For example, Australia still uses fines which were set during the signing of the 1884 submarine cable treaty: 2000 Australian dollars, almost insignificant now. Influence of cable networks on modern history Submarine communication cables have had a wide variety of influences over society. As well as allowing effective intercontinental trading and supporting stock exchanges, they greatly influenced international diplomatic conduct. Before the existence of submarine communication connection, diplomats had much more power in their hands since their direct supervisors (governments of the countries which they represented) could not immediately check on them. Getting instructions to the diplomats in a foreign country often took weeks or even months. Diplomats had to use their own initiative in negotiations with foreign countries with only an occasional check from their government. This slow connection resulted in diplomats engaging in leisure activities while they waited for orders. The expansion of telegraph cables greatly reduced the response time needed to instruct diplomats. Over time, this led to a general decrease in prestige and power of individual diplomats within international politics and signalled a professionalization of the diplomatic corps who had to abandon their leisure activities. Notable events In 1914, Germany raided the Fanning Island cable station in the Pacific. The Newfoundland earthquake of 1929 broke a series of transatlantic cables by triggering a massive undersea mudslide. The sequence of breaks helped scientists chart the progress of the mudslide. In 1986 during prototype and pre-production testing of the TAT-8 fiber-optic cable and its lay down procedures conducted by AT&T in the Canary Islands area, shark bite damage to the cable occurred. This revealed that sharks will dive to depths of , a depth which surprised marine biologists who until then thought that sharks were not active at such depths. The TAT-8 submarine cable connection was opened in 1988. In July 2005, a portion of the SEA-ME-WE 3 submarine cable located south of Karachi that provided Pakistan's major outer communications became defective, disrupting almost all of Pakistan's communications with the rest of the world, and affecting approximately 10 million Internet users. On 26 December 2006, the 2006 Hengchun earthquakes rendered numerous cables between Taiwan and Philippines inoperable. In March 2007, pirates stole an section of the T-V-H submarine cable that connected Thailand, Vietnam, and Hong Kong, afflicting Vietnam's Internet users with far slower speeds. The thieves attempted to sell the 100 tons of cable as scrap. The 2008