[HN Gopher] The Dunant subsea cable
___________________________________________________________________
The Dunant subsea cable
Author : johannesboyne
Score : 232 points
Date : 2021-02-04 12:55 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cloud.google.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (cloud.google.com)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| " enough to transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress
| three times every second" the engineer in me: compressed? With
| images? Or just raw texts?
| andreasley wrote:
| From 2016: "THE LOC'S DIGITAL COLLECTION currently comprises
| over 7 petabytes (7 million gigs) with more than 15 million
| items, including 150,000 print books. In an ideal future
| scenario, the LOC estimates that it could digitize a further
| 3-5 PB a year" [1]
|
| So only the raw texts, probably. 10TB sounds about right for
| that.
|
| [1] https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-
| library-...
| ksec wrote:
| I know a lot is focusing on the Bandwidth. But are we making any
| progress on Long Distance Subsea Cable using Hollow Core Cable,
| achieving close to maximum speed of light for theoretical lowest
| latency possible? Imagine cutting latency from West Coast US to
| Hong Kong by 50ms!
|
| Light is only traveling at around 2/3 of speed within Fibre.
|
| The previous decades have been around Bandwidth. Is time we shift
| out focus to latency. 5G is already part of that , and 6G is
| further pushing it as standard feature. I wish other part of
| network start thinking about Latency too.
|
| May be not network, but everything. From out input devices to
| Display. We need to enter the new age of Minimal Latency
| Computing.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| My bet is on tech like Starlink with inter-satellite
| communication. Starlink should have lower latency with space
| lasers compared to fiber.
| xoa wrote:
| OP is talking about photonic bandgap fiber I think, or
| perhaps another kind of photonic-crystal fiber. At any rate,
| whereas in regular fiber guiding light via differences in
| refractive index the speed of light is only about 70% c,
| photonic bandgap fiber can reach something like 99.7% c,
| which is close enough to c in vacuum as to essentially
| eliminate the difference vs a free space EM link
| (particularly for space-based ones which face an extra
| minimum RTT distance penalty). Last I checked though 3-4
| years ago they needed fairly frequent repeaters, were harder
| to mass produce, etc.
|
| I don't know of any being deployed long distance, though in
| principle they'd be really valuable for intercontinental
| backbones. Starlink fills a huge gap in existing infra, and
| there are places that won't see any sort of fiber, let alone
| fancy microstructured fiber, for the foreseeable future (or
| ever, obviously in the case of ships/aircraft). But the
| bandwidth isn't great. Each current sat does I think 20 Gbps,
| and though no doubt that'll increase over time that's
| literally orders of magnitude from this single cable alone.
| Having the sats support direct ground optical links for
| backbone usage might be interesting someday, but weather
| attenuation will never stop being a problem with that.
| Starlink is filling in the gaps for fiber infrastructure, not
| replacing it. They're complementary.
|
| So I agree it would be great to see more advanced fiber
| deployed long distances and start to shrink latency for
| everyone, and interesting to know what technical obstacles
| remain if any (maybe a lot remain?). A 40% speed boost while
| still having massive bandwidth isn't nothing.
| baybal2 wrote:
| Now...
|
| How do you splice a hollow optic fibre?
| m_eiman wrote:
| Won't they be at low enough altitude that they'll need more
| hops than fiber to get around the globe, where each hop adds
| at least some delay?
| 0xffff2 wrote:
| When you're traveling at the full speed of light in vacuum,
| compared to 2/3rds in fiber, even a few extra hops can
| leave you with significantly lower latency.
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| Right, if they are using standard OTN framing, the hop
| latency should be ~3 microsecond (which is <1km of light
| propogation)
| xoa wrote:
| Not sure what you mean by "hops" here? The current beta
| sats mostly act as "bent pipes", where they relay directly
| between user terminals and ground stations which then go to
| out to the regular net from there. But the final deployment
| sats are intended to have free space optical links between
| satellites (these are currently deployed and testing on the
| most recent polar orbit ones), so a connection can go
| entirely through the mesh in space until it reaches the
| nearest physical ground station (probably with some
| weighting for congestion and priority of course). The
| orbital RTT penalty will only be paid once, and with tens
| of thousands of sats the optical route will actually be
| much more direct for many people when crossing oceans than
| going through whatever undersea fiber links there are.
| Compared to regular fiber, final Starlink will definitely
| win on latency over sufficient distances.
|
| But Starlink will never match the bandwidth and reliability
| that fiber can do, nor is it meant to. So it's not a
| replacement, just another awesome option.
| xoa wrote:
| Also just to run the math on an example for "actually be
| much more direct for many people when crossing oceans":
| say someone is somewhere on the southern coast of Alaska,
| be it more towards King's Cove or back towards Newhalen,
| and want to talk to someone in Sapporo Japan. As the bird
| flies that's something like a 2500-3000 mile distance.
| But in practice there is no undersea cable direct linking
| Alaska and Asia (unless that's changed in the last year
| or two). Instead a connection probably has to go to
| Anchorage, then to Seattle, then probably to Tokyo, and
| then out to the rest of Japan from there. This could
| easily turn a 2500 mile path into a 7300 mile path.
| Starlink satellites in the current plan AFAIK are going
| to heavily be in shells 214 to 350 miles high (including
| Ku/Ka band current ones and future V-band ones). At 350
| mi orbit, so maybe a 700-1000 mile up/down penalty, total
| distance could still be half the cable distance in this
| example, even before latency advantages.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Starlink satellites are in orbit 550km high. So any journey
| would add at least 1100km. Moreover not sure that a single
| satellite would be able to hit another one across
| transpacific distances and may need to go through multiple
| hops to get there.
|
| Each hop will add latency since signal needs regeneration. So
| it's not clear to me a swarm of satellites is a real winner
| from a latency POV. Furthermore, given costs to put the
| constellation up there, it's extremely expensive on a $/bit
| basis and not sure how it could compete against fiber.
|
| The value of Starlink is providing service in areas lacking
| existing broadband infrastructure where the cost to provide
| service exceeds the cost of Starlink.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Are you sure about the necessary regeneration? Let me hand
| wave from the dark skies here for a moment:
|
| 1.) Think of the precision mirrors in the so often
| mentioned EUV-lithography equipment from ASML for latest
| generation chips from TSMC.
|
| 2.) Now imagine something like that on board of a
| satellite, maybe smaller.
|
| 3.) Have 2.) moveable with sufficient precision to bounce
| the rays from satellite to satellite in realtime, without
| having to regenerate them in any way for about 4 to 5 hops.
|
| 4.) problem solved by purely 'optical' mesh while signal is
| 'in orbit'.
|
| _kthxbaiiii!_
| morei wrote:
| Those 'precision EUV mirrors' achieve a reflectance of
| about 70% i.e. they aborb ~30% of the EUV light that
| reaches them. :)
|
| More seriously, those mirrors are special because they
| use bragg reflectors to handle 13.5nm light. They're not
| special for their precision, nor their reflectance.
|
| Setting that aside, the major problem with your proposal
| is that laser still have significant bream spreading. So
| the mirrors would need to be large enough to encompass a
| spread beam at every step, which adds weight and volume
| for both the mirror and the tracking mechanism. The
| tracking mechanism is particularly problematic because
| moving mass on a satellite affect the attitude, so you
| either need precision counterweights to null it out, or
| large reaction wheels.
|
| Using MEMS mirrors instead would solve some of the mass
| issues, but MEMS mirrors have very limited tracking
| (typically limited to a single axis) which would probably
| render them impractical.
|
| Far, far easier to just send and receive the signal at
| every step.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| While an interesting idea, I think you've greatly
| understated the problem. First, lasers and coherent light
| beams diverge, light cannot stay perfectly collimated and
| it's not really possible to collimate well over such long
| distances. So the receiver, >10,000km away, will "see"
| only a small cross-section of beam. The efficiency of
| this is defined by something called the overlap integral
| between the areas of the beam and the detector. Think of
| it like the amount of light from a flashlight that gets
| through a pinhole in a sheet of paper. This reduces the
| available signal power significantly. If you introduce
| mirrors you have the mirror loss plus the vignetting
| losses for each bounce. This is likely much worse.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| But the reciever won't be be > 10,000km away in the
| configuration I mentioned. 4 to 5 'hops', remember?
|
| edit: arrgh, forget it... one beam, reflected multiple
| times until 'end of the line', got it...(sigh)
| ballenf wrote:
| So slightly concave mirrors?
| mrtnmcc wrote:
| >> Starlink satellites are in orbit 550km high. So any
| journey would add at least 1100km
|
| Might want to check with Pythagoras on that one..
| ptudan wrote:
| Meh, he said at least. There could be cases where you
| beam up then down nearly vertically (same city).
| jamessb wrote:
| But the correct statement is "no more than" not "at
| least".
|
| Consider a right-angled triangle with base length d and
| height 550, corresponding to transmission from a base-
| station to a satellite. The hypotenuse has length
| sqrt(d^2 + 550^2), so the difference in length between
| the hypotenuse and base is sqrt(d^2 + 550^2) - d.
|
| This has a maximum of 550 when d=0 (i.e., shooting
| straight up), and _decreases_ as d increases: https://www
| .wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+sqrt%28d%5E2+%2B+...
|
| Alternatively, consider the triangle inequality: the sum
| of the lengths of any two sides must be greater than or
| equal to the length of the remaining side. This directly
| implies that the difference in length between the
| hypotenuse and base is less than or equal the height
| [base + height >= hypotenuse implies height >= hypotenuse
| - base].
| imoverclocked wrote:
| Are all base stations directly underneath a satellite?
|
| I think this is an over-simplification if we are chasing
| pedantics; There are cases where it will be more and
| others less so the slightly more precise wording might
| actually be "about 1100km."
|
| To the larger picture: it seems we often lose that order
| of length on the ground due to existing network
| topologies and geographical limitations.
| jamessb wrote:
| Yes, this is an oversimplification: the original
| statement seemed to be based on getting a fact about
| trigonometry backwards, and I was just trying to resolve
| the underlying confusion.
| sliken wrote:
| Er, no, "the difference in length between the hypotenuse
| and base is sqrt(d^2 + 550^2) - d".
|
| The hypotenuse is cos(angle)*base.
|
| If you think about it at a minute if a sat is 500 miles
| up directly overhead that's the closest it ever will be,
| as it flies off the hypotenuse gets longer, not shorter.
|
| So ideally you bounce off a sat overhead, (distance of
| 1100), any single hop will be longer, and to get across
| an ocean you'll likely need more than one hop.
|
| Basically the sin(beam path) will will never be less than
| 550 and the length of the beam will never be less than
| 550.
| jamessb wrote:
| ~~D'oh - yes, that formula is true only if the triangle
| is right-angled, which is true for only a single base
| length.~~
|
| Edit: Actually, this is always true: we are considering a
| right-angled triangle where the base is the horizontal
| distance from the ground station to point under the
| satellite, the vertical part is the 550 miles between the
| point under the satellite and the satellite, and the
| hypotenuse is the line joining the satellite and ground
| station.
|
| > if a sat is 500 miles up directly overhead that's the
| closest it ever will be, as it flies off the hypotenuse
| gets longer
|
| Yes: as the horizontal distance d increases, then the
| length of the hypotenuse (sqrt(d^2 + 550^2)) increases.
|
| However, the _difference_ between this and the horizontal
| distance (sqrt(d^2 + 550^2) - d) _decreases_.
|
| -----------------------------------------------
|
| If the angle from the horizontal to the line between the
| satellite and base-station is theta, then:
|
| sin(theta) = 550/hypotenuse => hypotenuse =
| 550/sin(theta)
|
| tan(theta) = 550/base-length => base-length =
| 550/tan(theta)
|
| difference in length = 550/sin(theta) - 550/tan(theta)
|
| [which simplifies to 550 tan(theta/2)]
|
| We are interested in angles between 0 degrees (horizontal
| - corresponding to the limiting case of infinite
| horizontal distance between the satellite and base
| station) and 90 degrees or pi/2 radians (straight up): ht
| tps://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=plot+550%2Fsin%28x%29
| +...
|
| This is always between 0 and 550. The triangle inequality
| holds: for _a single hop_ from base-station to satellite,
| the increase in length is never more than 550.
|
| But as you point out, there may also be multiple hops.
|
| > So ideally you bounce off a sat overhead, (distance of
| 1100),
|
| This is the shortest total ground-satellite-ground
| distance, but as you cover 0 horizontal distance it is
| the worst case: the difference between the ground-
| satellite-ground distance and the length of the direct
| ground-ground line is maximised.
| function_seven wrote:
| So, "at most" then, right?
|
| The further you are from the other end, the less
| additional distance the satellite adds on.
| idlewords wrote:
| You gotta bore for that sweet latency win. A chord tunnel
| between San Francisco and Hong Kong would save 1300 miles (20%
| improvement right there), and if you drill it straight enough,
| you won't even need a cable.
| m463 wrote:
| > if you drill it straight enough, you won't even need a
| cable.
|
| Well, yes and no. I recall they wanted to pursue hollow
| cables in the early days of optical cabling, but it turned
| out solid fiber was the answer.
|
| (sorry, can't find a good reference)
|
| So FTTC (Fiber Through The Core) is what you want.
| [deleted]
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Alameda enterprises excited by rumours of new chord tunnel
| Thursday, low latency burrito delivery futures up 5%.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Currently posting from Alameda. If you cause a local surge
| in demand that means I have to outbid a Manhattanite for a
| good burrito, I will cut someone.
| idlewords wrote:
| We have the technology!
| simoneau wrote:
| And they are heated along the way!
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| Please don't give the HFT's ideas, they'll probably do it and
| cause a half dozen tsunamis in the process.
| potiuper wrote:
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-frequency-traders-push-
| clo...
| hinkley wrote:
| ...and create a supervolcano.
| [deleted]
| jeffbee wrote:
| Heh baby steps maybe? The existing cables aren't even short
| paths along great circles. The Oregon-Japan cable google owns
| is 12000 km along a 7500-km path.
| extropy wrote:
| Need to have lava shields for that.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Who cares? Would be totally worth it because of unlimited
| geothermal energy!
| idlewords wrote:
| The photons go through fast enough that they won't get very
| hot.
| bmcahren wrote:
| Remember: You want your photons crispy around the edges,
| not charred.
| samstave wrote:
| I only use recycled photons, so my light is green.
| leprechaun1066 wrote:
| I take my photons medium-rare.
| craftinator wrote:
| Not to make light of these puns, but they aren't very
| coherent...
| uticus wrote:
| Medium-rare with a light salad
| rorykoehler wrote:
| How deep would this bore tunnel be at the centre most point
| if it was perfectly straight? Would it go into the mantle?
| potiuper wrote:
| d=r(1/cos(s/(2r))-1)=3958(1/cos(6906/7916)-1)~=2198 mi;
| Yes, into the lower mantle with only 692 mi to go to the
| outer core. What I would love the internetz to explain is
| how to justify the h8 for HFT, yet the luv for Musk since
| he is the one in the driver's seat at the moment for this
| stuff with StarLink and the Boring company.
| samstave wrote:
| And tell me how one would service any problems that arise
| either by tectonic movements or breaching an
| alien/breakaway civilization hollow earth chamber?
| potiuper wrote:
| Repair it like any other tunnel that requires
| maintenance?
| koheripbal wrote:
| One of the important components of online hate is that it
| requires zero justification or logical consistency.
|
| It just needs to feel gratifying.
| wmf wrote:
| Because HFT helps the rich AF get richer but Starlink
| benefits normal people?
| potiuper wrote:
| Satellite internet already exists; StarLink's defining
| feature is lower latency both by being in a lower orbit
| and inter-satellite links. It does benefit consumers by
| introducing another satellite internet competitor, but
| how many "normal" people want to rely on satellite
| internet or, if they do, care about a few extra 100s of
| ms of latency? (Inter)-National wireless companies have a
| tendency to consolidate and lobby out smaller companies
| and municipalities who have less incentive to build out
| fiber and landline companies, if any, have further
| justification to cut cords. StarLink is the now the
| leading solution for global low latency connections for
| HFT by being in a near vacuum in low orbit. The case for
| HFT benefiting non-professional trader Mrs. Mainstreet is
| that she no longer has to eat the larger spread offered
| by the big bank market maker every pay cycle when the
| 401K contribution hits with HFTraders providing
| liquidity. The opportunity for smaller traders to make
| the market is no longer there, but the odds that they
| would had a chance to begin with have been stacked
| against them for a long time with the cost of the fastest
| connection being marginal to now near insignificant.
| Seanambers wrote:
| " care about a few extra 100s of ms of latency?"
|
| Well, as someone who grew up with in the modem era and
| was trying to play fps games. I cared quite a bit about
| latency. Normal people also like things to be quick you
| know :)
|
| Based on that experience in the 90s to this day i want my
| internet connectivity to be as fast as possible and i'm
| willing to pay.
|
| Low latency enables video/audio chat amongst other things
| and just a better experience.
|
| A quick google search gives 600 ms latency for
| satellites(not Starlink) thats quite a alot. Also
| bandwidth is a issue with existing providers i think.
| roomey wrote:
| We used to manage a remote branch over geo stationary
| satellite, it was an excersise in pain. We used to check
| the local weather forecast to see if it was raining
| before doing any work on the servers. Geo internet is
| awful, I think you are underestimating how much usability
| difference there would be between LEO and GEO latencies
| and bandwidth (because geo bandwidth was awful too)
| dekhn wrote:
| couldn't you start experiments using the Alameda-Weekhauken
| tunnel?
| thomaslangston wrote:
| More feasible would be transmitting neutrinos or some other
| signal that would not be blocked by the Earth.
| jxcl wrote:
| > More feasible
|
| If they don't interact with the thousands of miles of earth
| between the source and the destination, they probably also
| won't interact with the receiver! :p Imagine the
| retransmission rates!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_detector
| atonse wrote:
| And you'd also have to ignore all the insane amounts of
| noise coming from regular neutrinos wizzing about in the
| universe.
| parineum wrote:
| If you've built a reliable detector, you've already built
| something that can intercept them. You just need to make
| a shroud around your detector and a tube facing your
| transmitter out of the same material.
| cameldrv wrote:
| There has been a lot of progress in the past 20 years on
| antineutrino detection. Antineutrinos are produced by
| fission and so there's been a fair bit of interest in
| detecting them to detect covert nuclear tests as well as
| potentially a new modality of detecting nuclear
| submarines.
|
| I think it could become possible before too long to use
| this to transmit data. It would probably be a ~billion
| dollar project, but the HFT arbitrage market is
| essentially winner-take-all, and may be large enough to
| support this size investment.
| [deleted]
| sneak wrote:
| I agree, but we can start on our local machines first. Most of
| the latency of modern computers isn't related to the network.
| ksec wrote:
| Yes. Keyboard, Mousepad, Display, Sound, Graphics.
|
| I mean input lag [1] is easily 50ms. But some of them
| requires software changes. And _any_ thing software is
| expensive. The cost of this new Cable is _only_ $300M.
| Hardware innovation is getting faster and cheaper than
| Software.
|
| [1] https://danluu.com/input-lag/
| sunbum wrote:
| Latency reduction like that would mostly be relevant for
| traders.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| And games.
| elbac wrote:
| If anyone enjoys this topic, I would recommend reading "A Thread
| Across the Ocean: The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable" by
| John Steele Gordon.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| > will deliver record-breaking capacity of 250 terabits per
| second (Tbps) across the ocean--enough to transmit the entire
| digitized Library of Congress three times every second.
|
| Damn. Anyone else just agog at this figure?
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| It's not that much in the grand scheme of things. A couple of
| data centres will saturate the link easily.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Old timer story - years ago, Demon Internet (my old employer) was
| beginning to enter super-growth and wanted to really set itself
| up for trans-atlantic connections. So they decided to buy a T1 -
| 45Mbps link across the atlantic. Now it turns out that BT had
| only ever resold fractions of T1s - they had never actually had
| anyone want a whole one. And as such their sales commissions did
| not cap out.
|
| So, we rang up, a sales guy picked up the phone and got a million
| pound pay day, and resigned that evening.
|
| But our customers were happy so thats what counts :-)
| ASinclair wrote:
| Great story!
| john37386 wrote:
| T1 maximum speed 1.544 Mbps T3 is about ~45 Mbps
|
| Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| My memory is very hazy - too many beers in North London pubs
| far too many years ago to remember clearly :-0
| tinus_hn wrote:
| In internetworking a Tier 1 carrier is a carrier that is so
| interconnected other parties pay to receive traffic from
| them.
| zenexer wrote:
| T1 and Tier 1 are not the same thing.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| That's true. However at least in my memory back in the
| day people would call the 10 megabit directly connected
| university connections t1 lines, because of the tier 1
| thing.
| hazeii wrote:
| And it was probably an E3 (Uk/Europe is E1/E3, US/JP is
| T1/T3)
| morei wrote:
| E3 is ~34Mbps, so it probably wasn't. It's true that the
| E1/E2/E3 hierarchy is used outside the US, but links to the
| US can be either depending on carrier preference.
|
| The T1/T2/T3 and E1/E2/E3 hierarchies join at the STM-1
| level: An STM-1 can be subdivided as 4 x E3s or 3 x T3s.
|
| This means that on a EU<->US SDH link, an STM-1 can be
| demuxed into either E3s or T3s, so you can have both
| standards on the same fiber.
| squigg wrote:
| As a Future Sound of London fan, I was so proud to be an early
| Demon dial-up customer when they name-checked their email
| address on Demon on their ground-breaking ISDN radio
| transmission on Radio 1. (To be read in a monotone female
| delivery) "For further information, please access the following
| code ... F S O L .. ACK ... F S O L ... DEMON ... CO ... UK"
|
| Good times - they were a wonderful company, thank you
| bagpuss wrote:
| _For further information on any aspect of this broadcast
| contact PO BOX 1871. London W10 5ZL. Copyright has been
| retained in the sound and visual._
| crispyambulance wrote:
| The article says this cable uses SDM (space division
| multiplexing). Which, for fiberoptics, means that you have
| multiple fibers. Of course they HAVE TO put many wavelengths on
| each fiber, each wavelength carrying a signal.
|
| The "state-of-the-art" AFAIK is to use many wavelengths per
| fiber, each one carrying ~192 wavelengths each wavelength
| transporting at up to 100Gbps (this is known as DWDM).
|
| So so with SDM, you just have more fibers? So what? It seems like
| I am missing something here? Why is "SDM" the key concept rather
| than "DWDM"? Why not just say DWDM with 12 fiber pairs?
| aappleby wrote:
| I thought the same thing, but they really are sending N
| completely separate signals spatially separated at the
| transmitters, then deconvolving them (sort of) at the other
| end. Relies on very complicated structure inside the glass of
| the fiber.
| DoomHotel wrote:
| You can send spatially-separated signals down a single multi-
| mode fiber.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-53530-6
| crispyambulance wrote:
| That's interesting! But multimode fiber isn't feasible for
| thousands of kilometers? This is transatlantic. Wouldn't that
| have to be singlemode just for the distances involved?
| sp332 wrote:
| Even single-mode needs repeaters along the length of the
| cable to get across an ocean. I guess you could use
| multimode and a lot more repeaters, but that seems more
| expensive and more failure-prone.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| Yes, and the SDM as described in the nature article in
| parent^2, it would require a something far more complex
| than a repeater (which in most cases is actually just a
| purely optical amplifier).
|
| Current practice is to use erbium doped fiber amplifier
| or raman amp for boosting optical signal at long
| intervals for transoceanic runs. Given the complexity of
| spatial signal, I don't think a regular optical amplifier
| will work? I could be wrong, this tech is changing but
| submarine fiber-optics tech is necessarily conservative
| and slow moving.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| When I was first learning about fiber, graded-index
| multimode was the "hot new thing" with corning promising
| the modal-dispersion of single-mode fiber with the light-
| carrying capacity of multimode, which should reduce
| repeaters compared to either. Since these are single-mode
| fibers, I assume those promises were overstated?
| jisco wrote:
| It's not the case here. On their website, google states: ...
| Dunant is the first long-haul subsea cable to feature a 12
| fiber pair space-division multiplexing (SDM) design ...
|
| Multi-mode fibers are not feasible for long distance
| transmission. For long distance communications, using
| suggested approach, may be better to use multi-core fibers.
| lsllc wrote:
| TechCrunch story about this posted yesterday:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26017592
| Ironlink wrote:
| My Firefox Developer Edition (86) doesn't load the page
| completely, one of the resources (https://gweb-cloudblog-
| publish.appspot.com/api/w_v2/pagesByU...) has an untrusted
| certificate (SEC_ERROR_UNKNOWN_ISSUER). It is issued by "Cisco
| Umbrella Secondary SubCA".
| cr3ative wrote:
| It's issued by GTS CA 1O1 for me. Umbrella sounds like a
| security thing on your network: https://umbrella.cisco.com/
| kristjansson wrote:
| Turn off your work VPN!
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Sigh... Removed because people don't seem to want to see it.
|
| Not a big deal, but... _sheesh_. It 's not like it was a troll
| comment; just a relatively lighthearted poke.
| Schalter wrote:
| I don't get it.
|
| Whats the issue?
| tomerico wrote:
| Check the second link.
|
| On another note - the third link captures the back button and
| doesn't let you get back to hacker news (at least on mobile).
| What a shitty site.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Yeah...remember when SlashDot was Hacker News?
|
| How the great have fallen...
| eitland wrote:
| Here's a trick from the old days (works in all my mobile
| browsers[1]):
|
| long click the back button, a popup will show your
| navigation history and you can click the last link before
| entering the broken site.
|
| That said, the behavior is absolutely unacceptable.
|
| [1]: And in Firefox desktop you can also do this but I
| can't remember if it is long-click or right click.
| easton wrote:
| Is Google using this for consumer services
| (Gmail/Search/YouTube/Stadia) that don't run on GCP or is this
| only for GCP? If it's only for GCP, they are betting big, which
| is good.
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| Google uses gcp.
| easton wrote:
| For everything? I was under the impression they still ran all
| the big stuff on their internal cloud with Borg and all the
| other infrastructure tooling they built.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Yeah, you should think of it more like GCP runs on Borg,
| not the other way around, although the description is not
| perfect. Also Google's cloud services like Cloud Spanner
| and Cloud Bigtable run directly on Borg.
|
| What's terrifying is that Google described each of their B4
| sites as having 60tbps uplinks in 2017, growing at 100x per
| 5 years. So a 250tbps undersea cable is nice but when you
| think about it probably not enough to make intercontinental
| transfer too cheap to meter.
| nameless912 wrote:
| My understanding is that GCP is essentially selling off
| extra capacity in those data centers, so for example your
| VM running in GCP is scheduled by Borg under the hood. So
| it's more like GCP runs on Google, rather than Google
| running on GCP.
| comboy wrote:
| Anyone who has some clue wants to take a shot at what could be
| investment cost for such a cable?
| tgtweak wrote:
| No mention of latency improvements?
|
| Seems crazy since oversea transit (tcp & single-channel) is
| usually latency (or loss) bound.
|
| I would expect it's better than going over public transit and
| legacy subsea fiber, but it would have been useful to see some
| comparison tests between POPs.
| trollied wrote:
| I'm not sure how easy it is to increase the speed of light in
| glass without some sort of new breakthrough.
| tgtweak wrote:
| Not travelling through 20 routers in the process tends to
| help. Again it would be good to get a tangible idea of how
| much better this is vs just stating the obvious about peak
| theoretical throughput.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Google invests a lot in TCP congestion control, mainly through
| BBR. I believe they do bulk transfers with centrally-scheduled
| fixed-rate UDP transmission. I also assume they have better
| control of buffers, loss, and queueing algo's to
| prevent/control loss/drops.
| adriancooney wrote:
| Excellent related Ars Technica article related to deep-sea cables
| if you want to learn more: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2016/05/how-t...
| atonse wrote:
| Mother Earth Mother Board is one of my all time favorite
| articles, which chronicles the laying of a cable.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| dgritsko wrote:
| Another recommendation in this vein is Arthur C. Clarke's
| "How the World Was One", it provides some fascinating
| historical context for how we got to where we are today (or
| rather, where we were in 1992).
| jdkee wrote:
| For those of you who haven't read Neal Stephenson's Wired article
| on submarine cables from 25 years ago.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| manishsharan wrote:
| Oh dear! how is NSA going wiretap that ?
| capableweb wrote:
| This cable is not just to be used by Google right? Or am I
| misunderstanding something? Fundamentally, infrastructure should
| be publicly owned and then rented by companies to use it, in this
| case it seems like Google physically owns the cables and
| infrastructure which would be a massive waste.
| d1zzy wrote:
| Feel free to convince your government and fellow citizens to
| use tax money to pay for such infrastructure. Google laying
| down their own cable isn't stopping anybody from doing so.
| morei wrote:
| Why is it a waste? If Google has enough demand to fill the
| cable, then how is it waste?
|
| (And I assume that Google has enough demand: If it didn't, why
| would they build such a large cable?)
| ed25519FUUU wrote:
| I see a lot of these fiber lines pop up on tiny islands
| throughout the pacific. What's happening at these places? Are
| there people who work there and if so what are they doing?
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Tax evasion, err 'financial optimisation'.
| phuff wrote:
| This is a video from google about how laying undersea cables
| works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9R4tznCNB0 I've always
| wanted to know! Super cool!
| supernovae wrote:
| Is this why they're losing billions?
| jiveturkey wrote:
| Your comment is both snide and wrong. lovely combination. I
| will respond anyway.
|
| They are losing billions because they are paying for growth. It
| is the proper strategy.
| aynyc wrote:
| I know nothing of this type of engineering. How do you even start
| a project like this? Map the bottom of the ocean, figure out all
| the danger zones? What is the cost of doing something like this?
| jesuschroist wrote:
| While not being super technical, there is an interesting
| miniature "The First Word Across the Ocean" in the "Decisive
| Moments in History" book by Stefan Zweig. It tells the story
| and circumstances of how the first trans-atlantic cable (back
| then for telegraphs) was laid in the late 19th century.
| Schalter wrote:
| The funny thing is, that when you realise that they just lay it
| down on the sea floor and you start to think through all the
| potential issues with throwing a very thick special cable on
| the ocean, you will realize that it already just works as it is
| for a while.
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Pretty much, you do surveys, probably based on existing ocean
| floor sonography, and then contact out a cable to someone like
| NEC, TE SubCom, Huawei, etc... Load it up on a cable laying
| vessel, and use software like Makai Lay to optimally place the
| cable on the ocean floor. [This is the basic idea, I wouldn't
| treat this as an authoritative answer, I'm just loosely
| adjacent to this industry]
| chokeartist wrote:
| In nutshell you got it. The cost is basically just bend over
| and smile (not trying to be glib... it is HUGE).
| tyingq wrote:
| _" What is the cost of doing something like this?"_
|
| Their Oregon to Japan cable, 9000km and laid in 2016, cost
| $300M.
|
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2939316/googles-60tbps...
| sparsely wrote:
| That is at least 1 order of magnitude cheaper than I would
| have guessed. Mind boggling that it's cheaper to do that then
| buy like the 4th best meal delivery app in Canada or
| whatever.
| frabert wrote:
| Yeah that's what I was thinking too. It doesn't sound like
| money well spent, it sounds like a _bargain_ to me, like
| "you'd be stupid not to do it" cheap for something the size
| of Google.
| Cerium wrote:
| Indeed, California spent 20 times as much for a 3.5km
| bridge.
| tzs wrote:
| It's probably cheaper than people would expect because the
| long run across the deep ocean is a lot more
| straightforward than most people would expect.
|
| 1. For the deep ocean parts of the route, cables and
| associated equipment (such as repeaters) are simply spooled
| out from the back of the cable laying ship, to settle on
| the ocean floor.
|
| 2. For shallow waters, the cable is buried. This is done by
| dragging a plow along the bottom which cuts a furrow and
| puts the cable into it. The plow has an altitude control
| and a camera so that an operator on the ship can control
| it, and a magnetometer to check if the cable is properly
| buried behind it.
|
| 3. For areas where burying isn't practical but they
| anticipate ships will anchor, they use armored cable.
|
| For #1, the costs are going to be the cost to operate the
| ship while it slowly spools out the cable and the cost of
| the cable. For #3, same thing, but with more expensive
| cable. For #2 I'd expect it is similar, except the ship
| goes a lot slower (about 0.5 knots when using the plow,
| compared to about 5 knots when laying surface cable).
|
| Finally, there is this.
|
| #4. At the shores, they need to avoid damaging reefs and
| other habitats, not wreck the beach, and things like that.
| The cable needs to be in conduits that are buried or
| anchored. And building those conduits needs to be done in a
| way that does not mess up the environment.
|
| So what you've got then for a long cable project is two
| ends that present underwater construction projects, the
| shallow waters near the two ends where you have to bury the
| cable, and then the long deep ocean stretch where you are
| just spooling the cable out.
|
| This suggests the costs are going to have a component that
| doesn't really depend on how long the thing is (the two
| ends and the shallow waters near the ends where burial is
| needed) and a component that is proportional to length (the
| long run between the two shallow waters near the ends).
|
| At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the deep
| sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour to
| operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no idea
| what it costs to operate these ships, but Google tells me
| that big cruise ships cost about that much to operate, and
| I'd guess that a cable laying ship is cheaper).
|
| Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as
| expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for 9000
| km.
|
| That's brings us to about $200 million for the deep ocean
| part.
| eitland wrote:
| > Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as
| expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for
| 9000 km.
|
| Still sounds really inexpensive when I consider it
| contains a large number of repeaters and is meant to stay
| at the bottom of the ocean.
|
| Edit: Forgot to write, I haven't run the numbers myself
| but I enjoyed your reasoning here, you put a smile on my
| face :
|
| > At 5 knots, it would take about 1000 hours to lay the
| deep sea part of the cable. If the ship costs $50k/hour
| to operate, that would be about $40 million. (I have no
| idea what it costs to operate these ships, but Google
| tells me that big cruise ships cost about that much to
| operate, and I'd guess that a cable laying ship is
| cheaper).
| iptrans wrote:
| Fortunately you only need repeaters every 80 km or so, so
| you'd only need a bit over a hundred repeaters across the
| 9000 km span.
|
| Repeaters aren't terrible expensive, so they only add a
| few million to the total cost.
| eitland wrote:
| Checked your profile now, I belive it :-)
| jaytaylor wrote:
| And how are potential repeater unit failures accounted
| for?
| parliament32 wrote:
| I figure the hard engineering challenge is the repeaters.
| How do you build repeaters and power them, considering
| you can't really service or replace them ever over the
| lifespan of the cable (the deep ocean bits anyway)? A
| repeater every 80km is a whole lotta repeaters.
| ativzzz wrote:
| They are repairable: http://www.k-kcs.co.jp/english/solut
| ionRepairingMethod.html
| aynyc wrote:
| > Assuming the underwater cable itself is 10 times as
| expensive as regular cable, its about $150 million for
| 9000 km.
|
| Looking at what I can find, it looks like way more than
| 10 times the cost.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/7Dm7EEp.jpg
| iptrans wrote:
| 10x is a fair estimate of cost vs regular armored fiber
| cable.
|
| Source: I've laid subsea cable.
| aynyc wrote:
| Just to be sure, you mean 10x between subsea cable and
| regular armored fiber cable, not cat6 I can get from best
| buy.
| iptrans wrote:
| Yes, not that there's a large difference. Best Buy has
| pretty large markups, especially on short CAT6 cables.
|
| You can buy subsea cable for $10-$20 per meter.
|
| EDIT: the cost depends on how many layers of armoring you
| require. Deep sea cable requires less, shallow sea cable
| more.
| tzs wrote:
| My estimate came to around $22k/kilometer for the cable
| itself plus the laying it in deep ocean. I didn't
| estimate the costs of repeaters.
|
| The Google project was $33k/kilometer, so I don't think I
| could have been too far off on the cable itself. Looking
| at other undersea fiber projects, that seem about
| typical. For example, this one [2] estimated
| $27k/kilometer [1].
|
| Here's an Alibaba seller with submarine fiber for
| $2000-9000/kilometer [2].
|
| The submarine cables have an aluminum or copper tube
| around the fiber optics, an aluminum water barrier, and a
| sheath of stranded steel wires, and an outer polyetylene
| layer, with various other layers of mylar, polycarbonate,
| and petroleum jelly in between.
|
| I'd expect the metal layers to be the most expensive
| parts. Looking at the cost of tubes or cables of those
| materials, it looks like each of those would be in the
| $1000-2000/kilometer range.
|
| [1] http://infrastructureafrica.opendataforafrica.org/ett
| zplb/co...
|
| [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Submarine-
| Fiber-Optic...
| aynyc wrote:
| This's so freaking cool!
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| That's is what I thought, years ago back when I worked for
| a big telco we actually had a small fleet of our own cable
| laying ships.
|
| The fun thing was the company hand book had a whole other
| section of T&C allowances etc if you worked on a ship.
| bryyyon wrote:
| Interesting! Would you be able to give us a few examples
| that'd be in the ship-specific section? I'm curious on
| what sorts of things would be
| permissible/acceptable/expected in a ship work
| environment but not necessarily called out off-ship.
| Perhaps safety and emergency procedure information?
| voidmain0001 wrote:
| That sounds like money well spent, and a good deal
| considering what it enables. It would be incredible to see
| the multiple levels of govt around the world collaborate to
| create a publicly funded (bond sales) project for laying
| fibre optic across the planet which could not be sold to a
| private corp, and that guaranteed access to it based on
| population proportion, not GDP.
| syoc wrote:
| I have no idea about how this stuff, but this wired article
| from 1996 written by Neal Stephenson about undersea cables is a
| fantastic read.
|
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The article is now almost a quarter century old and the
| cables have gotten better. In fact, even that cable probably
| got a lot faster after optical coherent detection was
| introduced, i.e. much more capable modems. But the way the
| cables are actually laid and especially the details of the
| shore landings and the issues of terrestrial runs, are as
| current as ever.
| tclancy wrote:
| Came here to recommend the same. I reread it every 5 years or
| so for inspiration.
| mizzao wrote:
| Is this a private cable that only connects Google datacenters? If
| so, too bad for open, neutral Internet.
| jl6 wrote:
| The article mentions the number of fibres in this cable is 12,
| and that new technology was used to increase that number.
|
| What is the limit on how many fibres can go in a cable? Should we
| expect future cables to have 50 fibres, or 100, or 1000, or more?
| doikor wrote:
| Problem is powering the repeaters. More fibers are not going to
| help if you can not use them. They mention in the article the
| improvements in the repeater design to cut down power draw to
| allow more fibers to be used.
| blantonl wrote:
| I think the limitation is based on repeater and laser-pump
| equipment to repeat the signal along the length of the cable
| run.
|
| I suspect that the repeaters and associated power equipment
| along the line is pretty big stuff. So the fact that this cable
| is able to "share" that equipment across the 12 fibers is a
| breakthrough in technology.
| SloopJon wrote:
| Wow, talk about a barrier to entry. Google already has Curie from
| North America to South America and Equiano from Portugal to South
| Africa. They're also working on Hopper from North America to UK
| and Spain:
|
| https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/infrastructure/announ...
|
| I presume that the other trillion-dollar companies are getting in
| on the action too.
| amit9gupta wrote:
| Welcome to the new form of Colonialism!!
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| Because Google owns the sea and no one else can lay cable...
| idlewords wrote:
| I'm delighted by all the speculation in this thread about whether
| the cable laid by the global surveillance company is somehow
| being spied on.
| blindm wrote:
| Well we assume any important Internet choke-point is used for
| surveillance. If I just started surveilling anything sent _en
| clair_ my first stop would be Internet backbone connections.
| cmpb wrote:
| Ah the old "entire digitized Library of Congress" per second
| metric
| ThePadawan wrote:
| I always find comparisons using text data incredibly worthless.
|
| I'm sure a Shakespeare play or The Great Gatsby are barely a
| few megabytes.
|
| But if you asked Joe Shmoe on the street "In Great Gatsbys, how
| big was the last picture your iPhone took", they would rightly
| have zero idea.
|
| It's so useless.
| edoceo wrote:
| I think all of Shakespeare was like 450,000 LOC.
|
| I used to use that metric when folks ask why it took so long
| to debug. Like, our project is 600,000 LOC and more
| complicated than any of his works. He didn't have it all
| memorized and neither do I. It's a metric PMs can understand.
| [deleted]
| bravura wrote:
| Agreed, number of books stacked end to end to reach the moon
| is much more intuitive.
| adverbly wrote:
| Easy! It's just three olympic sized swimming pools worth of
| dollar bills stacked to the moon in bits.
| ericpauley wrote:
| I think this says more about the minuscule (on Google scale)
| ~10TB size of the digitized library of Congress.
| nippoo wrote:
| This is super-cool! I found "enough to transmit the entire
| digitized Library of Congress three times every second" to be a
| really weird comparison though - I'm used to text being really
| small and compressible, and I doubt many people have an intuitive
| grasp of how much One Scanned Library of Congress is. How many
| hour-long Netflix/YouTube episodes per second, on the other
| hand...
| ehsankia wrote:
| How long to transfer all of Youtube? ;)
| supertrope wrote:
| War and Peace is a few MB. A "YouTuber" gossiping in HD is more
| bits. Luckily video services rely heavily on on-net caches.
| faitswulff wrote:
| As of March 2019, Netflix is reported [0] to have 60 petabytes
| of data. Google tells me that 60 petabytes / 250 terabits per
| second comes out to 32 minutes. I'm not sure that translates to
| the layperson who might not appreciate what a petabyte is, but
| in the space of a single show you could theoretically transfer
| the contents of Netflix's entire library over this pipe. So
| basically almost enough bandwidth to transfer the average
| user's porn stash in a single day!
|
| [0]: https://zeenea.com/metacat-netflix-makes-their-big-data-
| acce...
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| I agree, but somehow a LoC became a well-established unit of
| measuring data transfer[1]. So maybe less-technical readers are
| used to hearing that comparison.
|
| 1 - https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/2012/04/a-library-of-
| congres...
| lostlogin wrote:
| This can join the others - Olympic swimming pool, football
| fields, London bus, Empire State Building.
| sschueller wrote:
| Do those come with pre attached NSA listening devices [1] ?
|
| [1] https://siliconangle.com/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-
| underse...
| deelowe wrote:
| The cable itself? Almost certainly not. They don't need to. It
| terminates in the US.
| gnu8 wrote:
| Most certainly. You don't land a cable in either the US or
| France without a classified annex to the license that provides
| for interconnection to their intelligence services.
| _Understated_ wrote:
| Let's say they do tap the cables (I reckon they do too but in
| case they don't) what can they actually see if the traffic is
| encrypted?
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _what can they actually see if the traffic is encrypted?_
|
| They can see who is talking to who, and when:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_analysis
| ssijak wrote:
| And at 250tb passing by every second
| Keyframe wrote:
| Considering they do intercept, as widely documented,
| question is how do they see if traffic is encrypted?
| jagger27 wrote:
| Pretty trivial. If it looks like random noise, and
| doesn't have a compression header then it's probably
| encrypted.
| gspr wrote:
| Nobody knows. Probably not.
|
| But Snowden showed us that a lot of it is scooped up and
| warehoused. Maybe they can see your traffic in a decade or
| two?
| eric-hu wrote:
| I recall seeing a story in the past about how the NSA
| planted a misleadingly weak encryption library.
|
| https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2014/10/new_evidence_o
| f...
|
| If the encryption used is flawed, they could see whatever
| they want.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Source, destination, message length, etc. Lots of
| interesting meta data to play with.
| lallysingh wrote:
| assuming there isn't a point-to-point encryption layer
| for the whole cable.
| jagger27 wrote:
| Sure, but the NSA tap probably sits just after that
| point.
| temp0826 wrote:
| I'd love to see wireshark running on a saturated 250Tbps
| link
| xbmcuser wrote:
| Forget encryption every second so much data passes through
| at a time can they even isolate particular data let alone
| encrypted data. Can they process all that data in real time
| if not how are they storing it to process later. This is
| just 1 cable from 1 company there are now dozens of cables
| of different companies.
| vngzs wrote:
| > so much data passes through at a time can they even
| isolate particular data let alone encrypted data.
|
| They can't. That's why they call it "bulk collection."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MUSCULAR_(surveillance_prog
| ram...
| londons_explore wrote:
| There's a reason the vast majority of undersea cables have at
| least one end in a Five Eyes country. No need to tap it in the
| middle of the ocean then!
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| False. Snowden revelations clearly indicated that tapping
| undersea cables is (unsurprisingly) difficult to detect.
|
| A lot of surveillance is done both *illegally* and secretly.
|
| Forcing carriers to install black boxes next to their routers
| is not always the preferred choice.
| londons_explore wrote:
| You are missing the fact that most undersea cables get
| tapped multiple times. Five Eyes normally inspects the data
| on land, but enemies will do undersea taps.
|
| While a cable is being tapped, there will be a suspicious
| change in signal strength, and various signal reflections
| will tell the cable operators where the tap is. Thats bad
| for a spy agency who want to remain undetected.
|
| Instead, they break the cable in _three_ points
| deliberately. The middle point is where they put the tap,
| and the spy agency will repair it. The points either side
| are simply so that the cable operators don 't know where
| the tap has been inserted, and have to be repaired by the
| cable operator. That gets _expensive_ , since it will
| typically happen 3 or 4 times for a new cable install (3 or
| 4 countries want access to the data).
|
| Cable repair operations are typically public knowledge
| (they require specialized ships), so anyone who fancies can
| crunch the data and see how often a cable breaks in
| multiple places before being repaired to know how often
| it's tapped... Mediterranean cables seem to see the most
| taps.
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| > You are missing the fact
|
| Please don't make guesses. I'm aware of the tapping
| process.
|
| > Thats bad for a spy agency who want to remain
| undetected.
|
| Yes, this is inevitable and it's still extremely more
| stealth that plugging network taps in somebody's else
| NOC. Especially if the tapping is done illegally.
| actuator wrote:
| Even if this is true, I think the simple reason might be that
| one of the five eyes country is US, which is probably the
| global hub for data and services used throughout the world.
| Also, Britain being near entrance of Europe from Atlantic,
| and Australia being near Asia would make economical sense for
| the cables to take that path.
| onion2k wrote:
| You could load a modern Javascript-powered website in less than a
| minute with that.
| throw0101a wrote:
| Especially the linked blog post, as it doesn't render unless
| you allow JavaScript from gweb-cloudblog-publish.appspot.com
| (per uMatrix).
|
| Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so that
| JS being on is mandatory? Especially for something as prosaic
| as a couple of paragraphs of text.
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Ever heard of React, Vue or Angular?
|
| If you meant mandatory in terms of the actual medium
| requiring it, I can only hint to interactive applications,
| aside from that I don't think it would actually be mandatory.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| All of those can be rendered server-side if needs be, and
| in my experience, can actually lead to a superior browsing
| experience compared to plain server-side served HTML. But
| it has to be done right.
|
| Gatsby + Netlify with a CMS-as-a-service like Contentful or
| Prismic will lead you to a good result. We made e.g.
| https://fox-it.com/ using that, its back-end is Wordpress
| but it's drained empty to rebuild the website. Note how it
| works without JS, the dropdowns don't work but they fall
| back to full page navigation page. Note how with JS
| enabled, all the content shows up instantly. This is how
| it's supposed to be done.
| [deleted]
| dna_polymerase wrote:
| Absolutely the can, yes. I wasn't saying they couldn't. I
| just answered the question. And those frameworks really
| introduced the idea of loading JS in order to load
| content to the broader masses. Things have evolved, sure
| and it can be done right, but nonetheless, those
| frameworks are a reason to force JavaScript on the user.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| > Webdevs: is there a reason why a page would be designed so
| that JS being on is mandatory?
|
| I think in the case of Google, it's because they've been told
| they are the best developers, the top 1% of SWE's, they went
| through rigorous interviews, are paid a small fortune twice
| as much as they would get at a regular coding job, etc.
|
| So it's dick shaking. They need to show to the world that
| they're better than plain HTML websites, that they have a
| massive schlong, that they out-chadded the vast majority of
| software devs. Plain html? Psht, we can invent our own
| language, gonna put those six years of uni to work!
| Wordpress? This is beneath us! It has to be a client-side
| rendered JS-pulled-through-GWT behemoth because on my system
| it's... wait it's slower, but nevermind that it's
| technologically ALPHA.
|
| edit: actually looked at the source, looks like a Polymer /
| Web Components website. I've had to work in that once, it was
| dreadful compared to libraries used by real people.
| nerdkid93 wrote:
| Polymer is used by real people... even more-so if you
| include the spiritual successor to Polymer, LitElement.
| That's not to say either are incredibly popular, but still,
| that seems intentionally demeaning.
|
| [0] https://www.npmjs.com/package/@polymer/polymer
|
| [1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/lit-element
| [deleted]
| intrasight wrote:
| I got a blank page when I opened the web site. So as usual I
| looked at HN comments to see what it was about.
|
| Here's an idea: add some HN logic to automatically move a
| comment that begins with "TL;DR" to the top of the thread.
| rorykoehler wrote:
| That will just be abused
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Don't worry, as hardware advances roll out, software bloat will
| always expand to fill the vacuum.
| forgot-my-pw wrote:
| But can I download a car with that speed?
| a012 wrote:
| My browser loads that page like forever, until I remember to
| _allow_ javascript on that page, like why on earth they render
| everything except the content at all.
| c22 wrote:
| Yeah, it's one thing to build a page that wont render without
| Javascript, but making the only part that _does_ render be a
| never-ending spinner is just rude.
| LMYahooTFY wrote:
| This is what I encounter more often than not lately.
|
| Is this due to more and more content simply generated by
| javascript frameworks?
| speedgoose wrote:
| Yes and because developers do not have time for the very
| few people who decided to disable javascript and not enable
| it when necessary.
| linuxlizard wrote:
| if this were reddit, I'd be throwing gold at you.
| onion2k wrote:
| That would be very kind but I'm quite glad it isn't.
| markphip wrote:
| I know there are many of these cables that have been around for
| years, but I am curious how are they physically secured?
| Especially where they transit from ocean to land? Is there some
| long underground/sea tunnel of conduit that the cable is routed
| through to the basement of some building? Or if you are walking
| along the beach somewhere is there just some cable running out of
| the ocean along the beach to some building near the shore?
|
| I also wonder what kind of permissions and licenses you need to
| seek to run a cable across the ocean floor?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> Or if you are walking along the beach somewhere is there
| just some cable running out of the ocean along the beach to
| some building near the shore?
|
| It is generally buried either under the sand or inside
| concrete. But yes, there are places where you can get very
| close to these things if you know what you are looking at.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_landing_point
|
| Here is a pic of the landing for the US base in Cuba.
|
| https://www.dvidshub.net/news/186633/uct-1-unit-choice-gtmo-...
| chasd00 wrote:
| I've wondered the same, you can image search and find some
| pictures. They just sort of come out of the water and go up the
| beach (I guess what else would happen? Hah)
|
| https://media.wired.com/photos/59546c71be605811a2fdcfd0/191:...
| tyingq wrote:
| Guessing this would be more typical:
| https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/.e/interactive/html5-video-
| media/201...
| jaywalk wrote:
| I'd imagine that the permissions/licensing/whatever only
| applies to the ends of the cables, when you're out of
| international waters.
| fulafel wrote:
| There's a lot of documented cold war era espionage stuff about
| tapping undersea cables. Eg
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/intelligence-coup-how...
| [deleted]
| grandpa_yeti wrote:
| You're spot on. Most of the cables are either laid on the sea
| floor and up to a beach, or buried underneath beaches. The
| following link has some good background on what goes into
| laying cables and how they terminate.
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/25/asia/internet-undersea-cables...
|
| As for physical security, there isn't much on the sea floor.
| There are various instances of nation states tapping cables due
| to the ease of access when it comes to actually "listening" to
| the data. Obviously the issue there is getting to the undersea
| cable.
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/th...
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| > how are they physically secured
|
| Multiple nations have specialised subs to tap into them. I
| doubt you'd find anyone willing to make such a guarantee. They
| are impossible to secure in any way and you need to rely on
| security assurances at different layers instead.
| [deleted]
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This was done in the 70s/80s, but I doubt it's worth the
| effort now. It only worked because the Soviets assumed the
| cables were inaccessible. End-to-end encryption is a thing
| even for the general public now.
|
| Now we just compromise the servers/routers.
| https://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-actually-intercepted-packages-
| to...
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| > I doubt it's worth the effort now
|
| It's very much still happening. Metadata is enough for
| intel purposes, storage is ridiculously cheap and post-
| quantum breaks of key exchange is forever 20 years away
| like fusion.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/world/europe/russian-
| pres...
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/t
| h...
|
| https://www.zdnet.com/article/spy-agency-taps-into-
| undersea-...
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/exposed-the-
| us-na...
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/hisutton/2020/08/19/how-
| russian...
| CydeWeys wrote:
| You're not gonna get any useful metadata out of it since
| the entire pipe is encrypted/decrypted at each end. All
| you'd see from tapping it at the middle is an
| unbelievably vast stream of random ones and zeros, the
| encrypted version of all commingled traffic.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The first link describes _attacking_ cables - severing
| internet access for entire continents.
|
| The second is from 2013; Google and others encrypted
| those comms shortly afterwards after Snowden revealed
| those taps. https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2013/11/googl...
|
| > "The traffic shown in the slides is now all encrypted
| and the work the NSA/GCHQ staff did on understanding it,
| ruined."
|
| The third link is twenty years old, and no longer very
| doable for the same reasons as above. Anyone still
| sending unencrypted stuff along these cables deserves to
| get stung.
| paul_f wrote:
| What's more amazing than laying a transatlantic cable today?
| Doing it in 1858!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
| mcmatterson wrote:
| A number of the first trans-atlantic cables landed in the tiny
| village of Heart's Content, Newfoundland. I drove through there
| on a road trip about a decade ago & stopped at the excellent
| museum in the old cable station, and was excited to make my way
| across the highway to the beach to see this exact thing. It
| turns out that the old cables are just.... left to rust on the
| beach. It's really amazing that these cables, originally a
| technological wonder & a bridge between entire continents, are
| just left to the elements once their useful life is over.
|
| https://goo.gl/maps/Ku9FtfbMupApZthJA
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| http://dls.virginia.gov/commission/materials/subseacables.pd...
| felixc wrote:
| I'll take any chance I can get to link to this wonderfully
| sprawling 1996 article from novelist Neal Stephenson about the
| laying and landing of transoceanic cables:
| https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
|
| Yes it's long, but it's so worth it!
| ttul wrote:
| From back when Wired was a really great magazine. I threw out
| all my 1990s Wired magazines. What a shame.
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