Slashdot Mirror
University of Twente NOC Fire Arson
Lars writes "A 26-year old man from Hengelo has admitted to deliberately setting fire to the Network Operations Centre of University of Twente, last Wednesday. The fire gutted two wings of the building and devastated one of the fastest networks in Europe.
The arsonist is an employee of the University, which must come as quite a shock to those involved.
The University released a short statement to the press.
It mentions that the total damage caused is roughly 40-50 million euros (about the same in dollars) and that the guy was caught last Friday, when he tried to set fire to one of the faculty buildings."
Wouldn't going on strike have been a little more effective than burning down the office?
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
The Stake, obviously.
I guess those Euro's don't go for that sort of thing though, do they?
Never confuse volume with power.
Now that's a dedicated luddite.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
Any idea why he did it? The article is slashdotted already.
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
The arsonist is an employee of the University, which must come as quite a shock to those involved. The University released a short statement to the press
English text here.
They should have let him keep his red Swingline Stapler...
A few non - european services were affected as well - namely ALL security updates for Debain (the primary mirror anyhow) were offline for a while.
Brings up a good point in disaster recovery: How many organizations have machines at various places that they can't recover from a total loss?
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" -- George Orwell
The article basically says: he dun-it and he's an employee. What it doesn't say is why he dun-it, though.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
I mean, he's 26. He now owes the university and several companies 40-50 Million Euros (dollars). Its just arson so thats what 3-5 years. To me, thats way to easy to get off. Even if he makes $50k after taxes, it will take him 800 years to pay off 40million. Thats just messed up.
So, this guy gets out when he is 30yrs old, can find a job and move on with his life looking for more buildings to burn down. isnt there something wrong with that?
Ralph: "That's where I saw the Leprechaun. He tells me to burn things!"
Leprachaun: "You've done grand, laddie! Now ya know what ya have ta do! Burn the house down! Burn 'em all!"
They obviously didn't have enough firewalls.
(Sorry... couldnt resist)
-- 7 string electric violin + live loop samplers
Information wants to be set on fire.
Press release Twente Police 25 November 2002
Confession concerning fire UT
The 26-year-old man from Hengelo detained on Friday afternoon has confessed that he also started a fire on the grounds of the University of Twente on Wednesday morning 20 November 2002. In this fire two wings of one of the buildings on the grounds were completely destroyed and damages caused of between 40 and 50 million euro.
The 26-year old was detained Friday afternoon after witnesses had observed the start of a small fire in another building. On the directions of these witnesses the 26-year old could then be detained.
On the how and why of the arson on the 20th no further announcements can be made at this moment. The suspect will be undergo further questioning on this.
We can announce that the 26-year old is an employee of the University of Twente. The University staff has been informed of his confession by now.
He will be brought before the magistrate in Almelo today.
I believe that a lot of imporant free software sites were hosted by this university. Hence, its relevance here.
That's not what they mean by Firewire.
Stupid idiots.... the whole infrastructure was burnt down, and we're trying to rebuild it as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, www.utwente.nl is used as a central point of information towards students and employees. Which n00b put the link on slashdot, _AGAIN_? Thanks for ruining our just revived webserver, thanks for nothing!
(25-11 1345) Plead guilty within prickly UT Politiepersbericht Plead guilty within prickly UT ( university Twente ) Enschede: The vrijdagmiddag jl. aangehouden jr. spouse out of Fishing rod , has zondagavond well-known who he too the prickly has institution in the field of the University Twente worn woensdagmorgen 20 November jl. Towards this prickly went two wings with one with the buildings worn the shunting yard wholly ruin and went one pity raise with between the 40 and 50 million European currency. The jr. wax vrijdagmiddag aangehouden after through give evidence wax seen who towards one other edifice worn the Universiteitsterrein one young prickly wax sping up. Worn pointer with this give evidence might the jr. subsequently turn aangehouden. Via the the and why with the incendiarism worn the 20e November jl , may worn this one moment not one draw near information turn given. The suspect will about this yet nearer turn hearing. Well-being pitcher turn medegedeeld who the jr. one cooperator is with the University Twente. The personnel worn the University Twente is yet worn the altitude brought with one's plead guilty. Today is being he pre-gummed towards the master - superintendant within Almelo.
Can anybody make more sense of this more than the original?
First a massive fire, now a thorough slashdotting. What's next, Mecha-Striesand?
According to the mIRC home page, their message boards and mailing lists were destroyed in the fire as well. It appears to have affected a large number of people.
Politiepersbericht Bekentenis in brand UT (Universiteit Twente) Enschede: De vrijdagmiddag jl. aangehouden 26 jr. man uit Hengelo, heeft zondagavond bekend dat hij ook de brand heeft gesticht op het terrein van de Universiteit Twente op woensdagmorgen 20 november jl. Bij deze brand werden twee vleugels van een van de gebouwen op het terrein geheel verwoest en werd een schade veroorzaakt van tussen de 40 en 50 miljoen euro. De 26 jr. was vrijdagmiddag aangehouden nadat door getuigen was gezien dat bij een ander gebouw op het Universiteitsterrein een beginnend brandje was ontstaan. Op aanwijzingen van deze getuigen kon de 26 jr. daarna worden aangehouden. Over het hoe en waarom van de brandstichting op de 20e november jl., kunnen op dit moment geen nadere mededelingen worden gedaan. De verdachte zal hierover nog nader worden gehoord. Wel kan worden medegedeeld dat de 26 jr. een medewerker is van de Universiteit Twente. Het personeel op de Universiteit Twente is ondertussen op de hoogte gebracht van zijn bekentenis. Vandaag wordt hij voorgeleid bij de rechter-commissaris in Almelo. I ran this thru googles translator as French, German and Italian, and they all stayed the same! Is this the new Universal Language© that I've been hearing about?! :)
Sehr geehrter Toilettenbenutzer!
It turns out it wasn't arson, but merely a misunderstanding.
They asked him to install the new "firewall"...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Here's a summary of the statement in English (from Dutch):
--
A 26-year old man from Hengelo admitted sunday evening that he started a fire on wednesday 20th of November that incinerated 2 wings of the University of Twente building.
He was arrested after witnesses saw him at another small fire on campus.
Police can make no statements about why and how he did it. However the police confirms that he works at the University.
--
"Son, in a sporting event, it's not whether you win or lose, it's how drunk you get" - Homer J. Simpson
Arsonists are usually psychotic and often admit to anything. I know of one guy who confessed to setting fires that were set when he was 3 years old!
This is probaly true -- but he may not be the guy without cooroborating evidence.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
an o to a O.
:)
o - arse before jail
O - arse after jail.
Alas gallinaceas de urbe bovis volo
A kidney is worth how much?
They do say that > 70% of malicious attacks on computer networks come from insiders. And that network security starts with physical security.
I guess that this has been a painful learning experience for the SAs.
I'm sure if you submit it again, they'll keep posting it, though.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
gruntled?
The worst part was he burnt down the warehouse with toilet paper and lightbulbs. The insurance company refused to pay, because the school didn't perform even a basic background check which would have given away the man's background.
The worst part was taking exams in rooms to dark to power the solar-powered calculators. Some professors resorted to carrying lightbulbs from room to room.
In talking with a Disaster Recovery, quote EXPERT unquote, he said a little fact that quite surprised me: 62% of all technology disasters are premeditated by disgruntled employees, honest administrative mistakes, or lack of change control procedures. We build our moats around the castle, but we never think to install smoke alarms in the kitchen!?!?
If I don't post again before Thanksgiving, Happy Turkey day ya'll.
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
A random Debian server is more important than your petty concerns. Get over it.
You guy's are really considerate: fire destroys network, they do all their best to get it somewhat back to work and then you slashdot it back into oblivion.
Though the arsonist takes a huge part of the blame, i think the university also made some faults. Why put your servers in a building that burns that well? If you have so much expensive equipment, you should consider everything, including arson! A few days ago they were happy that no asbestos was released because it was removed shortly ago. But isn't asbestos a fire retarder??
Anyhow this fire is a huge problem for the university. When i was studying there 2 years ago, their biggest trouble was the financing of new buildings. They were supposed to build a new combined building for Physics, Electronics and Chemistry. When the drawings were almost finished they had to scap the whole thing. Right now several buildings are way beyond their lifetime and could technically be shut down to regulations any moment. Most buildings are already extended with temporary containers (Portacabins). And now this..... If they were a company this would certainly be their bankruptcy.
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
Of course, what the Dutch equivalent is, I couldn't tell you.
Let's show our sympathies regarding the loss of one of the fastest computer networks in Europe by Slashdotting their web servers!
Looks like the Scotty/Tkinetd pages are still up - I guess that they are hosted in another building, thank goodness.
Too bad employers do not give the employees the options to buy their office equipment. This all could of been settled for $4-5 instead of $40-$50 million!!
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
Instead he is going to prison and meet Bubba; the A$$ Plow.
Federal "pound me in the ass" prison!
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
My company is so paranoid about security on the main frame, all the local IT people are locked down to the point they almost can't work. Instead of worrying about logical security inside the system, I should send them the link to this story. This is what an employee would do if s/he were seriously pissed, not hack into the system. This sort of thing would be a mission critical disaster to any company. It really made me re-think my offsite backup storage scheme!
it is news, and I wouldn't want to censor the news, either.
A better idea would be to mirror the site whenever a non-commercial page came up. Perhaps permission could be asked for this (which in this case I'm sure would have been quickly granted).
D
Let's develop a manual, GUI router software.
The PC has 2 or more network cards, and one program on the system. The only interface is a mouse.
The delinquent sees as many windows on the screen as there are NICs in the computer. They manually route packets by identifying a packet header in hex in the window, and dragging that packet from the window it's coming from to the window it should be routed to.
They would be checked by an automatic router in operation in the background, and would be given further punishment if they route packets incorrectly.
Their sentence term would simply be to route as many packets as were lost due to their actions.
-Adam
nicht spraeken Deutsch.
It is Dutch which though a Germanic language is not the same as modern German.
They should not have taken his red stapler...
So far, I've found gruntled.com, gruntled.net, farfromgruntled.com and gruntled.co.uk.
Here's a summary of the statement in English (from Dutch)
:-)
Dutch, huh? Well, that explains why I couldn't get google to translate the page from German to English
$8.95/mo web hosting
Yeah, the rapist will probably force the arsonist to give his buddy a rimjob whilst he pounds him in the ass. You know how those europeans are...
Usually, the moderators "get it" much better than the repliers. But this mod total is just schizoid:
Offtopic=1, Troll=2, Interesting=1, Informative=6
While I'm glad that "Interesting and Informative" have outweighted "Offtopic and Troll", I think the modders are missing the point.
I interpreted "Thanks for ruining our just revived webserver, thanks for nothing!" as sarcastic humor, not as a literal slam of the Slashdot effect. So if I had mod points (see my journal for obligatory newbie whining), I'd have given it +1, Funny.
Note to self: remember to enclose all sarcasm in <SARCASM>proper HTML notation</SARCASM>.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
PS God loves you and longs for relationship with you.
I do not think that using that signature was a good idea. People might get the wrong idea about Prisons, rape and God.
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
He was just trying to overclock his Athelon.
Their 'campus'webserver (http://www.snt.utwente.nl/) has some information on their network.
They installed a 55Mb uplink to a company nearby the night after the fire, but this was through a masquerading server. Thursday night they have started connecting all buildings to SURFnet (so they would have official IP-addresses and stuff), still through the 55Mb link. The campus was last on Friday. They are repeatingly asking the students not to download large files.
They expect to get a full 1Gb uplink tomorrow afternoon.
I don't know what they did with the Debian servers, though.
tom_cooper@bigfoot.com who wants to talk dirty about sex with deities.
Lets try to keep this conversation on topic. It should of said "tom_cooper@bigfoot.com who wants to talk dirty about sex, prison and God with deities."
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
If you have so much expensive equipment, you should consider everything, including arson!
No, there's really no way to prevent arson.
You can take reasonable steps to prevent small fires from breaking out, or even expensive measures like halon to protect large server rooms from large fires. But you just cannot stop a dedicated arsonist, especially if he has access to the room you're trying to protect. Any anti-fire system can easily be defeated or bypassed by someone who's had time to plan ahead... which an arsonist usually does.
And if you protect your servers from the actual fire, what good is it if the building collapses down around them? Once the floor goes, it doesn't matter how well you protected that room.
Thus the importance of backups and disaster recovery plans. There's no way to stopping a dedicated arsonist, but you can back up your data easily enough.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Hmm, I wonder if he'll actually be brought to trial or will get judged to be a nutter and sent to a mental hospital.
When I was at primary school in Colchester(UK) there was a spate of school fires in my area which the police believed to be arson. They got extremely excited when they realised that the headmaster(principal) of my school had visited each of the schools just before the fires. Obviously they questioned him quite closely but then couldn't find any evidence against him, so they started secret surveillance on his movements.
A couple of days into the surveillance, my school got burnt down completely and what the police saw was another teacher torching the school. Apparently this guy had flipped and he was trying to assasinate the headmaster by burning down any buildings that he visited. Not really the most efficient way of taking someone out, but that's madness for you.
I'm pretty sure he was judged to be clinically insane and sent away pretty much permanently....
"Free software as in beer, copy protection as in racket" - Telsa Gwynne
Let's see, setting a fire and causing millions of dollars/euros in damage is wrong IN YOUR OPINIONWhy on Earth did you need to add the IMO here? Do you think that for some people this is an OK thing to do? Try to get the testicular fortitude to actually say some things are bad or even (God forbid) WRONG!
The wishy-washy, "Well in my opinion arson is kind of wrong, but I can see how some people feel good about it," thinking is dangerous. It leads to the ascension of those who don't believe in any right and wrong, such as the RIAA.
(Man, the things that set me off some days...)
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
There is no way any human can know of all the cities around the world. What is so significant about Twente that an American should be charged with knowledge of its existence? Could you proivde us stupid Yanks with a list perhaps of other cities that are wholly insignificant yet that we should know about in order to please Europeans like yourself who happen to have an over-inflated sense of self worth?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Please use them wisely, we dont want another fire to break out...or do we?
/me where's my stapler?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
I agree that concrete standards for right and wrong exist, and that wishy-washy handringing and relativism are dangerous.
In small things we can excuse behaviour because 'that is just his way', 'he meant well', 'too young to know better', 'insanity', or any other excuse you might come up with. Depending on the scale of the crime punishment may still needed even if the excuse is accepted. If this guy had voices in his head telling him to set the fire his actions are still wrong. He might not be responsible for those actions, but he still has to be locked up and not released until he is treated (part of which means showing true remorse). If he did this for 'patriotic' reasons then he should suffer severe punishment.
I know I'm offtopic here, but this whole idea is tangled up with the 'patriotism vs. terrorism', and 'personal freedom vs. protection of society' that are playing out right now. RIAA and co. are not the real danger here, they are just opportunists.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
Some people will go to any lengths to improve the popularity of their distribution. But please, burning servers?
Let's see. I would say that CNN.com could cause a flood of people to visit a site. Maybe MSN.com could also, simply because it is set as a default homepage and so many people don't know how to change their default homepage. I'm sure that there are other sites similar to those that could have a "slashdot effect" but certainly Slashdot is the prime example for the effect.
Sapere aude!
His debt to society includes the 40-50 million Euros for the building, plus the interference with everybody's lives who used the building. Thank God nobody was killed. Just going to jail, without restitution for the damage he caused, doesn't fix it. If jail helps him confront his mental problems and deal with them, then maybe he'd be stable enough for someone to trust him with a job, but he won't have paid his debt to society until he has actually paid his debt to society.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Surely you can give some benefit of the doubt to the poster and assume that the IMO is in fact associated with the 'what he did' and not with the 'is wrong'.
It seems more likely to me (due to how I parse english, which judging by my english marks in school all those years ago probably isn't correct) that he is saying that in his opinion he did 'it'. And that that 'it' is wrong. In effect saying 'what he allegedly did is wrong' combinged with 'i believe he did it'.
You seem to be from the US. I thought you guys still had the principal of assumption of innonence which leads to the use of terms like 'allegedly' and 'IMO' to clarify statements which would otherwise be in violation of that principal. Or has Ashcroft made a few more changes?
Need I say more?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Hi, Freak.
But that simply doesn't make sense in English. Let's spell it out completely:
:-)
"What he did (in my opinion) is wrong." It isn't proper, or even improper English to associate the IMO with "What he did". If someone said that out loud, 10 out of 10 english speakers would assume that he was talking about the "is wrong". Mainly because "in my opinion" *doesn't* *make* *sense* any other way. Even if the orig. poster was the investigator of the case, and was trying to show presumption of innosense, he would say something along the line of "What he allegedly did", or maybe "What he did (if in fact he did it), was wrong".
By the fact that you said "... from the US. I thought you guys..." in the last paragraph, I'll assume that #1 you are not from the US and #2 english is not your native language. So don't consider this a flame as you are (very obviously) much more fluent in English than I ever will be in your native tongue, whatever it is. But take it from me, there is simply no way that a native english speaker would ever use that phrase in the manner with which you are espousing.
Have a great day.
And of course I just made an ass of myself, by not looking at the ".au" url in your user info. Of course, one could make that argument that Australian english is as bad a perversion as American english, and thus we are talking apples and oranges ;-)
Parentheses are used for setting off an aside, to mark additional material that isn't needed by the sentence.
However, in informal writing such as an email or a slashdot post, they are often used to indicate an afterthought. Used in that way they indicate an addition to the previous statement. This is different to speech, I agree. English writing is often different to English speech.
Using 'allegedly' would be far clearer, but this isn't formal writing. Tagging (IMO) to the end of a statement isn't uncommon. Have a look at some IRC logs for example.
All your uses of ()s in the post I'm replying to, are traditional english uses. In that they mark non-essential elements, which can be included in place and make sense. Used in that way parentheses act just like paired dashes, or paired commas. Slang usage of (IMO) also includes the indication of an afterthought, a way of reducing a claim to opinion. (IMO) and (in my opinion) are different in that context since only the IMO version has this slang usage (that I know of).