Why the US and China Are Squabbling Over This One Wire
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- Опубліковано 10 лют 2025
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Video written by Ben Doyle
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The idea of using electric eel because lack of footage is hillarious
Theyre morays not electric eels
@@zac9311 That's *a-moray!*
That's a moray
I help the environment by tossing car batteries to feed the electric eels. A fun and legal thrill
@@1L-Student-Txhelp the environment too much and environmental engineers will be out of a job
I’m impressed Sam went a whole 7 minutes and never made a single potty joke about the cable being named “See Me Wee.”
He did. You just didn't sea it.
It's not Sam tho
@@rohankishibe8259He might not have written the script, but who was going to stop him if he made the joke anyways?
@@goinkosu what??!
It's the new ICUP
Scientists still have not documented how underwater cables reproduce, and their numbers are dwindling due to high demand for unagi leading to overphishing.
Fun Fact: Sigmund Freud once tried to disect internet cables to find its reproductive organs, only to find that they'll only have organs during mating season
I take any chance to talk about underwater cables that is presented to me! They're just so damn cool and interesting! They have extending hidden jaws just like xenomorphs from Alien and one species can flop itself up on land and use it's extendo-jaw to grab stuff like crabs lol.
I do love câble avocado sushi 😅
this is way funnier than it deserves to be 😂
😂😂😂
Using redstone repeaters as a icon is just amazing ❤
It made me so happy
Where?
@@michaelwells529 2:09
@@michaelwells5292:08
@@michaelwells529 2:09
this postmodern approach to b-roll. im obsessed with the eel labelled "im a cable" getting buried on land by a bulldozer. truly pushing the boundaries in the art of stock footage usage.
Half as Interesting has mastered the use of stock footage to the point where it's an entirely new artistic medium.
I was wondering if we could, you know, just cover the wire in bricks and then lay them in the ocean?
I wish bricks were mentioned on this channel more .
@@BojanMilic84 absolutely! Bricks are such an integral part of our lives. This channel is a disappointment for not being able to deliver us the bricks content we need.
@@nityodaytit actually is lol, thinking about it, bricks are used to create houses, which give warmth and shelter to us
@@briishteabag no way really???
@@videogames8261 yeah man i really definitely just realized!!1!!!1!11
Infomation in cables is actually coded in the wave function, not if its on or off, but how infomation is encoded in the wire could be a full Wendover Production, so i understand the need for simplification.
They actually did one for mobile cell towers, so they definitely understand the concept!
Since the wavelength of visible light determines as what color we perceive it, that means it's more like... blue/red (or UV/IR etc.) instead of on/off?
@@Blex_040More like blue + red + whatever other wavelengths they can manage. More wavelengths = higher bandwidth. Google wavelength-division multiplexing if you're curious.
@@sixith So... Wouldn't that be fundamentally the same as FDM in the traditional (RF) networking world?
@@iworms Pretty much so.
As captain of Cable Ship DURABLE our crew is extremely proud to have been featured in this video!
But do you wish he would have used a more recent picture? 😉
I got to tour one of the ships in Baltimore back in 2014. Always loved hearing stories from the Subcom guys back when it was part of TE!
@@moredotsWe just came out of the shipyard in May and have a totally diffferent color scheme!
Either way we enjoyed being the only vessel mentioned in the video!
@@brianmccormick9918amazing work! Thank you for your and your crew hard work
To be completely honest I don't really trust the US to not spy my internet traffic either
Well as early as 2 years ago, they were caught spying on their own allies in Europe lol
As much as I don't trust the US government, I don't trust the Chinese government far more.
Oh I complete trust the US to spy on my internet traffic. 😂 enjoying the boring ass content I browse I guess.
I'd personally rather the US than China considering the US wouldn't care about me.
If something happens to your data though, would you rather deal with a Western democracy one, or a Mainland China one?
If you think there's a non-NATO/Russia/China/Middle East neutral territory you can trust with your data, think again -- they're likely influenced by foreign intelligence services because that's how they get the funding to provide international-level service.
It's honestly really impressive that you can run an undersea cable halfway around the world for less than the annual budget of a mid-size US city.
Yet that same city can't fill potholes or improve like 3 schools with that amount of money 😂
Too many voters are "I got mine" retirees who have the time to go to the polls (because convenience for students/young adults/homeless/expats/"certain" neighborhoods is not seen as important) and vote to cash out and live a life of consumption at the expense of their descendants, moving to Florida if they're not appeased.
@@snailsaredumb9412 I'm not surprised. The US seems to love ridiculously wide lanes, massive swathes of asphalt, and carburbia. The upkeep cost of that is enormous.
Denser cities, trains, trams, buses, and narrower lanes/less parking, and suddenly not only is it more pleasant to live in, there's a lot fewer potholes, too.
Even NYC, the city with the best transit in the entire US and honest to god actual sidewalks, has way, way, WAY too much asphalt everywhere.
@@Olivia-W Mid size US cities wouldn't exist at that density, all those people would be displaced into larger US cities and there would just be empty land.
@@Croz89 nah that's just silly. My suburban town it's the car by decades, and had a couple trolleys and trains running through it.
Most areas need more minimalistic road infra. Back roads should be gravel etc
me summoning a shark to bite the cable:
@Dr.Lev_Luminesk me summoning a very strong shark to bite the cable for your home internet connection:
@Dr.Lev_Luminesk what about a sharknado, but underwater?.
US summoning a boat drone to obliterate the cable:
@@jotch_7627me making the cable as hard as diamonds and giving smg's to defend itself
@Dr.Lev_Lumineskme summoning a robot shark with laser teeth
I appreciate the use of redstone repeaters as a stand-in for amplifiers
Damn, I didn't even notice. Nice!
I now would really like to know what those massively thick cables connect to on each end and how exactly whatever it connects to knows what to do with the millions of data points being broadcast through it.
so you want someone to explain to you how computers work?
@@royce9018 Not computers in general, specifically the equipment specialised to deal with these extremely high volumes of data. A normal computer wouldn't be able to handle anything near that amount of data, they probably need specially designed hardware
That sort of information isn't very accessible unfortunately
@@chucklebutt4470 Sadly true
I believe it'd be a big Internet Exchange Point, or something similar. The cables first go to a landing station that provides power, then they can continue on land for some distance to a termination station where it interfaces with the land-based network. Presumably this is just a giant warehouse of switches (and hardware for decoding the fiber optics signals)
The market: decides
The US government: hang on now
It's interesting how the US government used the same tactics with NordStream 2... and when the scare tactics and sanctions didn't work (they only delayed the construction) and it was actually finalized, "Russia (with an economy that depended on NS2) blew it up" and we haven't heard about NS2 in the news again. Yup, an attack on European/NATO soil, and the result is secretive investigations and total silence on the news front. All very normal.
the market didn't exactly decide fairly, considering the heavy chinese subsidies. so its more like
china: hang on now
usa: nuh uh
@@tardonator Yeah, because government subsidies, and bribery is the same thing... US stinks
I was surprised at the cost.
“As you can imagine, this is all expensive.”
Then says only $40,000 per mile.
Bike trails cost more than that.
Giant underwater cables. One of those things that makes perfect sense for how the modern world works, but something I’ve never even considered might exist until now.
Now think that the first one was put there in 1858....
The first to be used reliably was laid in 1865.
@@artbk The landing site for it in Cornwall has become the Museum of Global Communication which is a really interesting place to visit because it's more or less where everything underlying global communication today was invented but also where most modern surveillance techniques were developed.
Light is the fastest thing we know of so why not use it to transmit data?
"down where the light dares not go" is pure poetry
Next unicorn start-up idea: use eels as fibre-optic oceanic cables ✅
Spy eels that can relay information from other countries. Genius!
Get and train eels to line up and shock in sequence so that they can carry signal
don't forget to call it quantum AI transmission
Name the company CableGate. Don't forget to make the cables from carbon fiber. I've heard that they are really strong underwater...
I love how the US, one of the most prominent countries for global surveilance, always trying to sneak backdoors everywhere they can and wiretap eveything that's wiretappable, is always like:
"Are you sure you want to buy that Chinese product? They might use it to spy on you!"
"Buy this US product instead, you will thank me later"
To clarify, it's not like I think china wouldn't try to spy on us if it had the chance to do so. It's obvious they would, like everyone else.
I just don't like how some countries always prentend to be "the good guys" while they clearly are not.
I guarantee you other countries do the same, its just in the best interest of every country to take information of others, and to keep its citizens' information as hidden as possible
Also the US: muh free market
*Government interference, tax payer subsidized bribery-by-other-names, and sanctions*
That's just being human. There's no such thing as a free lunch. There's always Someone who will try to game the system, because it benefits them. This is why the global economy is the crackerbarrel it is. It's a poker game. Everybody's lying about what cards they hold. So, nobody trusts anybody. Every relationship is contingent, And those running the show believe in hierarchies, and hegemony. So, that's never going to work out, as we don't learn from our mistakes.
Generational forgetfulness plagues us, and we're making the same fundamental mistakes in our economy and politics, that destroyed civilisations in Antiquity. It's just that nice new labels are applied.
Um... we know? It's about preference; I'd rather have the U.S. government (or the U.K., France, Germany, Japan, or other Low-Corruption Democracies) spying on me than China. All governments are going to spy to some degree, and all companies are adherent to the rules of their nation first and foremost. More information allows a nation to better make decisions, so all governments are going to spy to some degree. This, in turn, means all nations are going to want to counteract other nation's spying activities. So, whether its this internet cable or any other technological product that has the ability to store/transfer sensitive data, the U.S. is obviously going to attempt to prevent nations perceived as posing a security risk from ascertaining control. And since spying is going to have some benefits, they will partake in that as well.
The U.S. is not different from any other nation (and doesn't necessarily present itself to be). I'm not sure where your getting this idea that Americans think that our government (or that of other nations) doesn't spy on us, as anyone who believes that would have to have been living under a rock for the past decade. There have been numerous scandals related to the U.S. govt. conducting surveillance on its own citizens, and that of allied nations. However, that is still the preferred outcome to the Chinese doing so.
0:50 I genuinely lol 😂
Haven't laughed like that at an HAI joke since "smaller than [small country], [small country] and [small country] *combined*"
As an Aussie, hearing you pronounce Melbourne correctly made me so happy :)
I wasn't aware it was possible to pronounce it incorrectly...
@@safebox36 They pronounce it mel-born
@@namarrkon sounds like a burn to me
Mellborrrrrrn
melbs
I have been binge watching this videos all day long, a new upload feels like heaven right now.
Lmao same. I was watching another of his videos and then this popped up. Coincidence? I think NOT.
I wish I could lay cable around the clock. what a life
What's to stop the Americans from doing what they were saying the Chinese would do? Oh, yeah, nothing.
AMERICANS SPYING?????
they would NEVER
It is much harder for America to contain its international spying. That's why most people know of the spying the US has done, because US news outlets did their jobs and reported on it and guess what they didn't get executed by their government. I wonder what would happen in China if the same thing happened? (The answer is they would be executed)
But it's FREEDOM spying. 😅
If the american cables glow green, would the chinese ones glow red?
The difference is that the US government has limitations on its ability to force private companies to disclose their data for spying purposes. The CCP does not, and routinely forces Chinese companies to cough up any data the government wants. If you think these are equivalent, then you don't understand how the either government works.
I was in Western Alaska a week and a half ago, and right before I arrived an undersea cable was believed to have been cut by an iceberg. Cut off non-satellite internet and phone service to all of Western Alaska from Utqiagvik to Nome. Crazy how little it takes to knock it offline
My inner 5 yr old can't get over how the cable is named "sea me we". I had a good chuckle over that.
i like how sam put a drawing of a minecraft repeater because he couldn't find a picture of an actual SMW6 booster. 2:10
@1:15: ...or in the case of the recent/current Northern Alaska outage, deep-sea iceotage. From Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) to Kaktovik (near the US/Canada border) and the Prudhoe Bay oilfields, the entire area is without internet access due to deep sea ice slicing through a deep-sea fiber optic cable.
The cable should have been called I-See-U-Pee 6. Everyone would have agreed to a cable with that name.
That's the name of the espionage operation onto it.
These videos are ridiculously entertaining. Next video should be on brick-optic cable!
I respect the consistency in the eel footage.
2:10 loving that redstone repeater from Minecraft 😂
Haha the random eel footage got me 😂
Your videos are always a nice treat in the middle of a work day! Thank you
damn, the spam bots are out in foce today
I like looking at eels way more than I like looking at cables. I’m very pleased.
3:18 such an uncomfortably long handshake 😅
I love this channel! Thank you for the effort you guys put into these videos!
Thanks for the shorter vid. Many educational UA-camrs have started doing far more in depth (20min+). I don't always have enough time to follow some topics. 10min or less is great to get a summary rather than cut a vid short.
so if its easy to put spying equipment there, why does USA want it so hard ? just to put spying equipment there ?
if at any point it goes on land in their controlled territory - they don't need to, they can listen to it from there. Otherwise they can use UUV's for seabed warfare to install some listening devices regardless. And of course they can bribe the country in which it goes on land to "help them" as well. Currently couple countries have similar Seabed Warfare capabilities. China is among them. So this wasn't about espionage really. It was about tech superiority and controlling companies who have such expertise.
@@jannegrey Yeah US intelligence kinda relies on the internet being more or less invented in the US so the entire modern internet routes through the internet. And they also have had a very easy time getting allied countries to work together with them to tap internet cables in their territory, it's called the 5 Eyes Alliance and the 7 Eyes Alliance.
@@hedgehog3180 Denmark for example quite readily spied on other EU countries for US. I wouldn't look only for 5 eyes or 7 eyes, but more widely. Most countries that are allied with US will share at least part of intelligence with it. Usually all of it - if US reciprocates.
They already do Snowden leaked it before
@@NeostormXLMAX yup
First 15 seconds had me thinking this was a submarine joke😂
Using Minecraft repeaters to visualise amplifiers is hilarious.
Since it’s cheaper by the kilometer, they should use that instead of by the mile.
Why not just do it all by the meter then? Plus I think inches might be the best deal but idk im not a tech expert
That's why everyone outside the US does use km.
@@laurasisson1611 You have to pay a significant cut to inch worms whenever you use inches so that actually raises the price back up.
I love the use f the redstone repeater from minecraft in your editing, it really makes sense to a lot of people
Slight correction, the plow is only put in the water if the cable is going to be buried. Otherwise the plow lives on deck or can be left ashore and the cable is laid on the surface of the ocean floor.
he makes minor mistakes on purpose to drive up engagement in the comments
They usually don't own the "bandwidth", but a couple of the fibers itself. They'll choose to light it themselves with equally expensive DWDM equipment, of which landing stations are usually the top of the line hardware there (moved to inland backbones as they are replaced with new stuff) or sell it to someone who will.
congrats on 400 videos!
I laughed way too hard in the "IS IT THIS?" section :D :D
That depiction of the Earth and Moon is not to scale!!
"What is an eel if not an under water electric rope... Think about it"
Here is your honorary masters degree in zoology. 📜 🎓
0:15 Well, that's stupid. I would have gone for the fish that flashes all kinds of colors!
I don't understand the problem. On the internet, you're supposed to assume all of your traffic is being watched, which is why you use secure protocols and proxies depending on your needs.
2:26 the ocean gate titan submersible could of use that so it didn't implode
have*
@@andrewpinedo1883 Of still works, this is a UA-cam comment, not an English language exam.
how do you maintain such a consistent upload schedule?
People who research for him. People who edit for him.
99 % stock photos.
Read a text - boom - Video
It's called team work
Teamwork
Best cable footage ever.
The fact that we get free videos on UA-cam by Half as Interesting is truly a gift. 👍👍👍
Does the route of that cable via the moon explain the apparently awful internet access in Australia?
Plot twist: the USA is gonna install surveillance on the cable instead
That little bit about how cable is protected seems oddly relevant to submarine architecture, can't say why tho
Wow I learned both how information actually travels and got a better understanding of Minecraft redstone all in Seven minutes
Congratulations on 400 episodes! Sam!!
POV when you forgot that traffic gets encrypted at least 5 times and it isn’t possible to somehow decrypt it:
Gotta love at how US gets mad at even the possibility of other countries doing what it's been doing for decades
The US is horrible, absolutely. Our spying and penchant for overthrowing democracies to install dictators who will sell us cheap oil is profoundly evil.
But I would still bet everything I have and everyone I love that the CCP is pursuing evil harder than we ever did.
As they say, walk a mile in another man's shoes. Uncle Sam hates it when you steal his shoes.
@@rodh1404 Have you heard of "Chinese police overseas service stations"? There's a Wikipedia article on them. What is the US equivalent? Because I'm not aware of anything even close.
Is there any US equivalent to the Great Firewall of China?
Will the US remove your passport for criticizing it? Or make all your friends and family abandon you after the government labels you a dissident?
What is the US equivalent to North Korea? You know, the North Korea who will put an entire family line into labor camps for some crimes? The North Korea that wouldn't be able to continue without constant support from the CCP?
Don't misunderstand me, I'm fully of the opinion that *at least* all US presidents since Jimmy Carter should have been executed for their crimes against humanity. It's beyond appalling to me that Andrew Jackson still sits on the $20 - even if you only consider the trail of tears.
But the CCP (not the Chinese citizens) is absolutely evil.
I love how people keep calling china aggressive but if china did even 2% at what the USA did people would go insane
3 comments here already got chinese democracy'ed.
1:03 Hahaha this completely got me. Very astute observation, and great joke :-)
If they really wanted it to be secure (which neither China nor the US wants), the solution is extremely simple: just encrypt it at both ends.
i assume mostof it already is
I mean you can literally just do that yourself. It's not up to the cable to encrypt communication, it's up to the sender and receiver. The internet is built to be completely agnostic about the data it is sending so you can send encrypted data and it'll work just fine and no one will be able to intercept it assuming your encryption method is solid.
@@DropaBombOnM Well im not sure how deep sea cable internet is managed, but all websites with an thing are encrypted. My logic is that the man in the middle attacks only happen to the websites that still are only HTTP://, or have security problems.
To clarify: the app level can do its own encryption and usually does (e.g. your web browser w/ HTTPS). But I don't think the physical links themselves are encrypted - and way too much of the software out there is made really poorly by low-tier engineering practices, which is where you might find some exploits.
I love that the aplifiers are redstone repeaters
"shark bi-tage" 😂
I'd be more worried about an off switch than spying on data passing through the cable.
An on/off switch wouldn't affect the US but this line is the main connector from China to Europe and would affect both regions if damaged, which is why I would have rather a European or Chinese company has control of laying it.
@@krashd SEA-ME-WE 6 connects Singapore to France with branches for India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc. It doesn't directly connect to China.
I have always wanted to know how they lay the cable and always neglect to look it up. I find it hilarious that they literally just drop them out of a boat.
Blows my mind that the cable costs less per foot installed than the raw mild steel tubing I would use to build an automotive roll cage.
5:52 replying to boatloads of emails? i thought emails traveled by eel, not boat..
Correction: electrons do not move at the speed of light in a cable, but only at about 1/300 of that. It’s still fast though.
Luckily, photons in fiber optics cables do move around the speed of light, and you can easily test how fast the information moves. If you access a server on the other side of the world, since the Earth has a circumference of around 40,000 kilometers and the speed of light is around 300,000 kilometers per second, lightspeed lag would make you take at least 0.1 seconds to get your request from your computer to the server and the response back. If the information traveled at around 1/300 of the speed of light, it would travel at around 1,000 kilometers per second, and it'd take around 80 seconds before your computer even started getting a response.
Since getting a response from a server on the other side of the world usually takes around a quarter of a second (and certainly much less than a minute before you even start getting a response), it's pretty clear that the information in the undersea fiber optic cables are in fact traveling around the speed of light.
@@rytan4516 Sorry, but particles move slower through matter than through vacuum. In the case of fiber, you lose about 30%.
I love how a user called kevin luo wrote under most gpt44x bots that they are bots, good work keep it up.
Man I couldnt imagine my life if I had to lay cable around the clock.
In this kind of job, it makes perfect sense. You're on a ship in the middle of the ocean, so it's not as if after your shift ends you can just go home to see your family and come back the next day. So, because your commute is long and expensive (you're thousands of miles from home), and there isn't anywhere to go after your shift ends (you're still on a ship in the middle of the ocean), what you do is work a lot of hours, but not all the time. There are many schedules, but a common one is that you get on the ship and work for 30 days, then you go home for 20 days. You're still taking time off, you just take it all together where it matter, and not aboard the ship. Also, you rarely work 12 hours straight, it's generally organized in 3 shifts per day of 4 hours each. So, it's 12 hours in total, but not 12 hours without rest.
"...split two twelve-hour-shifts so they can lay cable around the clock."
I know the feeling.
"crush resistant armor to resist"
Falling in love
your videos have a great mix of information and comedy to help a boring day go by better
the USA government is seriously concerned about other government being able to snoop, or hinder their ability to snoop.
1:14 Shark Bitage 😂😂😂😂
damn he's really going with the kilometer thing
Great video THank you
I thought it was the submarine he was talking about at the start
0:23 Yes, this is the ultimate form of latency internet communication system humanity could have.
Technically, internet through space could result in slightly better latency over a long distance because fiber optics is not a vacuum and light do not travel at the same speed (it's like 2/3 or speed of light in vacuum).
cant believe hai made the amateur mistake of using stock footage of moreys instead of eels
I always wondered who "owns" the cables.
Happy HAI 400
modern internet was built around the idea that all communications would be spied on. everything on the internet is encrypted.
The amount of times it wrapped around the moon plus earth and more😱
Let me guess, nobody is sus on oceancuck being part of this that dropped to the bott?
What i got from this video is that America has already wiretapped the cables
Talking about government subsidy, did everybody not realize that the American companies have always been subsidized by the global use of the dollar, the economic sanctions that the US government imposes arbitrarily, and the military muscle of its armed forces?
I’m watching this during my online college session. Does that count as a meeting?
An eel is an underwater electric “nope rope”.
"lay cable around the clock" - me after taco bell
I like the minecraft repeaters in the cable.
Wow! Laying undersea cable is cheaper per mile than interstate highway building.
The fact he's not calling it a cable is driving me slightly bananas.
A wire is a single strand of metal! That's not a wire! It's a cable!
The reflecting is only for multimode fiber, single Mode (which is used in subsea cables) don't have this as the light goes through without bouncing.
happy new HAI video for all who celebrate
I too want to lay cable around the clock.