65
"That could reset the world order"
Lmao, what hyperbolic bullshit. It's just a cable cutter. Most nations have shit like this, but thanks for letting us know in the title this is just Chinese propaganda.
It will shift the orders from cables to starlink. Not the best idea tho, it sucks ass
Just wait! Then they’ll start flooding space with mini satellites. Then they’ll start dogfighting with them. :)
DOGEfighting
Powerful seems like a pointless adjective here.
It doesn't take much power to destroy a cable. Did they invent a really long, and powerful, chain with a powerful anchor on it only usable by a boat with powerful electric winch?
Maybe they put AI in it too, for extra power of course
...as reported by the South China Morning Post lol
Historically they were a solid paper, based out of Hong Kong. It’s a toss up these days though, not sure.
let's hope it's bs
They already do it by simply dragging boat anchors across, it's obviously going to be weaponized further. There have multiple data and power cables cut like this in the Baltic sea recently. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/12/30/europe/baltic-sea-cable-anchor-drag-russia-intl-latam/index.html
max depth of baltic sea is 1,500 ft
And it was done with something no designed for this purpose. Why is it hard to conceive that a tool designed for it would do much better?
because military subs can't go that deep. It's a lot harder to police.
I don't think they need to send people down or even complex sensors, they could use a similar dumb tactic, as above, of dragging something heavy for kilometers, until they can confirm that there was a disruption on the network.
This could have been a The Onion title
SATCOM here we come!
Don’t worry, they’re working on satellite warfare too. Kessler syndrome, here we come
Working on the thing we've had for half a century? Improving sure but thaad and kenetic kill devices have been around forever like South Korea just showed video of their testing which means it's almost certainly last gen and the new Gen is deployed.
I sincerely hope they’re smart enough not to trigger that.
Someone posted an article elsewhere on the thread about China practicing “dogfighting” in space - which, after you remove the fear-mongering, is just them figuring out how to do satellite-satellite maneuvering. Still immense opportunity for runaway collisions, but it seems like the military applicability is more toward sabotage than blowing things up. I could definitely see a scenario where high value satellites have had small boosters affixed to them, their electronics tampered, or some other way of commandeering or de-orbiting them to deprive their owners of them. A microwave + laser could disable smaller sats from above, then ablate some of their exterior to sap momentum so gravity drops them in short order. (Maybe. That’s idle speculation, but generating the power and dissipating the heat in space could make that idea impossible.)
Yeah, the only feasible way to do satellite warfare without creating a ton of debris is to mechanically attach to an enemy satellite and drop it out of orbit.
Like imagine an autonomous attacker satellite that clamps onto the target satellite, and uses thrusters to drop itself (and the target) into the ocean. Any kind of kinetic weaponry to destroy the target satellite will just end up with a debris cloud around the earth, making future space travel impossible.
But no country wants to invest in satellites just to intentionally drop them out of orbit. Every single attack would be prohibitively expensive when compared to just firing a missile at the satellite.
Seriously.. Anything but Starlink
Weird way to pronounce starlink, since it seems that’s what they’re hoping for. Privatizing the government
If I had that type of technology I would not advertise it
A doomsday device is useless if no one knows you have it.
"why didn't you tell the world, eh?"
For me it's quite the opposite. It's all about power projection in the grand scheme of things.
Cool
So for every European deep sea cable cut it should send a fleet of Russian and Chinese ships to the bottom, torpedo the fuckers. Just by default presume it was either of them and make then responsible for the safety of our cables. If you fail to protect our cables, we'll send your ships to the next life.
Gloves. Off.
Exactly what I've been screaming. Hang the captain and first mate, scuttle the fucking ship. This shit needs to be treated as piracy, no quarter given.
Luckily capital punishment is banned in most countries.
And that attitude is why China continues to test us, they know we're pussies. You should see what they're pulling on Vietnam and the Philippines in the South China Sea.
I really don't care.
Capital punishment is immoral and that's that.
Glad you're in a society that is able to entertain that notion. Looks like that society is going to collapse. Good luck.
No shit, lol. Those cunts have been cutting cables for almost a year now. This is why countries tend to hide the exact locations of cables. Shit is expensive.
Fucker McGucker, this is evil
I mean, no? Ok let's say you did cut off the internet, there's still radio. Shortwave still can reach spies in foreign countries with their numbers stations now, and then there's VHF/UHF at home etc. Snail mail still exists, so does ol' fashioned landlines for communication at least internally even if they cut undersea telcom cables, hell I'm pretty sure CDMA would still be running, this sets us back to like 1990 at most, especially if we take this threat seriously and start implementing non-internet based (or sat internet) fallbacks just in case standard comms go down for a while until a new cable can be lain.
Like don't get me wrong, we'd definitely feel the effects, but this isn't some kind of world dominating shit we're talking about here, it's just pretty inconvenient, especially if we already have alts in place as fallbacks so we don't have to scramble to set them up.
The knock on effects of substantial infrastructure interruptions like this can have massive impacts that snowball aggressively. Not saying you’re wrong, but it is nothing to scoff at. Things like this do have the potential to severely change the geopolitical landscape.
I'm not saying it's nothing, just saying I think it's massively overstated.
Me resetting the world order:
I can have 2 million of these tomorrow! Who's biting?
This is why we can't have nice things.
Coming soon to vague shell corporation owned fishing boats to the shore of the Baltic and Northern seas!
Sponsored by China and Russia
This feels really dumb from China. This is not a weapon against military. This is a weapon against civilian insfrastructure. You don't get minds and hearts of people by attacking something they love
Good thing we have the channel tunnel I guess, repurpose that for data cables that are protected.
I didn't know we have a channel tunnel to the american continents
Sure, it will be a shame to lose south/central America and Canada, but nothing else of value over there.
Operational depth is essentially the same as the claimed operational depth that oceangate sub that popped the other year. I have a lot more confidence that these things will actually work when China does it instead of some incompetent millionaire/billionaire.
Reset the world order by sending everybody including China back to stone age right? That’d be fun.
Well, everybody except people hooked up to Starlink and other satellite based internet
You realize that data comes from the same place, right?
Are we talking about the data? I understand the hosts and servers are fine, but if the cables are all destroyed, we will have to rely on access to satellite internet. They are actively economically attacking Verizon, canceling contracts they had and replacing them with SpaceX ones.
Like have ANY of you EVER roleplayed in DnD or like, done anything? Are you just chronically bamboozled? Genuinely curious. I talk to ppl like this all day every day - are you just stupid? Am I stupid for being here talking to you all trying to communicate what's happening?
Maybe you're just dissociated and unable to register everything. Idk. Jesus.
this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2025
65 points (84.2% liked)
World News
45377 readers
1864 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS