111–120 of 262 posts
I know nothing of this type of engineering. How do you even start a project like this? Map the bottom of the ocean, figure out all the danger zones? What is the cost of doing something like this?
Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 - 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did not cap out. So, we rang up, a sal…
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
You could load a modern Javascript-powered website in less than a minute with that.
Especially the linked blog post, as it doesn't render unless you allow JavaScript from gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com (per uMatrix). Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that JS being on is mandatory? Especially for something as prosaic as a couple of paragraphs of text.
Here's an idea: add some HN logic to automatically move a comment that begins with "TL;DR" to the top of the thread.
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Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?
Source, destination, message length, etc. Lots of interesting meta data to play with.
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False. Snowden revelations clearly indicated that tapping undersea cables is (unsurprisingly) difficult to detect. A lot of surveillance is done both *illegally* and secretly. Forcing carriers to install black boxes next to their routers is not always the preferred choice.
You are missing the fact that most undersea cables get tapped multiple times. Five Eyes normally inspects the data on land, but enemies will do undersea taps. While a cable is being tapped, there will be a suspicious change in signal strength, and various signal reflections will tell the cable operators where the tap is. Thats bad for a spy agency who want to remain undetected. Instead, they break the cable in three…
Please don't make guesses. I'm aware of the tapping process.
> Thats bad for a spy agency who want to remain undetected.
Yes, this is inevitable and it's still extremely more stealth that plugging network taps in somebody's else NOC. Especially if the tapping is done illegally.
I know nothing of this type of engineering. How do you even start a project like this? Map the bottom of the ocean, figure out all the danger zones? What is the cost of doing something like this?
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That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or whatever.
It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the long run across the deep ocean is a lot more straightforward than most people would expect. 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on the ocean floor. 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by dragging a plow along…
Looking at what I can find, it looks like way more than 10 times the cost.
No mention of latency improvements? Seems crazy since oversea transit (tcp & single-channel) is usually latency (or loss) bound. I would expect it's better than going over public transit and legacy subsea fiber, but it would have been useful to see some comparison tests between POPs.
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My browser loads that page like forever, until I remember to _allow_ javascript on that page, like why on earth they render everything except the content at all.
This is what I encounter more often than not lately. Is this due to more and more content simply generated by javascript frameworks?
