Sweden reports damage to Baltic Sea cable with Estonia | Hacker News Reader

Sweden reports damage to Baltic Sea cable with Estonia

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232 pointsperihelions187 comments

Somewhat relevant. Estonia has a law that financial instutions should have servers located on Estonian soil. (Exactly for this kind of scenario)

A great idea in principal, but having a local server doesn't necessarily mean said server will continue functioning once severed from the rest of the internet. Things like DNS and timing signals are an issue. Until it is tested, and retested after every update, I wouldn't trust any financial server to keep ticking along once so disconnected.

perhaps misunderstanding, but you could get time signals from GPS (or GLONASS)

sure, just a matter of what servers are configured to do ahead of time and what happens when assumptions fail - are the servers tested against a situation where they can't get the time as expected etc

> you could get time signals from GPS (or GLONASS)

You forgot to mention Galileo ... GLONASS may not be politically attractive :)

But beyond the GNSS ecosystem, there are of course other interesting options:

Safran STL[1] which uses LEO sats. Apparently it works well in places where you can't get a good GNSS signal (i.e. indoors without an external antenna). (This was previously Orolia STL, but they were acquired by Safran).

Most national time labs also offer a leased-line service, e.g. NPL (UK)[2]

There is also a very niche (read: VERY expensive) commercial timing-as-a-service product from a company called Hoptroff[3]. You license both the service/connection plus their software clients, so the $$$$$$ add up. Definitely one of those "if you have to ask you can't afford it" vendors.

[1] https://safran-navigation-timing.com/product/stl-option [2] https://www.npl.co.uk/npltime [3] https://www.hoptroff.com/

Galileo too! (Pre coffee oversight)

And, recursively, from celltower signals for any CDMA-related technology, i think.

What happens if/when your GNSS constellation operator intentionally degrades quality (ex: GPS & selective availability)? Do you fall back to a local atomic clock assuming one is available?

man, the more i hear about Estonia the more impressed i am. Their IT policy decisions have been amazing.

And they've open sourced a lot of the code they use for their infrastructure:

https://github.com/nordic-institute/X-Road

They also had a blockchain-based timestamping system a year before the Bitcoin white paper was released :)

In neal stephensons 1996 classic wired article Mother Earth Mother Board theres a bit in there about why cables are not attacked.

" There is also the obvious threat of sabotage by a hostile government, but, surprisingly, this almost never happens. When cypherpunk Doug Barnes was researching his Caribbean project, he spent some time looking into this, because it was exactly the kind of threat he was worried about in the case of a data haven. Somewhat to his own surprise and relief, he concluded that it simply wasn’t going to happen. “Cutting a submarine cable,” Barnes says, “is like starting a nuclear war. It’s easy to do, the results are devastating, and as soon as one country does it, all of the others will retaliate. "

Are we now in the retaliation stage?

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

Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20151107094324/https://www.wired...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-medvedev-says-m... (June 14)

Russia now has free hand to destroy undersea communications cables, Putin ally says

Look up the history of Medvedev's statements; there is a lot of extreme stuff.

Well, Biden did say he would destroy Nordstream-2 and followed up, so Medvedev can deliver threats too.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/if-russia-invades-uk...

Couldn't you say the same about undersea pipeline which did get attacked?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGk1si6dOKU

Attempting to stop an incomplete pipeline commercial deal that the US was already protesting long before the war is different than bombing an existing pipeline involving one of NATOs most important members, on sea territory of another NATO member, just because a war started.

It’s plausible but highly unlikely.

The evidence points to Ukrainian saboteurs on a rented yacht anyway.

I don't think that's very comparable. First, pipelines are much less common than cables, so the opportunity for retaliation in kind is less. Second, pipelines only go through relatively shallow waters; cables run across the ocean, so the type of attacks used are different. Third, whoever attacked the pipeline is concerned sufficiently about retaliation that they disguised their actions (by injuring both Russian and German interests) and denied responsibility. By contrast, this harms the West exclusively (Estonia is strongly pro-Western, and speaks a Finnic language), and if it were confirmed that the cable was attacked, the culprit is clear.

Well except any country on the Eurasian landmass doesn't need submarine cables at all to have direct fiber optic links with the majority of the world's population.

> with the majority of the world's population

I'm having trouble getting past 4B with terrestrial links.

China + India + Pakistan + Bangladesh + Russia (ignoring spanning the country) + Egypt + Vietnam + Thailand + Turkey + Myanmar + South Korea + Iraq + Afghanistan = 4.002

That's a lot of gnarly land to link.

You're counting Egypt but not everybody else in Africa?

Maybe the poster believes the other Africans don't use internet?

Maybe poster was trying to see the feasibility of the post he was replying to.

>> any country on the Eurasian landmass doesn't need submarine cables at all to have direct fiber...

There's a big difference between Nigeria and Egypt, via terrestrial links, to east/south Asia.

Of course we don't - this comment is being relayed via ham radio from South Africa to the Antarctic, where thankfully the German research team has a satellite uplink.

And none of the ~0.5B in the EU counts as EUrasia?

India and China are contiguous and contain 2.8b people.

I started there.

(Indonesia would have helped, but we didn't want subsea cabling... and kind of hard to get there without)

There's political (and geographic?) trouble going from Europe to Asia. Your internet would have to go through countries like Russia and Iran. Or maybe Turkmenistan, Afghanistan and China.

The shortest path from Eastern Europe to Japan would be a straight shot across Russia, but a tracert says that it goes all the way through Europe, through the Atlantic, through the US mainland, through the Pacific and finally to Japan.

A cable through the Arctic ocean between Europe and Japan could potentially cut the journey to Asia in less than half.

On a great circle over Canada, or over Russia?

Note that while the two options sound significantly different and look significantly different on a conventional Mercator with the page break at the Bering Strait, they don't seem actually that different on a globe, or in terms of difficult geopolitics.

In a couple years you won't need an icebreaker to make the trip...

Over Russia.

From Norway to Svalbard to some island between Russia and Alaska. From there to Japan.

It looks very goofy on a map but it's a lot shorter of a distance than expected.

All you need to take out a land-based fiber optic link is a backhoe. Arguable less equipment than taking out a sea-based link. I don't think long-distance network cables are surveilled in their entirety.

European countries won’t retaliate against Russia because

- They are too civilised

- They have already done everything with “sanctions” they can

- It is benefit for West for Russians to access free information, instead of Putin’s propaganda only

>- They are too civilised

Sure. The same "too civilised" coutries who were selling Putin toys for crowd control to suppress 2011 protest and more.

Same fucking people acting in their interests. Nothing more.

More likely, western countries still have many escalation options available.

Russia cuts a cable, we donate some F16s that were already scheduled for retirement.

Which is going to hurt the most?

(Just a theory, but right now it might not be worthwhile to even acknowledge that they cable was intentionally cut)

Nuclear attribution is probably easier than undersea sabotage attribution.

For one, the list of possible suspects is much smaller with a nuclear attack. This is particularly now that covert undersea sabotage using cheap undersea drones is technically feasible for countries without a traditional submarine force. Undersea sabotage may also be carried out in a plausibly deniable way, using fishing trawlers to "accidentally" snag a cable. Probably this has already happened numerous times already, but it's very difficult to prove intent with this sort of thing.

The traditional delivery mechanisms for a nuclear weapon are easily traceable. Even using an SLBM is relatively traceable; if an SLBM comes from the Barents Sea, there will be little doubt who sent it. And the chance of the launching boomer being actively monitored by an oppositional SSN when the launch occurs is too great to ignore. The ballistic properties of the SLBM probably reveal the make and model anyway.

The greatest risk is from a nuke smuggled into the target area. However the risk of discovery is very high relative to the risk of discovery for undersea sabotage and there's no plausible "just an accident" excuse. Furthermore you have the serious risk of forensic evidence from the blast and fallout revealing the manufacturer of the bomb. And what's the point of nuclear terrorism if not to send a message, and how can that message be sent if nobody can guess who did it? With pipe or cable sabotage, the point may be to directly inflict economic damage. Using nukes to inflict economic damage is complete overkill when alternatives exist (such as undersea sabotage, hacking attacks, etc) that don't put the aggressor nation's leadership personally at risk from a retaliatory nuclear strike.

Retaliation will be when someone cuts the cables connecting Kaliningrad to Russia.

Cable cuts near Singapore and Hong Kong are happening let say weekly and there is not much to investigate there: those are due to anchoring or trawling.

I bet Orcas have now something to do with it...

Africanized Orcas...

I'm sure you can see how this is a bit more newsworthy than regular cable cuts that are business as usual.

Due to political opportunity to exploit a regular accident or sabotage opportunity?

... and there as well https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/1cc1c10e-c137-4111-bd6e-2...

Undersea cables seem like a perfect target, how does a state even ensure their cables aren't damaged by bad actors?

Define "ensure", you can easily damage any cable undersea or not and if anything under sea ones are harder to get to.

You can drag an anchor after your boat and damage them. They are marked on the map to avoid such damages. It is a quite common accident.

> under sea ones are harder to get to

At least not for state actors, or perhaps well-funded terrorist groups.

It can't.

You can bury them deeper after being laid in trenches created using undersea ploughs or water jets. They will always be vulnerable where they came to shore though, unless you're going to bury them deep all the way to the equipment hut on the shore. There is undersea concrete available for vulnerable paths (both articulated blocks and a mix that can be grouted and will set underwater), but I believe that likely draws more unwanted attention to the asset's route without providing much more protection.

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/re...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9tRmJLOCdg

Those seem like a defense against accidental damage, but I don't see how burying a cable in a shallow trench or covering it with a few blocks of concrete will protect it from a "bad actor."

Absolutely, boils down to your threat model. If you are defending against a nation state actor, you are probably going to want to deploy underwater surveillance across the cable's length and station folks who can respond when someone nefarious shows up to chop chop. No security is absolute, you are either dissuading or slowing down an attacker based on their resources and available window of time. It's 42 miles/67km from Finland to Estonia across the Gulf of Finland, which does not seem challenging to defend vs cables crossing oceans. Sweden to Estonia is definitely a bit further.

Finland and Estonia share a 1GW electrical interconnector (composed of two HVDC submarine cables, with a signed MOA for a third) Estonia is using to consume power from Finland's recently turned up nuclear generator. I am unaware if it is buried, but it is a strategic critical infra asset that likely requires defense.

Its easy to overthink these problem spaces (imho), but I propose that Russia's current geopolitical posture adds an element of a wildcard necessitating the thought exercise. This infra can take months to build or repair, but only hours to cripple.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estlink

https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/EE?wind=false&solar=fal...

Example commercial system: https://electronica-submarina.com/protection-of-critical-inf...

Example US Navy military system SOSUS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOSUS (which is suspected to be what detected the Titan submersible implosion)

The bad actors aren't down there with shovels and robots digging down into trenches. They are just like any other ship dragging an anchor across the bottom close to the cable.

These cables are often deliberately laid far enough apart that, should they need to be serviced, they can be hauled up by dragging an anchor/hook until it snags the correct cable. So it is equally not difficult to attack a chosen cable with nothing more complex than an anchor, a long chain, and a handheld GPS.

The places where these cables come to shore are rightfully rated as high-priority military targets. You can't just walk up to them, nor go poking around in a yacht.

They don't. Damage happens all the time. There is an entire industry for repairing these cables. The answer is to have multiple redundant lines to redirect traffic onto other paths, which is largely what the internet does.

Undersea cables get cut like 2 times a week anywhere around the world

Taiwan would love to know the answer to that as well!

Naval patrols.

You don't need "bad actors" when you already have plenty of idiots in captain chairs doing damage by dragging their anchors where they aren't supposed to etc.

You can't; a while ago, there were Russian ships hovering near an important undersea cable (iirc between Ireland and the US). But since that's international waters, they can't do anything.

I'm 99% sure that all the cables have been identified and if the order is given, they will be cut. Along with all other infrastructure.

Yes you van. Surveillance equipment, remotely activated tamper explosives, patrols, etc.

Up until now there were silent rules of engagement of not touching this sort of infrastructure. All that probably went out the window with the NS2 bombing, but it's still doubtful that Russia would have anything to do with it. They've been meticulously avoiding escalation with any NATO country. Even when Lithuania tried to block Kaliningrad they solved it through diplomacy.

Russia does not do diplomacy. They lie, deny and threaten.

> They've been meticulously avoiding escalation with any NATO country.

Except for the constant threats of nuclear Armageddon, the sabotage of the Bulgarian munitions factory, ramming into a US drone over the Black Sea, shooting a missile at a British jet over the Black Sea, threatening to invade Gotland, threatening to invade Poland, violating Finnish, Swedish, and Norwegian airspace. I’m probably forgetting some things, it’s been a long war.

Relevant article from yesterday regarding which ships were near these cables and pipeline during the time of the event: https://news.err.ee/1609134998/chinese-vessel-even-nearer-to...

rather unlikely that a ship used for such an attack would make itself visible via AIS given that this isn't even mandatory to begin with.

not only is it not mandatory, it's fairly easily spoofed and has been for the sake of subterfuge in the past[0]

[0]: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D2...

if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Are we gonna do the thing where anyone who says Putin can't do whatever he wants is "in the CIA" and thus suspect and force autistic teens to look up publicly available vessel navigation data with a glorified set of links over a Youtube that is a Bellingcat cert?

This is a war, it's time to let military intelligence talk to whichever reporter they picked up at the start of their tour in a bar to feed the good leads and maybe wait a day or two for things that can wait.

please dont use autistic as an insult

Well, the explanation is rather banal https://www.iltalehti.fi/kotimaa/a/1cc1c10e-c137-4111-bd6e-2...

What a coincidence that this happened at the same time as the gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia.

I wonder who could it be?

Well, it's not really a mystery now is it?

In journalism you put the most important (what you want readers to take away) at the top of the article.

> Sweden said its undersea cable with Estonia was damaged at roughly the same time as a Finnish-Estonian pipeline and cable. Sweden and Finland have both moved to join NATO since Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The rest of the article comes up with no evidence of (1) deliberateness except that it happened at about the same time as the Finland–Estonia one, nor (2) who it could have been if (1).

Since when DW is a place for good journalism?! I have the feeling that good and fair journalism today is almost completely extinct with some remanence of it in existence only in Great Britain!

Sweden is getting the worst of both worlds: Agression as a NATO member, without NATO membership.

I'm sort of assuming this was an attempt to tap the cables that went badly.

Then why damage to the gas line?

Gas is expensive, "they" wanted to tap that one, too.

Winter is coming, but climate change currently works against Russian blackmail attempts.

The Ukrainians could blow off or simply close the Druzhba pipeline or any other pipeline going to Europe through their territory. But they don't.

I doubt it, a huge proportion of all traffic these days is the Internet and BCP 188 means it doesn't matter whether you think you're the good guys.

"Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack"

When cables mostly moved unencrypted speech this was plausible but that hasn't been true for a long time.

Starlink enters the chat.

Most people don't know but Starlink's ambition is to capture only a small part of retail market (a person buying a starlink terminal) but a big chunk of backbone traffic.

That's why latest version of the satellites have lasers to beam data between satellites so that they don't need to go back and forth between satellites and base stations.

That business will be direct competitor to under sea cables.

Fun fact: light travels a bit faster in space than in an optic cable.

Microsoft has already did partnership with Spacex for Azure: https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/digital-transform...

I doubt Starlink has the bandwidth needed to beat out an underwater cable, it's good as a backup option though.

I'm curious to know what is more expensive to roll out capacity for.

starlink launches are expensive but so is doing work under the sea.

Starlink uses wireless connections, be them laser or radio. That just cannot scale in the same way that fiber can. It's an apples and oranges comparison.

Quick note that: yes, but free space laser is a bit different than wireless because bandwidth can be extremely high and adjacent transmitter interference is essentially zero.

It still has to get to/from space at some point on each end.

Couldn't you scale horizontally, e.g. with thousands of satellite base stations scattered across a continent? Then each one could occupy a separate, non-overlapping spatial channel.

Perhaps you could split up and distribute your network backbone over something like that?

That'd require scaling up either the number of satellites or their size (talking to thousands of base stations at once = more power, more antennae) dramatically.

It is possible with micromirror devices to have a single lens on a satellite to send thousands of beams in different directions.

That opens up the idea of N satellites having N^2 bandwidth... Which scales much better than optical fibers, where in general to have double the amount of bandwidth, you have double the cable laying effort.

Current starlink satellites do not have this ability - they can connect to max 3 other satellites I believe, which is pretty much the minimum for a fully connected network.

>> in general to have double the amount of bandwidth, you have double the cable laying effort.

Getting double the bandwidth just means laying a slightly thicker cable, and I do mean slightly. Adding a bundle of extra fiber when laying a cable adds maybe a millimeter to the cable width. The cost of the fiber is almost irrelevant to the cost of the other layers and the effort of placing it. Most cables are therefore laid with plenty of extra "dark" fiber for later expansion/redundancy.

Why can't space optics scale as well as undersea fiber optics?

Because there's a non-space part of the route you have to deal with.

Lasers + clouds = unfun.

Aren't the lasers in space? I don't think the satellites beam lasers to/from earth.

Until you put all of Sweden (and the people they want to talk to, like Estonia) in space, that data's going to have to come down at some point. Fast inter-satellite data doesn't help you if it has to queue to get in/out of space.

Because the "beam" in a fiber is tiny and can be controlled, while the beam between two sats is actually very large and runs in free space. Most of the transmitted energy will always overshoot the receiver, resulting in significant crosstalk issues once multiple sats are in sight of each other. You cannot have two beams running the same path on the same frequency, not in space. But new fiber can be laid down infinitely along identical paths without any degradation.

Both are expensive, for sure, but the undersea cables will be used and paid for by major internet providers, whereas finding customers for Starlink is still proving to be tricky.

On the other hand, submarine cables can work for decades; Starlink satellites each last only very few years.

> Fun fact: light travels a bit faster in space than in an optic cable.

Doesn't it have to travel farther, tho? Does that cancel it out?

Starlink is only an extra ~10% of the Earth radius at orbit height, but optic cables slow light by ~30%. So it's actually counterintuitive but "could" be just as fast. (Depending on how far you need to send data, it will regress for intra nation but will theoretically improve long distance communication).

What's the theoretical max bandwidth in LEO's near-vacuum? Could we use a wide 1GHz-1THz channel for directional beams to hit 1Tbps, given a decent SNR?

Cosmic dust and H atoms seem like non-issues for 1000km links? Would power or thermal reqs be an issue here?

I understand it's only about satellite-to-satellite, but still it's interesting.

You're missing the fact that Starlink doesn't take your traffic to the destination. It takes to a nearby downlink station. Then it goes on those same optic cables to the destination.

It can take your data to the destination via inter-satellite laser links. That's how they offer service over water and near/at the poles, where downlink stations are not in line of sight for the satellites.

"can take your data" is not the same as thing as "takes the shortest path". There is no way that Starlink is using precious inter-satellite capacity when your data can go direct to a downlink station and transit on dirt cheap fiber

No one's saying they are, the point was that they're capable of it.

Seems that they operate in various altitudes but taking your approximation of 10% of the earth radius, that is 10% + 10% as the signal needs to travel to and from the satellite to the ground, that increases the total distance travelled

In certain cases low orbit constellations with inter-satellite links (like Starlink) can beat underwater cable for latency:

https://news.satnews.com/2020/10/14/leo-speed-when-milliseco...

Fiberoptic cables aren't perfectly straight either, and light in space is about 30% faster than light in fiber. Considering the link up&down to space adds about 1100km, the break-even point is at around cross-continental distances.

The speed difference is big enough that high-frequency traders have been using microwave relay networks for years now. Turns out that a relay chain of point-to-point radio links (which also operate at light-in-space speeds) has enough of an advantage over regular fiber links to be worth the hassle.

Musk’s recent involvement in Ukraine’s use of starlink makes me deeply hesitant to rely on SpaceX for communications, especially when Russia is involved as is likely the case here.

A service that is like starlink not run by Musk could be the way forward, of course.

Amazon's trying: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_Systems

SpaceX's (not so) secret sauce is the cheap launches, though. That's going to be hard to beat for at least 5-10 years.

That story was widespread, and ultimately false, with the correction never reported as loudly.

SpaceX had always had the cells over Crimea disabled, Ukraine was not aware. Ukraine asked for the service to be enabled there for their drone, this went against SpaceX's policies and the US's policies, so they refused.

At that point, the US had not given Ukraine any guided weaponry that had enough range to hit Crimea, Ukraine was looking to use Starlink as a guidance system, this would've created all sorts of issues and since Ukraine had asked for the cell to be unblocked IIRC a day beforehand, there wasn't enough time to even consider working through the various risks it'd expose SpaceX to.

Even if it didn't happen, it highlights the fact that it might be possible, right?

Sure, no country or company that needs reliable communications should rely on the stability of any single point, similar to how the DoD insists on dissimilar redundancy in national security launch providers, expecting the options to have supply chains with very little overlap such that issues with one don't affect the other.

There have been problems with suddenly-lost connectivity in the past as well, because the Ukrainians advanced far faster onto Russian-occupied territory than SpaceX and the US government expected them to be able to.

I think the larger point is that access is controlled by a single point of failure, and that single point of failure is exceedingly unreliable these days.

We would need an organization, not an individual, in control and that organization would have to be truly dedicated to net neutrality. Not dedicated to net neutrality when it serves them and their friends, or net neutrality as an empty marketing slogan, but actual real net neutrality.

(Plus, your "correction" doesn't even come slide to covering all the issues that have been experienced, and the correction itself needs a few layers of correction, but that's all beside the main point.)

Could be, but I'm also uncomfortable with using civilian tech / utilities like this for warfare; if a government wants sattelite internet, they can launch their own. And I presume they have.

Starlink laser capacity is 100Gbps. Undersea cables often carry more than 100Tbps.

> more than 100Tbps

Might be much more than that once twisting light for lossless compression becomes mainstream.

I will probably come at a premium, but I think it's pretty much given that governments and the military will have a huge interest in this, if only for the fact that you can't cut a laser beam in space. At least not without anyone seeing it - unlike undersee cables. '

Governments and the military already have their own space internet; I doubt the US would want to go into an agreement with a commercial entity owned and controlled by someone with dubious allegiances. They will require heaps of legal changes and certifications first, including making sure Musk does not have control over it.

The military has already engaged in such an agreement, known as Starshield.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink#Military_capabilities

> SpaceX also designs, builds, and launches customized military satellites based on variants of the Starlink satellite bus, with the largest publicly known customer being the Space Development Agency (SDA).

> In 2019, tests by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) demonstrated a 610 Mbit/s data link through Starlink to a Beechcraft C-12 Huron aircraft in flight. Additionally, in late 2019, the United States Air Force successfully tested a connection with Starlink on an AC-130 Gunship. In 2020, the Air Force utilized Starlink in support of its Advanced Battlefield management system during a live-fire exercise. They demonstrated Starlink connected to a "variety of air and terrestrial assets" including the Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker.

The military wants far more bandwidth than is available with their current setup, for everything from drone swarms to far-flung observation bases wanting to check their email.

The military could change the specs and require the sats be equipped with kinetic interceptors. Strategic Defense Initiative mk2. Oh, wait, they already have. It's now called SDA.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Development_Agency

The militraries space internet is very slow and high latency. Think 1 broadband connection shared with 100,000 troops...

They aint watching youtube over that.

Starlink is always 1 missile away from being turned off though. You don’t need to disable the network, you don’t need cause a Kessler syndrome, you just need to convince 1 billionaire that servicing a region is going to be met with force.

>Starlink is always 1 missile away from being turned off though

One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM early warning system on the planet. And since Starlink is not one system but thousands, trying to disable their backbone functionality would seem like a nuclear first strike. Yes, some countries could probably do it. But you can't do it without being seen, so the risk and possible ramifications are infinitely higher than for undersee cables.

One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM warning system on the planet.

Most of the world's great powers don't need to fire a missile into space to take out a satellite. They've already lifted that capability into orbit.

I don't believe any of those powers would take out satellites willy nilly. I think it would take open direct military conflict. At the same time though, I didn't believe any of them would 'cross the Rubicon' with respect to undersea pipelines and internet cables either without direct open military conflict.

So, yeah.

Gonna be fun times in the future I guess?

> They've already lifted that capability into orbit.

source ?

> One missile going into space will trigger every single ICBM early warning system on the planet.

Rockets go into space all the time without triggering accidental nuclear war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_1408 IIRC was blown up in an ASAT weapons test without any advance warning; nukes headed to DC/Moscow have a very different flight path than one looking to hit a Starlink node.

Of course they don't trigger nuclear war, that wasn't the point. The point is that they trigger detection systems. We know exactly what happened to Kosmos 1408, including all actors and events, down to every minute. We even have a Wikipedia article listing all those details that you were able to dig up easily. Compare that to the undersee cables that got cut, where we will probably never know exactly what happened. If we cought someone red handed while destroying critical infrastructure, that would be a pretty good casus belli.

> If we cought someone red handed while destroying critical infrastructure, that would be a pretty good casus belli.

We're not going to go to war because someone openly took out a Starlink node to send Musk a message. Not unless we were already going to do it for other reasons.

I find that hard to believe.

It's not that it's a message to Elon; that would be a message of air supremacy to the entire world. There is no way that wouldn't provoke a pretty drastic reaction of some sort from groups that seek to hold the title of 'owners of the sky'.

Case in point: Russians have taken down US drones in recent months. https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/16/politics/us-military-video-dr...

No war. We send a grumpy note to their ambassador and just consider it a minor acceptable consequence of obliterating significant chunks of their armed forces in a proxy war elsewhere.

These US drones were operating in a theatre of war. Things would turn sour very quickly if they shot down civilian critical infrastructure far away from active warzones.

It'll take a lot more than 1 missile to disable Starlink.

I suppose 1 missile aimed at Hawthorne California might do it.

You don't need to disable the system in a technical sense, you just need to persuade management/ownership that it might be a good idea to take the hint.

> Starlink is always 1 missile away from being turned off though

I think one Elon Musk can make more damage to the service than one missile.

It's a distributed, self-healing satellite constellation: it'd take thousands of very expensive [a] missiles to dismantle it. That's one of the features that makes it so attractive for militaries.

See, for example, Chinese military thinking in response to Starlink. They're fully aware they currently have no way to disable it (kinetically). Supposedly, they're putting a priority on figuring ways to do that, in a war.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3178939/chin... (nb. this is Chinese media–based in Hong Kong)

- "With more than 2,300 satellites – and counting – in orbit, Starlink is generally believed to be indestructible because the system can maintain proper functioning after losing some satellites."

- "The unprecedented scale, complexity and flexibility of Starlink would force the Chinese military to develop new anti-satellite capabilities, according to Ren and his colleagues."

[a] Here's what the US used for its anti-LEO-satellite test. Wikipedia says these cost about $10 million each.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-161_Standard_Missile_3

Such an engineer take. There’s an xkcd about this that involves a wrench.

Let me explain, “the Russians shot one of our satellites out of orbit and say they will continue if we keep providing internet to …, let’s stop” is much more likely than “1 down 2300 to go! Whoop”

Considering Musk’s history of far-right tendencies, I hope that countries and companies alike are thinking very carefully whether they want critical infrastructure to be backed by this guy.

What do you mean by "far-right" tendencies?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601894132573605888

https://apnews.com/article/elon-musk-twitter-inc-technology-...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/elon-m...

Further examples abound.

Eh, seems like guilt by association. Plus the 3 A.M. Fauci tweet is objectively funny.

https://twitter.com/TheDailyShow/status/1627669410629701636

"We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it" is unfriendly diplomacy from the perspective of small countries not allied to the US.

I am a bit surprised that this has to be elaborated here (as stories like the following are posted here fairly often), but here you go:

- musk openly sharing a German nazi party stance and equating migration with “invasion” [1]

- he allows hate speech to proliferate on twitter [2]

- he regularly shares conspiracy theories that are common in right wing circles, eg. casted doubt on the fact that the shooter of Allen, Texas was a white nationalist (even though he literally had swastikas tattooed) [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/30/german-governm...

[2] https://phys.org/news/2023-04-analysis-speech-significantly-...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65539698

>Considering Musk’s history of far-right tendencies.

I don't remember any far right tendencies, but I sure do remember him cosying up to the Chinese communist party. Yes, it doesn't even take one missile to disable Starlink in a warzone. All it takes is an order from his Chinese overlords threatening they'll take away his factory in China and hell do what they ask.

I think him taking down your starlink access when you are using it is a much more risky part for countries. Already happened to Ukraine as well.

> Already happened to Ukraine as well.

Could you point to more information on this? According to CNN the Starlink network was never active over Crimea, so there was nothing for Elon to “take down” Ukraine was asking for something more than what Starlink could do with its current infrastructure. Starlink was already providing much needed internet access for the rest of Ukraine though.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/09/07/politics/elon-musk-biogra...

You might be right in pointing out that for latency-sensitive low-bandwidth applications (HFT basically) starlink trunks over long distances should beat undersea optical.

As others have pointed out though, starlink as it currently stands isn’t going to corner the market on general internet backbone traffic.

Unfortunately, Starlink is not yet available in neither Sweden, Finland or Estonia: https://satellitemap.space/?norad=48119

Too much North.

Why didn't you link to the official map that shows availability in the Nordics? https://www.starlink.com/map

Bit of a shame this is the top comment, it has almost nothing to do with the article?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

What the top comment is is a factor of time anyway, check again later; commenting on the position a comment has doesn't add anything to the discussion either.

Backbone traffic will never occur over starlink. The bandwidth is tiny. The latency is high.

Starlink barely works when you are on a moving boat or away from the coast. Believe me, I've tried.

With the appropriate dish?

Possibly. If you find a solution, please forward it to me and I will share it with the nautical community.

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