

Post by bigiain »

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…

> if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair

An advanced enough attacker would build their cable taps in such a way that they automatically dropped off when they detected the cable being lifted - and would probably result in suspected but not provable "damage caused by human activity" that has broken through the cable armouring and exposed the fibre bundle inside. Now I'm wondering if the Svalbard cable damage was a software bug in the cable tap device.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#84

Post by pezezin »

oh_my_goodness wrote: post #67
cycomanic wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually we know that a single mode fibre (there would typically quite a lot of them in a cable) can carry around 100 Tb/s in the C band (used by most systems due to amplifier availability) over about 100km. Research systems have reached that limit and commercial systems are not very far off.

Is that right? The C band is only 4 or 5 THz wide, so that's impressive packing. (I'm way out of date, I know there is QAM and whatever.)

Modern DWDM systems use a channel spacing of 75/100 GHz, so you easily fit more than 50 channel in a single fibre.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#85

Post by lamontcg »

doublepg23 wrote: post #77
jhugo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

[flagged]

The Ukrainians are flying drones filled with explosives into Russian refineries and we still don't think it was just the Ukrainians taking out the Russian gas pipeline?

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#86

Post by bigiain »

lobochrome wrote: post #75
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.

Just tap a repeater and deal with encryption later.

As I understand it (being nothing more than a Google expert on the subject), the repeaters aren't the sort of thing you can just "tap". They don't decode and re encode any data, they don't even "see" the raw encrypted data as such, they're just specially doped sections of fibre with pump lasers that amplify the optical signals.

The "Get pumped" section of this page has an almost ELI5 overview: https://hackaday.com/2023/08/08/under-the-sea-optical-repeat...

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#87

Post by refurb »

resolutebat wrote: post #50
Scoundreller wrote: post #20

Had a case in Canada where a fisherman ignored the maps and kept picking up a fibre optic line with their fishing gear, and eventually cut it with a saw (twice): (I suspect it was a short-haul line, so carried no electricity for amplifiers) https://www.canlii.org/en/ca/fct/doc/2011/2011fc494/2011fc49... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peracomo_Inc_v_TELUS_Communica... > In 2005, however, he managed to pull up the Sunoq…

TL;DR of the court cases: the fisherman was guilty of damages to the tune of $1.2M, and his insurance cover was voided because his act was so reckless. Funnily enough, the cable owners (Telus) tried to thread the needle of making the owner liable, but not so badly that insurance wouldn't pay for it. The judge didn't buy this, and obviously a sole operator crab boat can't pay over a million in damages (although he did…

Despite not recovering any money, Telus may have seen some value in letting others know what the consequences can be.

“Kill the chicken to scare the monkey

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#88

Post by staplers »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #38
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…

I agree. The more you learn about trawling the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places. Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep…

  the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Financial "incentives" from fishing industry and political ramifications of raising food prices (seafood is a large portion in some places).

It's absolutely an existential threat to the ecology of the entire Earth yet those are the reasons why. "Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."

Source: https://www.unep.org/facts-about-nature-crisis

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#89

Post by tailspin2019 »

I’m probably being really slow but I couldn’t really work out what the pictures are actually showing. I see a bunch of yellow cables and some with steel sheathing - I’m not really sure what I’m looking at? Are all those cables laid together or are these photos of just one actual cable that has been fully pulled up and coiled?

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#90

Post by staplers »

glitchcrab wrote: post #22
holoduke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Criss crossing is quite normal behavior btw. I see it all the time here at the North Sea near England.

Sure, but that also makes it an ideal cover story too.

Why would the russians care to have a cover story? They're in an open hot war with the west.
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