The Swedish cabin on the frontline of a possible hybrid war
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Has Sikorski made a "thank you" tweet to any suspected party?
Sweden is the country with most islands in the world, followed by Norway and Finland.
https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/which-countries-have-the...
I’m from Europe and when I saw the islands on the ferry to Helsinki’s from Stockholm I have to say I was amazed at the beauty so much so I’d love own property there now. Truly astonishing seeing kids on tiny row boats chilling on random rocks in the estuary
You cannot make a campfire, drive off-road, damage agricultural fields, cut down trees or damage trees (even the already fallen ones), go into pastures with cattle in them, and so on. Rule of thumb, don't bother the landowner, don't damage anything, and don't disrupt any of their income sources, including logging, fishing, agriculture etc. You can camp but if you want a campfire I suggest going to one of the designated camping areas; there's plenty of those too, even completely free log lean-tos and benches around a firepit and even free firewood hauled in, if you go remote enough.
And then there's protected areas, with stricter rules. For example, if a rare bird is known to nest on some specific island, you might not be allowed to go on that island at all.
But yes, if you're smart about it, you can camp almost anywhere.
It is a tricky subject because you can do a lot on other peoples land as long as you are respectful. I have no problems with people camping on my land especially when they are walking or cycling while car camping is illegal in most instances.
The section for Australia seems very broad: "Australia itself dominates the islands around its coastal fringe, which range in size from smaller rocks that are not covered by water at high tide to ..."
While it says the US has 18,617 islands, I struggle to find an official source for that very precise number.
I also see how https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Florida says "The U.S. state of Florida has a total of 4,510 islands that are ten acres or larger", suggesting that ten acres is the minimum sized used for "island" in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_of_Maine says "Maine is home to over 4,600 coastal islands, ranging from large landmasses like Mount Desert Island to small islets and ledges exposed above mean high tide."
Clearly these are not using the same definitions.
I managed to find the Global Islands data set at https://www.sciencebase.gov/catalog/item/63bdf25dd34e92aad3c... with an explorer at https://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/gie/ which should have exactly what I want, except 1) it only lists ocean islands, not inland ones, and 2) I can't figure out how to get the data by country.
It categories things as "Big Islands (greater than 1 km2), Small Islands (less than or equal to 1 km2 and greater than or equal to 0.0036 km2), and Very Small Islands (less than 0.0036 km2)." "There are 21,818 big islands in the database. The remaining 318,868 islands are all less than 1 km2 and are classed as small islands.'
I give up.
Is the threshold the same for all listed countries, or does it use each country's specific definition of "island"?
Is it all islands, or only ocean islands?
Canada's north is so vast that even unique features remain unnamed, such as the "Island in a Lake on an Island in a Lake on an Island".
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/85342/island-in-a-l...
> Sweden has 221,831 counted islands ... Though Sweden is the country with the most islands in the world, less than 1,000 of them are inhabited.
Thus, around 221,000 islands are counted as islands, even if not inhabited.
If "large enough to be inhabited" sets the minimum size for an island, then I present Just Room Enough Island - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Room_Enough_Island - at 310 square meters / 3,300 square feet.
The Wikipedia entry says that previously Bishop Rock at was formerly the smallest inhabited island, due to the lighthouse keeper living there.
Open up Google Earth and scan around northern coastlines of all these countries and you’ll laugh at the premise of this article.
With that said I wouldn’t be surprised if they have the most documented/counted islands. That’s another thing entirely and also sort of interesting I suppose.
The East Coast has more islands, but then you need to decide how you classify the river deltas. Is a bump in a brackish swamp an island or not?
On the other hand, Sweden has thousands of really small but also well-defined islands. They can be just several square meters in area, but they are well above the water and clearly separated from the main landmass.
Alaska has similar terrain, though.
Name search, Names search mode is "Exact Match", Feature Classes is "Island".
State (FIPS) of "California (O6)" gives 522 named places.
State (FIPS) of "Washington (53)" gives 422 named places.
Note that this list includes river and lake islands, including islands in reservoirs.
There are two islands named "The Island" in California, neither in Wikipedia, and the one at 41.0922983, -121.4803677 does not appear to be an island.
It'd be nice to quantify this somehow. I guess one metric would be "navigable rocky islands"?
Yes, it has races. They have little to do with sailing itself.
Sweden sure has a lot of islands I’d believe they are #1. It’s the +10x claim that seems suspicious.
Bit whatever, it’s a great place to sail/visit no matter how you count.
This isn’t the main weak point.
Undersea cables are the squiggly lines.
https://www.declad.com/falu-red-and-the-rise-and-fall-of-an-...
>During this time the Swedish Krona even moved from the gold to the copper standard.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/why-are-all-swedish-co...
https://falurodfarg.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/stockholm...
Can someone provide some context here because I dont understand what is going on here.
Just remove all that stuf and the article would be so boring that it would not be worth publishing.
It looks like a PR from the facility to ensure nobody forget to send more fundings next year.
Perhaps the "security through obscurity" was only a tonge in cheek remark and the area is full of hidden bear traps or something.
Thanks that makes a lot more sense. It is sad that is the way how government funding are worked around the world.
It's obscure to people like you and me who aren't interested in undersea cable sabotage. For a government entity they either already have this knowledge or have the means to obtain it quite easily.
Russia is being really stupid in my opinion. They are antagonizing a far superior military force. The nuclear risk is obvious, but it seems that Europe will have to escalate the conventional conflict in Ukraine with more direct action.
Europe has to do some "growing up" militarily. At least it appears that Finland and Poland have their act together
https://www.royalihc.com/offshore-energy/offshore-equipment/...
Someone needs to do an A/B test. (no not really)
It’s not the easiest terrain to bury anything in.
And it’s always hard to access or even see reliably.
If it does get damaged then repair would also be more expensive than current methods
But I think this is the point of the article - that we start thinking with “a wartime mindset”. Which is a shame, but maybe necessary given the state of the world.
That also would eliminate the plausible deniability of the ship that moved out of its main route, and could reduce the cut of communications to hours or minutes (instead days or weeks).
Just speculating
Maybe there’s something that Finland and Finnish ISPs could learn from the big providers? And from Ukraine how they moved everything critical into cloud?
The big cloud operators and service providers with their own backbones have redundancies on their network on multiple levels. Not just IP level but also on light path level. Giving them enough bandwidth that even with failure they don’t get congestion.
Finnish ISPs could build more connectivity even inland or higher up in the Gulf of Bothnia. But many of them haven’t as they have optimized for latency and not for redundancy.
Even Finnish government networks were shown during the COVID to be under provisioned, the. pan gateways didn’t handle remote work. And then one roadwork cut a cable next to the road it was shown that the redundant cables were in the same ditch. Service owner has just bought “redundant” connections and never confirmed it.
Even if you assume that enemies' intelligence already knows about it, then doesnt it just show that it doesn't work?
Or maybe it is just fake cabin?
Additionally, a journalist would probably (reasonably) argue that writing about it exposes just how little consideration governments give to protecting this infra.
Yeah, ever thought about why?
How do you do that facepalm emoji on HN?
Funnily enough, it's right next to a base of the Swedish military.
[1]: https://geokatalog.sjofartsverket.se/kartvisarefyren/
The dictators all told us to our face what they would do in their propaganda . Nothing overt, hidden or hybrid . We need the hawks back that won the cold war and we need those doves caged in their own delusions gone.