Very interesting CPunks reading, for a variety of reasons.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68894,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1
Of course, the fact that Lucent has been in shit shape financially must have
nothing to do with what is effectively a state-sponsored protection of
intellectual theft and profiting by Lucent (merely keeping the tech under
wraps would have been possible in a closed-doors session. Remember that
connectors can easily cost $50 per or more, so these guys were really ripped
off and Lucent probably made out quite well.)
Aside from this the links are worth pursuing vz Variola Suitcase type
discussions.
I suspect that a thorough civilian analysis could reveal a lot about NSA's
undersea operation. One thing I can see about this connector is that it does
not require any visual orientation in order to mate the Bragg-angled fiber
interfaces inside...other connectors either mismate if you're not careful,
or require rotating the ferrule in order to get the notch to line up.
(Low-loss fiber connectors are Bragg-angled in order to prevent
reflections.) These might not be viable options at deep depths, indicating
that some of their operation must be done extra-vehicular (though by humans
or robots I can't yet tell.)
Their carrying on about HOW they select traffic is, I suspect, true: They
must have some kind of control and switching network in some areas in order
to select out some traffic, and I believe I've seen parts of this...the
bandwidth is just too large to develop a complete 1:1 copy of everything,
when we're talking middle-of-the-ocean-type applications. (And as I've also
stated many times, I'd bet NSA has a HUGE risk analysis department to
support the decisons about which traffic to grab.)
-TD
