Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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....
Because backhoes just won't cut it anymore.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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
...when you shoot it out of my cold, dead ground.
Viper is the preferred editor of the Emacs operating system.
OMG! THINKOFTHEFIBER!
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?
We already have gun control.
Those with the guns are in control.
http://www.teliasoneraic.com/tsicWeb/tsic/section
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
"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.
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
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.
No, just the gun owners whose guns only shoot sideways.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
Dateline: Cleveland
"In a bizarre story coming out of Ohio, A Mr. Johanson allegedly went on a shooting spree. He shot out every window in his house, blasted his mailbox, walked down to the corner gas station and shot up a pump, shot out several street lights, and finally shot up a section of fiber cable. When finally captured and confronted by police, he claimed he was cleaning his rifle when it accidently went off."
{Nods to George Carlin as the source of this joke...}
"Well..here I am..." - Jubal Early
Those are supposed to be speed holes... I've heard they make it go even faster!
stuff |
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...
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