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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."
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!
"Hi. My internet connection's shot. It's just not working."
Anybody want my mod points?
...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
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
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?
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
Just junk food for thought...
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
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
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