Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts | Hacker News Reader

Does the Internet Route Around Damage? – Baltic Sea Cable Cuts

labs.ripe.net

172 pointsvoytec62 comments

By the way, the original adage from John Gilmore ("The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it") was referring to a behavior of Usenet rather than of the Internet. In particular, if articles didn't reach a node by one path, the node would still accept that they were missing (according to Usenet routing rules) and accept those articles from a different path. Thus, one could not prevent Usenet messages or newsgroups from reaching most of Usenet merely by deleting or not forwarding them on a single node. Another way of putting this is that the connectivity of Usenet was (in general though not everywhere) a web rather than a tree, and the Usenet software didn't assume that messages had to be forwarded along some particular path, if another path was available.

As with Jon Postel's maxim (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle) people have also subsequently applied this to human behavior, not just the behavior of particular software.

There were ultimately more technically sophisticated means of censorship available on Usenet that were somewhat more effective.

It turns out that flooding your own lies is far more effective than trying to censor information.

Yep. The internet is an infinite copy machine. All you have to do is copy the lies an order of magnitude more than the truth, and Bob’s your uncle (whether you’re related to Bob or not).

The crime of polluting information to control it was perhaps the most unforgivable sin of our Information Age.

Like with everything else, the internet didn't invent the crime, it just does it at scale.

https://www.fayobserver.com/story/opinion/columns/2018/09/08...

"When fake news hit Abraham Lincoln"

Made possible in turn by giving safe haven for user content on the big social networks. Turned out to be a double edged sword.

When Rupert tried to lie about voting machines, he was fined couple of hundred mils. All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever.

Will you also blame the telephone companies and mailman too?

I think that when GP stated "All the social networks mouthpiece accounts spouting nonsense suffer no repercussions whatsoever." they were referring to the people lying and not the social networks them themselves.

This is the old dichotomy: either you dont censor and are just a medium (like electricity) or you do censor some things and then you are responsible of what is published. Social media seems to want to censor while not being responsible.

Section 230 of the communications decency act explicitly gave these companies this power, on purpose. Unmoderated online spaces are mostly useful to scammers and spammers.

And thus now they are responsible for all content published there.

If somebody kept using the same phone line to trigger bombs, do you think that the phone company doesn't have an obligation to shut that line down? Let's say the police came to the phone company and said "we know that if you shut this phone line down, so and so wont be able to trigger the bomb they have planted in XYZ space." Do you think the phone company should do nothing?

What about a courier that knows it is delivering bombs? We should look past that too?

Which principles are you invoking exactly?

Traditional telephone is currently at risk of being so full of scams that it isn't sensible to keep a number.

Like a 51% attack.

Hmm. Insightful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

But the lies can go in any direction. So the winner becomes who can lie more convincingly

Think it is more subtle than that. Straight out lying back fires easily it is more of spinning the story, i.e, on January 6 did we have an insurrection or protest? You have to push the agenda of your side so you have to try to re-define words. What is the definition of insurrection and protest? Those definitions need to be twisted so it is more subtle. Another example is "I did not have sexual relationships with that women. Oh I thought oral isn't a sexual relationship, so I didn't lie"

Not even. Russia has been amazingly successful with really obvious lies. Remember the furor over the Jade Helm exercise in 2015? When Gov. Greg Abbot asked the Texas State Guard to monitor the federal military? Turns out that was a Russia psyop that worked so well it emboldened Russia to go all out getting Trump elected a year later.

https://www.texastribune.org/2018/05/03/hysteria-over-jade-h...

A counter point to this adage in modern times is that censorship seems to spread as a result of users sharing content across platforms with varying levels of moderation. I've seen many examples of "shorts" being shared on FB or Instagram which originated from TikTok and which feature heavy use of either euphemism (eg. "unalived" instead of "murdered") or even explicitly silenced language.

Platforms which do not heavily moderate content will nonetheless still have heavily self-censored content as a result of users being conditioned by other platforms into self-censorship.

I can confirm that content censored to suit restrictive platforms finds it's way to less restrictive platforms (e.g. a screenshot of a Tumblr post censored for Meta may find it's way to Imgur)

I have noticed that some users on Imgur will make an effort to de-censor content though (e.g. re-adding the censored text in a screenshot)

I thought Gilmore was referring to the earlier idea that the Internet could survive a nuclear war. https://www.wired.com/story/h-bomb-and-the-internet/

I don't think there would have been a straightforward way to connect that to the effects of censorship.

"interprets damage as censorship and..." where these terms are being treated as equivalent

Interpreting one thing as another thing does not imply the inverse. The order in the original quote matters.

In the context of knowing the internet (DARPANet) was designed to be resilient and route around damaged nodes, hearing "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" immediately connects the ideas.

I have started quoting the robustness principle when people ask me what my politics are.

The robustness principle is really just another way of stating the Golden Rule.

this was the old internet.

as it is seen in 2024: "the net interprets economic profit as imperative, and routes toward it." next-hops will frequently be FAANG, some faceless CDN, or the cloudflare protection grotto.

Cost for the route has been supplanted in favour of cost for the shareholder.

I have workloads on hetzner data centers in Finnland and Germany. Hetzner owns part of that cable, to connect those sites.

Tracerout gives me a path like this spine5.cloud2.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core22.fsn1.hetzner.com -> core5.fra.hetzner.com -> core53.sto.hetzner.com -> core31.hel1.hetzner.com

Which is worse than before, but still works for me.

My route from Poland to dedi box leased from Hetzner in Finland currently goes through AS1299 / twelve99.net (Warsaw->Talinn->Helsinki) peering, and there's a slight increase in latency since the cable cut. On a normal day, it's Poland -> Hetzner in Germany -> Hetzner in Finland. I'm guessing that the situation hurts companies like Hetzner financially.

> I'm guessing that the situation hurts companies like Hetzner financially.

So maybe, in the end, is a Hetzner competitor who profits from those "cable cuts". /s Just follow the money.

I think you have to follow the really big money.

What if these cuts were meant to route traffic through a specific network to intecept data?

I like your thought pattern.

I assume they need to pony up to get the cable repaired (unless there's insurance against such thing) but I'm not sure if I see the cable connection itself being a huge financial hit. Submarine cables getting damaged is fairly normal, and from what I've read, it should be back up by the end of the month.

I don't think a slight increase in latency can hurt them financially in any way. From my own measurements between Hetzner's datacenters, the latency increased from 25 ms to 40 ms.

Mildly amusing to say this had a direct, measurable impact on me? Absolutely. Something to lose sleep over? Maybe in some extremely niche situations.

I'd assume the financial impact is from increased costs for traffic. For Hetzner's customers traffic is somewhere between free and $1/TB, compared to AWS's $90/TB. Hence Hetzner hosts a lot of high traffic websites, and their margins on traffic have to be pretty slim. And with the cheap low-latency connection between the DCs some customers are bound to run a lot of traffic between servers in different Hetzner DCs.

Now I don't know what their peering agreements look like, but it seems like they normally route everything through Frankfurt's internet exchange and now have to take some different routes.

I mean, it will definitely cost someone money to go fix the cables. I know that in the US, our insurance explicitly does not cover acts of war (1) so I would be curious as to how insurance covers this.

I suspect that the costs of moving extra bits through other cables is not large. I would assume that Hetzner (and the other companies that own parts of these cables) have peering agreements with other companies and that most of them will not try and take advantage of the cut cables to renegotiate their peering agreements (2). So whatever rates they paid before will still be paid.

1: Because a war creates a problem for the risk pool, it is one of the things that actually can destroy huge amounts of property simultaneously, so it is a risk explicitly separated out and basically impossible to insure against, at least in the US commercial market.

2: Too risky to start renegotiating when your cable can be cut just as easily the next time.

Is there any actual evidence that this is an act of war? Comments on Hacker News and reddit are not evidence. Act of war by a civilian Chinese tanker (not Chinese military vessel) against whom?

Recent events suggest dismissing sabotage as a likely cause would be foolish.

10:13 presents details involving sabotage throughout Europe as well as states choosing to not disclose to their public about the nature of what is happening to avoid spooking their citizens https://youtu.be/6KVnJqaBsnk?t=613&si=8lgB4A7x2fSmJC4N

NATO’s Admiral Rob Bauer discusses what he is at liberty to disclose to Arctic nations https://youtu.be/DjpALbzKdJM?si=b4uU2KZ18JlNW5wf

I’m willing to trust what he’s saying verses online discourse where individuals will never have the level of insight as someone in his position.

Yes but he's not a lawyer. We're not talking about military strategy. Sabotage is not necessarily an act of war. Sabotage can also be simple crime. Crime is not excluded from insurance payouts.

Think about the MV Dali that crashed into the bridge in Baltimore. Was that an act of war by Singapore against the United states? Six people actually died in that case.

Sabotage committed by a foreign power could be considered an act of war though….

Who would claim what depends on who benefits from what type of claim, I expect.

That's why I said it would be interesting to see how insurance companies decide on this. The insurance companies definitely would want this to be considered an act of war, I would expect, so they wouldn't have to pay out. But an act of war against a NATO country would be a much bigger deal, so I would expect that the governments of the necessary countries to not want this to be considered one and we'll have to wait and see what shakes out from all of this.

UNCLOS Article 113 seems to say (to this non-lawyer) that the merchant ship operating country is responsible for punishment, and the only protection is if the mariners can prove that they "acted merely with the legitimate object of saving their lives or their ships, after having taken all necessary precautions to avoid such break or injury." Article 114 says that the merchant ship owner is responsible for the cost of repairs.

So that means, if it can be proven that Yi Peng 3 was responsible for this, then it's going to be on the Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Company to pay, and the PRC to punish. From what I have been able to find, that is a small shipping company with just two ships, one of which is currently unable to operate due to being stuck in the Kattegat. I suspect that means that not much money would be available from that direction, and so I wonder if the insurance companies would be on the hook for whatever excess costs are born by the various companies.

I think you're conclusions are correct that it's most likely shipping company/insurance would have to pay. If there's no money I think usually they seize the ships and sell them.

There are multiple contexts at play here. It’s ambiguous, and multiple parties want to keep it that way for their own reasons.

Russia/China/US would I’m sure like to keep plausible deniability here, as it minimizes outright repercussions (for everyone), while still keeping the option on the table for them to tit-for-tat.

It wouldn’t surprise me if any insurance involved (which surely wouldn’t pay out in event of war) would want to claim it was an act of war.

Anyone trying to claim against such insurance would want to claim it wasn’t an act of war (just a mistake), so they could get the payout.

It routes around damage just fine. It doesn’t magically create extra capacity to handle cuts unless the capacity was built out already. Just in time capacity thinking has its downsides.

I was on jersey island when they lost 3 out of 4 cables. Didn’t notice a thing.

Then again that place was wired up with all fibre infra like it’s nobody’s business even a decade ago so perhaps not surprising.

Best residential internet I’ve ever personally seen.

I think it was late 2012 or early 2013 when I was in India (Hyderabad) at a time when an earthquake in the Mediterranean Sea cut I think it was SEA-WE-ME 3. The internet was terrible for the next two weeks, until the cable was repaired: almost half the internet flat-out didn’t work, including most USA hosts. I have no idea why communication between India and the USA, which should head east, was affected by a break to the west in the Mediterranean. I do know that local ISPs often have fairly dodgy peering arrangements.

My workaround was to tunnel via my own VPS in Singapore, as I could connect to it and but I was using OpenVPN back then and performance was pretty terrible. (Now if I want such tunnelling I use WireGuard, and it’s much better.)

We'd really need traceroutes (ideally bidirectional) from before, during, and after the break to diagnose your issues :P

But, even if your traffic was going east, with the broken cable to the east, there might be a lot more traffic going east (or coming from the east), and that could cause a lot of breakage.

For better or worse (mostly for worse), BGP doesn't propagate capacity of links, so it doesn't matter if there are alternate routes, if the overloaded route has the most desirable advertisement, it gets the traffic even if most of the packets are dropped into the sea.

> We'd really need traceroutes (ideally bidirectional) from before, during, and after the break to diagnose your issues :P

You jest, but RIPE Atlas may have that data.

we indeed collect that data, we didn't analyse it (yet)

I mean India to USA is almost exactly opposite sides. Great circle routes to the east coast of the USA go west from India, and to the west coast USA would be east.

Even back in 2012, us-east was huge.

> The scarier part is that, while we don’t see capacity issues, we are blind on what would happen if another link would be severed, or worse, if many are severed

An actual attack would be capacity based, but xx% of the internet is Netflix, Disney etc. you can DNS block these. Then unless it's a war zone like Yemen quickly fix it.

News, Messager, websites, VoIP, Zoom (probably) should all work fine on minimal capacity. Just like we throw out a lot of food because we have redundancy, 4K streaming is our redundancy.

It'd be interesting to see a write up by a non-insane person, so not HN users or cyber security 'experts' or military consultants.

TikTok is a vital part of the Ukraine war for Ukraine for instance, but mostly the video gets out and then is organized for the external audience.

4K internet might not "Route Around Damage", 720p might?

We'd need an Internet Protocol that would support the opposite of net-neutrality. Basically, only allowing important traffic and blocking or downgrading everything else.

That was part of the original ip specification, it was modeled after army telecom patterns. where there are priority levels baked in. when the net starts to overload the lower priority traffic gets discarded first.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc791 calls it precedence

  Precedence

          111 - Network Control
          110 - Internetwork Control
          101 - CRITIC/ECP
          100 - Flash Override
          011 - Flash
          010 - Immediate
          001 - Priority
          000 - Routine

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

The bits ended up being reassigned for service codes. mainly because nobody used them. I also suspect there would be problems with a priority system in a peer network like the internet. It works in a more managed network(like the army) where strict priority control can be enforced. but it would probably be an arms race when one peer starts setting their priority a notch higher so their messages start getting through better on a congested link.

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