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Gunplay Blamed For Cutting Fiber
coondoggie writes "Internet service providers in the US experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. TeliaSonera AB, which lost the northern leg of its US network to the cut, said that the outage began around 7 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday night. When technicians pulled up the affected cable, it appeared to have been shot up over a length of a kilometer. 'Somebody had been shooting with a gun or a shotgun into the cable,' said a TeliaSonera spokesman. The company declined to name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications Inc. Level 3 could not be reached for comment."
Since when did Sonera operate in the US?
OK, does anyone know? How many XP do you get for killing a Level 3 network?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
took a shot in the dark (fiber)! *rimshot* That sounds deliberate, though. I can see there being a small section that was accidentally shot once, but the entire length of a kilometer? That's not just a couple stray shots.
"Hi. My internet connection's shot. It's just not working."
Anybody want my mod points?
My bad. I lost control. See, I'm not very good at FPS, and got tired of being spawn killed and trash talked by some 12 year old punk. But I am a bit better IRL.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
I imagine this is how the mob would get into the net neutrality / protection racket.
In other news, Level Three has begun filtering all traffic relating to online first person shooters until cables capable of handling that kind of fire power can be installed...
We needs shotguns for this shit
I keep telling myself I'm not the desperate type.
Its not speculated that it was Level3 its Cogent. Its all over Nanog.
...who instantly pictured corporate warfare, tech condotterie, and other cyberpunk-style happenings? Imagine a van full of shotgun-weilding, blue-print reading, monacle-wearing overlords....
This is just a gang member with a poor shot. Victims of said misfiring are often power lines, telephone wire, discarded AOL discs and squirrels. It was just a matter of time before fiber got was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just another day in an your average American city. Nothing to see here.
Maybe his telephone bill? Or mad over something else, like the lack of broadband to his home.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Because backhoes just won't cut it anymore.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
However, this is one persuasive argument for making guns illegal!
(I feel compelled to point out that I'm only joking.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Read: if you shoot INSIDE the fiber and along the line, you can get a lot of fiber in one shot.
So it was deliberate, but also quite quick if done right too. Pretty devious way to take out fiber because the entire length needs replacing, not just a short section that requires a bypass.
Obviously, some Gansta Rappa's be pissed that dey be dissed by da Intarweb homeyz downloadin' deyr tunz free and not payin' da rappa's so dey'z kin git dey's new bling - so de Gansta's be poppin' some caps inta dat Intarweb!
www.eFax.com are spammers
Ever since Grand Theft Auto introduced shooting up fiber optic lines into their, uh, game play sequence, urm...
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
repeat each 20x to effectively shut off your brain and all critical thought
You're well on your way.
...when you shoot it out of my cold, dead ground.
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
My theory on why Teliasonera is involved. Teliasonera AB is one of the biggest (the biggest?) ISP in sweden. They are not only a major ISP it basically own most of the copper in sweden. So it probably own some fiber connections too. So it got a big net in sweden. Since the internet is international it probably have invested in networks in other parts of the world aswell. According to the article it doesnt own the particular fiber but it probably use it to attach its different networks across the world.
no text
More music, fewer hits
If someone did this to a lot of fiber links around the country. We'd be totally
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
By speculating the owner of the fiber, is the implication that this was an attack on the network?
remember kids, guns don't kill the internet, people do! ;-)
Does this mean the internet should be getting a bigger gun to defend itself with?
Can you imagine what you'd think if you fired into the ground and light came out?
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
Wow, is that how all gun owners talk in America?
And I was getting severe packet loss until recently... maybe this was the cause...
Anyway - this raises the question about how the network is actually arranged - too much star topology and not enough redundancy. Of course there are some problems that arises from setting up a redundant network like the possibility of circular packet routing. But if the design is done with care it shouldn't pose a problem.
A friend of mine suffered from the outage - no access to any service at all for a few hours - just when he needed it!
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Somebody needs to call the A-Team!
You need to mention the other: "My version of gun control is keeping both hands on the grip." (or something like that — I don't actually own a gun and I probably never will)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Five people with shotguns could virtually isolate a large city from the internet. If someone else managed to blow up a steam tunnel, crash a tanker truck or drop nerve gas into a mall, it would be downright crippling.
technical writing / development
Maybe because it was just vandalism.
"My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my internet, prepare to die".
While I am by and large against intrusive gun control, the poster had a point. The gun-rights lobby is guilty, as many others are, of reducing what ought to be nuanced and well-reasoned arguments into trite slogans that don't help any discussion of the issue. The problem becomes that through these slogans rank-and-file believers become a liability to the cause, as their parroting makes them and their position seem overly simplistic, naive, and unreasonable.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
quote: "When technicians pulled up the affected cable..." To me this sounds like an underground cable, not strung along telephone poles along the highway. I don't know how things are handled in the US, but here in Canada, when backbone or trunk cable is underground it is several feet underground. It is often sharing space with sewer pipes. Within a residential area, I have seen cases where cable is threaded in underground (3 to 4 feet down) plastic pipe (ABS? PVC?)in a designated "service corridor" parallel to the sidewalk, an area set aside by the municipal planners for gas, water and communication connections. Either way, there is a fair bit of dirt between the cable and the firearm. From my Reserves days I know that a .303 or 7.62 NATO round will only go about 20 inches or so into the range berm if fired at very close range, depending on soil type. A twenty inch wall of sand bags will stop most small arms fire. The idea of of a bullet penetrating enough dirt to reach the cable, penetrate the rigid pipe and then damage the cable seems implausible. (Even allowing for the fragility of fiber when dealing with impact.) Then there is the fact that even work crews digging for the stuff rarely now precisely where the cable is, they have to dig a fairly wide and long trench to access the stuff. So even if you DID have a firearm and ammunition combination capable of doing the penetration (Barrett .50 maybe?) it would take many rounds fired essentially blind into the ground to get even one hit. Many hits along a 1.1Km length would require many MANY rounds. How many big rifle rounds do you suppose you could shoot into the ground before somebody showed up to ask you what the hell you were doing?
Shooting above ground cable doesn't have the penetration issue, but hitting that line 30 or more feet up is quite challenging as well. Any round that did hit however would stand a good chance of severing the cable altogether, making that section between poles simply fall to the ground at the severed end. There is still the problem of firing multiple high powered rounds without making the local police unduly interested. Does anyone know for sure if this was above ground or underground cable? And is it maybe hunting season in Ohio? If the cables ARE above ground and in a rural area, then maybe some drunken yahoos thought it would be a good idea to use the cables as a target in some macho bullshit marksmanship test. Most hunting rounds can easily go a kilometer or more downrange and retain enough energy to sever cable, on the other hand, deliberately hitting a target that slender from a klick away is a feat even elite military snipers would likely find challenging. Drunken yahoos would have to be within tens of yards to have a hope in hell of achieving it. One or more drunken idiots repeatedly shooting off a rifle within sight of a road does tend to attract official notice even during hunting season in rural Canada.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
That's because all those idiots are holding their guns sideways when shooting.
I've yet to figure that one out yet!! Where did they get the idea that was a good way to aim??
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Level 3 could not be reached for comment."
Well, duh. Their fiber's been all shot up. Of course they couldn't be reached.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The first thing that I thought of when I read this article was a hosting company called Latency Kills.. Really makes me wonder if Level 3's lines carry any bandwidth for Latency Kills... hehehehe
It doesn't actually specify how many breaks the cable suffered, just that a 1.1 Km length was affected.
It's possible that it was one continuous piece 1.1 Km long that had one break. While this weakens my points, it doesn't entire negate them.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
This story doesn't make a bit of sense. They dug up some cable, and found it had been shot? Are they saying someone first dug it up, shot it, and then gave it a decent burial? That would be a lot of work. Does the cable perhaps run along a sewer tunnel, and someone crawled down the tunnel and shot up the cable over an interval of a kilometer? (Just be alert for a guy who's talking very loudly, and keeps saying, "Speak up, I can't hear you".) And no, a shotgun blast is not going to penetrate anything like a kilometer of cable if you shoot down the length of the cable.
I'm not saying it didn't happen, but this article tells me little more than that there was a cable outage, and that the cause can't be explained coherently. Maybe it was mice...they've been known to chew up fiber optics. But that wouldn't make a good headline, would it?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
Well at least it wasnt a backhoe....
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
I hate to spoil all the wild speculation that I'm sure is coming about sabotage, corporate meddling and such...but TFA says "somewhere between Montville, Ohio and Cleveland". Montville and the areas around it (where I live) are in the absolute middle of nowhere. The ratio of hillbillies-with-guns to things-to-use-for-target-practice is fairly high out here. It's not like someone was down in a manhole aiming at a fiber installation...more likely the beer cans fell down and the feller kept shootin' em. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
This sig intentionally left blank.
You don't need gun control. Let em have all the guns they want. As many as they want.
What you NEED is bullet control.
"I'm not a procrastinator, I'm temporally challenged"
1) Actually bury your cable. Don't just lay it on the ground. And when you bury it, bury it sufficiently deep. Shotgun pellets don't penetrate the ground more than a few inches. 2) Redundant paths? Helloooo. This is supposed to be a selling point of the Internet. If this little botched cable is shutting you down, then you have bigger problems to fix with your network architecture.
Really? It seems to me that the vandal who did this had very good gun control.
www.wavefront-av.com
The radio station I once worked for used to have its 10,000 watt transmission cable shot out all the time. Bored hunters who can't find any game are extremely destructive. We probably averaged $5,000 - 10,000 per year repairing it.
Someone got revenge for the utility not burying the cable. Perhaps the installers got tired of burying the cable whilst out in the country, and just laid it on the side of the road on a farmer's plot, and said farmer got annoyed they didn't bury it and shot it up. (Guessing it was in the country given (a) it's in Ohio, which has a lot of farm land, and (b) you'd have to be so far away to not hear the gun shots...though it is near Cleveland that they're talking about...so may be not...).)
Perhaps the cable companies will sit up and start burying their cables now.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Like the old Dilbert cartoon: "The network is down! ...But I'm feeling better."
It's just too bad the guy didn't just take out his own Windows box.
Cool funny t-shirts for geeks, gamers and everyone else
Now there's a completely worthless angle to pursue.
I cast bullets bullets and load cartridges by the thousands in my shop. The tools and materials are simple and cheap.
Ammunition control would be nearly as big a time & resource sink for the government as it's current campaign to stomp out the production and distribution of a certain popular, easy to grow, weed.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Guns don't sabotage fiber cables, people do.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
We agree with your statement and find your terms acceptable.
-The MPAA/RIAA Coalition against Net Neutrality
This comment does not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the author.
I was wondering what was going on. At that point, I was just outside Uldaman instance, a level 38 Hunter, trying to take out this weasel level 44 Horde thief who was ganking people at the instance. It was tough going, owing to the level difference, his ability to chain-stun (made more problematic again by level difference), and the difficulties in close, indoor fighting (hunters do much better with lots of room.)
3 deaths later, a 48 counter-rogue joined me, but we never saw the guy again. A few minutes later, while waiting for him, my connection died. Restarts and reboots didn't help much, as I could only get back in 2 times, both of which I soon got booted back out.
Horde bastard, you lucky son of a bitch.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Everyone is just misunderstanding what was going on here. Bullets were the easiest way to make holes for the new tubes L3 was going to use to expand their intertube structure.
The word is "no." I am therefore going anyway.
Those are supposed to be speed holes... I've heard they make it go even faster!
stuff |
Well, Morpheus, it looks like it was us that struck first, after all.
My theory is that somebody got into a man hole, stuck a loaded shotgun into a large, multi-purpose conduit, and pulled the trigger.
Then some pellets continued to travel a km before making contact with something.
Not as unlikely as your scenarious, but not probable either. A full klick sounds a little long for a shotgun.. Although, shooting into a tube can do wierd things with range due to muzzle gas emmissions and so forth.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
And here I thought this was a story about unwise dieting techniques...
ahhhh good old cleveland!!! it's such a delightful place to visit. if it wasnt for the rock museum and drew carey i dont think anyone would care about that city.
-- troutsoup.com
shoots out fiber optic cable to teach those bastards a lesson in tech support, spotted fleeing the scene in a white van driven by a disgruntled Comcast customer
Think of the targets!
Even with a full choke you are lucky to get anything more than 3-500 feet out of a 12 gauge, the US Marines list the effective range as 50 yards.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I was playing on the idea that we value our internet more than our lives. Again, it was only a joke.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I think the GP was referring to an old Chris Rock joke, but your point is very valid. I cast bullets for my 9mm Luger, .45 ACP, and .30-30. Every few months I'll go out to the local shooting range and pickup all the centerfire brass I can get my hands on. Tumble it, decap it, sort it, and store by chambering. I've probably got 7-8 bucket loads of brass cases stored from this. I also usually get wheel weights from mechanics which I melt down into ingots and store the bars for future bullet casting. I'm not running out of ammo any time soon :).
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
We all know that Idaho doesn't exist.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Yesterday both my DSL connection and my 3G mobile internet connection, both from Telia were behaving like 56k modems. Loading pages from the US/Japan/etc took minutes. And of course, nothing was posted about this under their support pages/etc.
153 comments so far, and no one questions that in the US we refer to it as gunPLAY? Come on people, where are the biting commentary and jokes?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
He got the Internet Goin' Nutz!
I'm not running out of ammo any time soon
What about primers and propellant? Not being a smart-ass... those are just a lot harder to make yourself, that's all.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You know, that movie is not exactly bleeding edge these days - it's entirely conceivable that there are some child prodigy geeks on Slashdot who were born after it was released.
When I was a teenager, I don't think there were very many movie dialogues, from movies made before I was born [or even made when I was a young child], which I would have recognized. Maybe "The Wizard of Oz", but that's about it. Didn't really get exposed to things like "Casablanca" or "Citizen Kane" until college [or even graduate school], and I only learned e.g. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" much more recently.
Heck, I don't think I saw "The Godfather" until a few years ago.
Jules: We should have shotguns for this kind of deal.
Vincent: How many up there?
Jules: Three or four.
Vincent: That's countin' our guy?
Jules: Not sure.
Vincent: So that means there could be up to five guys up there?
Jules: It's possible.
Vincent: We should have fuckin' shotguns.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/quotes#qt0255
How is measuring cable in feet any more or less "silly" than measuring in meters?? You could measure them in grognards if you wanted - as long as you know how long a grognard is it shouldn't matter one iota. Measuring cable in meters seems silly to me as I would have to divide by 3.37 to get an idea of how long it really is...
"But this one goes to 11!"
Ok you advanced Level 3 Communications Inc. fiberoptic lines, listen up! You see this? This... is my boomstick! The 12-gauge double-barreled Remington. S-Mart's top of the line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right, this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Retails for about $109.95. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel, and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart. You got that?
Thank you IMDB.
Some ol farmer thawt it wuz a snake! A really really long snake.
Fear the CHUDs.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I measure my cable in ells.
The opposite of progress is congress
Primers go for about $20/1000.
.38 Special with a powder charge around 3.5 grains, it costs less than $60 to stockpile enough materials for 2000 rounds.
Powder goes for about $13-20 per pound.
So to load something like
If you forget to stock up on smokeless powder and primers, you could always use a percussion revolver like my 1858 Remington replica. Black powder isn't hard to make, and you can get a simple tool to make percussion caps from aluminum cans and paper caps.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It's usually just a GOB (good 'ole boy) shootin' at some varmint. In this case, someone probably drove down the fiber in their trusty pickup shootin at birds along the way. Buckshot has a wide dispersion patter (ask the guy that Cheney shot) so they would probably get some fiber on each shot! I've got a piece of fiber on my desk with several pellets embedded in it!
Move along... Nothing to see here!
Keep passing the open windows...
I think the article may be wrong.
. html or here for the thread index (lots of followups).
Over on the NANOG mailing list, which has a lot of people from the major U.S. backbones and networks subscribed to it, it is being reported/said that the line was Cogent's, not Level 3's, and that Cogent at one point had an advisory up about it.
Lots of people posted traceroutes that seem to confirm that it was definitely Cogent that took the hit. Packets were basically going all over the place on their network yesterday, and people who had fixed their routers to prefer Cogent over other backbones (apparently Bell) were having some slowdowns as a result.
See http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg02483
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I have a fiber network connecting 35 sites in my city, and about 60% of our outages come from someone shooting the fiber (we've had bullets, buckshot & an arrow) but it's not because they hate fiber! It's usually just a GOB (good 'ole boy) shootin' at some varmint. In this case, someone probably drove down the fiber in their trusty pickup shootin at birds along the way. Buckshot has a wide dispersion patter (ask the guy that Cheney shot) so they would probably get some fiber on each shot! I've got a piece of fiber on my desk with several pellets embedded in it! Move along... Nothing to see here!
Keep passing the open windows...
It's *fibre* a foot would have done the job.
Quack, quack.
Ummmmmm if that caused so much of an issue for so many people including complete loss of a network connectivity where is the backup ? or would this just be dragging up the point about being an under invested internet layout which was designed to protect against these very issues.
In retrospect and after reading the thread on NANOG's mailinglist, I think this is actually what happened.
The cable was somehow damaged, and in order to fix it, a 3600-foot (or whatever it was exactly) section needed to be removed and replaced with another one, which would need to be reblown into the conduit.
So there could conceivably only have been one point of damage, but because of where it occurred it necessitated replacement of a fairly long fiber span.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Where was Dick Cheney at the time in question?
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
I measure my cable in *cables*.
Infuriate left and right
...where was Dick Cheney during all of this?
i ncident
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Cheney_hunting_
My gun instructor said it was an efficient way for a noob to improve their accuracy. He said that upon squeezing the trigger, a novice tends to pull the gun to the left or right. When turning the gun sideways that movement translates into vertical movement. Since people are generally taller than wider, this theoretically increased their chance to hit the intended target. So yeah, but I doubt most of them even know why.
-those people who tell you not to take chances, they are all missing what lifes' all about-
This was all a minor misunderstanding. It was the *engineers responsible for windows networking* that we're supposed to have been taken outside and shot. Unfortunately, after this went through SMB, Exchange, and outlook, the network was targeted in error .
hawk
But it does drop packets after it dies....
:-/
The question is are the dropped packets vendor trash or are they useful as mats/reagents etc?
Are they grey, white, green blue or purple?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Heck, all you really need is one homeless guy and a mattress:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/03/03502
Pessimists.net - as if life wasn't depressing enough.
I guess thats one way to cut back on fiber.
Oddly enough, they all seem to wind up being exactly one cable long...
I've found that nurturing one's Zen nature is vital to dealing with technology. Violence is pretty damn useful too.
No they don't
Infuriate left and right
Those things will dislocate even a big man's shoulder. Also it depends on the type of powder used as the shell's propellant. 8 and 4 gauge shotguns typically use powerful black powder to fire their heavy loads. Me at 160 pounds and braced properly in a straddled stance still got knocked flat on my ass and bruised the hell out of my shoulder.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'm just throwing out another possibility that I haven't seen posted yet..
I've seen aerial copper/fiber spans cut by crackheads/methfreaks shooting them down from the poles on more than one occasion (In some areas, like mountainous regions, its difficult or impossible to bury cables).. The idiot thieves take the copper span that they just cut down and leave the (at least to us) more valuable fiber laying on the ground....
I'd be surprised if this isn't what happened.. even if it was underground they probably broke it by shooting tried to pull it back up...
I'm pretty sure they aren't off shooting guns in the city in those other countries which have better high speed access than we do. This is why we can't have nice things.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
Let's see...the cable was shot up with a shotgun over its entire kilometer length and nobody heard anything and the police didn't respond to shots fired. Way to go Cleveland!
Following the success of Bluetooth Sniper Rifle, it was natural that someone would try to bruteforce data into networks with a shotgun.
Heh... shortly after I moved to Athens, Georgia a few years ago, our internet and cable went down because someone shot through the cable in our neighborhood - while trying to kill a squirrel.
...if you were inclined, then this would probably put a big dent in the ISPs share price...
Thanks for the clarification.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
It ended up taking them about 6 hours to string up some new fiber and splice it all, which I thought was very quick considering the task. They put a cable about twice as thick in to replace it and left plenty of extra slack, but it just goes to show you that fiber isn't bulletproof or critter proof.
If carrots got you drunk, rabbits would be fucked up. - Comedian Mitch Hedberg R.I.P. 03/30/68-2/24/05
Let me get this straight: Someone shot more than one kilometer of buried optical cable -- with a shotgun? NFW!
Guns are not 'designed to kill people' They are tools. Just like a car is not designed to kill people, but cars have kill far more people every day in 'civilized' countries than guns ever have. (the notable exception being open warfare).
I don't see anything extraordinary about vandalism. Being from 'the country' I don't see anything unusual about some jack ass using a fire arm to do it. People have been putting holes in road signs with varmit rifles and pistols ever since we started installing them in the country.
I'm sorry the time since Amerika was a wild, untamed country has been so much shorter than from where ever your at. Its going to take us a few hundred years more to 'grow' out of our liking to be able to take care of ourselves, and not rely on The Church, The King, or some other 'higher authority' to make sure we are taken care of.
Having such lethal instruments in our possession makes the US a dangerous place to live. don't come here.
But in all seriousness even though I am an american I tend to think in metrics for some reason when it comes to networking, maybe it is because back in the day when I was a coder the metric system was so pretty. Or it could be that the Standards I read are written by Metric people. Either way, standards need to be kept or you get assholes who think...oh a cable can be 300meters long so I can go 1000 feet with copper no problem.....it comes in spools anyway.
Measuring in grognards or noodles or whatever your system of measurement is only causes a problem when you are hit by a truck and some poor SOB comes in and has to deal with your non-standard crap....wait you dont work for apple do you?
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Well DUUUUH! The cable was BROKEN.
it was elton john.