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You can also do the extra work to bury the cable.
Probably impractical. Digging underwater is much harder than carefully lowering something on the floor.
The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder.
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> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage.
I mean shooting electricity transformers turns out to be pretty viable, it's just got the basic problem of (1) you probably need that electricity yourself and (2) while it might be hard to prevent, catching the guys who did it is a lot easier and no one wants to do 12+ months in prison.
it’s been 10 years, and you think it’d be easier to catch someone in manhattan in this day and age but things fall through the cracks. I hope satellite surveillance advances to protect infrastructure assets but there’s really only so much unknown you can protect yourself from.
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You can also do the extra work to bury the cable.
Probably impractical. Digging underwater is much harder than carefully lowering something on the floor.
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It 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 anyth…
For some reason people on HN imagine that, but it's not how it works in reality. There are many, many international agreements - decades and in some cases centuries of them - that are effective, and new ones all the time. The UN Security Council has great power - that is why countries work so hard to promote or defeat Security Council decisions. The ICC has been effective - warlords know that they can, in many cases…
It's an easy simplifying heuristic to suppose that countries are all self-interested and nobody actually cares about "norms" or "war crimes" or "not filling low-orbit space with satellite fragments", because you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go, but like most simplifying heuristics that make things cleaner to think about, the conclusions this leads you to should be taken with a grain of salt
It’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
I wonder if the cable could be enclosed in some sort of container whose shape would make an anchor glance off its surface.
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well, a more charitable take on it would be they just don't have the means to achieve what they might want to do. would you be able to charter a boat with the ability of cutting the cables while also ensuring that whatever crew you hired will be complicit with your task? make it more simple you say by finding where the cables come on land and attack them there is more complicated because now you're on foreign soil. s…
> well, a more charitable take ... One of the main reason the very few manages to ruin cities for everyone else is because of the charitable take. In addition to that, just like GP, my experience is that the people being nuisance are really just stupid. I haven't seen many chess IMs nor many engineers destroying things the majority relies on just for fun. There's zero reason to be charitable with dumb people acting e…
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Agreed, but at the same time it would also be worthwhile to look at ways to increase our detection and policing of shipping around these cables. I'm no expert but I imagine there are ways to speed up naval reaction times, tighten penalties for ships going dark (transponder off) and set new policy norms enabling rapid investigation. Basically things that make it harder for bad actors to maintain plausible deniability.…
>The fact this Chinese ship was chased down and stopped before getting too far away was actually pretty lucky. Were they actually stopped? The linked Reuters article only says: "The ship now sits idle in international waters but inside Denmark's exclusive economic zone, closely watched by Danish military vessels." which makes it sound like it stopped of its own accord. It's also uncertain what, if anything Denmark or…
I think the broad, practical answer to that is 'almost certainly'. I'm pretty sure if warships hadn't shown up and asked to come over and have a chat, the ship wouldn't still be sitting there. There's also probably a very technical legal answer which may indicate they weren't "stopped" at all based on the precise wording actually communicated and relevant maritime law.
Interestingly, a long time ago I got to experience being on a freighter in the South China Sea and having some sizable Singapore navy warships pull up and ask to have a chat and take a look around. Warships pulling up at sea certainly has a way of commanding your undivided attention. It's like being pulled over by a cop, except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter.
I suspect the only reason the navy hasn't boarded that ship yet is because the captain is being ordered to stonewall by the owners and the government would prefer to avoid breaking maritime law (especially with everyone paying attention). However, if the relevant governments determine there's sufficient value in searching the ship, they'll just have their maritime lawyers come up with the best excuse or "exigent circumstances" pretense they can and board anyway.
The ship I was on was flying a Liberian flag but Indonesian owned. Given that we were in international waters and these guys weren't even customs, police or port authority (who are the dudes who usually pull over freighters), the captain could have technically denied their request but he didn't even consider it. He later told me, basically, if you are not 'the droids they're looking for' then you let them the fuck on board. As a commercial hauler there's simply no upside to making trouble for the Navy, they have a lot of ways to ruin your day and you might someday need their help if you've got an emergency (or pirates chasing you, which is not impossible in those waters). The only freighter captains who insist on exercising their rights under maritime law when facing a naval warship typically have a political motivation or maybe are actually pirates, spies or smugglers (of weapons or people - warships don't give a fuck about that undeclared container of stereos). Naval warships (at least in that area) also don't usually care much about expired paperwork, lapsed passports or even outstanding warrants. They aren't law enforcement and a warship like that costs over a million dollars a day to keep at sea. They are there under national command authority for reasons that are way above a freighter captain's pay grade. The captain and crew are usually just contractors hired to drive the ship. Our captain had been at sea 15 years and that was the first time he'd ever had a naval warship pay any attention to him.
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Fortunately the people wanting to do that are often to stupid to realize what's vulnerable.
This is the thing that actually worries me the most about AI. Right now there are meaningful practical obstacles to, say, manufacturing ricin or 3-D printing a working gun or figuring out how to kill somebody with a drone, and apparently these practical obstacles are enough to deter a nutso but insufficiently committed/intelligent/methodical would-be assassin, but if you have a chatbot that will happily talk you thro…
Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.