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Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

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Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#101

Post by croissants »

vkou wrote: post #80
croissants wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The chatbot can't even give me a code sample which doesn't hallucinate APIs - something that is easily machine-verifiable. Asking it to do something complicated that's not machine verifiable and expecting it to be correct is science fiction.

I'm not sure what chatbots you're using, but the big free ones at this point can and, in my experience, typically do give valid code samples for a surprising range of tasks. I'm skeptical about LLMs as the ultimate future of AI, but they aren't useless.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#102

Post by mmooss »

croissants wrote: post #76
mmooss wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For some reason people on HN imagine that 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 t…

> you get to forget about a lot of context and motivations and just put on your game theory hat and go

Great insight.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#103

Post by kortilla »

rkagerer wrote: post #19

Can someone explain this excerpt to me? NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance. We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying thi…

Starlink is the highest capacity satellite network by far and the entire constellation’s RF capacity would struggle to compete with a single undersea fiber cable.

It’s hard to put into perspective how impressive modern fiber is. Each wavelength carries many gigabits per second so FDM lets you pack terabits/sec onto a single fiber. Undersea cables can easily bundle 50 fibers, with the primary constraint being the repeaters. Confluence-1 is supposed to carry 500 tbps with just 24 pairs.

In comparison, at a generous 50gbps a sat, that’s 1000 satellites of capacity in a single cable. And that’s not even possible logistically due to orbit distributions and inter-sat interference aiming all of their RF beams at one spot.

All that said, starlink is an incredible technology for “last mile access” that will globally eat the market for remote locations with nothing coming close to competing. It’s just that undersea cable is still moving orders of magnitude more volume.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#104

Post by massysett »

vijucat wrote: post #94
kouru225 wrote: post #14

I remember reading that the early telegram adopters were really surprised that no one destroyed the lines just for fun. They all thought it was a doomed technology cause the masses would sabotage it. TBH we’ve been pretty lucky for the last 2 centuries.

Just look at the airport luggage belt. Runs on reciprocal altruism. Most people are not good (and this was true even before CCTV, for the cynics :) )

That’s not altruism, more like because a bag of someone else’s used clothes and underwear isn’t very useful or valuable.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#105

Post by tuukkah »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #89
mrandish wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were they actually stopped? 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 l…

As far as I'm aware, the ship still also have to go through the strait between Sweden/Denmark (or through pure Danish territory) to reach the Atlantic ocean, so there are plenty of waters ahead where these governments very well could do more if economic waters it's not enough. So that probably also helps with not wanting to just escape. Where it's now it can at least escape through international water all the way to…

It seems you have it backwards: the ship Yi Peng 3 was already allowed to pass through the Denmark-Sweden straits and to the Kattegat sea area before it was stopped. What it cannot do is return through the straits to Baltic Sea and St Petersburg.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#106

Post by boznz »

rkagerer wrote: post #19

Can someone explain this excerpt to me? NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance. We already have satellite links and can configure our networks to route through them when a primary route disappears. Why are they saying thi…

I expect Starlink and other satellite providers can do QOS and prioritise critical traffic so it wouldn't have to compete with the 99.99% of streaming services in an emergency.. But I may be wrong.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#107

Post by ge96 »

croissants wrote: post #66
buckle8017 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You don't need AI for that, just look it up on Reddit

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#108

Post by aaron695 »

alsodumb wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #73

Cables can be buried in trenches in the ocean bottom. There are cable plows for this. [1] They're huge and slow. Undersea power cables are routinely buried, but comm cables are only buried near shore. The downside of cable burial is that repair is harder. [1] https://www.smd.co.uk/category/trenching/

There isn't a significant upside either. At the end of the day, buring cable throughout it's way is very expensive while damaging it at one spot, even if it's buried, is not that hard or expensive.

[dead]

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#109

Post by gerdesj »

mrandish wrote: post #79
gruez wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Were they actually stopped? 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 l…

Thank you for your description of your first hand experience - very interesting. Life at sea is rather different to on land!

"except the cop is heavily armed commandos in an Apache attack helicopter."

Apaches don't deploy at sea. They are land based beasties. They don't carry commandos either. Pilot and CPG - two crew. Perhaps you meant a Blackhawk, if you are thinking about an American setup, which I think has a maritime variant or two. Brits will come at you with a Lynx or a Merlin.

You'll probably never see an Apache at sea. Their usual targets will sink without any assistance Anyway, I think you mean marines in a Blackhawk. Commando is also a bit British.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#110

Post by Aloisius »

dylan604 wrote: post #64
bobbob1921 wrote: post #54

I would think for longer run cables, a majority of the run is at a depth, such that anchors don’t even go that deep (except once you get closer to land/shore ) I wonder how far into the seafloor you have to bury a cable such that it’s beyond How deep an anchor can reasonably penetrate (even if the anchor is being dragged). I’m sure this adds quite a bit of cost to the fiber run anywhere you have to bury it, however,…

They call it "an anchor", but could it not be a tool designed for purpose that only resembles an anchor in the fact that it connects to the ship while sitting on the ocean floor? We are talking about hostile nation states and not some fishing crew

Why bother when an anchor would work fine and provide plausible deniability?

This is not a fishing boat. A cargo ship the size of the Yi Peng 3 would have an anchor that weighs on the order of 11.5 Mg with 2-3 meter long flukes. With force of such a massive ship underway, it would have little issues destroying the cables.

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