Last undersea Internet cable connecting Vietnam with the world breaks down | Hacker News Reader

Last undersea Internet cable connecting Vietnam with the world breaks down

en.vietnamplus.vn

173 pointsteddyh140 comments

Not many details in this article, but further north there is another threat to undersea cables carrying Internet traffic:

On Feb. 2, a Chinese fishing vessel sailing close to the Matsu Islands severed one of the two cables, which connect the islands with Taiwan proper. Then, six days later, a Chinese freighter cut the second cable.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/02/21/matsu-islands-internet-...

What a truly unfortunate coincidence.

Rather like the Russian elite who keep mysteriously falling out of buildings.

Defenestration, what was once medieval is hip again.

I never thought I'd see the day where buildings become sentient and rise up against their overlords.

On the renewed China-Vietnam tensions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Vietnam_relation...

Is this an effort to force Vietnam to route all their traffic via China? Through the Great Firewall?

If it is intentional, I would guess it’s more likely general intended to scare Vietnam into accepting island territorial claims

No, they’re trying to get to Singapore. Business in Vietnam is highly dependent on things like Facebook and Google. I was there last year, and have some friends that run businesses there.

https://vietnamembassy-usa.org/news/2001/02/vietnam-puts-reg...

Last fall an internet cable to Svalbard was cut.

AIS recordings showed a Russian fishing vessel traveling many times over a vulnerable spot just before it happened.

> traveling many times over a vulnerable spot

I am reminded of this classic Ali G skit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdOQYlYS2q0

And they are spoofing their AIS data frequently. Now they control if they are where the AIS send information about, and use satellites to help with the location task (because they don’t trust the AIS from Russian ships).

Could probably be the same with other countries ships

Now we have to worry about Russian phishing attacks and Russian fishing attacks

And in a worse scenario, Russian fission attacks.

There's a long history of Russian / Soviet "fishing expeditions" and spy trawlers.

<https://www.blindbatnews.com/2022/08/cold-war-revells-spy-tr...>

<http://www.emmitsburg.net/archive_list/articles/misc/cww/201...>

I don't know it seems plausible to me that it was just an accident. There is plenty of legitimate Russian activity in that area. I'm no fisherman so someone correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think it is that unusual for them to go back and forth. It's not surprising that it happened to a vulnerable spot, because if it wasn't vulnerable the cable wouldn't have broke and no one would be looking into it. Finally the Russians have submarines they could use to cut the cable without being detected. Who runs a covert op with AIS on?

Why do you need a throwaway account to post that?

Just ask plainly:

Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party of the United States?

No but I did go to a meeting once. They had doughnuts.

That was clearly an FBI honeypot. Real communist meetings only serve Engels Food Cake.

Depending who you ask Engels was the first Revisionist!

I once went to a talk at Berkeley's Revolution Books.

Fortunately, I doubt if they could topple a suburban HOA.

Edit: Revolution Books, not Revolution Cafe.

Are you kidding? American communists are more fractious than Quakers - they couldn't topple a game of Jenga if you pulled half the blocks out first.

True. That was a bad example. Some HOAs are tough.

So's Bob Avakian, I hear. But he's only got three fans.

You have hit a tough crowd.

I make these accounts every so often, use them for a while, and then make a new one. It is just for general privacy reasons.

The account name would be green if they made the account recently just to post this.

Well it seems many are hell bent on war so it would hardly be surprising that more infrastructure is deliberately sabotaged.

A lot of VN internet infra is yandex (Russia), so I don’t see them intentionally doing so. Especially since Russia has their attention elsewhere. There is a different player that would benefit however

> There is a different player that would benefit however

Who?

The same "player" who benefited from blowing pipelines and arms selling.

And by arms selling you mean giving away arms, right?

The whole way down this could apply to the US or Russia and probably a few others.

How do fishing vessels sever internet cables lying on the sea floor? Or is this a case of the ships being "fishing vessels"?

It's at least possible - drag nets can and do touch the bottom.

As do crab pots and lobster traps.

Pots and traps tend not to get dragged. Nets do.

It's conceivable for a crabber / lobsterman to damage undersea cables. It's far more likely that it's a net fisher.

It’s called “bottom trawling” and it’s pretty much what it sounds like.

Also known as cruising?

Russia has a pretty remarkable set of nuclear submarines designed for covert ops. You don't see anything on the surface when they mess with cables.

Why in the world would they cut the cables to friendly Vietnam, or for that matter Svalbard, which has a Russian town of Barentsburg?

Does Svalbard really have a huge e-commerce sector or something that needs undersea fibre? They doubtlessly have plenty of satellite internet, so this will just limit their bandwidth and maybe interrupt things temporarily. What's the strategic value in cutting it?

Article gives scant information but found this from 01/30/23: https://e.vnexpress.net/news/news/internet-slows-to-a-crawl-...

From that article:

Vietnam is currently connected with seven undersea cables: SMW3, AAG, IA, APG, AAE-1, SJC2 and ADC. Besides the recent breakage of the IA, problems with the AAE, AAG and APG cables that have been present since 2022 and early 2023 have yet to be fully resolved.

The SJC2 and the ADC are yet to be officially operational, while the SMW3 cable is outdated and about to be decommissioned.

The fact that Vietnam currently only has one fully functional undersea cable has caused internet speeds between Vietnam and the rest of the world to slow to a crawl.

>> about to be decommissioned.

I presume this means disconnected and forgotten about on the sea floor. Or do they actually do anything to pull them up? I imagine pulling an old cable might be very difficult but I don't like things just being left for the sea to deal with. There is far to much trash on the seafloor already.

I would think pulling up a cable would be detrimental to any ecosystem that built on and around the cable. I would not be surprised to learn that ecosystems were affected negatively when the cables were laid, too, so I think we probably want to limit damage by letting them lie there.

Depends on what kinds of substances are present there, that will leach out over time.

Steel, rubber, and glass? Doesn't seem so bad.

Future archaeologists may find "the fossilised remains of continent spanning worms!".

There is no plastic in the cable?

If you are worried about plastic in the ocean I have some really bad news.

This attitude continues to perplex me. "There's already plastic in the ocean" is not a justification for adding more plastic to the ocean.

If you're optimizing for the minimum amount of plastic in the ocean, not building undersea cables is not going to be very effective.

You see, the question you're implying with that answer is different from the original one posed: from "do we put this cable down or not?" to "what else could we do with our time and energy?"

You're not wrong, but in the context of this conversation it is an incorrect assessment.

Typically they're just left there. But every once in a while someone will decide it makes sense to acquire the cable for cheap, pull it up, and re-use it somewhere else that doesn't have high bandwidth requirements but would still benefit from getting subsea connectivity. Seen this for Pacific and some Caribbean islands.

In Vietnam now. The speed is slow but not as slow as a crawl. More like a swift jog.

Swift Jog allows Swift language input into your Apple Watch via swipe and type gestures on your Apple Watch while you’re on the move.

Only 3999£ on the App™® Store™®.

I'm in central Vietnam now, speed is exactly the same as yesterday. 300mb/s. I tested on speedtest.net to a Singapore server. Ping is 58ms though, I don't know if that's gone up.

I often see this happen on HN where seemingly easy to verify claims made by parent and child comment directly contradict each other.

Often I think it’s tempting to take claims more generally than they are stated. Based on the information in the article speeds across Vietnam have indeed slowed to a crawl. We would like to interpret that as all outbound connections for anyone in any area of the country have all slowed down to a crawl and while that is the simplest and most direct take it’s not really the claim being made. Even the article does some work pointing out its not everyone, not all the time, and not all connections are equally impacted (e.g. one person switching to a wireless connection which was now working faster than their wired).

A day later and some friends have been frantically messaging about zoom calls and slack not working. Meanwhile I've tested several times with connections to Singapore, San Francisco, Berlin, and I get a steady 300mb/s every time, and slack is fine (didn't test zoom).

We live in the same town, within 5km of each other. So maybe it depends on the ISP?

Whenever I read of an undersea cable breaking, I worry that the next world war has started. Seeing pipelines getting blown up for presumed geopolitical reasons hasn't reduced this anxiety.

I know these cables regularly break for ordinary reasons. And every time I hope it's just that.

There's no point in being scared when running isn't an option.

Logically, I know you are correct, but that does nothing to help.

Probably nothing will, but understand I have significant sympathy for younger folks who are getting their first real taste of zero-sum geopolitics and have nothing to compare it to for scale/threat level. For those of us that grew up in the 80s the days headlines represent a slow news day from our childhood.

If you’re not that young and didn’t try mediation yet you definitely should. It can drastically reduce anxiety of future events, even if it does not reduce “problems” when they happen.

70s in Italy were wild. Cities were cratered, blood was on the roads monthly in a triple underground war between brigate rosse, neofascisti and the state, with the cia meddling trough gladio. 90-10 were bliss in comparison. Wouldn't claim these are golden age because as the first world stabilized the unaligned world became the proxy for the great powers' wars, to all that it entailed. The proxies are getting nukes now, and so the struggle between great powers is shifting again...

What a fascinating bit of history I’ve never heard of. Thank you for introducing me to it. This whole story of the gladio operation only being discovered because of an Italian investigator trying to crack an unsolved case around far right terrorism feels like it should have had a block buster movie made already.[1][2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/11/14/c...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Casson

Checkout the Daniel Ganser book.

Running is an option for some.

Hah they can certainly afford to fund that delusion but I assure you if international logistics were to well and truly collapse they'd find out real fast the have-less native population in their bolt-hole country of choice 1. Aren't confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded 2. Are surprisingly adept at operating heavy equipment.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean.

For some people, none of that applies.

The super-wealthy think they can outrun any geopolitical shitstorm (up to and including WWIII) as is evidenced by the surge in luxury survival bunker construction in places like New Zealand.

Hey when I don't get an instant fix, I think that the positioning signal must have been intentionally degraded in my area! Incoming cruise missiles!

Even if another world war isn't starting, think of the data pollution from all those leaking bits!

Nothing to really worry about.

Being fiber optic cables; this will be light pollution.

But I just read that light pollution is poisoning the planet too.

This is a heavy topic.

Likely nothing you can do anyway, unless you've already moved to patagonia or something.

Many nations DDoS each other all the time outside of scope of a war. I can imagine them breaking cables as a similar hostile action without an implication of war, especially if it's difficult to prove who's the culprit.

Phantom Menace: “A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion.”

Or DNS.

Don’t forget BGP

The problems with Vietnam's internet have been going on for a long time now.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2872728/dont-blame-sha...

https://saigoneer.com/saigon-technology/11885-sharks,-anchor...

https://vietnaminsider.vn/apg-undersea-internet-cable-which-...

I've lived in Vietnam for the last five years and I read lots of reports like this. The local joke is always "sharks" biting the undersea cables, where the sharks are the Chinese I guess.

The reality doesn't match though, except for during huge storms there's rarely connection issues. The fastest speed five years ago was about 100mb, I now get 300mb for the same price. I'm still getting that speed right now (testing on speedtest.net to Singapore).

The joke was more that the VN govt was slowing down internet during holidays and blaming it on sharks... since that is when it always got slower... except that doesn't take into account that more people needed internet during holidays.

Nice to hear the speeds have increased over time. It was pretty bad when I was living there. That said, the 4G LTE coverage was amazing... literally the entire country, even in the most remote areas. Another reason to look forward to going back some day.

It's amazing what you can do when you don't need to apply for planning permission to put a 4g mast. They're everywhere - people rent out their rooftops to internet companies.

The blessing and curse of Vietnam: you can get away with nearly anything, but so can other people.

It's a beautiful country though and changing incredible fast, mostly for the better. There's a huge and somewhat successful anti corruption drive going on in high level government over the past few years.

If you've been away even for five years you'll see changes.

I spent 2016-2020 there and saw the rate of changes, even in that short time. I left literally right as covid started and wasn't able to go back.

> The blessing and curse of Vietnam: you can get away with nearly anything, but so can other people.

I quite enjoy the culture there... really opened my eyes quite a bit.

> There's a huge and somewhat successful anti corruption drive going on in high level government over the past few years.

I don't think that's something that is ever really going to change in my lifetime. There is corruption to the core, but I found that corruption isn't necessarily a bad thing. For example, I'd much rather pay my "traffic ticket" on the street than deal with the bureaucracy of having to go to court and hope the officer doesn't show up. Choose your battles.

> I'd much rather pay my "traffic ticket" on the street than deal with the bureaucracy

I'm not talking about low level corruption like that. That will change later, hopefully, once the wages of police increase.

I'm talking about high level corruption where a hospital is supposed to get built and instead the project gets stalled for years and then it turns out all the money mysteriously vanished. Or an entire minority village get kicked off their land to make way for a new resort, and a politician coincidentally gets a large cash gift. These are far more important to solve than police taking small bribes, and that's what they're working on now. I don't have enough insight or knowledge to comment on how successful they are likely to be but I wish them luck.

One point about the low level corruption, though: like you say, it's very convenient to pay a small bribe on the street to avoid a traffic ticket. Unless you make $150 a month and that small bribe is actually your day's wages and you can't eat that day. So yeah, it's convenient, if you're wealthy, and terrible if you're poor. Like so many things in life.

Yea, when I think of corruption, this comes to mind:

https://e.vnexpress.net/photo/news/half-finished-hotel-proje...

It isn't just central, it is the entire coastline.

> Unless you make $150 a month and that small bribe is actually your day's wages and you can't eat that day.

Oh totally. So many times I've seen them loading bikes onto trucks because people couldn't afford to pay. There is a lot of really f'cked up stuff there for sure.

I ended up just giving money away left and right, because I was lucky in that I could and it was the right thing to do. Nothing drives me nuts more than expats who complain about having to pay an extra 10k for something because the locals were 'ripping them off'...

> Nothing drives me nuts more than expats who complain about having to pay an extra 10k for something because the locals were 'ripping them off'...

Not all expats are rich. Many Vietnamese are rich. So yeah, it is kind of shitty that if you're a foreigner you'll be overcharged for everything all the time. It's racism, to put it bluntly, and not a good part of Vietnamese culture. I think it's totally reasonable to be annoyed about racism.

That kind of corruption (paying off cops) is absolutely toxic to economic development, just as much as the bigger scale corruption.

You never know if your competitor will just bribe a government official to cancel your license. Or the bank is corrupt and your funds disappear.

Its pervasive in Vietnam. During Covid government officials charged $10,000+ USD for repatriation flights. Funny thing is they did it to the wrong people and it got back to the government and several senior officials were charged. Covid tests were rife with corruption, and the Minister of Health got busted. Hell, Anti-corruption officials were caught taking bribes.

Until Vietnam effectively deals with corruption it will stall as a middle income country.

Singapore used to be like that and with independence the government clamped down hard and still do today.

I know people who work for the Singapore government and things like “can you call your friend at immigration and check on my visa?” are a big no-no. They arent even supposed to talk to other departments except for legitimate reasons.

A truck driver who gave $0.50-$1 to get to the front of the line at a factory to offload his truck was recently found guilty of bribery in Singapore. And so was the forklift operator ge gave the money to.

https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/courts-crime/man-take...

And as a result you can invest in Singapore and know your money wont be stolen by some crooked government worker. Its a safe haven in SE Asia unlike any other country.

> That kind of corruption (paying off cops) is absolutely toxic to economic development

You do realize that in order to get a cop job in Vietnam, you literally have to buy it? The corruption of 'paying cops off' actually happens much higher up.

Singapore went to the opposite extreme and not entirely in the right way. When I worked for Grab, it was run by a religious nutter who made really awful decisions and the company was full of nepotism. There are still plenty of ways to lose money there, it just happens in different ways.

Im not sure either of your points are really relevant?

Who cares if the cops has to pay someone else off? Corruption is corruption.

And nepotism isnt corruption.

https://www.transparency.org/en/corruptionary/nepotism

I am assuming the "SMW3 cable" mentioned is SEA-ME-WE 3, which was mentioned multiple times in "Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson (1996, Wired) [0]. It was noted as a competitor to FLAG, the cable Stephenson was mainly following.

That seems like a very long lifespan.

[0]: https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/

Title makes it seem like Vietnam is in an internet blackout. Not the case apparently, they're still connected and are fine.

But what are the implications of this internet cable being down? Will there be a slowing of internet? Is there an easy fix?

Based on a different article[1] and the submarine cable map [2][3][4]... Asia Africa Europe 1 (AAE-1) is currently broken between Vietnam and Hong Kong, but presumable is functional from Vietnam to the rest of the cable that travels west (landings in much of southern asia and a couple points in southern Europe). Intra Asia (IA) is broken between Vietnam and Singapore, but it also lands in Hong Kong and the Philipines. SMW3 lands in a lot of places, but is reported to be obsolete.

So, it seems Vietnam no longer has a direct fiber connection to Singapore, and has reduced capacity to Hong Kong. There will likely be some slowdown as Hong Kong and Singapore are both popular locations for data centers.

There's not really an easy fix. Traffic will flow over alternate paths, but repair boats need to go out and locate the ends of the broken cables, bring them up to the surface, splice them back together, and then let them sink again.

Terrestrial cabling tends not to get damaged by ships, and is a lot easier to locate for repairs, but it's hard to run it over mountains and through forests, and you can't run a terrestrial cable from Vietnam to Singapore or the United States.

[1] https://en.vietnamplus.vn/internet-slows-as-four-out-of-five...

[2] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/asia-afric...

[3] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/tata-tgn-i...

[4] https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/seamewe-3

How do ships damage the cable to begin with?

Dragging nets thru the ocean floor. Throwing anchor.

That or they disturb the sharks that eat the cables ;)

Don't believe me about the sharks? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/aug/14/google-un...

Or maybe more accurately: they are not fine and have a lot of problems with their undersea cables, but assure us that losing this specific cable didn't make it any worse than it already is.

This is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam state run news agency reporting on the annual Tet holiday internet "outage" caused by "cable failure" it has gotten better over the years. Instead of complete blackout they slow social down to a total crawl or dead, my guess is they do it to stop the ability for any kind of organized public uprising, protest or civil unrest.

It is normal in Vietnam to have nation wide internet blackouts leading up to some politically important moment, holidays or maneuver. The authorities always blame some upstream fault and there is silence from government on it (apart from injecting some press about undersea cable failure. One year they put an article about sharks developing a penchant for internet cables which is now the running joke), the expat forums in Vietnam have pretty frequent and humorous complaints about it.

My colleagues in Vietnam frequently get cut off for days and just laugh that the "shark ate cable again"

Vietnam cant be connected by only undersea cables, they have land borders with China, Laos and Cambodia, whilst *mostly third world countries their internet is doing just fine during these Vietnamese internet outages. Not far away is Singapore - an island, with an AWS, Azure and GCP regions and they do not have shark eating cable internet outages.

TLDR this article is total BS

Starlink is the future here right? You can’t sever a satellite link like you can with a cable.

Well, actually I guess you technically can. But it’s definitely way more difficult.

Shower(-ish) thought: such cables are lasting and obvious artefacts for the future. These cables will stay where they are for eons. These Starlink satellites are like dragonflies. Once they are no longer continuosly replenished by new launches, they will disappear.

You can lower the SNR to the point at which it's unusable.

A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.

> A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers

I don't see how a system that likely would need to be larger that the Duga-1 "Russian Woodpecker" can be hidden, and the Duga-1 wasn't even particularly powerful enough at jamming radio stations - well, it was a over-the-horizon radar, not a jammer, but the power and size requirements for an actual effective jammer are still there.

>You can lower the SNR to the point at which it's unusable.

This would be the equivalent to blotting out an AM or FM radio channel by outputting white (or other) RF noise on a given frequency -- or frequency range.

>A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.

Roughly equivalent, yes...

100% exactly equivalent, well, maybe not...

I don't know if Starlink is capable of frequency hopping or not -- nor the range of frequencies it is permitted to hop around in if it is -- but, if, let's say (for the purpose of discussion) that the following things were true:

a) Starlink can and does frequency hop;

b) The range of frequencies that Starlink is permitted to frequency hop in was infinite (1 HZ - infinite HZ) -- not true obviously, but if that that was the case,

then:

>A system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel would be roughly equivalent to "cutting an undersea cable", I believe.

Yes -- but it would have to simultaneously broadcast white (or other) noise RF on all RF frequencies simultaneously -- and it would have to use a sh-tload of power to accomplish that.

The state-sanctioned jammers might have a lot of power to back them up -- but remember that the power of an RF signal falls away according to distance according to the inverse square law, that is, it does not fall off linearly, it falls off exponentially (like the light of an incandescent light bulb) -- so again, it would need one hell of a lot of power to block each and every Starlink (or other satellite) subscriber in a given country...

If Starlink only uses one set frequency -- then blocking would be a whole lot easier (no need to expend unnecessary power blocking multiple RF frequencies) -- so perhaps the "system of distributed, hidden, state-sanctioned jammers doing C&C over a unaffected back channel" -- with enough power, could in fact work...

> one hell of a lot of power

Which is much easier to generate/store on land than on space.

> RF signal falls away according to distance according to the inverse square law

On land, a state actor, operating on its own territory, could put jammers every 50 km, which is much closer to the receivers than satellites that orbit at 550 km. Even if the jammers transmitted at the same power as a Starlink sat, being 10x closer would mean jamming signal 100x stronger.

>being 10x closer would mean jamming signal 100x stronger.

At a specific frequency.

The effect is similar to how a nearer radio station at a given frequency -- will typically block out others that are at the same frequency, yet farther away...

But does a strong radio station nearby mean that all other radio stations at all other radio frequencies are simultaneously blocked?

No -- someone can simply turn the dial and tune in to a different radio frequency, and listen to another "unblocked" / "unjammed" station...

If Starlink frequency hops, that is, automatically changes its frequency if bands of the RF spectrum are blocked -- then it will be much more difficult for the state actor to block all of them at the same time -- especially if each individual Starlink subscriber could frequency hop with no pre-set pattern, that is, independent of all of the others...

> You can’t sever a satellite link like you can with a cable.

What do you mean? China, Russia, India and the USA have anti-satellite weapons around if they really want, and "destroy everyone's stuff with a kessler syndrome collisional cascading" works very well when the USA is the one with the most to lose.

There are far too many Starlink satellites to destroy a meaningful number.

Ironically, very-low-Earth-orbit as used by Starlink (lifepan measured in single-digit years) means that collateral damage from a-sat weapons would likely be limited.

E.g., where Kessler Syndrome in even modestly-higher orbits would remain a problem for decades, at Starlink altitudes, most of the debris itself should de-orbit over a relatively short period of years.

That could actually increase likelihood of such attacks.

Starlink is an access technology. The Tier 1 backbone providers of the Internet are still terrestrial which means terrestrial fiber and submarine cables. Starlink still has to buy transit from the people with fiber. I think Starlink purchases transit from GTT, Lumen, Zayo and buncg of others. A fiber cut could still impact Starlink. Think of what happens when your ISP goes down but the Wifi on your routers is still up. It's somewhat similar.

I used to live in Vietnam circa 2016, and the joke every other month when the internet went out was that some sharks ate the cable again. Seems those sharks are still eating good!

Having been in Vietnam for long periods of time a few years back, "broken undersea cables" were at least quarterly occurrences.

> However, Vietnamese service suppliers said the failures on the five cables will not have great impact on the speed of Internet connection between the country and the world.

> The SMW3 cable is outdated and going to be decommissioned, so it has not been used for fixed broadband Internet services, they explained, adding that the latest breakdown didn’t occur in the peak time, and they immediately carried out responding measures to reduce impact on the Internet speed.

The article was 6 paragraphs long. I’m not sure citing two paragraphs without commentary adds much value.

It does, I didn't have to read it. Title might as well been "unused internet cable breaks down in Vietnam"

So you read it here instead of there, and everyone else gets to read it twice. Cool.

How would we read the article if people didn’t put it in the comments? What, by clicking the link? Unthinkable! Please remember this is hacker news, you’re not allowed to click the link /s

You would be surprised by the number of people that skip the article and start commenting based solely on the headline.

Even more surprised by editors who will knowingly mislead with the headline in order to force people to click through and get those sweet, sweet ad (or subscriber) dollars just to find out the “man bites dog” headline was a lie.

I have seen multiple instances where the url was a significantly less sensationalist title that was presumably the authors original headline but an editor decided they needed to get the clicks and modified the actual article headline. Very funny how laid bare it was.

I've noticed some sites start with a clickbait headline and then change it after a few hours to something less sensational. I originally thought that they were responding to criticism, but I've seen it enough now that it seems to be a pre-planned way to game SEO/Socials. You can use the wayback machine to check, and I've seen some big headlines get revised down 4+ times.

Quoting from the article without further comment can also be quite annoying to those who did read the article, for whom this is then just a waste of time. It’s like, okay, that’s from the article, but what is your point?

When the headline is contradicted by the article then the relevant quite is relevant and valuable. It saves time. Not everybody reads the article, I'd say that it even is rare and that a lot, maybe even most people jump to the discussion immediately after reading the headline. Because of cases such as this one: When you quickly see the headline being contradicted.

Usually articles are a lot longer and they bury such info deep, so checking the comments first if its even worth clicking on the article is normal, given the huge number of sensationalized headlines coupled with the attempt of the article writers to keep readers on their page for as long as possible instead of coming to the point right away.

The reading behavior of many is optimized for sifting through a large number of submitted headlines without wasting too much time, not for maximum enjoyment of any single one of them. The (I think reasonable) assumption is that many, maybe most, even of the initially interesting sounding headlines turn out not to be worth reading.

Yes, but then please at least state your point why you are quoting this portion — preferably above the quote rather than below. Otherwise one can be left to wonder.

The first time this happened the official explanation was that the cable had been bitten by sharks. The Vietnamese loved this, so now every time the internet is slow we just say ‘sharks’.

Obligatory link to "Mother Earth Mother Board" by Neal Stephenson for anyone wanting a deep dive into the fascinating world/history of undersea telecommunications cables:

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

Perhaps it would be appropriate to stop the hug of death on the whole country, and instead link to a working source with complete information.

That's why internet is extremely slow here, I am in Myanmar

Myanmar has its own cables: https://www.submarinenetworks.com/stations/asia/myanmar

Additionally the cable in question comes from Europe, so the Vietnam break shouldn’t affect Myanmar (which also has direct access to it) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SEA-ME-WE-3-Route.pn...

That's probably not why you are having slow internet. If you hear about cable cuts in the Malacca Strait THEN you can worry.

Myanmar is not directly connected to Vietnam via sea cables specifically. The major connections to the outside world via the sea are:

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/seamewe-5

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/asia-afric...

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/seamewe-3

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/singapore-...

Thanks. Might be other problem, but the internet slow down happened yesterday, especially to GitHub and a few other side.

Internet infrastructure in Myanmar is still relatively underdeveloped, which is why it's slow. These cables are not heavily used for routing your traffic typically.

Tit for tat. You take out nord stream we take out internet. /s?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com