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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

People forget that the internet is, in fact, a series of tubes, and that a measure of digital GDP is tied to bandwidth and information export/inport.

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Imagine the chaos if during war-time the first thing a major power did was cut all the internet wires to their enemy?

Imagine if during peace-time, N. Korea decided to do just this for kicks and giggles and to "flex it's muscle"?

Rich people have submarines, what's stopping some rich dude from doing this and betting against the markets? (Other than jail time if caught)?

> Rich people have submarines, what's stopping some rich dude from doing this and betting against the markets? (Other than jail time if caught)?

Now, that makes me think. What, if any law would you be breaking presuming this was done in international waters?

I mean, I'd assume you'd probably just cause an armed response from /someone/, but I imagine it'd probably be a extra-judicial process.

There are plenty of approaches that have been developed over the centuries for dealing with nefarious actors (usually pirates) on the high seas.

The tools employed can be blunt and destructive.

The venn diagram of people who can afford autonomous wire-cutting submarines and people who can hire accountants to hide white collar insider trading fraud is a circle.

Most "evil plans" are subverted by the fact that it's literally easier to just become rich and powerful in traditional/corrupt ways than to try to execute some elaborate scheme with espionage and robotic inventions.

Cables are cut all the time just by eg anchors; I don't think you'd need a sub. The hard part would be finding the cables though, since their position isn't publicized to prevent this sort of thing. Plus the place where it'd be easy to do this, on the continental shelf, is probably in territorial waters.

You're kidding right? There are giant maps of these cables all over the place.

Maps that show exact location? Ocean’s big.

> Imagine the chaos if during war-time the first thing a major power did was cut all the internet wires to their enemy?

Britain cut the telegraph cables to Germany at the start of WWI, it lead to being able to intercept the Zimmermann Telegram [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimmermann_Telegram

I think this is more or less assumed to be the case already. It would be foolish to initiate your nuclear retaliation without first burning all your zero-days on widespread infrastructure failure.

For more localized conflicts this is also already routine, lots of countries in civil war order ISPs under their jurisdiction to start blocking websites or the entire Internet whenever blocking it benefits the incumbents (which is always).

In any case there are counter-measures and counter-counter-measures for such situations. It's why Starlink has always been presumed to be a financial success even if civilians don't get behind it; every government in the world (and especially the DoD) would want a satellite network that can provide Internet connectivity to any part of the world, and you would have to literally shoot down dozens of satellites to impact its availability.

> you would have to literally shoot down dozens of satellites to impact its availability.

I'm not a satellite engineer, but I'd be surprised if this is true. What's preventing jamming a small, distant satellite signal with a big strong local transmitter?

It's trivially easy to jam GPS [0] and GPS is a much less complex signal than internet traffic.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/jamming-gps-signals-is-illegal-dangerous...

> What's preventing jamming a small, distant satellite signal with a big strong local transmitter?

Anti-radiation missiles which home on the strong local transmitter.

I'm not saying this flippantly. Obviously not all Starlink consumers have access to such a thing. The scenario I'm talking about here is when a country is trying to choke the military communications of an other one.

The big benefit of these LEO satellite constellations is that they have hundreds of satellites in them which makes anti-sat weaponry not cost effective. (Or at least that's the hope.)

Any jamming attempts would have to be localized within a certain radius. Jamming an entire country's worth of area is probably untenable unless you are a really small country. Even then you could e.g. route communications across the border with a meshnet and then shoot them up to Starlink in a location that isn't being jammed.

This is the castle and invader problem; the castle builders must guarantee that there is no hole anywhere in the castle, and the invaders only have to find or make one hole to render the castle useless. Whereas you could cut an underwater cable and guarantee outages for at least a few days or weeks, an adversary only needs to move to an un-jammed area in order to resume communication with the greater world.

There are usually a few undersea cable cuts every year just from accidents with ships dragging their anchors in bad weather. Most places have redundant connectivity now so it isn't a major problem.

But are they really accidents? I know they are blamed on random ships but some of the time if you dig a little there will also be some geopolitical posturing you can tie it to, or the potential for bugging should be considered. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/08/19/how-russian... this article is about Russians but you can be what ever they are doing, 'we' are doing too.

Globalization and the detriment of their own counties economy is what limits the likelihood of this happening. Russia definitely has a plan to do this and the capability. But they won't.

...or, leave them intact? Nothing worse than an enemy you can't spy on, or feed disinformation to.

I can imagine major power or North Korea doing those sort of things when the circumstances come, but the 'rich people' part is pure non-sense.

First of all they have no interest in doing such.

Secondly, Attacking cable infrastructure using submarines is in effect a declaration of war (or act of terrorism). I understand this world gives you this illusion that money = power, but just remember who prints the currency, who owns the army. Only because this sort of things are not in your daily life so often like the rich people are doesn't mean they don't exist.

The last but not the least, they likely won't be rich at all when the governments of countries affected freezes their assets, which should be the least of their concerns if that actually happens.

Why imagine?

The 2007 attacks on Estonia [1] and the cyberattacks before the actual attacks on South Ossetia [2] are generally believed to be a Russian test of its capabilities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_cyberattacks_on_Estonia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberattacks_during_the_2008_S...

I don't exactly remember when it was, I guess around 2005 or before. In a timespan from about 6 months multiple undersee cables had been 'hit by a ship' (pre Snowden, everybody believed the story). One cable was pretty bad, so traffic to asia was almost complet broken for a few days.

I remember this panic. I, and many others, actually learned at that time that anchors damaging undersea cables are actually a common occurrence.

But that would is a bit of a stretch, some rich countries, say UAE (Dubai) and Saudi Arabia, do not have a direct access to " super fast nodes, they connect through Singapore, while countries in the Mediterranean basin have better access, yet it does not give them that big edge.

Is Starlink also a "tube"?

Starlink is a series of tubes connected by airgaps :)

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