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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

It is a highly automated process. It is also not as highly regulated as other construction projects, as the cable won't kill anybody. There are also no vested interests that want internet connectivity to remain bad in Africa.

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Oh yes there are: telco incumbents fight furiously to protect their turf. This is why it's 2022 and it's still illegal (!) to provide video calls over the Internet in the UAE.

https://www.travelizta.com/frequent-question-why-cant-i-make...

Neal Stephenson goes into this in some detail in his 1996 classic:

https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Zoom calls do work in Dubai.

Video call on teams also works

Yes but WhatsApp and FB calling do not. As I understand it, Zoom only started working reliably during Covid as companies needed it to

End-to-end encrypted calling is illegal in Dubai, so not surprising that WhatsApp does not work.

This. It is more about end-to-end encryption and the government wanting to have the certs to decrypt stuff if necessary.

I was in Dubai twice earlier this year, and among other people I met with Dr Marwan Alzarouni, who helped create the first certificate authority in UAE many years ago. And their group have now released an app that has all your info and you choose what verified credentials to present.

https://community.intercoin.app/t/qbix-and-intercoin-around-...

Monaco and Dubai are “police states” if you will, with cameras everywhere and end to end encryption technically illegal. Many people (tourists, businessmen) seem to like that.

Why Monaco? https://www.gp-digital.org/world-map-of-encryption/

The fact that the country may require decryption in legal cases is not limited to Monaco, UK is the same.

France has restrictions as well, in the US encryption is munition.

Does Zoom count as a video meeting instead of a video call?

Maybe a loophole they found.

The UAE's connectivity isn't actually bad. Latency to most of SEA is quite good (50ms to India, 80ms to Singapore).

But for what I assume to be political reasons latency to Europe is about 20 or 30ms higher then what it could be .

When I was there, I could get sub 100ms latency to France using a Wireguard tunnel to an AWS server in Bahrain, while direct connections were closer to 120-130ms.

Overall though, I found connectivity in the UAE to be absolutely fine by middle eastern standards.

Sure, the connectivity itself is fine, the thing that's pathetic is that the only reason they ban calls is to try to protect Etisalat's long-distance phone revenue and to funnel people into its paid alternatives (are they still charging from Botim?).

Does the uae even benefit from this? The cable is on the other side of the African continent

What about impact on marine life? Genuine question.

I only have concerns about the coastal connection point being in an environmentally sensitive area, e.g. a wetland.

Not to mention the impacts on the people who live in the communities on the coast that these cables often land at. See what has happened with Facebook's new cable in Oregon: https://oregoncoastalliance.org/facebook-proposes-undersea-c...

Sorry, what were the impacts other than a few weeks of construction noise? The cable is buried under the beach and the seafloor until you get half a mile offshore. According to the link, they left some drilling equipment 60 feet underground, and that's a "disaster"?

This site seems to be dedicated to opposing any sort of development along the Oregon coast, so I guess it's not surprising they didn't like this.

"...and at least 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid" feels considerably more significant than the "drill bit" in another comment.

That's like a small swimming pools worth of whatever it is. Feels pretty insignificant.

If it's mineral oil based that would be enough to destroy a few ecosystems I think

Didn't read the article but from what I understand drilling fluid for environmentally sensitive areas tends to be water with bentonite clay and a small amount of thickener like barium sulfate or calcium carbonate (i.e. seashells) in it.

The independent analysis [1] concluded that "there are currently no adverse environmental, scenic, recreational, or economic impacts resulting from the drill break or presence of Remaining Materials 50 to 70 feet below the sea floor, nor is there a reasonably conceived scenario (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, long-term coastal erosion) that would expose the Remaining Materials to the surrounding environment and result in future impacts."

The drilling fluid is in a borehole ~60 feet underground, and has hardened into a solid (as it's designed to do when not under the mechanical stress of drilling). It's mostly water and clay, with a few additives, all of which are below their ecotoxicity threshold concentrations, even at full concentration in the borehole. And if the drilling fluid ever entered the ocean (which it won't), it would be diluted such that "concentrations of the drilling mud additives and their chemical constituents would be orders of magnitude below ecotoxicity threshold concentrations (and therefore non-hazardous to natural resources) and undetectable".

[1] https://oregoncoastalliance.org/documents_20/edge-cable/06_F...

I wonder if it could be a net positive for the connection point areas.

I'm speculating that areas with undersea cables are often marked as "no anchor" zones due to the risk of damage (in areas where such practices are followed).

So the drop in damage from anchors and extended motor boat presence might eventually outweigh the initial damage from laying the cable.

The idea of net positive is flawed, as multiple local net positives from different disruptions (other than cables) might lead to deterioration of global quality thresholds for sensitive issues, e.g. chains of wetlands required for migratory birds. These global connections are most often unwisely accounted.

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