The shark biting the cable is what gets me

I like that the hand crank is going counter-clockwise

Crap, I saw it as clockwise. (Furious reversal of effort…)

Oh wow! :)

Thank you for the laughs. I needed that!

given the events of the last few days, one could add a Shahed drone too.

Can someone help me understand the single brick at the very bottom under Linux? What is it representing?

The undersea cables actually connecting the entire internet. Sometimes sharks just take a bite of them, they're reasonable well protected but it's enough damage to cause outages and disruptions.

It's the single pin under everything because there are a limited number of those cables especially in some regions so a single shark can take out the entire internet for some countries.

http://www.mirceakademy.com/uploads/MSA2024-6-6.pdf

I feel like having them as a single brick is a bit hyperbolic, since undersea cables are pretty redundant in most of the world. Get rid of one and traffic just routes around it. Ships have been routinely destroying cables in the Gulf of Finland and the Baltic Sea in the past couple of years without causing significant disruptions.

The whole Internet was designed for precisely this use case. If there is an outage, the distributed system will try to find another path. No actual central point of failure. As you say, the single brick is hyperbolic. But yea, those sharks can certainly be disruptive at times.

Well that depends on how much traffic that cable was supporting, how much free capacity is available on other cables heading to the same area, how much additional latency the rerouting will add and how sensitive to latency the rerouted traffic is doesn't it?

Only mildly. There's not huge amounts of dark capacity just sitting around waiting to take over so if a major fiber connection goes down the remainder will get congested with the extra capacity. It won't cascade like a power outage but the remaining lines will slow down.

"most of the world" is doing a seriously large amount of heavy lifting in this sentence.

There are many regions that are served by a single line, more than you think.

Even "well connected" places have fewer cables than you expect, and the frustrating thing is that you don't know that you can route around an issue until you try.

BGP is really resilient, which is great, but if your path is not clear then you'll only realise it when the failover doesn't happen, you'll think there's a redundant path.

Do satellite networks not move the needle in terms of capacity/reliability now?

Only a little bit. Just clicking around, a new Hawaii cable is supposed to have 24 Fiber Pairs and 18Tbit per Fiber Pair at the end of this year. If you lose several tbits of bandwidth, you're going to have a hard time making it up with satellite.

For small island countries and such, satellite capacity may be sufficient; and it is likely helpful for keeping international calling alive even if it's not sufficient for international data. But when you drop capacity by a factor of 1000, it's going to be super messy.

No. They're not setup to be a principal route between two nations and most satellite networks until very recently didn't even route messages through other satellites but instead retransmitted them to a ground station with access to hardline internet. Even Starlink mostly does this still because it's way cheaper and easier.

You can see an unofficial tracker [0] of the Starlink downlink network and see how outside of some areas your data is only moving a few tens of miles away most of the time before it's sent down to a ground system. Their sats have 3 200 Gbps laser communicators for intra constellation routing which is pretty small for the task of replacing fiber optic links.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1805q6rlePY4WZd8QMO...

God, those nicknames. The Algo of Power GW (gateway?) the Pew Pew GW? Elon chose these.

It's all so pick me. Like his insistence that he's a top level gamer.

I never understand why questions like this get downvoted around here.

They don't, you just have to wait longer than an hour for an accurate rating

Conceptually, it's the difference between your wifi versus running a single fiber to each room in your house. The difference in bandwidth is multiple orders of magnitude.

This is never going to change because from a physical perspective free radio is a shared medium while each individual fiber (or wire) has its own private bandwidth.

The capacity of satellite networks is minuscule compared to that of undersea fibre optics.

Plus still have to contend with the space sharks.

Undersea cables. With a shark biting one.

The cables at the bottom of the ocean.

Looks like an undersea cable to me

One of DNS pillars should be replaced by BGP.

And NTP, if I recall correctly.

When was that?

When was BGP? Or when was NTP?

I think it was a joke based on NTP being a time protocol.

whoosh

Apparently it is impossible to find the time or place to add them.

The "Whatever Microsoft is doing" bit was always my favorite.

The depiction of Microsoft as "angry birds coming to indiscriminately fuck everything up" is absolutely on point for Microsoft in 2025/26

AWS definitely lives above unpaid developers. In fact they should probably be the bird flying straight at the unpaid developers as they force yet another company to move to a closed license to survive.

You don't think AWS is internally built on massive amounts of open source?

That's what it would mean to place them above unpaid developers in the illustration, yes.

There's a recent update: https://x.com/Hesamation/status/2028289544676630739?s=20