What the damaged Svalbard cable looked like

Maybe you're thinking about Nord Stream

Criss crossing is quite normal behavior btw. I see it all the time here at the North Sea near England.

Yeah the Russians also used "trawlers" to hide their recovery operations of KAL007 to hide their mass murder.

Trawler does not mean unintentional or not state related.

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.

Though surely the repeaters in a cable, such as the one in the article, presents hard limits?

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'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.

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.

Reminds me of the early dialup to DSL communication over standard telephone lines evolution.

I've wondered in the past: is there an actual theoretical upper limit based on the physicality of it on the bandwidth of a single fibre link?

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.

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.

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)

svalbard is a island, far away from mainland. Not many live there (3k people). But they likely have higher seasonal numbers (Tourists)

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=5/77.504/13.008

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!"

But not over a cable.

Submarine cables are clearly marked on nautical charts, and even recreational boaters know not to anchor in those areas.

A professional trawler captain is not going to accidentally trawl over such an area.

yes – the trawling pattern in the GIF is over (part of) the area marked as damaged in the NRK article: https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/this-is-what-the-damaged-...

Its the groundstation that needs backing up and the location is surrounded by the sea.

That's not how satellites work.

I for one welcome our new Polar Bear Overlords. (Hope the Russians don´t forget their rifles when they move in.)

Thx, that was a huge brain fart, I meant each revolution.

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.

Despite not recovering any money, Telus may have seen some value in letting others know what the consequences can be.

“Kill the chicken to scare the monkey

Not even a down payment on the fine?

Makes you wonder if those cables should (can) be insured against such problems instead of relying on a craber's insurance.

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.

  the less you’ll understand why it’s still permitted in so many 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."

Source: https://www.unep.org/facts-about-nature-crisis

Cool. How about you paying cost of the wildlife?

Allright, let's not do anything, ever.

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.

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.

Just tap a repeater and deal with encryption later.

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.

Here's a description of an early operation (which I think was actually on copper cables): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells

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.

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".

Source: I worked on said analytical software.

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.

[0] https://fac.ksu.edu.sa/sites/default/files/06149809-Optical_...

Ohh there’s physical electronic repeaters. Okay. I thought this was some sort of electromagnetism witchcraft.

Comments like this are why I love HN!

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier#Doped_fiber_...

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.

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.