PCs Pilfered, Paralyzing Populace

Heywood Yabuzof writes "According to this Wired story, thieves in Chile caused traffic to grind to a halt when they decided to steal the computers (15 PCs and 2 servers) that control the traffic lights in Santiago. Funny how everyone worries so much about preventing "evil hackers" from breaking in to systems remotely and causing chaos, and then some burglars just go ahead and steal the critical computers to produce the same (unintended?) results."

Comments

I hope they had a good backup strategy

[cygnusx]

The real test for the admins at the end of the day will be -- how fast can they bring the systems back online?

Honestly, how different is this (apart from being more spectacular) from a power spike frying your servers (maybe because of a UPS problem)?

Re:It's a good thing...

[BlueUnderwear]

I find it hard to believe that most city streets operate at anything even approaching 100% capacity. It's probably more like 60-70%.

Considering the average over the whole day, and over all roads and streets in the network, it's probably even much lower than that. What's relevant here is peak usage: how overloaded are the main arteries at rush hour?