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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

#61

Post by dylan604 »

buckle8017 wrote: post #57
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.

Fortunately the people wanting to do that are often to stupid to realize what's vulnerable.

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.

so does that make someone stupid because they're not an evil billionaire and just someone that likes to watch the world burn?

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#63

Post by JumpCrisscross »

lxgr wrote: post #50
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.

> 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.

> If that were true, we’d see a lot more sabotage

It is true. There is a lot of critical infrastructure out in the open that a dude with a pick-up truck of fertiliser could trash. (I'm not even getting to our electrical or natural gas distribution systems.)

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#64

Post by dylan604 »

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

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#65

Post by XorNot »

lxgr wrote: post #50
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.

> 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.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#66

Post by croissants »

buckle8017 wrote: post #57
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.

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 through the whole process, maybe that equilibrium changes.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#68

Post by TacticalCoder »

dylan604 wrote: post #61
buckle8017 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately the people wanting to do that are often to stupid to realize what's vulnerable.

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 evil and there's zero reason to attribute intelligence where there's typically close to none.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#69

Post by mmooss »

kylecazar wrote: post #60
mmooss wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because it takes 1 person ... It turns out that empirically , in every area, such '1 person' risks are very low, even though theoretically it sometimes seems likely to us. For some reason we often theorize, we imagine the world, as if homo sapiens are sociopaths. There's also a political/social movement (or set of movements) that require that to be true, and insist on it. In reality, it is very much against our nat…

The book kiosk in my town had a leave-one take-one program that was suspended because a local stole all 40+ books to sell on Amazon. Also, no more nativity scene at the church because they steal the baby Jesus.

Things happen, but there are still nativity scenes and book kiosks all over the place that work fine.

Re: Protecting undersea internet cables is a tech nightmare

#70

Post by samatman »

ajross wrote: post #36
vasco wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. Even though society as a whole works, there's things where one person can easily mess it up for potentially millions of people. So even if that person would have to be a big statistical anomaly, they'll exist.

> Because it takes 1 person, in an isolated spot to ruin a whole chunk of a network. In point of fact no chunks of the network were ruined at all. Dynamic routing was a design point way back when DARPA funded IPv4, and for exactly this reason.

The topic was the telegraph network, which did not have that property.
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