Let's assume that these incidents actually were accidents, there's still a bigger question open: why is trawler fishing still allowed? Imagine it's not a fiber cable that ends up being crushed by a trawl door... but all the other marine life: Fish can swim away (or not, being the point of getting fished), but plants, corals, bugs?
Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to quote [1], page 16:
> Seabed habitats are under significant pressure across European seas from the cumulative
impacts of demersal fishing, coastal developments and other activities. Preliminary
results from a study presented in SWD(2020) indicate that about 43% of Europe’s
shelf/slope area and 79% of the coastal seabed is considered to be physically disturbed,
which is mainly caused by bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU’s coastal area has
probably lost its seabed habitats.
Honestly I'm pretty much in favor of banning trawler fishing and the import of trawler-fished fish into the European Union, even if it's just to protect our fiber links.
I agree. The more you learn about trawling the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Where I live it’s cut back dramatically, but the bizarre thing is that it’s strictly permitted in territories where we know rare deep sea glass sponge reefs exist, and once thrived. These reefs are islands of immense diversity and biomass which fed huge numbers of transient species moving through the deep. They were also nurseries for a large number of fish species we commonly fish for.
We work so hard to regulate our fisheries yet do so little to properly protect the resources they extract from a holistic perspective.
> 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 intentional collision, at least in legally "open" seas) would likely result in WW3.
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”.
the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many places.
Financial "incentives" from fishing industry and political ramifications of raising food prices (seafood is a large portion in some places).
It's absolutely an existential threat to the ecology of the entire Earth yet those are the reasons why. "Close to 90% of the world’s marine fish stocks are fully exploited, overexploited or depleted."
Fishing as carried out industrially is terrible for the environment as a whole, and really often also exploits those employed in it. The huge army of Asian fishing fleets that skirt the law and the ethics of both sides of this are the worst of the worst, however, and deep sea trawling is particularly awful.
Then again, farmed fish isn't exactly ecologically brilliant either...
They do more than skirt laws and ethics. A large amount of fishing vessels operating in several regions around the world practice outright slavery. Working-age men are lured into debt-bonding to work at sea indefinitely for no wages up to 20 hours per day with little to no food until they succumb to exhaustion, injury, or disease, or if they show signs of resistance, are executed as an example to the other enslaved men. When someone dies, their remains are thrown overboard. Most accounts of this have only surfaced because people have bought the freedom of some of these men, who are seen as nothing but a labor resource, bought and paid for usually directly by the captain, in order to catch otherwise mostly unprofitable fish. If an industry is prepared to engage in slavery, playing fast and loose with international borders and environmental regulations is of course not a concern to that industry.
Complete agree. The hidden damage we are doing to marine ecosystems is horrendous.
I love eating seafood but have basically given it all up due to environmental concerns, there's very few fisheries left that are harvested sustainably and farmed fish as an alternative cause a host of other problems for marine wildlife in the area.
Even the sustainable types of fish usually end up with huge amounts of bycatch that it's hard to justify eating them too.
At this point the only seafood I can eat is something I've caught myself and isn't of concern for sustainability, Australia is lucky in that respect with quite a few species thriving but we still face a lot of illegal fishing in our waters that's incredibly hard to police.
Are you asking if I would be willing to pay more money for goods that don't irreversibly destroy ocean ecosystems and that aren't made with slave labor?
I struggle to imagine the kind of person who would say no to such a question. Someone with no money in a country with no safety net on the verge of starvation? Someone with no moral comapass?
> I kinda don't like the taste of bugs.
I don't understand what bugs have to do with ocean trawling. Is this an unusual way of referring to lobster?
Just in case why people are wondering why cutting of internet for an arctic island is a big deal.
What many might not know is that Svalbard is home to the northernmost satellite station in the world. It is just one of two stations that can communicate with polar orbiting satellites each day. ESA and NASA as well as other civilian organisations are present there, and the station communicates with well over a hundred satellites, and are pretty vital for much of the satellites that look back at us.
To be pedantic - most places on Earth can get a contact with a polar orbiting satellite at least once or twice per day, however the number of contacts per day increases the closer you get to the poles. Svalbard is far enough north that you get lots of contacts per day. I forget the exact number and I don't have STK open in front of me to simulate it, but from memory it's something like 15 or so contacts per day for a typical earth observation orbit. This gives you lots of data and relatively frequent contacts to maximize the freshness of the imagery.
There are tons of commercial observation satellite operators that use Svalbard for downlink (downlinks at Svalbard can be procured commercially through a company called KSAT which operates the station). Ukraine has been purchasing a lot of imagery from these companies, including both optical and radar imagery. If I had to hazard a guess at a possible motive, that'd be it.
Correction: not one per day, one per revolution. Since the satellites go from north to south pole while the earth is spinning, the polar areas is the inly the pass each time.
Most probably Russia will claim sovereignty over all of the Svalbards after the next big war and redrawing of borders, Stalin was too circumspect in not scaring the Americans into WW3 the first time when they had the chance to do it.
All that because whoever controls the North Pole controls most of the Northern Hemisphere, it’s actually one of the very few “ways in” inside North America and control of the continental United States (there were a few US geopoliticians/geographers who first became aware of that in the early 1940s).
I thought this forum still wanted to be on the serious side, so under that view look at the works of George T. Renner, in particular his World Map for the Air Age, published in 1942-1943. [1] [2]
As air-power started to be taken seriously with the advent of WW2 (some) geographers started realising that one of the shortest ways of getting from Europe to North America is via the North Pole, or close to it, anyway. Hence those maps I've linked to, which had the North Pole at their center, and that is because Renner thought that the control of the North Pole was similar to the control of the Northern Hemisphere. Related, a little bit later on ICMBs were meant to take the same route, give or take, hence why NORAD became a thing.
But, again, we can choose to take the "lol! lol! lol! The Russians and their shovels!" angle, which won't benefit anyone involved in this conversation, intellectually speaking.
Later edit: Additional resource, this study [3] titled: "The Hot Struggle Over the Cold Waters: The Strategic Position of
the Arctic Region During and After the Cold War"
This paragraph there is a good start on how important were the views of people like Renner when it came to the Arctic, that is in the context of the US vs. the USSR/Russia (potential) confrontation:
> The first to focus his interests on the significance of the strategic position of the Arctic was George T. Renner, when in the 1940s, based on a map with the North Pole at the center, he estimated the opportunities and threats associated with this new perspective. However, the increase of the Arctic’simportance is inextricably linked with the development of technology which allowed greater exploration of the region. Shortly after the outbreak of the Cold War, in the rhetoric of the United States, the High North began to be identified as a “mighty” and “important” region.44 Hence, the geostrategic role of the Far North was fully revealed during of the Cold War, when it was possible to observe real military and political tensions on the polar waters and islands.
This is why when the USS Nautilus became the first submarine to transit the arctic entirely underwater, traveling from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the North Pole, it was such an important event in the Cold War. It gave credibility to the submarine fleet becoming part of the nuclear triad, the use of nuclear power for propulsion and life support, and long distance navigation without any external references (can't use a compass up there!)
You can look at the https://satellitemap.space/ to see that starlink isn't (yet) too feasible in the northern/arctic areas. Even in the Nordic countries the connections are not that great.
>> We're talking backup vs. primary. Of course the backup is not going to be as good.
Then it isn't really a backup. A lower-bandwidth failover capacity is properly described as an alternative or degraded pathway. To be a proper "backup" a thing has to actually do the primary job at least temporarily.
aye. Starlink could be, best case, an Out of Band (OOB) management interface.
good for getting into the other side of a connection or doing some management tasks like back-up telemetry -- but we're talking SNMP, SSH connections to routers, etc, not GigE levels of data.
It's a good idea for future satellites, but upgrading existing satellites is probably not feasible.
And these polar orbit satellite typically live a lot longer than the relatively short lived starlink satellites, potentially opening you to a (perhaps unlikely?) scenario where starlink moves to new and incompatible hardware for inter-satellite communications, and your satellite is then made obsolete.
Vertical integration is not cheap, but it does have it's upsides.
That would require replacing all the satellites with new ones capable of doing that, which doesn't seem feasible. Starlink also doesn't have great coverage of the polar regions.
“We're passing over terabits per second [of data] every day across 9,000 lasers,” SpaceX engineer Travis Brashears said today at SPIE Photonics West, an event in San Francisco focused on the latest advancements in optics and light. "We actually serve over lasers all of our users on Starlink at a given time in like a two-hour window.”
Again though, you can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station" unless all of the satellites support talking to Starlink, which they don't. That means they'd have to be replaced.
As I understand it, the Starlink network has a number of ground stations, and an active inter-satellite "mesh," thanks to laser links, which would allow it to route around the loss of one or more ground stations? (although obviously it requires at least one ground station to be live in order to access the non-Starlink-connected Internet)
The lasers began being integrated between 2020 and 2021, so it's likely SpaceX has made decent progress equipping their network with this capability, although I can't find the latest figures for the proportion of satellites that have lasers.
It sounds like there's something I'm missing if we can't do "Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station"
Do you understand what the problem trying to be solved is?
There are satellites in orbit today that have nothing to do with Starlink. Some of these have been up for a long time. We're talking weather satellites and research satellites. The ones in a polar orbit can only use one of two ground stations to communicate back with the earth, simply due to their location. One of those ground stations has lost it's fiber optic connection so it can't be used at full bandwidth right now.
None of that so far has anything to do with Starlink. We're talking about a system os satellites that already exists and predates Starlink sometimes by decades.
The person that started this thread proposed: "Maybe just use Starlink from the satellites, so we don't rely on a specific ground station." In other words, have these already existing satellites integrate with the (relatively new) Starlink system.
So they're saying that we somehow make those old satellites, which are already in orbit and have their own communication systems designed to interface with ground stations, somehow stop using the ground station and start using Starlink instead.
> I wonder how much data per unit of time this is capable of transporting.
The max throughput of fiber optic cables isn't exactly constant. As fiber optic modem and DSP technology improves you can get much higher speeds on 15+ year-old cables than were ever possible when they were laid.
The Shannon limit is constant if you assume reasonable but idealized SNR values for the medium, and gives you a real "law of physics" upper limit ... typically still many orders of magnitude beyond what we can transmit today.
But it's amazing how effective DSP can be; trellis coding managed to get modems to squeeze right up to the Shannon limit of POTS telephone connections.
> The Shannon limit is constant if you assume reasonable but idealized SNR values for the medium
The Shannon limit is changed by changing technology over the medium, not the other way around.
If you signal with light on/off pulses, you get one limit. If you add polarization tricks (using different physical properties and tech), you get another limit. As you add QAM and a zillion other tricks, you get another channel limit. If you add quantum superdense coding, you get another channel limit. Each of those, until we learned there is yet another layer of physics and tech, would be "the Shannon Limit." All of these can be done on the same medium.
The Shannon limit is a mathematical *model* of a channel. It's not a physical/technological limit.
Here [1], for example, is a paper pointing this out for transoceanic undersea optical cables. "As pointed out in Section 9.3, the Shannon limit is only limiting if we assume there is no technical way to further improve the QoT..."
Technology changes routinely change the "Shannon Limit," since that limit has almost nothing to do with physics. Physics and the signaling technology define a Shannon Limit for that particular channel combination, nothing more.
There is also a technology-independent Shannon limit for a cable. You can calculate Shannon limits based on the bandwidth and noise of your specific fiber-optic transceivers, which can improve, but you can also calculate one based on the cable itself.
The Shannon limit already accounts for any number of channels and any level of QAM.
Ah, here's but two interesting and well cited papers regarding an optical "shannon limit", both published in IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology.
The old idea of a "Shannon Limit" has been split into many types, including linear (old tech) and non-linear (using more modern tech). Both these papers address the non-linear limit (which is not a limit, as both papers show, but more of an artfact of modern tech):
[1] "Approaching the non-linear Shannon Limit" : From the abstract "We also discuss the techniques which are promising to *increase* and/or approach the information capacity limit."
[2] "Scope and Limitations of the Nonlinear Shannon Limit" : "It is shown that this is a limit (if at all) holding only for conventional detection strategies. Indeed, it should only be considered as a limit to the information rate that can be achieved with a given modulation/detection scheme"
These are extensively cited, so use google scholar and read up to see that there is no "Shannon Limit" except for a particular channel technology. The concept has been split into a million directions depending on the underlying technology, each with a different value for "Shannon Limit".
I just gave you a paper showing that is not the case. I even provided the quote.
There is no inherent limit from physics, only from engineering. History provides ample evidence were a given medium had it's "Shannon Limit" broken via new signaling methods over the same medium. The terms you used, "bandwidth" and "noise" are technological, not physical. "Bandwidth" increases each time we invent better methods to pack and decode it. Most of the old concepts are based on old Fourier Analysis, whereas a better modern framework is wavelets or even their successors. Fourier is a very simple way to think of signals, missing plenty of useful things, which is exactly what led to the development of wavelets, to enable more powerful signal analysis.
Note in particular there is no single "bandwidth" when dealing with photonics, since photons can be physically stacked arbitrarily without interference. Simply google for breakthroughs in photonics bandwidth to see decades of advances beyond what was previously thought to be "the bandwidth".
The Shannon limit is a *model* of the system. That model is necessarily incomplete, since there increasingly advanced technology. Those models almost always use simplifications to make the math tractable, such as gaussian noise, independent errors, and a host of other things that are not true physically. Even the concept of noise requires either a non=physical abstraction to math or some details of the engineering used to measure it. Simply saying there "is gaussian noise" is a gross model used to simplify math. It is non-physical.
A simple example that leveraging quantum has created a new field of quantum shannon theory, which has better bounds. Under shannon's theory and his understanding of information, quantum key distribution would not be possible, yet it is, and companies have offered commercial versions for 20+ years. I would not be surprised if more and more pieces of physics not currently used for communication get used in the future, changing the "limits" again and again.
Before MIMO transmission, single channel over the same medium had a shannon limit. MIMO surpassed it. Many channels, especially where light is used, allow stacking more and more information into the same medium, subject to technology ability to decode, which is an engineering feat, not a physical one.
The world of information theory has moved past shannon, just like orbital mechanics moved past Newton. Both Newton and Shannon have uses, but they're not valid for modern techniques.
Two of many such changes are compressed sensing, which was a major discovery, that routinely beats Shannon-Nyquist sampling theory, and the discovery of what is called generalized sampling developed around 2000-2010 (and still making it's way through image processing). Both are fundamental theory changes that allowed breaking previous "limits".
So please read the paper, and if you claim there is still some inherent limit, publish the paper countering the one above.
Bandwidth does not increase based on packing methods. Bandwidth refers to analog signal bandwidth, something we can measure - not data rate. MIMO gets around the Shannon limit by creating more channels, like putting more fibers in a bundle.
MIMO added no "new fibers". - it's more throughout with no change in medium, a consequence of photons not cross interacting. Electrons cross interact, and end up with different physical properties. You're proving my point: the physics has major impact in practice. Shannon says zero about this, since his is a simple, outdated model.
Bandwidth is defined by the signal type. A signal is defined via the technology and model of communication. Change the tech or model, and you get different Shannon limits.
Take some time and read and understand the papers I gave you. Your claims are contradicted by each of those papers (and hundreds more).
How can you honestly ignore all those well cited papers that state exactly what I said? Post some evidence countering those papers or there's no more point replying to your opinions.
This applies to single-mode cables, but much less to multi-mode cables. Of course long-distance cable like this is always single-mode, but it's worth keeping in mind if building a fiber network inside a building.
You can use SM for short runs, you just have to match the optics to the cable/distance you're looking to use. Tons of very fast single mode optics out there that only expect <300m runs.
That said, it's likely not worth it, given that cabling is typically viewed as a ~10 year investment, and if you're installing OM4 Multimode fiber in a house you're not likely to hit the limit of that fiber within 10 years even in extreme use cases.
But why stop at 10 years? If the theoretical bandwidth limit of SM Fiber is above 100 Gbit/s then there is simply no way that a household will need more internal bandwidth than that. Even for the next 20-30 years, because other technologies (like SATA) will be the limiting factor.
I believe this could be a case of future proofing that will actually last 30-40 years, no?
10 years is the guideline because you can't predict most of the future, but, you can predict the physical wear fairly well. It's likely that the plastic terminations will be iffy by that point basically, which means reterminating, or, running new fiber, and most of the time you'll just run new fiber.
You're referring to single continuous fiber optic cables on land. Long undersea cables incorporate powered repeaters. Those can't be upgraded in situ with improved technology.
would the repeaters need to be replaced? if you are compressing the data differently or sending it faster or whatever, I'm not sure the repeaters care, they are just amplifying the signal, not decoding it and resending it.
They’re probably amplifiers rather than repeaters. Optical amplifiers don’t need to decode the signal to work. Here’s Wikipedia on erbium-doped fiber amplifiers:
> A relatively high-powered beam of light is mixed with the input signal using a wavelength selective coupler (WSC). The input signal and the excitation light must be at significantly different wavelengths. The mixed light is guided into a section of fiber with erbium ions included in the core. This high-powered light beam excites the erbium ions to their higher-energy state. When the photons belonging to the signal at a different wavelength from the pump light meet the excited erbium ions, the erbium ions give up some of their energy to the signal and return to their lower-energy state.
I think NASA helped fund it because they wanted more (And more reliable) data to a groundstation on the island, not because this subsea cable is anything special.
Fibre optic is great because you can usually add more bandwidth by lighting up another wavelength. The amplifiers don't need to be substituted if the wavelength is within its range.
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.
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).
OS2 single mode fibre is pretty future proof. The transceivers may change, but the underlying cable should last a looong time and can be sliced and diced considerably with WDM (16+ channels AFAIK).
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 peer sharing from other Internet users nearby).
I'm not sure where they got that number from, but when the two cables were put there many years ago the stated capacity at that time was 40Gb/s for each of the cables (though that capacity was not meant to be used at full back then).
Source: I worked on the network setup that was going to be used by NASA. (The main funding of this cable was not NASA, but in any case it was used by NASA to replace a much slower and more complicated satellite link)
Each individual fiber, which is a fraction of a cubic mm in cross sectional area, can provide this much bandwidth in a fairly trivial low-cost configuration. Cables like the one pictured carry many of these fibers.
Dave Barry made a similar observation about antismoking PSAs, objecting to one that had someone throw a diseased lung on a table. He pointed out that you could present any random internal organ and it would look just as bad: "This is what will happen to you if you keep smoking. Look! A perfectly healthy goat kidney!"
This was the big one for me too. The juxtaposed healthy versus unhealthy lungs resemble an uncooked chicken versus a roast chicken which was left in the oven for 30 minutes more than necessary.
The antismoking PSA that made the strongest impression on me, by far, was the one that showed a grandfather encouraging a baby to take a step. Eventually, the baby starts walking, and rushes over to the grandfather.
And through the grandfather, who fades to translucency.
It wasn't just me; that PSA made enough of a splash that it was called out on Friends.
I've tried to find that PSA in the past, but with no success. Once I asked a friend if they could find it, and the response was "Oh, I know exactly the one you're talking about. I won't help you look for it. I hate that commercial and I don't want to see it again."
I note that the second comment is "This commercial was what made my father stop smoking." It's interesting to think about the balance between disturbing the smoking audience so strongly that they stop, and disturbing the non-smoking audience so strongly that they complain about being exposed to your traumatic imagery and imperil your funding.
There have been some Oceanic anti-speeding ads that had the same effect on people, apparently. There's one where time freezes right before a collision and the person at fault apologizes for the little boy he's about to murder. There's one where the driver is talking to the ghost of his friend who died in a car crash. There's one where the grim reaper spins a roulette wheel every time a driver makes a mistake at an intersection. There was one where they rewind time, nudge the speedometer slightly lower, and resume normal time, and a fatal accident (pedestrian hit by car) turns into a bruised leg.
Related, I was struck by a comment made by the respiratory specialist doctor Martin Tobin, during the George Floyd murder court case. He said less than 10% of smokers actually go on to get 'issues'. He was pushing back on the line that as a smoker, George Floyd was more prone to react badly to 'having a knee on his windpipe...' you know the rest.
I did rewind and listen again then look up what he was saying and indeed, my assumed knowledge of smoking was altered.
Apologies for my vagueness with 'issues', I don't want to under or over state what he said and right now I can't locate the exact sentence within the days of testimony.
For anyone curious, I found the relevant sentence. An astonishingly counterintuitive almost throwaway remark by a world's expert sent me on a deep dive on what else can and does cause lung problems. Dr Martin Tobin says it at 3h 02m 40s...
I am aware there is a lot of complexity (obviously) in why people develop lung cancer, or any illness for that matter, but within that assumption was smoking being far worse than it actually is. Reading further, and this may also seem obvious written out in this simple form, the cancer numbers for people in homes using coal burning for cooking food varies hugely depending on the coal. And that the incidence of lung cancers in 'never-smokers' is rising rapidly globally.
Thats what they do. Those lungs are fake, sold by medical supply companies. They just take a healthy pig lung and dye it black and burn holes in it for "tumors".
I'm pretty sure there is some of automated brigading, every post I make gets modded down for no reason. Why mod this down? It's just a fact that is easily verifiable. It had been voted up to 2 or 3, then very quickly went to 0. Very odd.
"These inflatable swine lungs have been stained realistically and then specially preserved in odorless, nontoxic solution that retains the texture and elasticity of fresh lungs."
Plausible deniability because it works.
As for the fishermen in that boat.. yeah.. totally innocent fishermen, and on that very spot they hit a 'school' of that one fish they were looking for, so they are fishing this 'school' and nothing else sinister going on keep walking (omitting commas on purpose)
There's a big difference in seriousness between being able to show whether they were likely doing something they shouldn't be doing for the sake of making more money on the fishing, vs. if they were doing what they were doing with the intent of causing damage, though. But of course, that difficulty is also exactly why it'd also be a great way for an adversary to damage your cables.
given the use cases re: satellites on the island, and the continuing cold-yet-increasing tensions with Russia, it's absolutely reasonable to make that assumption
maybe they'll try to blame this on Ukraine like they tried with the undersea pipelines that got blown up, too
It's reasonable to assume. But it's wildly insufficient for either a prosecution or diplomatic consequences, especially given that all 3 also would apply to a trawler just intent on profiting from trawling.
I agree the odds are reasonably high Russia arranged this on purpose. And that's fine for the purposes of a discussion that doesn't have consequences, but not for much more.
This reminds me of a story in "Blind Man's Bluff," summary:
[Capt James F. Bradley Jr.] was at his office in Naval Intelligence one day at 3 a.m. when the St. Louis native began reflecting on his boyhood life on the Mississippi River. As he later told the authors, he recalled that the river beach was dotted with signs warning, “Cable Crossing — Do Not Anchor,” so a boater would not foul the cable.
At that point, he wondered if the Soviets did not have similar signs along their Arctic coasts to prevent their critical cables, including those used by the KGB and the Soviet Northern Fleet, from being damaged.
As a result of these ponderings, in 1971 the American submarine Halibut, with its periscope up, slowly and secretly traced the Siberian coast looking for telltale warning signs. The cable signs were found, and American divers put a tap at the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk on Soviet communications.
Is it possible to tap fiber-optic cables without the owner getting wise? Even if you could tap modern cables, I assume everything is now encrypted and carries so much bandwidth that it becomes possible to sample the interesting intelligence.
It certainly has been the case in the past (when undersea fiber operators were much less careful) that cables have been tapped without the owner getting wise. IIUC the method used in the past was to bring the cable inside a submarine which has a specialized fiber cleaving and joining machine. Some amount of full transmission loss already occurs, so to the operator is just looks like blip.
When I worked at Google, Snowden and others showed that it was likely the US NSA was spying on Google fiber outside of US, I believe the speculation was that they tapped lines around UK, possibly underwater. There's nothing quite like seeing a packet trace containing an RPC between a frontend and backend and being able to recognize the communicating services, collected by a third party. Google greatly sped up its RPC encryption project after that revelation.
This is one of those ones where my instinct is "no": not only would you have to not cause an interruption or reflection that the break detection TDR systems could see, and crack any encryption, and sample what you want from the Tbps, all from a small box under the sea, but also you have to somehow get that data out and back to base, again from under the (mostly radio-opaque) sea and halfway around the world, all without even a whisper of a clue to the tappees.
Then I remember how far ahead the likes of the NSA and NRO are compared to what we're familiar with, and become rather less sure. The Orion satellites have 100m radio dishes, and were first launched in the 90s. Two Hubble-like telescopes were so old hat that they were donated to NASA in 2012. Considering that the NRO is so secrecy-oriented that its very existence was classified until 1992 (it went 11 years completely undetected, and leaked via a New York Times article in 1971 and an accidental entry in a budget report in 1973) and no mission since 1972 is declassified, this says a lot about how much further on they are.
Then again, if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair. And they'd be so advanced that it might be worth lifting an entire cable to check for and acquire such a tap. Which means the tappers would think twice about putting one in, if they could then lose it.
> if unattended taps were installed on cables, you'd also expect them to occasionally be found when lifting cables for repair
<conspiracy theory> An advanced enough attacker would build their cable taps in such a way that they automatically dropped off when they detected the cable being lifted - and would probably result in suspected but not provable "damage caused by human activity" that has broken through the cable armouring and exposed the fibre bundle inside. Now I'm wondering if the Svalbard cable damage was a software bug in the cable tap device.
even the metadata would be valuable though, so you wouldn't need to crack the encryption, and you don't have to have it be real-time, so you can just process and save the relevant data and pick it up later, so my instinct is that it's possible there's something there, but it would be really difficult, and we might hear about it in 50 years, just like we learned about Bletchley Park.
Normal fiber optic can be tapped surreptitiously[0]. There are a number of companies that sell anti-intrusion tech, but it's hard to say which side is winning with respect to what governments can do.
As I understand it (being nothing more than a Google expert on the subject), the repeaters aren't the sort of thing you can just "tap". They don't decode and re encode any data, they don't even "see" the raw encrypted data as such, they're just specially doped sections of fibre with pump lasers that amplify the optical signals.
Private companies provide equipment and software to analyse all raw data going through an ISP. All the big names, from US and EU to some countries in Asia, bought this equipment and software.
So, my guess is that a government's budget can enable sampling anything from "so much bandwidth".
Regarding encryption, if you run the numbers, to brute force common encryption algorithms it would take Google's compute 1 second. Image all Google service have an outage for 1 second. Google is just an example to imagine the sizing required. In other words, technically possible. And shouldn't be dismissed with "oh, there is encryption, so that door is closed for any threat actor".
Many measuring devices used in eg Germany have both proper units and Freedom units printed on them. It's probably just easier to have one model that you can sell anyone on the globe. Economics of scale and all that.
I'm Norwegian, and it's very common in Norway as well to have e.g. rulers and other measuring devices with both inches and metric units. It's if anything pretty rare to have just one or the other unless it's a "format" where displaying both affect usability - e.g. make the writing too small.
That line of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that trust is impossible. If you cannot trust the Norwegian police to produce accurate information, then you must trust the media. If you can't trust the media, then you have to trust strangers on the Internet. If you can't trust strangers on the Internet, you have to trust your friends and family. But what if they're informed by the corrupt police, media, or Internet commenters? Can you even trust yourself?
Apply this logic elsewhere, and you cannot trust social institutions; for example, your local human services department when they come to warn you about your domicile being unfit for human habitation. Next, you can't trust the medical profession after you've been involuntarily committed to a mental institution after threatening the local schoolchildren (although we all know you were only warning them about the coming danger). You can't trust the state medical authority to regulate the medication that is used to treat paranoid schizophrenia. Now you're stuck in a padded room, unable to move your arms to scratch that incessant itch on your nose, pleading with your caretakers to just listen to reason, open their eyes to the truth.
All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.
You're not making a logical argument against the reasoning, you're just saying that a logical argument, ignoring probability at every level, leaves you helpless. Trusting things isn't a solution, it's a cop-out.
Instead of a magic formula, you take things on a case-by-case basis, examining sources and possible motives of those sources, looking at past experience with them for hints. This sounds like work because it is. It's very easy to just accept what you're told, but it's not heroic or even reasonable.
> All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.
Meanwhile, the United States government is like "that line of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that trust is impossible."
I am describing the line of reasoning which connects "these photos have Imperial measurements" to "the United States is orchestrating the press release". Please illustrate how this reasoning—given the evidence and our shared reality—demonstrates critical thinking, drawing on past experiences, or examining sources; you know, the stuff that sounds like work.
There is in fact a line between using discretion and critical thinking and falling prey to paranoid superstition. This is important because there are people who prey specifically on people who are vulnurable to conspiratorial thinking and they are very good at it.
For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.
The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility" (I just made that term up). The refrigerator example seems going a bit too far. Hormones in milk might do the trick though. Cold drinks like Pepsi and Coke definitely have some potential.
Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option.
More seriously, we do live in a complex world, we can't function without trust but we also have to be open to changing our opinions based on new evidence. I'm just reading "How to talk to a science denier" and it's got some interesting takes on these topics.
Seeing as "(leaky and scrapped) refrigerators are damaging the upper atmosphere, allowing ionizing UV to reach the ground and cancering the everyone," actually happened and AFAIK is disputed by almost nobody, it's not that implausible. Hormones in milk is more plausible still because hormones are known to do that kind of thing, but the main knock against the refrigerator idea is that we already have fairly strong protections against leaky fridges because of the ozone.
>The thing about most conspiracies is that they need to have some "marginal plausibility
We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.
I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.
See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.
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 category of fables I'd call "religious fables". Those are ones that can't be falsified. Feels like your other examples fit in those. Religious people believe all sort of things in these categories. They're not really related to the factual reality. This is different IMO from your run of the mill conspiracy theory because those generally have enough counter-evidence where you can make a reason/logic based assessment of the probability of true vs. false. An analogy is flat earthers pointing to some "evidence" that in their mind supports the idea that the earth is flat while ignoring the bulk of evidence demonstrating it's not. Even if you do not have the ability to directly observe whether the earth is flat or not you can weigh the evidence. It's true religion and conspiracy often intersect. Religion by its nature is belief without facts.
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 200 years old.
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.
> understand the details… really understand everything
That’s two different standards, and only relevant if either of them was a significant percentage of total population. Most people don’t even understand why a refrigerator door gets briefly stuck after you close it. It’s practically a magic box that gets cold which is perhaps why they fall for conspiracy theories so readily, any explanation is equally plausible.
And sure at a high level I understand both, but to really understand a refrigerator the same way you would need to really understand 5G etc, you would need to know the actual pressures involved etc. People don’t know the chemical properties and makeup of the refrigerant. What’s the acceptable impurity levels. What lubricants are in use, etc. The physical geometry of all the mechanical parts and so forth.
One way to convince yourself that a fridge is simpler than a 5G cell system is to look at the science history behind them. The heap pump, the core concept behind a fridge, goes back to 1748 (Cullen). Radio goes back to Maxwell (circa. 1864) and Hertz (1886). Basically at the time that Radio was invented/discovered refrigeration along the lines of the modern fridge was well understood. The first cellphone was invented in 1973 and the first commercial cell phone was 1983. Lots of technologies in the latest generations that are pretty cutting edge and today's phone and technologies look like science fiction to someone from the 1970's or even 1980's...
Longer history can also imply complexity. A 2024 Honda Civic is way more complicated than a Model T.
Though ultimately yea a smartphone extremely complex. I’m just saying being able to have a high level understanding is very different than knowing how to maintain or design something.
"Maybe a clue about the real origin of the photos".
No. It's simply the _commercial product_ the police used for markers. It shows both cm and inches. You don't think that the police themselves are actually manufacturing these things, do you?
Hey, I apologize. Only two photos loaded on my phone, both of which used inches only.
Conspiracy was the furthest thing from my mind; I’ve seen photos from police in the US with centimeters and I thought it was hilarious: Americans using cm and Europeans using inches. What’s the world coming to?
In addition to that, this photo was taken onboard a cable laying vessel. There are not that many and they are booked back to back all over the world, so it is not of the question that they would have dual metric and imperial measurement devices. Also, onboard a working ship there is usually an international mixture of crew and contractors, and of course they might have American clients.
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 meaningful.
Ah but how the media has such different standards for conspiracy theories when it furthers a desired narrative, rather than contradicts it.
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).
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)
> In 2005, however, he managed to pull up the Sunoque I. He did not know what it was but managed to free his anchor
> The next year, he again hooked an anchor on the Sunoque I. This time he was able to haul it out of the water and secure it on deck. He made no effort to free it. He deliberately cut the cable in two with an electric saw. A few days later the same thing happened. This time it was much easier to haul the cable out, and he cut it again.
> Some weeks later, after the fishing season, while on the dock at Baie-Comeau he noticed a strange looking ship in the area where he usually fished. Later, he saw a photo of the ship in the local newspaper. The accompanying article stated that the cable had been deliberately cut and a search was on for the culprit.
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 lose his boat), so in the end everybody except the insurance company got screwed.
I think they taught the value in letting others know to NOT put things together yourself that you cut an operational cable and report it to police yourself voluntarily.
In most cases, when insurance covers a loss, they also subrogate the loss and pursue damages from the responsible party, if feasible...
It's reasonable for the responsible party to pay the damages. And yet, it's a risk, which is why it's common to carry insurance for your own liability (in which case, your insurance usually wouldn't subrogate and sue you)
Seems like the insurance would still pay but he loses his boat to the insurance company at that point, assuming carrying insurance was part of his fishing license.
Due to problems with moral hazard, insurance generally doesn’t cover anything illegal done intentionally or due to extreme (willful) recklessness/negligence.
Hard to argue that wasn’t what the fisherman was doing at the point he was sawing a cable in half using a saw he’s already dredged up several times.
He apparently didn't realize that it was important:
"is in his 60s, has fished since he was 15. The courts were told that he had no formal training but picked his fishing grounds by experience"
"he saw a chart showing a line running through his fishing area with the handwritten notation “abandonne.” He concluded his underwater nemesis was fair game and when he snagged it again in June of 2006, he pulled it up and sliced through it with an electric saw."
"Vallee heard that police were looking for the culprit. He came forward and made a voluntary statement."
Poor guy. He might be an idiot for just slicing some cable he dredged up, but possibly had neither the education nor the knowledge to understand what he was doing.
The willful negligence is not asking someone or saying something before slicing into an expensive looking underwater cable with a saw - which would take some time, preparation, and persistence.
And if it was actually abandoned, what was cutting it going to do for him anyway? Unless he removed the cable, he was going to keep snagging it in different areas.
This isn’t like cutting a corner pulling out of a parking lot and running over some flowers. This is like digging with a backhoe in front of your business to install some irrigation, and getting irritated at all those pesky cables and stuff underground. And rather than talking to someone about it, ripping them all out because ‘it didn’t look like anyone was using them’.
Mandatory insurances (that are mandatory to ensure victims get paid) are often required to pay even in such cases, but are then allowed to (try to) get the money back from the perpetrator. This protects the victim but not the perpetrator, eliminating the moral hazard.
They do, they'll just come after you for the money and will not cover your costs since you acted reckless.
Where I live this is the minimum you MUST insure yourself for and they pay out no matter what (to the other party). If you acted in bad faith they will come for your money. If it's an accident or out of your control they pay the damages you caused for you and you are fine. Since everyone is insured by law what usually happens is the companies involved all pay out and then afterwards figure out among themselves if and from whom they can collect.
Similar here: auto insurers lobbied to exclude coverage for damage to your vehicle if you were under the influence or alcohol or drugs.
I guess people may ethically agree to that but did premiums go down? Of course not.
A very profitable move for the insurance companies to provide less insurance without handing over the savings.
And it even applies to “anyone you let drive your vehicle” so everyone is supposed to be a drug recognition expert, which is even controversial amongst those that are supposed to be the “experts”.
The “moral hazard” argument is completely bullshit as usual, there's no moral hazard if there's consequences besides the damage, and it's always the case when doing something illegal (there's a fine, or jail time for instance).
But insurances' business is about finding reasons not to pay, so it's not surprising at all…
Imagine a scenario - a restaurant owner is insured for $3 million dollars for the business and structure (not atypical).
Business isn’t doing great. The place catches on fire and burns down. All the business assets and the structure are lost, so the business needs to shut down.
If arson wasn’t an exclusion;
1) why would anyone look closer to figure out if it was intentional or not? Assuming no one was injured. Who has the incentive to do all the investigation?
2) even if they got caught and convicted, in California the jail penalty is only 3 years for structure arson. $3mln is a hell of a payday for three years in jail, and without the exclusion, they’d still be entitled to the payout.
3) what if they had a buddy do it, and the evidence they conspired wasn’t strong enough to get a criminal conviction - but enough for civil court. Or civil discovery would uncover evidence, where a criminal investigation may not.
Same dynamic plays out for life insurance, vehicle, personal liability, home insurance, etc.
Moral hazard is a real issue for any insurance, as knowledge that a payout can come due to a circumstance someone can intentionally trigger definitely changes the odds of those circumstances occurring. In some cases to the point of strongly encouraging or even outright warping the market so those circumstances occur regularly.
Without insurance, the owner is the one who bears the costs directly no matter what, so we’d likely have a lot fewer buildings burning down!
People would in general be a lot more careful, just like they’d be more careful driving if every car has a giant knife embedded in the center of the steering wheel instead of having airbags. A lot more lives would be ruined though when being careful isn’t enough eh? Or people get overwhelmed.
And of course insurance companies have a strong incentive to not pay out illegitimate claims. They’d go bankrupt if they did anything else!
Sometimes (or often, depending on your POV) they try to not pay out legitimate claims, which is why documentation and legal representation is important too - and why it’s such a heavily regulated industry pretty much everywhere.
I don't understand your example because from your description I can't tell who set the place ablaze.
If it's the owner, then it's insurance fraud, and it has nothing to do with moral hazard.
If it's not the owner but say a random crackhead, then I also fail to see how it qualifies as moral hazard, and if the insurance doesn't not cover them nobody will (because the arsonist is insolvent and will never be able to pay $3M) and the business owner is screwed, which is a terrible outcome (and is exactly what happened here).
In any case the answer to 1) clearly is “the insurance company” exactly as if arson is excluded.
> Without insurance, the owner is the one who bears the costs directly no matter what,
Which is exactly what he's trying to avoid when paying for an insurance in the first place.
And like with health insurance, there's actually very little link between the fact that you're insured or not and the risk you're taking (Like nobody gets hurt because their injuries get reimbursed) because the harm goes far beyond the economic loss you're insuring yourself against.
If the owner won’t lose out on the payout from insurance by committing arson, or could plausibly get away with it without getting caught, he is experiencing a moral hazard to commit arson.
It’s only insurance fraud if he lies to get a payout from insurance. Which means the insurance policy would need to have an exclusion to not pay him out if he committed the arson, so he lied about it. If it did not have that exclusion, then he doesn’t need to lie about it, hence no fraud.
Either way, that the insurance policy would pay him if he burnt his place down is literally the moral hazard. It’s called a moral hazard because it creates an incentive for him to commit an immoral act that he otherwise would not. It’s existence is a hazard to his morals.
That they would exclude if he did it himself, and would investigate it, is what the company is doing to attempt to mitigate that moral hazard. But it always exists.
This random example is interestingly at odds with all the other definitions and example on that very web page!
> If the owner won’t lose out on the payout from insurance by committing arson, or could plausibly get away with it without getting caught, he is experiencing a moral hazard to commit arson.
This makes zero sense, because in that line of reasoning, the moral hazard is always there no matter what the policy is about arson: “all the owner needs to do” is to commit arson without being caught, which is exactly the same thing whether or not arson is excluded from the policy, since committing arson on your own good to receive payment from insurance is insurance fraud anyway.
The only thing that changes if arson is excluded is if the arson is committed by somebody else!
> Either way, that the insurance policy would pay him if he burnt his place down is literally the moral hazard.
But you are making things up! This particular moral hazard would only exist if insurance fraud was not a crime in itself, which it is already! And as such, there can be no such moral hazard, because no insurance company is to pay a dude that burns down his own place no matter if there's an exclusion about arson in their contract.
> That they would exclude if he did it himself, and would investigate it, is what the company is doing to attempt to mitigate that moral hazard. But it always exists.
The company would have to do no investigation and it would do no mitigation, as it would be the police investigating to protect public order.
AS I said before, the moral hazard would only exist in a place where insurance fraud is not recognized as a fraud.
Saying that this a moral hazard is like saying that bank robbery is a moral hazard on the perspective of banks, and that's clearly not what this phrase means.
Btw, you are the one missing the subtlety of “burning down your own good” vs “having it burned by a third party”. But sure, I'm the one who don't understand.
The underlying thing is it doesn’t necessarily matter in illustrating the point, especially in a discussion about moral hazard. This is because having insurance means the owner now has a strong incentive to see the place burn down (as long as it happens in a way that doesn’t stop a payout) because someone else will pay him if that happens. Assuming that payout is ‘worth it’ compared to the alternative of it not burning down.
It could be from leaving the door open ‘accidentally’ so someone ‘breaks in’ and does it (actually, or intentionally) or it could be hiring someone to do it - as long as they don’t get caught in a way that stops the payout. Or ignoring that pile
of cardboard boxes near the oven, or the weird smoke smell near the electrical panel. Or not hiring security when they know they have angry protestors threatening to burn the place down. Or pissing off the local unstable homeless dude, and then not doing anything when he threatens to burn your place down. It doesn’t have to be a rational or conscious decision for it to be a problem for the insurer.
Moral hazard is a fundamental problem with insurance, because insurance by design and necessarily by definition removes loss/creates payouts for events that would otherwise leave the owner solely on the hook. Which if not done carefully, can alter behavior significantly.
It’s usually mitigable, or no one sane (or able to remain solvent long term!) will write such a policy. The early days of insurance, there were plenty of examples of people abusing it or weird edge cases causing insurance companies to go bankrupt. These types of
Risks are so obvious though, and the industry so much more mature, that in modern history it’s usually due to corporate incompetence or the like.
For example, good luck getting a huge life insurance policy on a random homeless person and having it pay out if they die (regardless of if you had anything to do
with their death).
Or not having a serious investigation if a friend gets in a car accident with you and gets lifelong disability injuries.
Insurance fraud is a crime created for the insurance industry to help protect them, and in theory reduces insurance costs and helps society.
Because this issue is always on their mind for a good reason.
They’re also a business in it to make a profit, and will happily exclude reasonable things and refuse to payout for reasonable claims if they think they can get away with it. Hell, I can’t think of any insurance company that likes paying out for anything.
But that doesn’t change the nature of moral hazard.
Your argument is weird because you’re essentially saying moral hazard isn’t an issue because there are laws making some of the more obvious damaging behaviors illegal.
But that’s like arguing it’s never dangerous to drive a car because there are laws making reckless driving, driving without a license, drunk driving, vehicular homicide, etc. illegal.
When actually, those laws are because at a fundamental level, it’s always dangerous to drive a car, these problems are common, and we’re attempting to mitigate them somewhat because we think (at a societal level) it’s worth it.
The idea of being way out on the open water, and pulling up your anchor and finding that it is bringing up some giant steel-wrapped black cable up out into view as you look over the edge of your boat, going off in either direction downward into the seemingly infinite deep water... brings up some crazy weird primal fear [1] in me. I wouldn't even want to touch it, let alone haul the cable onboard and cut it. I'd cut loose the anchor chain and hope to see the thing again.
I’m probably being really slow but I couldn’t really work out what the pictures are actually showing. I see a bunch of yellow cables and some with steel sheathing - I’m not really sure what I’m looking at? Are all those cables laid together or are these photos of just one actual cable that has been fully pulled up and coiled?
Yes, that must be the coil of cable after they had started pulling it off of the seabed. The steel armoring is supposed to be a bunch of steel wires tightly wound around the cable, to protect it from damage.
We once booked a night on Rebak Island, next to Langkawi, Malaysia.
The day before our arrival I receive a call that a boat somehow broke the water pipe which lies on the bottom between Rebak and Langkawi, cutting the island off from fresh water, and whether I wanted to rebook to another hotel.
Not sure what the moral of the story is, but it kinda fitted the context :)
I don’t know about this cable specifically, but it can be done by transferring more power to the optical signal.
Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers work by utilizing a nonlinear optical effect where energy is transferred from a pump laser to the signal. This is in principle possible in any optical (glass) fiber, but by doping with exotic elements, the amplification characteristics can be optimized. Erbium is suitable for the conventional communication wavelengths.
For reference I have a PhD in information theory and signal processing for fiber channels.
This is still a good practical reference I like to point out, when people ask: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWqe8_5SUvk Richard A. Steenbergen has also other good talks, e.g. on traceroute. There are multiple versions of these talks that include more or less the same stuff with occasionally more information here and there.
The crush to the cable could be a number of things but without knowing the terrain, and knowing these cables just lie on the sea floor, it could be caused by the cable sitting on some jagged rock and has been pulled tight elsewhere (perhaps by fisherman dredging the seabed) resulting in the cable being forced onto the jagged rock and it being crushed onto the rock.
Likewise, but unlikely, some heavy object from above has some how landed on the cable, perhaps even a submarine of sorts resting on the seabed.
Again knowledge of the terrain of the sea floor where the cable crush took place is key into gaining some idea of what might have happened, but I think its the first scenario, a fisherman dredging the sea floor elsewhere has caught and pulled the cable tight and the cable crush is the damage from it resting on rocks where its snagged and crushed itself from the tautness.
Rock climbers and abseilers using ropes will see this with their ropes.
"Fiber optic amplifier undersea" should do the trick. It's not that the power supply wrapped around/alongside the fiber does anything directly; it's being delivered to amplifiers. There's a hackaday article that's got some history in it.
What kind of international law can we expect in the future? A law that is constantly broken by various maleficent actors? Of course we've heard them complain that the current order is run by the west and harmful to others. What are the alternatives? A hundred cables?
> According to Johnson the US has never endorsed the ICC because it's a "direct affront to our own sovereignty. [...] We don't put any international body above American sovereignty and Israel doesn't do that either," he added.
God I have developed such a distaste for political opinions. Everyone thinks they're right and everyone sees the various maleficent actors in others.
"constantly broken by various maleficent actors" is a pretty good description of the past of international law. There is no reason to expect the future to be any different.
If by "the russians" you mean russian defence, I can guarantee they would use something as inconspicuous as a trawler for the job rather than a combat vehicle
For the curious - google “tanker Minerva Julie Nord Stream”. While officially the tanker is Greek, it is tightly connected to Russia.
I’d be looking for the key places in international waters and the likes needed to be cut simultaneously to say paralyze Europe banking and other infrastructure and would be checking whether there are Russian (and affiliated like that Minerva company) “trawlers” with a habit of hanging around those places.
"NRK has previously reported how a Russian trawler crossed the Svalbad cable more than 140 times, and more than a dozen times before the damage occurred in January 2022. The shipowners have denied having anything to do with the damage."
The norwegians seem to think it was a russian trawler and that trawler doesn't exclude the possiblity that russians did it.
Wow, the Russians shot down another plane. I never heard of KAL007 and thought MH17 was the first time this happened. Did any other nation states ever shoot down passenger airplanes?
Because West is week and easily manipulated. Its just a travler guys lol, we are just testing our radio transmitter in Królewiec lol, oh we didnt know those buoys were yours Estonia oops. Shoot someone in broad daylight and there is no doubt you did it, take off military insignia before sending little green men and paid off morons in the West will call it a separatists revolution.
russia wont openly invade Baltics/NATO, they will send little green men under the cover of some self manufactured crisis. A big forest fire, chemical spill, maybe an aircraft crash or terrorist attack. Then it will be "touch our guys and we Nuke you" like they keep saying in Ukraine, with West trembling to cross magical imaginary red lines.
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.
Maybe, the USA's governance system seems to be malfunctioning. The 6 month gap in supply to Ukraine has made all of the USA's defense partners around the world, (eg. asia pacific) go "what the fuck!?! The USA doesnt actually honor it's defence pacts!?"
It's an open war with Ukraine only so far. And many are not aware of the wider geopolitics of it, they don't know their countries are at war with Russia. Open attacks would scare many of those people and make them more hostile towards the Russian side. As it stands many are more neutral and Putin even has a significant number of fans in the West.
The argument I remember goes something like this (and I could be remembering it wrong).
They claimed technical problems prevented them from fulfilling the amount of gas required by their contract for NS1 and NS2. Due to sanctions they essentially had to provide gas for free - or at least in exchange for money they were unable to spend or access.
The pipe blowing up potentially saved them from having to pay a penalty fee in the contract once the gas hadn’t been moving for X number of days.
Why would Russia be concerned about a contract? Reminds me of a story on something like Unsolved Mysteries....lady had her husband killed because she was a christian, and thus, didn't believe in getting a divorce, and wanted to be with another man (his best friend.) And his friend went through with it...
They left one pipe of NS2. It would have been a political victory for Putin with humiliation of the German government if they had switched to this instead of stopping gas imports via NS1&2 completely.
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?
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.
That's the thing though, at the time it wasn't supplying gas. Gazprom said it was having 'technical difficulties' (that the German equipment manufacturer denied) and had reduced the flows over time to zero to put pressure on the Europeans through high winter gas prices and low supplies.
Your broader point is correct though, admitting to blowing it up would be bad press to any party.
Ah excellent, fishermen not only destroying the ocean but also the infrastructure of countries. When will peoples appetite for destroying the ocean be qualled?
Despite people downvoting me I did read the article. I don't assume this is all fisherman since that Chinese boat mentioned seems to be conveniently taking out cables and the Chinese gov is not responding to their investigation requests. Still doesn't change the fact that fishing operations destroy the ocean floors, a simple amount of research can confirm this.
> Initially, the police stated that they believed the damages were caused by human activity. Later on, the investigation was dropped, due to lack of evidence....
> Several experts with extensive experience with submarine cables and installations have assessed the images for NRK. Their judgement is that the damage to the Svalbard fiber was due to the cables being crushed.
Trawler fishing is devastating for the local ecology, we just don't see the damage - to quote [1], page 16:
> Seabed habitats are under significant pressure across European seas from the cumulative impacts of demersal fishing, coastal developments and other activities. Preliminary results from a study presented in SWD(2020) indicate that about 43% of Europe’s shelf/slope area and 79% of the coastal seabed is considered to be physically disturbed, which is mainly caused by bottom trawling. A quarter of the EU’s coastal area has probably lost its seabed habitats.
Honestly I'm pretty much in favor of banning trawler fishing and the import of trawler-fished fish into the European Union, even if it's just to protect our fiber links.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/720778d4-bb17...