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

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

This rule was broken last year and it will happen again with more and more frequency.

https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/content/purposes-and-prin... : "prohibits the threat or use of force and calls on all Members to respect the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of other States".

The post-WW2 peace structure was built around a prohibition on aggressive war and sub-war violations of the integrity of other states. This hasn't always held, and once we get into a situation where there are state-power-but-not-a-state actors involved (who are by definition not part of the UN!) things get messy.

I do think the US breach of this principle by invading Iraq did a colossal amount of damage to this principle, both morally and practically in that the collapse of the (repressive) Iraqi state caused the rise of non-state groups which destabilized Syria. The collapse of Yemen has been going on for a while with very little caring from outside, and now it's a venue for the proxy war between Iran and everyone else in the area (mostly Israel, but also Saudi).

It's also an easy mistake to blame everything on the US and Israel; there are a lot of different groups looking to seize various sorts of power in various places at gunpoint, with varying outside backers with varying levels of control.

There was even at one point indirect cooperation between the US and Iran to defeat the only group that was an even worse influence on the stability of the region than either of them: ISIS. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/us-iran-forced...

There are a couple of differences:

1. the sheer number of cables today makes an individual - or even several - cuts far less dramatic.

2. there's likely still a perceived difference between a nation-state being seen to openly take responsibility for cutting cables, and terrorist groups doing so.

It's still an interesting chang (and everyone should read Mother Earth Mother Board), and you're probably still right it will happen more often, and things could escalate very quickly.

3 is a nuisance, but the Red Sea route cuts thousands of miles and according latency between Europe and South Asia - Africa is big and both the African and direct Eastbound overland routes have all kinds of "challenges". If more of them are cut, expect a drastic escalation.

Wouldn’t it be almost impossible to assign blame? The ocean is big and submarines are not easy to find. Maybe if you had other evidence like SIGINT?
It’s not like a nuclear war because it’s easy to blame it on a dragging ship Anker or whatever.
I am in South Asia and some Europe bound traffic goes though US and Japan now.
wow
Seacom has confirmed to some press outlets service issues (though they have not said anything about a cause):

> Telecoms provider SEACOM suffered an outage on its subsea cable system over the weekend.

> The disruption is affecting the segment of the cable that runs from Mombasa (Kenya) to Zafarana (Egypt), SEACOM said in a statement.

* https://itweb.africa/content/WnxpE74YRQjMV8XL

> Seacom, one of Africa's leading undersea communications systems and fiber network operators, has suffered a disruption to its connectivity services as a result of breakage on a segment of its cable lining in the Red Sea.

> Confirming the incident, the company says other cables around the area have been damaged as well but has not been able to pinpoint the cause. Seacom's East African cable system, which runs from Mombasa in Kenya to Zafarana in Egypt, went down.

* https://www.benjamindada.com/seacom-cable-damage-red-sea/

* https://techcentral.co.za/seacom-is-down-in-the-red-sea/2402...

This is one of four that are apparently damaged:

> The first reports of damage to submarine cables off the coast of Yemen began emerged on Monday morning, with Israeli news outlet Globes claiming that four cables (EIG, AAE-1, Seacom and TGN-EA) had experienced damage. Seacom has reportedly confirmed damage to a cable it operates on a stretch between Kenya and Egypt.

* https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/27/red_sea_cables_houthi...

A map of their network at:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SEACOM_Global_Network.png

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEACOM_(African_cable_system)#...

Maybe too tangential, but here is my question anyways:

Is there a project that tries to build (using Raspberry Pis for example, or an app on a smartphone) a second global network of privately run nodes. The most similar project I can think of was the Fon project [1] where you would purchase a Fon box and share internet access with all other Fon users. Sort of an organised wifi hotspot club.

But, what I'm thinking about is more something that would just need electricity (vs electricity + ISP) and be running more like a big LAN. Everything would be P2P on it, from DNS to hosting. I think some federated systems could work almost just the same on it but possibilities (and speed) would be very limited.

With all the conflicts and natural disasters happening world wide I've been thinking more and more about ways to still be connected to others through something that would be more P2P even hardware wise.

I know internet (arpanet) started by trying to be just what I describe, but we all know now that it's not how it works anymore with some big centralisation points along the stack.

Is what I'm describing the "infamous" Web3? The few hazy definitions I read don't make it sound like it.

Anyways, if anybody knows any project that ressembles my poor explanation, I'm all ears as I'd like to get on board an promote it.

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

I think you’re looking for community mesh networks.

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

People have tried, but they’re hard — and TLAs tend to show up. (At least from stories I heard; before my time.)

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

But they’re doing a crypto one too — maybe that’ll work better.

https://www.helium.com/

There’s also a HAM radio option.

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

If you’re okay with just text communications, the meshtastic project is also an option. Because it uses LoRa for communications, nodes can be further apart. As a bonus, it allows for encrypted [1] communications as it doesn’t use licensed spectrum. But, LoRa is a low bandwidth technology (or at least meshstatic is), so text is about all you’d get. But it works with pretty cheap components.

[1] I’m not sure if the algorithm has been vetted or not.

Nodes are useless without links. And links over distance are harder than people think.
If the internet were to go down, experts (perhaps like yourself) would definitely work on building local IP networks for their local communities. The cool thing is that with P2P tech like BitTorrent, you can have edge nodes connected to multiple such networks at once. Edge nodes can then download a torrent from one network, then seed it on all connected networks.

Wireless mesh networking also exists but is complex, unreliable, slow and high-latency. Not to mention there isn't an established standard like there is IP/TCP/UDP.

How can they even technically achieve that? You need to locate the exact location and drop some charges at presumably fairy deep depths Are these cables accessible by divers?
Why make it complicated. You pull an anchor along the bottom of the ocean and cut the cable.

It was commonplace where I grew up on an island, that our telephone line were cut by accident. Happened like 2 times in 15 years.

Bab-el-Mandeb strait is quite shallow, deepest part is only 310 m, with less than 200 m average depth.
I don’t know enough to speak to the geopolitical issues, but from a technical aspect, repair of this won’t be cheap or fast.
Why? An honest question, I thought undersea cable repair is a common, straightforward procedure.

In this case the repair ship might need some air defense, but US or UK could easily provide that.

Even more so if you have houdis drones buzzing around.
These incidents are interesting due to because of how people like to assign blame or not.

Nordstream 2? Of course it was Russians despite how illogical it was.

This cable? No way the Houthis despite them saying they would attack them.

The prejudice is interesting.

Nothing illogical, Russia had been limiting supply due to supposed technical reasons for months before, with a clear intention to empty European/German reserves. Look at the charts of gas flows and storage prior to the war and the literally hindreds or news articles on this.
Maybe because the Houthis clearly stated that all their efforts are linked to the Gaza conflict.
I'm 50/50 on whether Nordstream 2 was Russia or someone opposed to Russia because Russia's response to it has been indistinguishable from its usual disinfo dance when trying to shift blame for something they have done. I don't think it made strategic sense but neither did invading Ukraine (and especially not right before the start of mud season).

I thought with the cable the general objection to the Houthis having done it is that they're too incompetent to pull it off. I'm inclined to believe the Houthis did it as they could have literally done it by accident at this point.

It would benefit a budding satellite ISP to suddenly have a critical “land line“ in an active war zone severed and their long term sustainability questioned.
Are you implying that starlink cut the cable or am I misunderstanding you?
I suppose a proxy war between the westand Iran via Yemen is inevitable for 2025 now. Why they would piss of China and India as well I have no idea. US will see more internet traffic now which is nice for the US. Maybe they want to ambush the slow repair vessels that will have to come that way? It can take them a couple of months at times to arrive. There isn't a whole lot of them, they cost in the 100's of millions to construct as well.
What did they hope to accomplish by making the world slightly worse?
People at war causing damage to the infrastructure of their enemy isn't that surprising really
Not everyone agrees that "widely available internet" is a good thing.

CF "starlink for russia"

Well, the world (specifically, the USA and Britain) is currently dropping bombs on "them". Surely you would expect that "they" might be a bit upset about "their" people getting blown to pieces and may wish to return the favor somehow?
Who is "they"? Cite your sources and show your work.
Sounds like the sources of financing need some kinectic disincentive as well
The CIA have nothing to do with this.
Funny, the same thought is what's motivating the Houthis.
This really makes China look weak.
Wonder if the Spaceship will allow Musk to send up a serious satellite-based backhaul option. Sounds like there'll be some money to be made there, perhaps sooner than anticipated...
I think this might be the cleanest-looking, fastest news site I've ever seen.

It's Israeli obviously, but shame that despite the name implying it might have a wider outlook it does seem to be Israel/Israeli business focussed.

Lets just quickly blame someone and then make the investigation inconclusive.
If you can't see this is a false flag from Israel and/or the US, I have a bridge to sell to you.