US-China tensions loom over undersea internet cables

Significance Most users’ interaction with the internet occurs wirelessly but underpinning global data delivery are hundreds of submarine cables that traverse the ocean floor. The sector’s prospects are changing as the investment landscape shifts, cybersecurity risks rise and US-China technology tensions intensify. Impacts International consortia will remain key investment vehicles for logistically complex and expensive submarine cable projects. Indian private-sector telcos will emerge as major players in the cable owner landscape, boosting prospects for India-centred networks. Biden may push for international cooperation on standards for building, owning and maintaining undersea cables. Taiwan, a communications and technology hub, may prove especially vulnerable if its cables are cut or threatened by China during conflict. Emerging market economies will be negatively affected by growing US-China tensions around undersea cables.

On the Possibility of Using ULF/ELF Electromagnetic Waves from Undersea Cables to Detect Airplanes Submerged in the Ocean

The loss of Malaysian Flight on March 8, 2014, and the subsequent lengthy search for the aircraft highlights the need for an effective detection system for locating airplanes that have crashed into the ocean. The goal of this paper is to test the feasibility of detecting submerged airplanes using ultra-low frequency and/or extremely-low frequency electromagnetic signals generated by undersea cables located along the bottom of the ocean. The proposed detection system is tested using three-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling of the cable source, ocean water, ground, and submerged object (aircraft). The perturbation caused by the object is obtained for different positions of the object relative to the cable source. The magnitude of the perturbation is compared to the expected background level for a depth of 3 km into the ocean. A sensor array is proposed for detecting objects within several km of the cable.

A Meta-Integrative Qualitative Study on the Hidden Threats of Smart Buildings/Cities and Their Associated Impacts on Humans and the Environment

Smart buildings deploying 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) are viewed as the next sustainable solution that can be seamlessly integrated in all sectors of the built environment. The benefits are well advertised and range from inducing wellness and monitoring health, amplifying productivity, to energy savings. Comparatively, potential negative risks are less known and mostly relate to cyber-security threats and radiation effects. This meta-integrative qualitative synthesis research sought to determine the possible underlying demerits from developing smart buildings, and whether they outweigh the possible benefits. The study identified five master themes as threats of smart buildings: a surfeit of data centers, the proliferation of undersea cables, the consternation of cyber-security threats, electromagnetic pollution, and E-waste accumulation. Further, the paper discusses the rebound impacts on humans and the environment as smart buildings’ actualization becomes a reality. The study reveals that, although some aspects of smart buildings do have their tangible benefits, the potential repercussions from these not-so-discussed threats could undermine the former when all perspectives and interactions are analyzed collectively rather than in isolation.

Thinking through silicon: Cables and servers as epistemic infrastructures

Data centers and undersea cables allow information to be transmitted, stored, and processed. Yet, more than passively housing knowledge, information infrastructures actively shape knowledge. Infrastructures facilitate a certain use case, privileging some forms of knowledge while ignoring others. And infrastructures are material investments by states or corporations at a particular site, solidifying their knowledge-production, while marginalizing alternatives. These conditions are exemplified by two sites in Tseung Kwan O, Hong Kong. The TKO Express is a private undersea cable that offers its clients high-speed connectivity between financial centers, supporting the “fast knowledge” of finance and trading, while ignoring slower or more social forms of intelligence. The TKOIE industrial estate allocated land to a data center rather than a community center, prioritizing the production of corporate, proprietary knowledge over local and communal knowledge. The article reworks the concept of epistemic infrastructures to stress how such facilities influence what can be known and what remains unknown.

Grounding Cryptocurrencies

Chapter 6 documents a more specific and exploratory follow the thing research technique to uncover the digital-material architecture of Bitcoin. Treating the Bitcoin code as both a text and material, a single bitcoin is followed through the decentralised protocol “from” Australia “to” the United States. By tracing the spatial relationships between miscellaneous paraphernalia that facilitate the transaction, from proprietary software to Bitcoin mining rigs, the chapter navigates the material culture of the Bitcoin blockchain. This involves opening up source code for inspection to uncover the functional performativity of the network. The spatial lens used reveals several material infrastructures such as undersea cables, data centres, pools of Bitcoin mines, active nodes, and third-party wallet software, that assemble to form operational modes of centralisation.

What is the resource footprint of a computer science department? Place, people, and Pedagogy

Internet and Communication Technology/electrical and electronic equipment (ICT/EEE) form the bedrock of today’s knowledge economy. This increasingly interconnected web of products, processes, services, and infrastructure is often invisible to the user, as are the resource costs behind them. This ecosystem of machine-to-machine and cyber-physical-system technologies has a myriad of (in)direct impacts on the lithosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere. As key determinants of tomorrow’s digital world, academic institutions are critical sites for exploring ways to mitigate and/or eliminate negative impacts. This Report is a self-deliberation provoked by the question How do we create more resilient and healthier computer science departments: living laboratories for teaching and learning about resource-constrained computing, computation, and communication? Our response for University College London (UCL) Computer Science is to reflect on how, when, and where resources—energy, (raw) materials including water, space, and time—are consumed by the building (place), its occupants (people), and their activities (pedagogy). This perspective and attendant first-of-its-kind assessment outlines a roadmap and proposes high-level principles to aid our efforts, describing challenges and difficulties hindering quantification of the Department’s resource footprint. Qualitatively, we find a need to rematerialise the ICT/EEE ecosystem: to reveal the full costs of the seemingly intangible information society by interrogating the entire life history of paraphernalia from smartphones through servers to underground/undersea cables; another approach is demonstrating the corporeality of commonplace phrases and Nature-inspired terms such as artificial intelligence, social media, Big Data, smart cities/farming, the Internet, the Cloud, and the Web. We sketch routes to realising three interlinked aims: cap annual power consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, become a zero waste institution, and rejuvenate and (re)integrate the natural and built environments.

Transnational News Flows

The international flow of news has traditionally been dominated by that from North to South, with the West being at the core. Within the West itself, news flow is dominated by Anglo-American media, a situation which has its roots in the way that journalism developed historically. The historical context of global news begins with the introduction of the telegraph and undersea cables in the nineteenth century, which created a global market for news. Major players emerged—including news agencies—and shaped the transnational news flows. What emerges is that, in all ages, key innovations in transnational news flows have been closely linked to commerce, geopolitics, and war, from the telegraph to online news outlets. The increasing availability and use of news media, from major non-Western countries, are now affecting transnational news flows. Global journalism has been transformed in the digital age by internet-based communication and the rise of digital media opportunities—allowing for multi-directional news flows for growing global news audiences.

Investigation on the Shooting Method Ability to Solve Different Mooring Lines Boundary Condition Types

The study of undersea cables and mooring lines statics remains an unavoidable subject of simulation in offshore field for either steady-state analysis or dynamic simulation initialization. Whether the study concerns mooring systems pinned both at seabed and floating platform, cables towed by a moving underwater system or when special links such as stiffeners are needed, the ability to model every combination is a key point. To do so the authors propose to investigate the use of the shooting method to solve the two point boundary value problem (TPBVP) associated with Dirichlet, Robin or mixed boundary conditions representing respectively, displacement, force and force/displacement boundary conditions. 3D nonlinear static string calculations are confronted to a semi-analytic formulation established from the catenary closed form equations. The comparisons are performed on various pairs of boundary conditions developed in five configurations.