Would Starlink and other satellite ISP’s be able to mitigate some of the traffic?
Russia can’t take out all the “internet cables.” Presuming we’re talking about undersea cables, there are a fuckton of them. The logistics of taking out even a handful of those before the world takes action is beyond what Russia is capable of pulling off.
Even if they do manage to cut some, traffic would slow down, not stop. Then the cables would be repaired, and everyone would be more pissed at Russia than they already are.
It’s nothing more than bluff and bluster. It would be a minor setback for the world, and have huge downsides to Russia.
This. Russian subs can be sunk just as quietly as they can cut cables. This is an extremely stupid gambit.
All I needed to read is the threat was told by Medvedev. The guy constantly spews crazy shit
Fuck with the internet and millions of nerds with billions of hours of Call of Duty playtime will be very upset with you. I would not want to be on the other end of that rage.
…because they know how to swear in Russian?
Not just “more pissed”
Pissed off beyond all semblance of rational thought.
This would ABSOLUTELY start a war.
Not a very long one, as China and India would both be pissed…
That made me less happy. There’s 4 chokepoints they could use to seriously damage the “western internet”
The chokepoints still cover kilometers or more.
It’s not like all the cables were run at the same timeBut still, a lot easier than I thought.
Almost none of it.
The amount of data flowing through undersea cables around the world is insane compared to the inter-satellite links available.
That being said, a lot of data that you use as a consumer on a daily basis doesn’t pass through any undersea cable at all. It’s more of a business problem than an individual problem.
The majority of the websites or online services you access are locally hosted on your own continent. Netflix, Facebook, Amazon, etc. all have local servers. Even for video games, most of the traffic is local just due to lag issues caused by too much distance.
What would break? Banking and financial institutions transferring money to or from overseas institutions to complete investments and loans ,Communications (Like e-mailing or calling a factory in China from the US, or contacting your Grandma in Thailand), International shipping, Flight tracking, etc.
While the satellites could take over for some of that, what would likely happen is specific companies would bid up the price for that limited capacity, and less financially valuable uses like being able to look at the latest lemmy posts from European submitters wouldn’t work.
I think you’re greatly underestimating how many non large corporations just host their shit in US-East 1.
how many non large non US corporations
Still a lot… More than you would imagine.
I am quite confident the person you’re replying to was not disagreeing with you
Yeah, I think you’re right actually. Non-large, and non-US.
Wouldn’t you think video streaming would be the first to go? Also music and podcasts. First in line is critical things like banking, credit cards, etc. It’s actually convenient that the most important things are the smallest data size. The problem I see is that so many companies are putting everything on the cloud.
You have to remember that the cloud is just a series of data centers owned by cloud providers. If you are Netflix, you’re not hosting Stranger Things for audiences in the US from the EU. You have a copy of it in both places and leverage AWS regions in each area to server geographically closer users (it’s typically called latency based routing). If the undersea cables are cut, the EU still watches Netflix because the content doesn’t need to travel undersea, it’s already in the EU, same thing in the US. The challenge comes in at the end of the month when people pay their Netflix bills and the banks needs to process international payments. End users are largely not impacted by direct service outages but big companies are.
Beautiful redundancy. My one true love
I suppose:
1a. that’d be a lot of cables to take out
2b. many cables are terrestrial
3c. Putin would tick off other BRICS members and other countries
4d. ship-to-ship—maybe get some airplanes and balloons involved
5e. American Navy attacks Russian vessels cutting cables, and Biden tells Putin to stop this folly
That is a curious enumeration strategy
The US has been able to send bandwidth via laser beam long distances for a while. I wonder if they could set up a network this way to bypass any bad cables. Even if only while they are being repaired.
Not across oceans though. Earth is curved.
Even without curvature, there’s way too much atmospheric interference for that. Laser communication works well in space where there is literally nothing in the way, including ajr. Even point to point microwaves only kind of work on earth.
Some short waves seem to be good a penetrating clouds, so some transmission is possible.
Sure sure, next you’ll say birds are real!
Come off it, nobody’s saying that.
I know, what if we put lasers on the birds!
Not just curved, but curved quite substantially, despite what your eyes may tell you. At eye level on a flat plain you can only see about 3 miles due to the curvature. The closest points across the Atlantic are 1,770 miles apart.
At 10 meters, line-of-sight is over 10 km.
From a jet traveling at 1 km, line-of-sight is over 100 km.
We’ll just curve the lasers then.
I’ll get my wrench then
Not across oceans though. Earth is curved.
Lasers work really well in space for secure sat-to-sat data links, but are a lot less viable on Earth’s surface due to diffraction and weather, nevermind the limits of the visible horizon for any height of a communications tower. For pretty much any scenario where laser comms would be considered, microwave RF links would likely be just as good, cheaper, and more commonly deployed and understood by telecom engineers. The only exception is when absurdly high bandwidths are needed, which is where lasers rule.
But using RF links across thousands of kilometers of oceanic waters? For that, you must construct additional pylons on floating islands to repeat the signal. Otherwise, the only RF signals that could reach land would be too low frequency to carry much bandwidth.
For reference, when the German Aerospace Center (DLR) set the world record in 2016 for free-space optical communications, they achieved 1.72 Tbits/sec over a distance of 10.45 km. Most optical systems observe a bandwidth/distance relationship, where at best, shooting the signal farther means less available bandwidth, or more bandwidth if brought closer. This is a related to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, since the limiting factor is optical noise.
So if 1.72 Tbits/sec at 10 km is the best they achieved in free air in 2016, then that pales in comparison to the undersea fibre cables of 2006, where a section of the SHEFA-2 Scottish-Faroese cable runs unamplified for 390 km and moves 570 Gbits/sec aggregate.
In short, free-space lasers are fast and long-distance. But lasers within fibre cables are much faster and cover even longer distances. They’re not even in the same league.
A cable-cutting war will be absolutely devastating to the global economy. It’s the modern equivalent of Mutually Assured Destruction. There are few viable contingency plans.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
You’re not emphasizing the MAD part of it enough.
Russia’s threats are all thermonuclear, fuck everyone, we’re all going to die, kind of threats.
Nukes being the first, then they were saber rattling about satellite destruction, now under sea cables.
But go ahead and watch Russia cut an undersea NATO cable and suddenly have the entirety of NATO bearing down on them for starting a war. Or watch them start shooting down satellites and ruin the ability to put anything in space at all including their own positioning and communications systems and make them a pariah to literally every country on earth that might need a satellite for something.
Russia is not strong enough domestically to do much of anything. They are certainly not strong enough domestically to thrive on their own, and literally all the cards they have to play end with the entire world turning against them.
I say this as a telecom wonk: hope and pray and vote so that war never comes.
All the more reason to support piracy.
Piracy has nothing to do with global supply chains crashing.
Gonna need something to watch while the world burns.
How ya going to download anything from servers outside of your country if the connection was cut?
… That’s what he’s implying, download it illegally ahead of time.
Dammit, alright I’ll buy an ssd
Buy 24x8TB HDD’s instead. 🤣
Time to implement RFC 1149.
And a new protocol “BirdTorrent” 😁
Everyone is talking about this like it would be a snow day or something.
You’re right - it would be a catastrophe. I think companies that could function in any way without offshore servers of some kind would be a rarity.
The question is, exactly how much impact could Russia have. Enough that we couldn’t route around it? Probably not.
I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
Which actually works against Putin since that means his troll farms also get cut off, meaning less new material for the useful idiots to keep other useful idiots freshly indoctrinated with.
his troll farms also get cut off Why don’t we already have a hardware firewall for this?
Because generally where the West can extend their communications the people tend to provoke change for the better.
Cutting Russia off entirely for the troll farms is locking Russians into a Russian curated echo chamber, or a least doing that to an even worse extent than Putin is already trying to do himself.
I’m pretty sure it would result in the US internet being isolated from the rest of the worlds’
except for most of North and South America.
South America probably uses sea cables.
cables which might need be only a few 100 km long and remain in territorial waters.
(thanks for the WP link. 🙂)
Yeah, fair
I would imagine that it would be equally devastating to Putin to cut the cables as it would be to anybody else. I want to believe that he’s bluffing, trolling everybody to get their attention and reactions.
The comments are from June. If they were going to do it, they’d have done it by now
Mid year 2018, maybe it was 2019, there was a massive internet outage. Closest guesstimate to the causes was a truck with their boom up ran through an intersection clipping fiber and power lines, and a fiber bundle was accidentally cut in a separate incident, this was all state side. Internet went down for nearly every ISP, services dead, country wide it was found we don’t have redundancy like we thought. You see, when internet lines are built out, the lines are divided up to different owners and leases, those third parties sell backup internet services to major isp’s, but no one was checking if the backup was running across the same infrastructure at any point, sales was selling, and the backup lines worked and we never had a full bundle break previously that was carrying main and backup bundles. When this outage happened, it hit Russia as well. Russia had an internet outage because of 2 bunlde breaks in the US. This tells me they are linked to the US network, and might infact be capable of doing multiple nefarious activities that made use of the wide open hole we had in our infrastructure. Now I don’t know if our infrastructure was patched, they kept that above most peoples pay grade. But the weakness was there, and it was on display to the entire world plain as day. They could either poison our networks/DNS/routing tables/etc with their high-speed connections, or just use it as a heartbeat to see the success of internet based attacks.
By internet based, I meant attacking the internet itself, not attacking thru the internet, my mistype
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Something like 1% of internet traffic is by satellite…
Basically none. The satellite link isn’t getting traffic directly between you and the server you are reaching - the satellite just relays the data to the nearest ground station that then uses the normal fibre network to get the rest of the way.
Even if you managed to reconfigure starlink to be a peering network rather than an access network, you’d still have the issue that the starlink network as a whole has orders of magnitude less bandwidth than even one under sea cable
They’re not going to take out the internet lol. At least if you’re not in Ukraine that is.
oddly enough i think the internet would have to behave in a federated way
content would need to be cached in connected areas and we would need to optimize use of the satellite connections to propagate content between federated islands
It would give them (satellite internet providers) a boost if the cable cutting were continuosly occurring to a point of crippling then they may turn back the clock to what they have in military installations that’s an Intranet a closed network but closed because they choose for it to be it doesn’t actually have to be if they host large servers in areas that work on a local area connection (LAN) either and/or WIFI joined together and users connect to those servers to effectively use in effect a home made custom internet (Intranet) you could have frontend user interfaces to allow you pick and choose services or a search engine and or a file sharing server etc etc, you could even use banking apps just closed networked together, you could ramp that up by using large scale wifi and or satellite dish style relays or large antenna array equivelencies of such a thing capable of sending out the signal across an entire country and possibly beyond that…in fact theoretically it would be far safer to do that than having the current setup we usefor internet over undersea cables and so on in terms of outside access being denied, provided encryption was extremely high p2p end to end as well, it would be a case of if the owner says no then you don’t get in unless they want you to, at that stage unless your in the country on site physically thre in person to incercept the transmitted data and break the code to access it, then you can’t use it thus international countries cannot communicate or attack on it or inside of it and most certainly not entire building fulls of hackers any way, the serve3r providers would simply just transmit the data outbound to other countries as and when required not feed everything as in all communications through cables that every person can physically cut or attack out at sea or in some building in some on other continent it would prevent data being intercepted for the most part and lower infrastructure related hacks taking place and or working achieving success would be far lower than ever before. . The speeds would be confined to the relays speed and your connecting devices bandwidths as well so potentially ultra fast as well if the hardware improved further in time, that’s alsio a way of loosing cables in ocean’s for good doing that at the same time theoretically. It will not happen though, the world would say “enough’s enough” before that stage of cable destruction were remotely possible to achieve by the Russian’s
I think most of our critical ones are in the Atlantic. And I don’t think China would be too happy with them taking them out in the Pacific.
Won’t do this cause it’ll hurt em friends Marc, Elon and Donald too.
A large amount but at 500ms+ latency it might as well be useless for most applications.
if by “most” you mean “a scant few applications that can’t tolerate it” then sure. US to Germany pings are currently ~120ms. Not many things that can’t tolerate 500ms outside of gaming.
Rather than number of unique applications, I meant amount of traffic when I said “most.”
Stock exchanges, some but not all streaming services, gaming, and any form of direct human communication over internet would be heavily impacted. It could also potentially increase frequency of timeouts during authentication attempts which would make everything else slightly more annoying to use as well.
