Chinese Ship Suspected of Dragging Anchor 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Ship Suspected of Dragging Anchor 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables

wsj.com

47 pointspcl27 comments

Sweden seeks clarity from China about suspected sabotage of undersea cables (3 points, 55 minutes ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42268586

E.U. Vessels Surround Anchored Chinese Ship After Baltic Sea Cables Are Severed (5 points, 16 hours ago, 2 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42262913

This story previously with limited discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42256553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42263100

Also,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42191394 ("Yi Peng 3 crossed both cables C-Lion 1 and BSC at times matching when they broke (bsky.app)", 756 comments)

I'll add, Dr. Sal Mercagliano has an excellent YouTube channel that covers shipping (a topic he's a qualified expert in) and he has a video discussing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJmqCKtJnxM

The bottom line is that the alleged incident occurred in deep water, making an accidental, unnoticed anchor runnout *very* unlikely. He describes it as "A coincidence, and a very strange one," that this one vessel was seemingly over both cables just at the time they were severed, and gives a visual of maritime tracking to illustrate this.

Is "budweiser wassup commercial" the new rick roll?

This appears to be the actual video referenced, from the channel "What is Going on With Shipping?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7cS1aVGwUE

Thank you very much, I really fumbled that one!

Oh no... this was a case of me being a little buzzed from Thanksgiving beverages, and overly confident in the content of what I was pasting. I apologize!

For the record, I had that commercial on tap because I ran into someone who thought that the origin of the "Wasssup" meme was from Scary Movie.

The origin of the meme is not the commercial either

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

Hilarious. I didn’t know about this. Thanks.

Incredible, I had no idea!

That would be perfect

Original lengthy title: "Chinese Ship’s Crew Suspected of Deliberately Dragging Anchor for 100 Miles to Cut Baltic Cables"

https://archive.is/sa1VE

I wonder if we will be able to completely replace these cables with satellites one day.

Redundancy doesn't hurt.

You have to develop subspace (i.e. faster-than-light) communications for this to work. The distance between two points in Europe, after bouncing off a satellite in geostationary orbit, is very, very far, and EM waves can only travel at lightspeed, resulting in very long latency. It's significantly faster if your satellite is in low-earth orbit, but you can't keep a satellite in a fixed position there, so now you need a whole swarm of them so you have sufficient coverage at any time, and you need a way of periodically boosting their orbits or replacing them as they fall into the atmosphere.

There's a very good reason the world likes submarine cables for internet communications.

Isn't that exactly what Starlink and other similar services are doing? They're putting swarms of communication satellites into LEO for this very purpose.

Starlinks are placed in LEO at 550km, which would have a theoretical 3.6ms round-trip ping at the speed of light. That is not a "very long latency".

No, it's not, it's doing the "swarm" thing I mentioned to get around the limitations of GEO. The downside is now you have a big swarm of satellites in orbit, interfering with telescopes, and regularly falling into the atmosphere. Also, there's a significant cost to maintaining this system, and its total bandwidth capability is limited.

No, we won't. It would be easier and cheaper to replace them with microwave links or something like that. Satellites are always more expensive, limited in power, harder to fix, and unlikely to ever match the capacity of underwater cables.

I think microwaves could be jammed too. The safest solution is probably to run the cables over the Øresund Bridge and the future Fehmarn Belt tunnel, and then continue overland to Finland.

No because they would be point to point. Many parts of the phone network were connected via microwave links before fibre optic cables replaced them, as fibre carry much higher amounts of data.

No, even with Starlink lowering the latency to an acceptable level, there's no way to get anywhere near the total bandwidth of these cables with a satellite constellation, there's limits to how much you can transmit through the air (the biggest issue being there's limits to how tightly you can form beams from your satellite to a station on the ground, and those are quite large, so you ultimately can only get a certain bandwidth per square kilometer).

(This, BTW, is why Starlink isn't and will never be a true competitor to traditional ISPs in all but the most sparsely populated areas: they simply cannot support enough users to make a dent in most places)

There’s a devious ambiguity in this type of conflict. Is it an act of war? Sabotage? Accident? Negligence?

What kind of ambiguity? A ship with a Russian crew, registered in China.

I didn’t know it had a Russian crew. That’s pretty damning inmediately.

that this is a blithe, broad daylight incident, with no attempt at concealment or escape, means that it is a very specific.....response.....to something else....that we are not privy to some sort of spiders in a jar,geopolitical poker game turned grudge match

The result of the cable cut was essentially meaningless. I doubt there was intent to cut these specific cables.

https://labs.ripe.net/author/emileaben/does-the-internet-rou...

Another attempt to protect children from the internet? How thoughtful.

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