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What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

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Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#131

Post by YZF »

Retric wrote: post #124
YZF wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, virus can change your DNA. Cell phone towers being everywhere with people not generally understanding how they work or whether they pose health risks is another thing. You need to tell a story that the layman can't readily refute. Crazy government scientists engineering viruses that can be remote controlled by radio signals is "marginally plausible". The fridge story IMO doesn't qualify. There's another categor…

I don’t think people actually understand refrigerators any better than cellphones which are 41 years old at this point. Create some story about the “hum” of an air compressor being linked to declining birth rates or whatever and someone will believe it. Keep harping on it long enough and it goes from a fringe idea to vaguely plausible surprisingly quickly. Just look at the Anti Vax movement and those are well over 20…

The number of people that understand the details of how a refrigerator works is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people the really understand everything about cellphone technology. But yeah, the hum is not pleasant, has that been studied? ;)

I feel like for something to stick there does need to be more than that. But who knows, give it a try and see! If you look at the common conspiracies they seem to target more complex things.

Anti-vax is a lot more complex. There was Andrew Wakefield's fraud. There are real side effects for many vaccines. There are public health considerations. The science is definitely not at a fridge level. Pharma companies can have conflicts of interest. Maybe the original cowpox gives immunity to smallpox is more intuitive but mRNA vaccines that cause cells to make the Covid spike protein are not as simple. Covid vaccines were rushed to market (one can argue for good reasons) and they did have side effects (e.g. myocarditis, tinnitus?). Authorities have walked the line of being open about the considerations vs. trying to force public health policies, sometimes eroding trust while they do that. Even experts differed on some finer policy points. I know I was really upset with people who didn't vaccinate for Covid because I believed we could get herd immunity but then new variants showed up that were so more infectious and got around the vaccine where that didn't matter.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#132

Post by guappa »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #107
saithound wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Svalbard is not a country, but a remote archipelago of Norway. The main island, Spitsbergen has a population of 2.5k people, they don't allvuse the Internet (certainly not all at the same time), and they do not pay for gigabit home internet, more like 75Mbps. For reference, the Southern Cross fiber network connecting Australia to the U.S. does more like 10+ Tbps.

All of this but also even in the case of bigger lines, a lot of home Internet traffic is not routed globally if you can avoid it. CDNs cache content on the same physical continent as much as possible, things like Netflix are usually streamed from your local ISP. A lot of traffic over the Internet is extremely unexciting things like Windows updates as well, which are generally globally served by a CDN (or even peer to…

Before https anyone could put a proxy and cache content.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#133

Post by lamontcg »

austhrow743 wrote: post #97
lamontcg wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a good reason to think it wasn't Ukraine not that it was. They're in open war with Russia, are openly attacking their resource infrastructure, and are frequently posting excellent high quality footage of it. Taking out the gas pipeline and then not using the attack for propaganda doesn't fit either their situation or their actions.

The pipeline had the additional complication that it was supplying heating fuel to Europe. Bragging about it to the Germans would have probably been a bad idea.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#134

Post by eru »

somenameforme wrote: post #130
eru wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you considered more mundane explanations first? It's indeed more likely the police just bought an off-the-shelf measuring device. They often come with both imperial and proper units. > If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error. Alas, that's not necessarily a good rule-of-thumb. Incompetence is a thing. Compare to eg how the Russian spooks placed three copies of…

That isn't 3 copies of the Sims 3. It's one copy of the game and two different expansion packs - Outdoor Living and Master Suite it looks like. This is a pretty important detail, because it's pretty difficult to come up with a reasonably likely explanation for why somebody would have 3 copies of a single game, but trivial to do so for game + expansions, which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being mea…

Thanks for correcting my memory about three copies of the Sims 3.

> [...], which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being meaningful.

Well, my narrative here is that one way or another the officers were incompetent. Either in staging (more likely), or in assigning meaning (less likely).

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#135

Post by throwaway290 »

BostonFern wrote: post #93
mschuster91 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective. Our fish industry is really well connected politically and the large players exactly know how to play the fiddle, and any attempt to hold the foreign ones accountable with actually working and appropriate measures (it's highly likely that it will take live ammunition or an intention…

To add to that, the extent of slavery taking place on fishing vessels operating in international waters is enormous. The laws to board and free captive slaves have been in the books going back to the 1800s in the case of Britain, yet nothing is done about it globally. The media and researchers who detail it are hesitant to even use the term “slavery”.

Outlaw ocean episode: https://music.amazon.ca/podcasts/9d669553-a9ee-4cf2-96fd-311...

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#136

Post by Jerrrrry »

YZF wrote: post #131
Retric wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think people actually understand refrigerators any better than cellphones which are 41 years old at this point. Create some story about the “hum” of an air compressor being linked to declining birth rates or whatever and someone will believe it. Keep harping on it long enough and it goes from a fringe idea to vaguely plausible surprisingly quickly. Just look at the Anti Vax movement and those are well over 20…

The number of people that understand the details of how a refrigerator works is orders of magnitude higher than the number of people the really understand everything about cellphone technology. But yeah, the hum is not pleasant, has that been studied? ;) I feel like for something to stick there does need to be more than that. But who knows, give it a try and see! If you look at the common conspiracies they seem to ta…

All conspiracies are based in reality.

All of them.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#137

Post by sgt »

staplers wrote: post #90
glitchcrab wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because they still want to keep a good relationship with Norway. There's trade and collaboration on fish. Russian fishing and transport vessels are using 3 major harbors in Norway.

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#139

Post by cycomanic »

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.)

For the super high capacity demonstrations, 256 QAM and/or probabalistic/geometric shaping is typically used so we get to about 12 bit/s/Hz (accounting for FEC and pilot overheads). Interestingly, data rates are mainly limited by the transceivers (RF amplifiers, DAC/ADC ENOB... is not that great at 25-100GHz, which is required for the 50+Gbaud symbol rates).

Re: What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

#140

Post by charles_f »

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…

Makes you wonder if those cables should (can) be insured against such problems instead of relying on a craber's insurance.
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