Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted | Hacker News Reader

Two undersea cables in Baltic Sea disrupted

cnn.com

597 pointsmooreds1,045 comments

It's worth mentioning that cable breakages happen quite often; globally about 200 times per year [1] and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor. The Gulf of Finland is evidently quite shallow. From what I understand, cable repair ships are likely to use ROVs for parts of repair jobs but only when the water is shallow so hopefully they can figure out whether the damage looks like sabotage before they sever the cable to repair it. Of course, if you're a bad actor and want plausible deniability, maybe you'd make it look like anchor damage or, deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables.

Cable repairs are certainly annoying and for the operator of the cable, expensive. However, they are usually repaired relatively quickly. I'd be more worried if many more cables were severed at the same time. If you're only going to break one or two a year, you might as well not bother.

1: https://www.theverge.com/c/24070570/internet-cables-undersea...

"Germany’s defense minister says damage to 2 Baltic data cables appears to be sabotage" - https://apnews.com/article/germany-finland-baltic-data-cable...

English isn't my first language, but isn't "appears to be" inconclusive? It is or it isn't, "appears to be" is still too vague for my liking.

"Appears to be", in English, generally means "on first look/glance." It runs very close to "I believe such and such."

If I asked you for an answer to a math question, then you showed me the answer with how you got there, on a very quick glance I might say: "That appears to be correct."

It could mean they've seen more evidence to make that assessment, or are basing that assessment on the same evidence we have. Regardless, "appears to be" is hedging in the absence of certainty.

In this case the phrase likely means "we think it was sabotage but can't prove it yet"

The sibling comments are very relevant, but I wanted to provide a marginally different perspective. You have to take not only what is being said, but _who is saying it_ into perspective.

In this case, this is a government official speaking to the press (i.e. in an official capacity). If they were to say "this was sabotage," that is a definite declaration that the government believes - again, officially and on the record - that an outside party has deliberately done material damage to their country. Given the general situation, it is not a huge leap to come to the interpretation that "this was an attack against our country, and possibly an act of war."

No government official would want to be within miles (or kilometers) of that sort of statement unless they have pretty much already internally decided from the top-down to escalate the situation. Almost no single government agent has the authority to escalate the situation in that manner. So what we end up with is "appears to be." This overtly says 'all available evidence points to this being the case, however something else cannot be ruled out.' (As a sibling comment suggests, it can also act as a type of propaganda). So it is not an official government declaration that another nation has damaged them, but they have reasons (probably both apparent and not) to believe what they are saying publicly.

It's inconclusive but only a little. There's a spectrum of conclusitivity through "possibly is", "might be", "could be", "very well might", "looks like", "appears to be", "almost certainly is", "is".

The phrasing is in any case that of the AP article, not the Defense Minister.

What the latter actually said was much stronger and less ambiguous.

As detailed in the helpful sibling comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42187127

Since they likely used the German expression "es scheint", I think your interpretation is correct.

I interpret "appears to be" to mean "we certainly know it to be true based on factual evidence but we need to keep an exit door politically".

I suppose in today’s world it’s hard to know what was sabotage and what was an accident, and where the buck stops - particularly in marine matters. Was that anchor drag intentional? Did the operator know their charts were out of date? Did that trawl net really fail and snag like that?

We’ll go around in circles until it’s irrelevant.

He just wants more funds for his department.

Reflexive cynicism about the military isn't as warranted in 2024 as it might have been a decade ago. And it wasn't really warranted a decade ago either, when Russia was blowing up Czech ammunition depots, airliners full of Dutch people, conducting assassinations in the center of Berlin, and sending "little green men" to Ukraine.

It could be an accident, sure, but suspicion of sabotage is not paranoia.

And also, like, the German government (and European governments generally) DOES need to spend more on their military. They underinvested for decades and are now stuck needing to catch up very quickly.

The last time it happened, the Russian ship had also been seen unnaturally going back and forth over the cable where the damage occurred. These damages do not happen by themselves. Considering the current international situation and the fact that it happened in a short time in several places unnaturally in a limited region, the Baltic Sea, you have to be very naive if you do not see this as probable sabotage.

Do we have some kind of time-of-flight system that can find out exactly where a cable damage occurred, the instant that it occurs?

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread-spectrum_time-domain_re...

The "Yi Peng 3", a Chinese ship that parted from a Russian Port, has been located near both cables just before they were cut. The ship was detained in NATO water, and now faces an investigation.

Currently, all points to a deliberate act of hybrid warfare

There's repeaters so the general area should be known.

yes, OTDR

well, we did blow up their pipeline, so not like we didnt open the salvo for making international resources fair game

It was 50% funded by the west so it was much ours as theirs. I think it was rightly bombed by Ukraine anyway, not nato.

Either Russia or Ukraine blew it up.

Who is „we“?

A 1 in 36 million chance for three breaks in one day.

https://mathb.in/80217

Why is this analysis focused on the Baltics? That's p hacking, given that it happened to happen in the baltics.

Let's instead say there are roughly 20 ocean regions we would post hoc consider "the same". Now, given a breakage, what is the probability of at least two more in the same region and day? This is a Poisson distribution with lambda=200/365/20. The probability of two more independent breakages is 0.04 % for that specific day.

But again, picking a specific day would be p-hacking. Zooming out, an event that rare is expected to happen every seven years or so.

Now, "every seven years" is a far cry from "1 in 36 million." Whenever you get crazy p values like that, there is often an error or overlooked assumption in the analysis.

----

If you like this sort of thing, have a stab at forecasting competitions! I can recommend the Metaculus Quarterly Cup. The current one is in full swing so use the remaining 1.5 months of the year to practice and then you're set for when the January edition starts.

I see, this was in fact what I had in mind. The maths I posted represent the horizon of my knowledge in probability and was surprised how well o1-preview was able to output correct numerical calculations.

Having said that how would the odds look like if we factor in the fact the Baltic Sea is one of two zones with the most geopolitical tensions (along with Taiwan).

---

Thanks for the Metaculus recommendation. I was a bit disappointed in the lack of maths in the comments in general. Can you recommend something in the vein of Leetcode with various degrees of difficulty, from very basic to advanced problems ? I'm both interested in probability and statistics

That's assuming independence. I'm not ruling out sabotage but the world is often not fully independent. A storm or an anchor both may affect multiple cables if they're in generally the same area which would definitely make the probability far more likely than those stated. (edit typo)

Indeed !

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/lithuania-sweden-...

>Lithuania-Sweden subsea cable cut, was 10m from severed Finnish-German cable

the contrast with independent random events is exactly the point of the comment you've replied to, isn't it?

I was told in my stats class that events in the real world are almost never truly independent.

“Knowing that 200 undersea cables break every year globally, estimate the probability that 3 cables break in the baltic sea on the same day.”

I’m stealing this to use for grad-student mock-interviews—thank you!

Hint: The cables are often very close. If one breaks, the otherone also breaks :-)

A clever answer would be "it's a 50/50 chance, either it happens or it doesn't". That's statistics my simple brain can comprehend at least.

One a day is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.

Or they’re right next to each other and the laws of physics continued to exist for the object that struck them.

You can't even assume they follow a normal distribution. For all we know, ships drop anchor more on certain days or weather conditions. That's just the start of the rabbit hole.

I'm supporting gleenn who beat me by seconds to much the same observation.

Clusters are a thing.

And what about adding in the chances of a Russian spy ship seen relatively near by only a few days earlier:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/16/russian-spy-sh...

Irish sea is relatively near to the Baltic sea?

Today’s that day. Start the clock for the next one.

I watched a rep from the operators of the cable claim that this particular cable is pretty tough, and anything other than deliberate sabotage would be very unlikely.

> and the article itself mentions that just last year, two other cables and a gas pipeline were taken out by an anchor

Yes, by a chinese ship that dragged around a huge anchor over the seafloor of whole baltic ocean, widley suspected to be ordered by Russia to do so.

This is in no way a reasonable argument for "shit happens".

If cables break organically about 200 times a year then I'd think a bad actor breaking a cable to send a message would be a tear in the rain.

Right. It's indeed worth pointing out that while this certainly looks like Russian terrorism, it's really fairly bad terrorism, all things considered, and not particularly hard or expensive to mitigate.

It's basically a "Putin tax" on the industrial democracies in the reason. I don't see how this helps Russia at all, honestly. Putin has a real shot, given the state of US politics, at salvaging something approximating a "victory" in Ukraine and getting back to peacetime economics. Why rock the boat?

> it's really fairly bad terrorism

The goal at this stage is not the outcome of some minor outage, but signaling that they are prepared and ready to go ahead with major acts of sabotage. This is the local thugs smashing some furniture in your store as a warning.

You offered nothing to support the theory that Russia is behind this. This reminds me of the Nordstream sabotage, when many jumped to accuse Russia even though that made no sense at all. Perhaps wait for the official investigations. If they like what they discover this time, they might publish it.

> deliberately drag an anchor right over the cables

Can we not make the cables resistant to this? Like if someone drags an anchor over a cable, it instantly locates the break based on time-of-flight over the cable and instantly dispatches a drone from the nearest shoreline to spray nasty sticky shit all over the ship?

Cables can be buried and ploughed into the sea floor. This is usually done in the shallow last miles when approaching a landing on a coast, because there the risk for damage due to anchors, fishermen and other human activity is far higher. However, sometimes the ground can be unsuitable, and burying is expensive, so this isn't done for the whole length.

Doesn't need to be a drone, there should be coast guard etc of all neighbouring countries nearby that can dispatch a plane.

That said, radar systems and sattelites should be active at all times too keeping track of every ship on there, especially if they don't have a transponder active.

This is a misleading framing. The two cables last year were not taken out by an anchor as an accident, it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable. In other words, sabotage. There's no point in trying to color any of this with rose tinted glasses when it's clear who's done it and why.

> it was literally a ship putting down its anchor just before the cable and then dragging it over the cable

I don't understand. That's how I'd expect most accidents to happen. Someone decides to anchor too close to an undersea cable, the anchor fails to hold and the drifting ship drags the anchor over the cable damaging it.

I'm not saying it wasn't sabotage, but there needs to be something a bit more than that.

Source: have dragged anchors - thankfully never near undersea cables

The case last year with the gas pipeline, the Chinese / Russian owned left Kaliningrad, and then while sailing, dropped its anchor before the pipeline and cable, and then dragged it over them, and then raised it. It was apparently accidental, yet both the Chinese and Russians didn't want the crew interviewed, the Estonian and the Finnish authorities both shrugged and didn't really care, and the Estonian energy prices were severly impacted for ~9 months.

IMO very very likely sabotage, and brushed under the rug in fear of Russian escalation.

I can only upvote. How does the anchor come into contact with the cable if not by that exact sequence of steps? The ship isn't sailing through the Gulf with its anchor down, it has to go near the cable, drop anchor then drag. Otherwise the cable and anchor will not interact. This is the only way an accident could happen (almost).

Have you draged anchor for 100+km?

>I don't understand. That's how I'd expect most accidents to happen. Someone decides to anchor too close to an undersea cable, the anchor fails to hold and the drifting ship drags the anchor over the cable damaging it.

In most of these cases, it's Russian ships dropping their anchors in areas where the cables are known to be and then driving around in circles until they snag and break it. It's not even slightly plausible that they'd be doing it accidentally.

Yeah if I could just anchor these boats right when its windy just over your cables that'd be great.

Whoopsy, well would you ever!

Have you filed your observations of the ships anchor at sea to the authorities? Because it does sound strange, if you indeed have a witness to this, that they dropped and then hoisted their anchors to damage infrastructure four times that day:

> Swedish-Estonian telecoms cable at 1513 GMT, then over the Russian cable at around 2020 GMT, the [Balticconnector gas pipeline] at 2220 GMT and a Finland-Estonia telecoms line at 2349 GMT.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-telecoms-ca...

They just released a statement saying it is sad that they have to be suspicious that it is, perhaps, sabotage:

https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/-/2685132

Oh no, the EU is gasp deeply concerned.

Well, you never know 100%. There is a small (really small) chance it was an accident. Just like there is a small chance that Al Capone was innocent man.

(But really, it clearly has “Russia” written all over it)

This is not nearly as obvious as this entire thread is making it out to be, unfortunately. I think it has to due with commercial shipping operations and procedures not aligning with our intuitions.

just to be honest, the Pipelines explosion, had "Russia" written all over it, except after investigation, and a possible culprit, i.e not Russia, then nobody wanted to discuss about it anymore. I think the hysteria is too high, people are thirsty for War, looks like..

But this person is just speaking the truth - I worked for an ISP with cable landing stations. These cables went down several times a year due to physical damage of non nefarious kinds. It's not obvious that this malicious. It certainly might be but it's not a slam dunk.

Yeah and if you shoot someone and they die it might be an unrelated heart attack.

> when it's clear who's done it and why.

Is it though? From my understanding it's clearly sabotage, but who's responsible is open to some debate. Compare to NordStream, it's still not officially determined who's responsible.

There has been an arrest warrant for a Ukrainian diver. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Nord-Stream-Arrest-warrant-for-...

It's still not officially made public who's responsible.

> officially determined who's responsible

Becuase they are afraid to figure out the truth. It might not fit the propaganda narrative.

the culprits have been getting chased around the north sea for the past two months suspected of attempting to perpetrate the same in other locations.

Same procedure this time

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/chinese-ship-investigat...

If this wasn't an accident, given the recent Biden escalation that allows ATACMS strikes in Kursk in could mean two things:

1) Russia hastily retaliated, which is out of character. You can accuse Russia of many things, but not of retaliating instantly (against the West, in Ukraine they probably do).

2) False flag in order to drum up pro-war sentiment in the West.

If Biden escalates in the last weeks of his presidency, presumably to make it more difficult for Trump to negotiate, why would Russia take the bait and escalate? It does not make any sense.

"Escalate"? Allowing Ukraine to use the weapons it has to strike back at an aggressor in order to mitigate or reduce said aggressors ability to continue attacking is ... "escalation"? I don't think so.

If anything artificial limits have been placed on Ukraine that are not placed on other nations (or in some cases proscribed terrorist organisations) purchasing or being "gifted" weapons. Whether those weapons are from the U.S., UK, France, Germany, Russia, RoK, whoever.

> Joint statement by the Foreign Ministers of Finland and Germany on the severed undersea cable in the Baltic Sea

> We are deeply concerned about the severed undersea cable connecting Finland and Germany in the Baltic Sea. The fact that such an incident immediately raises suspicions of intentional damage speaks volumes about the volatility of our times. A thorough investigation is underway. Our European security is not only under threat from Russia‘s war of aggression against Ukraine, but also from hybrid warfare by malicious actors. Safeguarding our shared critical infrastructure is vital to our security and the resilience of our societies.

https://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/en/newsroom/news/-/2685132

And also the cable between Lithuania and Sweden:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/18/telecoms-cable...

And also Ireland escorted a Russian spy ship away from their cables:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/16/russian-spy-sh...

A disruption in communications can mean only one thing: invasion.

It can also mean that Russia is posturing and retaliating for the US's announcement that Ukraine can strike inside Russia with US missiles. This feels more like the same kind of exercise that North Korea does with their missile tests than it does an actual invasion.

yes. What Russia does currently is probing and testing - what it takes to disrupt all the necessary cables simultaneously to create communication breakdown and a lot of chaos, what resources and time it takes to repair (and thus planning the options on blocking those repair resources, etc.) It takes tanks half-a-day to cross the Baltic states to reach the sea. That is the time Russia wants to buy. Once Russian forces are already in Riga, Tallinn, Vilnus, the NATO will have a decision to make on whether to bomb the Russian forces already placed by that time among the Baltic states population.

This isn’t Reddit…

Russia does not have the manpower or logistics to invade anywhere (else). They have spent 2 years tossing meat-waves against Ukraine to grind them down, take a few km a week, and cause demoralization until their stooge could get into the Whitehouse and give it all to them for free.

Invading the Baltics or Poland or Sweden... not on the table.

"Hybrid" warfare, yes. But that's been going on for two decades.

Thing is: cutting people's fiber optic lines isn't going to get them out of this sanction regime.

That‘s one of the cables mentioned in the CNN article.

Substantial Russian activity also near UK, raises concerns that Russia would cut off UK. [0]

Russian ships ‘plotting sabotage in the North Sea’ [1]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-undersea-...

[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ships...

The Irish just chased away a Russian "research" vessel.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/16/russian-spy-sh...

Interestingly, Ireland is not a NATO member, so it's somewhat surprising Russia is poking around there. Although they're still EU, so maybe that's why.

Are there not cables run through the Channel Tunnel? Seems like a no-brainer.

Yes, there is fiber infrastructure in the Channel Tunnel [0]. I'm pretty sure that while any one good link is vastly better than zero links, no one link is sufficient to carry all traffic from/to the British Isles?

[0] https://www.colt.net/resources/colt-successfully-completes-t...

If you're routing through the Chunnel, I suspect you could fit at least two seperate links.

I mean, the UK has 20+ fibre links to other lands. If one goes down, fine, if a second goes down, it's suspicious. If a third goes down, and there are Russian ships milling about over the location of the.. yes, there goes a fourth, it doesn't take long to realise what's going on.

Now, what the British Navy would do about this I'm not precisely sure. But even to escort the ships away would put a stop to it, and the UK wouldn't be cut off.

The silly thing is they know entirely well that we can do the same to them. The US/UK at least have at least the same capability, if not moreso.

Do these nations not have navies? Can’t they tell the Russian non-combat ships (or pressure them) to get lost?

We do but ocean and air is big :)

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nato-jets-in...

Also with cables, they can be destroyed with "innocent" ships that have a right to be there actually :)

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65309687

Russia has a programme to sabotage wind farms and communication cables in the North Sea, according to new allegations.

The details come from a joint investigation by public broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

It says Russia has a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels in the North Sea.

> Can’t they tell the Russian non-combat ships (or pressure them) to get lost?

Not in international waters, which is where submarine cables are largely located.

And even if they could: The oceans are... kind of big. If it were that easy to "just patrol" shipping lanes/submarine cable tracks etc., why would piracy still be a concern?

Would relatively cheap AI-piloted satellite connected ships with sensor equipment work as a solution?

Just because it is not publicized does not mean it is not happening. Most military operations do not take along journalists, and are not reported to the press. Some are even secret.

That said, there is a limited amount that can be done in international waters without creating an international incident. Law Of The Seas, Freedom Of Navigation, etc.. It is to our advantage for example, when we want to prevent CCP's from denying access to international waters around Taiwan or Phillipines, but to Russia's advantage when scouting undersea cables in international waters.

They can field more "research" vessels than we'd typically field mil vessels, but I'd bet real money that that ratio just changed a lot in the past few weeks, as it hits the press.

> They can field more "research" vessels than...

Back during the cold war, there was very often a Soviet "fishing boat" trailing after any substantial US Navy fleet. Said fishing boat may have had far more antennas than any fisherman would expect, but far less interest in catching fish.

Fast forward - what would be the cost of having cheap western drones hanging around nearby, when suspected Russian assets were close to undersea cables, pipelines, and such?

They do: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/16/russian-spy-sh...

However, another one will be along soon.

I'd assume, at the moment, that the primary goal is intimidation rather than anything else.

Who says they don't do that constantly, but missed it this time?

And risk escalation!? /s

So what's the solution ? Assign a surveillance UAV to every Russian ship parked "without a good reason" over a cable ? It would be expensive, but doable, and create a reserve of vehicles for wartime use.

The solution is to project strength and hit them where they don't expect. You are dealing with a thug, not a cost/benefit accountant, as Obama seemed to mistakenly believe. As long as they do things and we respond, nothing good will happen. They have already calculated the response and found it acceptable. Instead of this, go to the mattresses. Oh, your bridge has suddenly exploded? Shame.

"We" won't respond because "we" just elected a Russian asset and he is going to install more in his cabinet.

It's already been settled that the trump dossier from 2016 was a work of fiction.

Why did Putin take crimea under Obama's watch, parts of Ukraine under Biden's watch, but then not make any huge moves like those while his "asset" was in the white house?

> You are dealing with a thug, not a cost/benefit accountant

Spot on.

"We" already screwed their pipeline, what's left? Provide Ukraine with the means to blow up the Kerch bridge maybe? They're the ones that could legitimately do that sort of escalation.

> what's left?

The other pipelines. Their shadow oil fleet. There are lots of options. But to my knowledge, only the British, French and Americans are capable of the long-range clandestine operations.

> "We" already screwed their pipeline

unfortunately, "we" didnt have to pay a sacrifice to the economy for it, because germany paid it.

The US is too afraid of nukes, and won't escalate. The russians rightly predicted this.

>> what's left?

Cut trade? But everyone likes Russian dirty money too much

NATO filter blockade on Öresund?

The Danish straits is European Waters. We fully control shipping in and out of the Baltic. International law dictates that Denmark cannot prohibit transit passage of foreign vessels unless the vessels appear to be violating the international rules on marine pollution prevention.

So Denmark can start assuming every vessel (or at least more vessels) are in violation. Russia can take that to some international court if they so desire. Inspect every ship. Question the crews. Take plenty of time doing it. Perishable goods on board will perish before reaching St Petersburg and Kaliningrad. Tankers will be refused entry, limiting or delaying export income for Russia.

Make them pay dearly every time there's even reasonable suspicion that Russia has messed with Western/NATO technological infrastructure.

That we still have oligarchs and bratva members walking around on NATO soil in the open this far into things is insane.

There’s loads more we can do but the Russian government might just collapse if they go too far attacking western assets. They know there will be a response “at a time and place of our choosing” and cutting the Internet properly will be extremely expensive for Russia, they will have no banking system at all and we will give Ukraine weapons to attack their oil infrastructure.

What do you mean "pay dearly" Not more violence I hope...

https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/12/11/afghanistan-papers-detai...

Imagine if every bad thing USA did... people want USA to "pay dearly"...

It is not the time to call “but US also did it” card.

When thug attacks, what do you do?

> Imagine if every bad thing USA did... people want USA to "pay dearly"...

First off, whataboutism is a logical fallacy.

Second, Afghanistan is nothing if not a bunch of people who wanted to make the US "pay dearly", even if to their personal and national detriment.

Third, there's a way for the Russians to avoid consequences: stop attacking Western digital infrastructure.

The long term solution is to stop being naive about submarine cables. This is a well-known vulnerability, inevitable, and ignored. There are better alternatives now, and locally this may be temporarily re-routable. But there's no way to protect existing cables on par with something like the Hardened Intersite Cable System (HICS). I'm surprised it hasn't occurred more in the Persian Gulf area. And it could occur in western urban areas with relative ease. Most critical cabling intersect points in the US are unguarded, although may have cameras or other remote monitoring.

Treat it as the act of war that it is, and confiscate or sink the ship involved in it. If it can be done before it reaches a harbor, of course also arrest the crew.

If it happens repeatedly, declare the passage of all Russian ships (or possibly starting with ships of the type involved in the incident, allowing other shipping and giving Russia a chance to stop abusing it) "prejudicial to the peace, good order or security of the coastal State" and deny passage through territorial waters. Extend the territorial waters between Finland and Estonia to the full 12 miles without the current corridor in between.

Russia understands and responds to strength better than to diplomacy and appeasement.

>Treat it as the act of war that it is, and confiscate or sink the ship involved in it. If it can be done before it reaches a harbor, of course also arrest the crew.

The ships involved aren't warships. They're ostensibly civilian vessels. Also other people mention that accidental fiber cuts happen all the time. Are we going to drone strike Russian civilian ships on the off chance is malicious?

>Russia understands and responds to strength better than to diplomacy and appeasement.

The best way to stop someone committing war crimes is... to commit war crimes ourselves?

> The ships involved aren't warships.

That has hardly stopped people before.

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

The key word here is "ostentibly".

There seems to be consensus that this was not an accident (politicians have stated as such), and treating it accordingly would show Russia "no, you can't just pretend it was an accident and expect us to do nothing".

On the off chance it actually is an accident at some point - that's the downside (for Russia) of having pretend-accidents too many times.

The alternative is ignoring it "because we can't be sure" until we get to ignore the "little green men" that totally aren't Russian when they come across the border...

That sounds borderline feasible – in a world where submarines don't exist.

I’m certain the sea is as mapped as you can possibly imagine, cutting say 50% of cables would lead to a lot of Russian ships sinking and a ban on them entering western waters. Their equipment is absolutely shit compared to ours and we know exactly where it all is. Surely they have been told this is a declaration of war which clearly they are scared of too.

The russians have been investing heavily and have some very good kit

http://www.hisutton.com/Yantar.html

http://www.hisutton.com/Belgorod-Class-Submarine.html

http://www.hisutton.com/Russian-Spy-Submarine-BS-64e.html

and so on

According to CNN reporting, the US is already keeping track of Russian ships near critical submarine infrastructure. Chances are that they already have a prime suspect as to what ship or ships have been engaged in this.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/09/06/politics/us-sees-increasi...

The solution is to refuse passage of the ships to\into Russian part of the Baltic. Naval blockade. But it is impossible as so many Russian-backed politicians are elected in EU. And all other doesn't have a strong will or doesn't care about Russian threat. No Churchill\Reagan types are there.

Good times creates weak men.

Good thing we have strong reality tv hosts.

Well, since Russia has nothing to gain from such actions, you might want to assign surveillance on some other parties in case. But yes, I suppose surveillance might act as some form of deterrence.

Maybe a saildrone, that seems feasible with today’s technology.

Why would they use a Russian flagged ship for that?

It's harder to get false identification then people on the internet think.

But also the Russian MO has never been to do things where it's not obvious they did it: the spate of critics of the Russian government dying by falling out of windows isn't because they lack creativity in assassinating people.

Dumb question but my assumption is fiber optic cables could be “tapped”? But the disruption would be noticeable when monitoring the cable. Could you just tap it when you cut it and when it hooked back up that’s the new baseline with the tap in place? That would seem more of a logical reason then a country just randomly cutting lines to me?

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...

NSA's OAKSTAR, STORMBREW, BLARNEY and FAIRVIEW

It’s a message and hybrid warfare.

Hybrid warfare - the infrastructure is offline, and the repair resources are consumed. And you gather intel what the resource impact and offline time is.

Message - we can do this. Now think what else we can do.

Of course the message is also pushing EU closer to war footing. But China and Russia don’t see it that way - they think the lack of popular outcry means weakness.

Most/all of the traffic would be encrypted.

That wasn't the case in the past. Events over the past 15 years have resulted in most companies encrypting all traffic between datacenters (due to the perceived risk). TLS between consumers and companies is probably at an all time high though due to a push for end-to-end encryption.

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/submarine-cable/c-lion1 for reference

It'd be nice to see stories about a western navy or two getting off its butt, and actually trying to discourage "accidents" which damage critical infrastructure.

Alas, some would rather let criminal governments invade sovereign countries, commit acts of global sabotage and murder dissidents all over the world rather than take any action at all to dissuade them. Peace through appeasement is likely to work as well as it has at any other point in history.

Are you referring to the US or Russia here? Hard to tell when you talk in riddles.

Right? Turns out having a spine is really annoying and inconvenient for the ruling class who now find themselves actually having to fend off interlopers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-65309687

Russia has a programme to sabotage wind farms and communication cables in the North Sea, according to new allegations.

The details come from a joint investigation by public broadcasters in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

It says Russia has a fleet of vessels disguised as fishing trawlers and research vessels in the North Sea.

On the other hand, I'd rather see cables get cut than watch shells get lobbed between world powers.

As the saying goes, who lets others cut cables to have peace deserves neither and will have both taken away.

There are quite a few response levels between "don't even bother monitoring the sabotage" and "start WWIII".

at these points, these cable cuts are more dangerous than actual bombs

They do already, but do need reinforcement.

>>"“We put in place a National Maritime Information Centre in about 2010 and we needed a Joint Maritime Operations Coordination Centre alongside it, because we said very firmly we have to take threats to our territorial seas and exclusive economic zone very, very seriously.

They are now in place, which is good, but they need to be really reinforced and the departments involved need to fully man them, because otherwise we are not going to be able to counter what is a very real and present threat and could cause major major damage to our nation.”" [0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/uk-undersea-...

It is time to get off your high horses and realize that western military might doesn't rule the world anymore.

Hetzner seems unaffected?

    ping hel1-speed.hetzner.com

Gives me 52ms from Germany which should be about normal?

It should be around 25 ms in normal conditions. That's what I got when pinging Hetzner in Germany, from Finland, when the cable was still in use and when using a connection that routes through the cable.

I am don't use Hetzner, but I use ssh between Finland and Germany every day. As a matter of fact even back and forth because of tunneling. After reading the news this morning (Hetzner incident is date 3:30 UTC) I was surpised that I had not noted any lag. It remained very reponsive all day.

Hetzner says they are affected: https://status.hetzner.com/incident/ec8a2f28-e964-46cb-94fa-...

That is a very terse statement all things considered.

I think it is slightly higher than normal. I remember getting 30-40ms pings to germany in recent years. 45-55ms is around the range it used to be in early 2010's before the direct cable from finland to germany was built.

If you want to know if they are affected, search for "Looking glass hetzner". It will help you better than ICMP PING. See https://bgp.he.net/AS24940 for example.

I'm getting 25ms from my mailserver at hetzner helsinki to amsterdam. Looks more then OK to me.

48ms from England, for whatever that's worth. Would that've used the cable?

It is really a bad plan to attack that type of infrastructure in the way they are waking up hardcore gamers and other sleeping techies!

if they attacked successfully, the techies and/or gamers wouldn’t be awoken

https://archive.is/ZucmV

Looks like a pretty transparent hint on how response to the recent US/UK/France permission to use long-range missiles against the Russian territory could look like. The Nord Stream sabotage has opened Pandora's box almost exactly how it was predicted in Cryptonomicon.

It didn't open a pandoras box, Russians are very creative in the escalation warfare. It was known for quite a bit of time that Russians were mapping these cables out. They are probably, like always, just testing to see the response (rather lack of it).

> The Nord Stream sabotage has opened Pandora's box almost exactly how it was predicted in Cryptonomicon.

Can you elaborate?

“This is the new balance of power, Randy."

"You can't seriously be telling me that governments are threatening to--"

"The Chinese have already done it. They cut an older cable--first-generation optical fiber--joining Korea to Nippon. The cable wasn't that important--they only did it as a warning shot. And what's the rule of thumb about governments cutting submarine cables?"

"That it's like nuclear war," Randy says. "Easy to start. Devastating in its results. So no one does it."

"But if the Chinese have cut a cable, then other governments with a vested interest in throttling information flow can say, 'Hey, the Chinese did it, we need to show that we can retaliate in kind.' "

"Is that actually happening?"

"No, no, no!" Avi says. They've stopped in front of the largest display of needlenose pliers Randy has ever seen. "It's all posturing. It's not aimed at other governments so much as at the entrepreneurs who own and operate the new cables.”

Probably yet another case of fish trawlers or some dumbass freighter captain not reading the sea charts before dropping their anchor.

I'm all for finally showing the Russians a response for their covert warfare... but this is not the right opportunity. This kind of situation happens many times every year (and the causes are almost always the same, with a few cases of submarine landslides or seismic events).

Swedish telco Telia reports that the undersea internet cable between Sweden and Lithuania was also damaged on Sunday: https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/2416006/undersea-ca...

Btw last time they damaged the finnish cables it was a chinese merchant vessel. Not just russians doing sabotage at the baltic sea

Russians could've also been involved in that since Newnew Polar Bear was en route to Russia.

> "it’s obvious this wasn’t an accidental anchor drop.”

If it's "he who shall not be named", gotta admit, that's a clever strategy: ramp up sabotage and see how NATO/EU will feel about their "red lines", and how well does that article 5 really work in practice. Is it worth more than the paper it's printed on? Let's find out!

People have been laughing at the West crossing multiple Russian "red lines" and the Russians not doing anything. So the Russians can follow a similar route: a cable torn here, a warehouse blows up there, maybe a bank website is hacked, water supply or power station company blows up "randomly". Is anyone going to launch nuclear bombs because of that? That's absurd, of course not, yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process.

Ideally, these countries should ramp up similar acts of sabotage on the Russian territory if they confirmed that's exactly who it is. A dam fails in Siberia, maybe the payment system goes down for a week, a submarine catches on fire while in port for repairs. Honestly I don't think they have the guts to do that.

Some regimes only speak the language of power. They have to be believably threatened; calling them on phone to chat and beg for them to behave, is just showing more weakness. Scholz just called Putin. Anyone remember Macron talking with Putin for tens of hours at the start of the war? A lot of good that did. When they see a credible fist in front of their nose, that's the only way they'll stop.

Ask yourself, when was the last time a nation officially declared war?

It doesn't happen anymore for legal reasons.

NATO will 100% not be the first to declare war despite even very serious provocations. Maybe they'll take a leaf out of Russia or Israel's book and declare a 'special' or 'limited' operation though...

> Maybe they'll take a leaf out of Russia or Israel's book

As you yourself just pointed out a few lines line above this, there's no need to take a leaf out of anybody else's book: all the US' and NATO wars of the past decades have been presented as "special operations": e.g. the war against Serbia, the war against Iraq, the war against Afghanistan, etc.

If you want to, I think you can invade Russia without declaring war, because the Korean war is still unresolved, and North Korea's military is active in Russia.

Just claim your advisors to South Korea are taking care of extra-territorial combatants from that war. No reason to declare a war on Russia when it's clearly part of the existing conflict.

> NATO will 100% not be the first to declare war despite even very serious provocations.

But if it doesn't declare war, it now looks weak. That article 5 isn't worth very much all of the sudden. At the same time it's stupid to start WW3 over a village in the Baltics, a town in Romania, a cut cable or a few blown up warehouses. The Russians took the same "red line" idea and are playing it against the NATO and the EU. I can't interpret as any other way. And on one level, it sort of works.

> Maybe they'll take a leaf out of Russia or Israel's book and declare a 'special' or 'limited' operation though...

I'd like to believe. But remembering how much hand wringing was needed to send a few tanks to Ukraine and some F-16. Somehow, I doubt they'll be able to do anything as bold as a "special" military operation against Russia. Heck, they can't even provide air defense for Ukraine's skies. (As in use NATO's own defense systems to stop the Russians destroying apartment buildings). That's the point the Russians are providing. They are destroying NATO's reputation without even trying to too much, and I posit, so far it works.

> yet NATO/EU just looks weak and pathetic in the process

Really? Russia, with the 6th largest army in the world, had to pull in Iran and Pyongyang to not get invaded by the 13th largest [1][2].

Moscow is being a nuisance. That doesn't make NATO or Europe look weak, it makes Russia look pathetic.

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

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/13/world/europe/ukraine-russ...

13th largest backed by the whole NATO and other US-aligned countries. They send almost everything they can outside of nuclear weapons, the most cutting edge military tech, and people (well, outside of a limited contingent of "advisors"). Let's be honest, without this backing the war would've ended in the first month as was drafted in Istanbul.

> Really?

That's exactly how the Russians perceive the EU. They are perceived as weak. There is no way they would have started the invasion if they were afraid of them. They are engaging in asymmetrical warfare because they are convinced they can demonstrate that to the world as well "look what we are doing there and well we get is phone calls form Sholz" [1]

> Scholz condemned the war of aggression against Ukraine

> The German leader called on Putin to withdraw Russian troops from Ukraine ...

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-scholz-calls-putin-for-first-...

That might look like a "power move" by Germany but it looks absolutely weak in the eyes of Putin.

It looks more like they are just winning their war by the most effective means they have at their disposal.

To say that Russia is just being a nuisance.... They have just won a war. That is clear as day now.

Trump's election is the nail in the coffin. Immediately we saw Schultz call Putin and Zelensky declare that the war will be over early next year - implying a negotiated settlement.

It's done. The Russians won. Exactly what they won is all that is to be decided.

Weak?

Macron is rallying for major support.

Poland is building an extremely strong army, and is having none of Russia's BS.

Rutte is head of NATO now, and he has peace as his nr. 1 goal.

There are so many ads for cybersecurity and military on tv here in the Netherlands.

Ukraine received ATACMS (long range missiles) a while ago. This is why they are able to invade Russia back.

We are "weak" because Putin has been destabilising our peaceful politics over the past 20 years.

Russia isn't a fucking bear, it's a drunk wasteland with plenty natural resources, but with fucked up leadership. The Russian oligarchy is desperate, and it's showing.

And yes, I _am_ mad. I am 100% going to protect the EU. What we have and what we had is beautiful, and my Russian friends and my Ukrainian friends deserve better.

I am picking up math, Nix, ML, geopolitics, nature, sports and more because of these idiots in Russia. And I'm exactly what they fear most. A transgender person.

I'm so, so done with Putin and Lukachenko's BS.

EU as a whole has actually been weak in terms of military capability and perhaps also civil defence. The end of the Cold War and the long peace had allowed a lot of us to believe that there wouldn't be a foreseeable risk of military conflict or a need to seriously prepare against aggression. Many European countries cut back significantly on their military spending and capability. And that seemed like a reasonable and popular thing to do given the circumstances. (Countries in Eastern Europe were perhaps the exception and didn't cut back, at least not so much.)

The problem is that defensive capability cannot be just built all of a sudden if it turns out to be needed after all.

Of course the reason that has become a problem is Putin's aggression and authoritarian rule.

But Europe has indeed been weak in the sense of not having maintained defensive capability. Perhaps that is, both fortunately and unfortunately, changing. (Fortunately for obvious reasons, unfortunately because it means significant spending on something that should not be necessary even though it is.)

Hopefully EU societies will remain strong and resilient in the sense they've been strong all along: strong civil society and democracy.

> Russia isn't a fucking bear, it's a drunk wasteland with plenty natural resources, but with fucked up leadership. The Russian oligarchy is desperate, and it's showing.

It doesn't matter. It attacked one of the largest countries in Europe, captured territory and is still holding it and making progress. Right under EU's nose. It can brutally throw men in the meat grinder and doesn't worry too much about it. Calling Putin like Sholz did or like Macron didn't help. Showing him a fist that's ready to strike, only that works. Anything else is showing weakness.

> We are "weak" because Putin has been destabilising our peaceful politics over the past 20 years.

The weakness is not accidental, they've been weaving in their agents all over the place and shaping public opinion. Now they are engaged in asymmetrical warfare. Germany has been doing deals with the Russians buying gas and oil from them. Merkel laughed at the US for being worried about it:

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/aa2afe9f-0b5d-45b7-a647-cc61f6d01...

> If we’d known then what we know now, we would of course have acted differently

Warmongering 101. Ready to protect the EU and drunken wasteland at the same time. The enemy is simultaneously pathetic and an existential threat.

Restraint is not weak and pathetic.

If you accidentally pick a fight with a BJJ fighter, hope they are a black belt instead of a purple.

Or to paraphrase Vladimir Kara-Murza, democracy will come to Russia. So far the west has been better off letting Putin tie his own noose.

> Or to paraphrase Vladimir Kara-Murza, democracy will come to Russia. So far the west has been better off letting Putin tie his own noose.

Unfortunately the noose is a tie and it's soaked in Ukrainian blood so far.

Of course Ukrainians should be grateful for the help they got, and no doubt they are. But they should also be worried about how little they got and based on that rate where this war will eventually end. I am afraid it will end with bleeding all of Ukraine. I wish Western leaders, especially West European leaders were more bold. Where are the Margaret Thatchers, François Mitterrands, and Helmut Kohls of yesteryear. We got milquetoast Sholzs and Macrons instead.

First thing out of that russian "opposition" mouth after exchange was "Ukraine please stop resisting" and "Please stop the sanctions".

There is nobody in russia to make democracy happen. Their "opposition" is just different shades of putinism.

Putin would not be where he is without the support of China. And China has plenty of levers that the west can press without needing to do sabotage or war. 15% of China's exports go the US. EU another 15% or so.

The west won the cold war without firing a shot or blowing any bridges or sinking any ships.

I do agree Putin will change course if he feels he can lose power but it's not clear how pressure on Russia leads to that. He holds the country in his iron fist. He's not going to care about losing some ships or bridges as long as he thinks that he can come up ahead in the long run. He'll just use that as motivation to send even more soldiers to Ukraine and ramp up arms productions.

Despite all the shifts in China and in Chinese-Western relations in the last 10 years it remains the fact that the thing China cares about the most is commerce. If the spice stops flowing because of international warfare, China will not be happy.

Which is why I think it's insane that both US political parties have made "trade war with China" a major policy plank. I think the CCP is as awful as the next person, but cutting trade now means cutting leverage later.

Closing in on at least 3 years of hybrid warfare and yet this is nothing but a "mystery".

As big of a mystery as who poisoned Sergei Skripal or who shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Sounds very similar to what happened to Nord Stream oil pipelines.

Just a little unnerving

I dislike the immediate jumping to “war, sabotage, destruction!” that happened in this article. Cable breakage happens quite often, and sometimes are caused by such menial things as sea debris, or at times, sharks chewing on them [1].

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/melissacristinamarquez/2020/07/...

If you look at all the oceans as a whole, sure.

Baltic? A tiiny tiny area of water. Critical infrastructure?

It’s sabotage.

Sharks love undersea cables, except the fact that AFAIK there are no sharks in the baltic Sea https://slate.com/technology/2014/08/shark-attacks-threaten-...

I wonder how expensive it would be to bury undersea fiber cables deeper under the seabed to protect them from anchors cutting them. It might be cheaper to just install a second cable far enough away that they are unlikely to be cut at the same time.

Time for Biden to write a bunch of letters of marque, and get Russian ships out of our seas.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6869

It seems that the obvious solution could be Starlink-style meshes.

Can anybody comment on how fragile the Starlink protocol would be during a war? If its line-of-sight, presumably it would be hard to jam?

Ignoring everything else, C-Lion1 has a bandwidth if 144 Tbit/sec

How much can a constellation offer say between many points in both countries? Seems unlikely it could get close but I would like to know.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-Lion1

Russia already demonstrated that they are able to take down satellites [1] and that they can interfere with Starlink [2]>

1: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/16/world/europe/russia-antis... 2: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/24/technology/ukraine-russia...

The Swedish part of AMPRNet [0] has some ambitions to be a fallback in case of a crisis[1]. It seems cheaper and easier (a bit of an understatement) to deploy and repair, in case it gets attacked.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet

1: https://amprnet.se/images/Kriskommunikation-2014-01-27.pdf

Send some sharpnel on the same orbital altitude as Starlink and the whole constellation disappears.

True, if by "some" you mean a few thousand rocket launches worth of shrapnel.

It's Starlink. It would take an sms from Putin at most for Musk to turn it off.

Nuclear detonation(s) in LEO would likely cause significant harm

Did Russia make a threat to Elon Musk at some point that it would take down Starlink satellites?

Sure, let them try down 1700+ satellites, with new being put up multiple times a week by the dozens. Cant't even cause a proper Kessler Syndrome due to the low orbit.

Getting more and more Footfall vibes these days with Spacex already having a full orbital dominance. ;-)

Elon Musk is not someone Europe feels it can rely on in a crisis when Russia attacks

Elon Musk is probably the private individual who has done most for Ukraine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_in_the_Russo-Ukrain...

So to keep score, in the last year we've seen cables sabotaged between Finland and Germany, Lithuania and Sweden, Estonia and Sweden, Estonia and Finland. Any others I missed? You might say it's too early to call it sabotage, but the earliest two cable incidents were exactly the same, so it's hardly a coincidence at this point.

Russia warned that they were going to do this last week. I think it's pretty reasonable to conclude that 1) this was sabotage and 2) it was Russia.

> Russia warned that they were going to do this last week

Source?

Hey, hold your horses. Biden also threatened to blow up the Nord-Stream 2 pipeline, yet after the sabotage, everybody said "it was Russia". Now about this incident, to be consistent, I'm inclined to think it was the Americans.

The peaceful Russian Baltic research fleet is doing research, nothing to see here.

Between mainland Norway and Svalbard.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40484591

This would be an excellent time for Germany to announce that it is tripling munitions production, and that they’re going to do whatever they have to do to protect the territorial integrity of Europe. But they won’t.

As risky as it may sound, they will triple the depth of concerns.

The Taurus

Our governing coalition just split and there will be early elections (most likely) in February. Nobody has a majority right now, any anmouncement is currently unlikely. In fact our lovely head of the Government just reaffirmed that we won't send taurus to the ukraine.

Meanwhile, in the real world Germany is de-industrializing because of the high energy prices and competition from China and US.

The constant Russian interference, combined with the regular escalation from the jets patrolling, and the radar jamming, really needs to be dealt with.

We're stuck between having to do timid actions and full NATO escalation. This feels like constant creep.

I have read reams of rhetoric regarding relations with Russia rehashed as "don't poke the bear".

No one ever seems to want to discuss what to do about the bear going around poking everyone else.

I agree. Do you want to sign up and go fight in a war? Or should other people besides you die? It's easy to say it "needs to be dealt with" but it's not an easy thing to do.

Best course of action at this time would be to properly arm Ukraine.

> really needs to be dealt with.

Ignoring the passive voice, who do you suggest should deal with that, more precisely? And how do you suggest "dealing" with one of the two nuclear hyper-powers in existence? (the other one being the Americans)

From history: "Flexible Response" was a policy implemented by JFK in 1961, in response to previous administration's over-reliance on massive retaliation.

Of course, it dragged the United States into Vietnam as things slowly escalated.

IMO the right action is to counterattack with equal force, ideally in the same way. So cut one of their undersea cabals, fly jets near or over their airspace, etc.

That way, there's a clear line for what NATO will and won't do that Russia can understand. If attacks escalate it will be Russia that escalated every time. If Russia feels it's threatened, all they have to do is stop the attacks and NATO will stop. If Russia is going to nuclear warfare over not being able to unevenly harass NATO, because we can't read Putin and the oligarchs' minds, and what objective measure would allow that but not allow Russia to go nuclear warfare over not enslaving all of NATO, or claiming they can/others can't do everything not written unambiguously in a treaty (which would extend to new technologies like partitioning the solar system that we couldn't have thought ahead-of-time)?

But I'm no diplomat, so maybe I'm wrong and my idea would be catastrophic.

> We're stuck between having to do timid actions and full NATO escalation

If only there were someone applying pressure to Russia we could have fight for us!

I keep wondering if that scale of operation that we are witnessing is their "testing the waters" phase and it is 1% of their true capability, of if what we're seeing is already their full-steam operational pace.

They do a good job of instilling fear, but we've learned from Ukraine that there are a lot of paper Tigers in that army that aren't as capable in a real fight as they are in a demonstration.

How much of this is news and how much of it is normal occurrences due to shipping or fishing?

I've found this example of a proven sabotage: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-21963100 which involved a few guys caught in the act less than 1 km from shore, then there are a lot of "suspicious" events where intention is never publicly proven.

Nord Stream Part II

No. Nord Stream seem more and more having been an Ukrainian action. Maybe not official government, but obviously more in Ukrainian interest than in Russian.

I can't see any Ukrainian interest an cutting internet between two of their supporters. Whether the support has been sufficient can be debated, but both are supporters. Germany among the top in absolute terms, Finland among the top relative to their own size. Yes among, there are stronger supporters in both categories.

It could be argued that it was more in US interests than Ukrainian... And, of course, the US was better resourced to carry out such an operation.

It will end up in the need to destroy Russian saboteur boats on sight. Putin is a moron if he thinks piracy methods will help him.

It's not about "winning" it's about flooding the information space with doubt and crazy and fear.

It's just practice. Locate the cables, establish a means of damaging them, deploy the means as a test and a show of force.

The western economy is almost completely built using off-prem in Cloud PaaS environments. It should be pretty fun when WW3 starts and not a single hospital, school, laboratory, or factory can operate.

It also sends two messages: "We can do this to any of your cables", and "we're willing to" – with an implied "we could easily do it to all of them at the same time".

And the last scenario is the real problem: While there are enough cable repair ships to continuously handle a normal rate of simultaneous peak failures, fixing multiple cuts can quickly exceed their capacity. (There's nothing that says an attacker can only cut the same cable in one spot!)

[flagged]

while outages definitely cause big problems in hospitals and schools, neither are completely dependent on connectivity in the short term. most hospitals are required to be able to operate critical services in an outage. even a full power outage. Schools will definitely be fine. they just may have a serious backlog of entering grades, absences, and payroll once things get back online.

> once things get back online.

That would be like trying to cold start a power plant without any power.

I think you're missing my point. I'm trying to point out that there are 3 "infrastructure providers" that our economy CANNOT live without. In a world war situation, these 3 organizations are going to be the biggest targets. They are literally our crown jewels.

They will be under continuous attack from all angles. As we know with security, it is a game of time. Even the strongest bank safe has a rating in hours that it can resist direct tampering. Beyond that time rating the safe offers little to no protection. It is the layers of security that keep the safe from being tampered with beyond its rating.

What I'm saying is, no target can be secured with 100% security guarantee. Even the most secure systems will fail if met with a concerted attacker with unlimited resources.

If WW3 starts, we will lose Azure, AWS, and GCP within 5 days and it will be more or less completely destroyed within 30 days. They won't survive concerted attacks from nation state actors during war time.

Even if they can't be hacked, they will be physically destroyed with kinetic weapons. There is no Bitdefender plan that will save them from warheads.

> The western economy is almost completely built using off-prem in Cloud PaaS environments

US and lesser extent UK. Companies in France, Germany, Spain, Italy are much less likely to use public cloud providers, especially for critical (customer data, critical for the business, etc.) services. Not that it doesn't exist, one of the premier health tech startups in Europe, Doctolib, is full AWS; but it's rarer and much less prevalent.

Source: I work in a US tech company and cover EMEA, and compare notes with American colleagues.

Right but how much of that is cloud shit hosted on a different continent?

> It should be pretty fun when WW3 starts ...

Which may happen as some people just got Biden to authorize (honestly I don't think he can do that by himself), without congress approval, the use of long range missiles by Ukraine.

Some people are really hard at work trying to start WWIII.

I don't think it's the russian who severed those cables.

Russia knows that if WWIII doesn't start until a few more weeks, Trump is probably going to stop the US aiding Ukraine and stop the US giving its approval for total nonsense (like allowing these long range missiles weeks before handing over the presidency).

So why would Russia severe those cable?

I think there's a very high probability the bad actors here are the same that used Biden as a puppet to give Ukraine the greenlight to fire long range missile on to Russia.

> honestly I don't think he can do that by himself

Why not? They're not restrictions instituted by Congress. They were restrictions instituted by this and previous Presidents.

Looks like Russia preparing another warcrime invasion

Predictable blowback and it's only going to get worse.

It's like 3rd or 4th submission of this news today? One of the previous discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42175676

Thanks! We've merged that thread hither.

Discussion (44 points, 5 hours ago, 43 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172565

It's a different cable, even though they were close together.

CNN and Bloomberg mention both cables (although both articles have update times)

It seems very likely to be the same incident.

Merged hither. Thanks!

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42172565

Merged hither. Thanks!

sharks. maybe even Russian sharks.

Root cause is known and obvious; Minuteman III is a solution, to moderate bully you need 10x response

So blowing up North Stream was fun, but this somewhy isn’t. I’m very often puzzled by the logic and morale in the West.

> So blowing up North Stream was fun, but this somewhy isn’t. I’m very often puzzled by the logic and morale in the West.

North Stream was blown up by the desperate defender in a war of aggression.

These undersea cables were (likely) severed by the aggressor in the same war.

Are you less puzzled now?

All media coverage after Nord Stream was blown did say that Russia did it (just because it's evil, no real reasoning was presented). So, was it really Russia that destroyed German infrastructure? Or was it someone else?

I'm surprised there's such a cable in the first place, it seems it would be easier to go on land through Denmark and Sweden. Is it for some reason easier to have an undersea cable than a land one?

You can see an undersea cable map here. I don't know about cables specifically but:

1. Anything sea based tends to be cheaper than land based, both in terms of sea transport and also lack of other interfering infrastructure, homes etc along the way

2. Shorter distance means lower latency

3. There surely is a land cable too. There's a lot of redunancy in the system

https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

It's much easier to lay a cable on the bottom of the sea. There's nothing interfering there, you don't have to dig, you don't have to put up poles. If you give it some thought, you'll realize how much easier it is to have an undersea cable.

We can put atomic mines every yard along the cable ... or explode completely this planet.

At the time there will be no more Earth, they will be no more problem with human.

I do not support the war, or violence in general.

But EU & NATO ante engaged in a hybrid war with Russia.

- It actively supports a military which is engaged with Russian forces

- It has seized Russian financial assets

- I doubt that attacks on Russian infrastructure are perpetuated (planned & executed) just buy Ukrainian forces

I do not try to support any side by this statement. My point is that by any rational account is a “hybrid involvement”. EU & NATO are part of an active conflict.

This makes them targets for symmetrical actions — economic warfare by means of sabotage.

Russia has been involved in sabotage, shooting down planes with Europeans (MH17), killing people they don't like in EU/UK for years now. If anything EU is extremely timid and does not retaliate.

I look forward to everybody completely missing the resolution to this mystery when it turns out it was something like a Danish sailing boat that got unlucky with their anchor...

How does the saying go? Once [1] is happenstance, twice [2] is coincidence, but thrice [3]...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/finnish-governme...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-says-telecom-cab...

[3] https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/18/europe/undersea-cable-disrupt...

A Danish sailing boat with 460 meters of anchor chain? Really?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com