Slashdot Mirror
Elderly Georgian Woman Cuts Armenian Internet
welcher writes "An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper with a spade when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to nearly all of neighboring Armenia. The fibre-optic cable near Tiblisi, Georgia, supplies about 90% of Armenia's internet so the woman's unwitting sabotage had catastrophic consequences. Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours. Large parts of Georgia and some areas of Azerbaijan were also affected. Dubbed 'the spade-hacker' by local media, the woman is being investigated on suspicion of damaging property. She faces up to three years in prison if charged and convicted."
Company laid vital fibre-optic cable 10cm from the surface. The company that put that fibre down should be investigate for endangering the public.
I mean, it was an accident. 3 years in prison for a poor woman scavenging for metal doesn't seem too fair, at least assuming her goal wasn't to steal copper wire. Hopefully they won't charge her, or will give her a slap on the wrist.
---linuxrocks123
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
In other words, some old granny succeeded where even 4chan would fail?
How many Americans are thinking "I didn't know that Armenia was anywhere near the South-Eastern States"
If one shallow cable knocks a country out, someone failed pretty hard in the first place.
I don't know an awful lot about backbone type setups, not being in the industry, but I was under the impression that a self healing ring was a fairly common way of dealing with important fiber. That way as long as you don't cut two cables at once, you're golden, and can take your sweet ass time fixing a broken link without a whole bloody country losing internet access.
But of course, redundancy costs money. Hopefully not as much as downtime...
Sent from my PDP-11
Sooo, an adequate demonstration of the need for redundancy when it comes to telecommunication networks. Honestly, the only reason this is news is because it cut of 3.2 million people, and it was caused by an old lady. But telecommunication cables are cut all the time, both by people and accidents.
Yet, if I cut the phone line near my parents place, they'll still have Internet access (satellite). Indeed, I suspect they would still have phone access, because the cable would need to be cut on either side of their house to completely kill it.
I wonder what the Armenian response to this is going to be? Maybe make sure to get another outside link? (Perhaps via a country to the south, such as Iran or Turkey.)
Anyway, the article has very little to add to the summary, so I wouldn't bother reading it. (Or, so I was told by a neighbour who I get to read the articles so I don't have to.)
Appended to the end of comments you post. The maximum is 120 characters.
But then again she is Georgian, has lived through one world war, countless skirmishes, the Stalinist purges and survived 'til now.
I say pay her room and board, and free internet, until she dies.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Obviously this is a serious case of redudancy issues of redundancy. /.).
Not only for Armenia and Georgia, but also for slashdot (though not forgetting Armenia, Georgia and
In a time like this, the redudancy mod should obviously give +5 instantly. well + 1 initially, but later for safety reasons it should give +1 again for safety reasons.
Thank you for your time, your time is important to me, thank you.
- The redundancy minister of redundancy in the minestry of redundancy
Around last year an anchor cut the only undersea connecting cable which connected where I live to the rest of the world.
The country spent half a week without internet. Sometimes you can't really afford redundancy.
Georgia gives new meaning to the word "back ho"
can only mean one thing - the Georgians are coming and they are loaded for bear.
...the whole internet?
... Turkish government issues a statement denying the event ever happened ...
Why the euphemism? The woman was stealing the copper, not scavenging it.
She must be quite the 'hacker' to bring down the Internet for a whole country.
Goodbye Slashdot. You've changed.
I mean, it was an accident
So said Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
If you cause harm due to ignoring the possible consequences of your action you should be punished according to the consequences of your act, not according to your intent. That's what the law defines as "criminal negligence".
Not really. Sometimes they need 2-3 days for the whole copy&paste overhead.
Uzbekistan citizens are required by there 'leader' to collect scrap metals for the rulling family to dispose off naturally at a profit to them alone. You may not have heard of it but it exists. The world has some interesting leaders.
Uzbekistan citizens have complained that metal buckets for recycling are not as easy to find as they once where.
Ok, could we sensationalize this one up more? Catastrophic? really? So how many people died? how many places exploded or burned to the ground?
Oh and Sabotage... really
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabotage for a definition... so "Unwitting sabotage" makes Merriam Webster cry.
I'm not a grammar Nazi, but good god, I've seen better and more level headed reporting on Fox News.
Maybe next time the submitter could make more crap up so that he can put in more inflammatory words to get us all worked up into a proper outrage?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
She can't be alive if she's that old.
Not Victorian, too young to be late Edwardian but definitely not Georgian.
If she were Georgian she would be displayed in a glass case somewhere.
internet. serious business.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The amazing part is how damn fast the response was.
Cable goes out. Is noticed a short time later in Western Europe. A "crack team" of sorts arrives soon after to arrest her.
Personally, reading the summary, I thought the person who wrote it was attempting to be a bit humorous about it. . .I mean, immediately after using the words "catastrophic consequences", he says, "Web users in the nation of 3.2 million people were left twiddling their thumbs for up to five hours."
If that's not being facetious, I don't know what is.
Is this the same internet that was built to be able to survive a nuclear attack?
Ummmm, whoever modded this up, please post here to cancel your mod. This is ridiculous.
Really, they bury unshielded copper wires in the ground of someone's backyard now....sounds more like someone dropped the ball with installations and then want to pin it on some elderly lady. If an elderly lady has enough force to cut through a thick shielded trunk of a wire
with a shovel, then guess what, it definitely wasn't installed or built right, but then again, they do not have a lot of money there, and probably cut corners everywhere.
Poorly designed network...
So much for "routing around the damage".
Proverbs 21:19
I don't think they will imprison an elderly lady. I think nothing will happen except a slap on the wrist and a "don't do that again!" speech
It may be that you're right, and the wrong light has been shone on this woman and she really is a theif stealing that which has not been abandoned, but your comment makes it sound very much like you're suggesting scavenging is always theft. It's not.
Scavenging is never theft, and theft is never scavenging. Morality is not the issue. Scavengers take things that aren't in use and aren't owned by anyone. Thieves take things that are being used by others. The question is whether she was looking for actual scrap copper, or whether she was looking for telecom cables that she knew (or had reason to know) to be in use.
In my decadent western country, old copper doesn't exist. Copper is a valuable commodity. It's almost always dug up, sold off, recycled, re-sold and re-used by us fat-cat Western capitalists as soon as a more profitable use is found. There is no extra copper just lying in the ground. All the copper that's out there is in use by some utility or other. Anyone who takes it is a thief, plain and simple. The idea that there are legitimate copper scavengers is as ludicrous to a Westerner as the idea that there are legitimate diamond scavengers. Nobody just leaves that stuff lying around.
But we're not talking about a rich western nation are we? We're talking about a country which has in recent years been at war with a super power- Russia, which also makes life as hard as possible for the nation economically such that it's poor- all this in the middle of a recession which Georgia was not immune to, and hence has plenty of decaying infrastructure. Whether it's areas abandoned as a result of war, whether it's leftovers of the destruction of that, or whether it's simple decay due to economic decline, we're not talking about a country that has the funds to make sure it's infrastructure is up and running, and has the money to pay people to go clean up in deprived areas. It's perfectly possible that in poor areas of countries such as this that there are resources merely lying around that would otherwise just be left to decay over time because the money just isn't there to invest in cleaning up the area and solving the area's problems.
This story isn't nearly as big of a deal as it sounds (unless you want to talk about poverty in post-soviet countries).
The majority of internet users in Armenia use 3G usb modems, not landlines. Realistically, the only individuals who noticed the outage were in Yerevan (give, that does count for over 40% of the population).
Those of us who live outside that city, and probably 70% of those who live in the city didn't notice a thing.
Actually, here in the UK we have a law - Theft by Finding. If you find something and don't hand it in you can be prosecuted. This has been used by (for example) supermarkets to stop people taking and eating the food they've thrown out because they can't sell it -
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1357741/In-court-charged-theft-finding-woman-took-food-Tesco-bin.html
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Let's do some calculations. Cat-5 cable has eight strands of AWG 24 wire, which has 817.7 feet/lb, that means the cable contains one pound of copper for each 102.2 feet. Scrap copper is worth $4.30/lb, meaning 23.77 feet of cat-5 are worth $1.
The minimum wage in Armenia is, according to Wikipedia, equivalent to US$1888/year. Assuming someone works 50 weeks/year @ 40 hours/week, that is 2000 working hours to earn those $1888.
What all this means is that she has to steal 22.4 ft of cat-5 to get the same she would get working one hour at the Armenian minimum wage.
In the USA minimum wage is $7.25/hour, that is 172.3 ft worth of cat-5 scrap.
In conclusion, it may not be worth pulling cable out of a building in the USA unless you are doing other restorations or demolishing it, but in Armenia you should be less likely to find abandoned copper.
Welcome to Tiblisi gentlemen.
So, is this technically a DOS attack?
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
Murder is a person to person action.
War is a state to state action. So yes, war is murder, but on a state level, not a personal level.
Murder is an illegal killing. State approved killings - self defense, defense of another (often police), execution of a death warrant (prison), military combat against combatants - are legal and thus not murder.
cares
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I thought the Armenian Internet backbone was a pair of wires up on poles and glass insulators.
Have gnu, will travel.
If the submitter wanted to be more like Fox News, they would have misused the term "Nazi" in some way to make their point more emphatic. *ahem*
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I don't think the Georgians write about Wsahington DC.
Considering the importance of that cable and that an ELDERLY woman managed to damaged it with a spade, people should be asking if the service provider has invested in sufficient protection for it.....
"Life," said Marvin dolefully, "loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."
From the previous story:
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2073404&cid=35745324
We're talking about a country which has in recent years been at war with a super power- Russia, which also makes life as hard as possible for the nation economically such that it's poor- all this in the middle of a recession which Georgia was not immune to, and hence has plenty of decaying infrastructure. Whether it's areas abandoned as a result of war, whether it's leftovers of the destruction
The "war" has lasted a week, with a grand total of 160 military and 60 civilian deaths on Georgian side (and about 1000 wounded). The amount of damage from that was very limited on both sides of the conflict - and that was more than 2 years ago by now.
I love that the Slashdot moral center has swung so far to antisocial with all the copyright-infringement justifications that we now take the side of common thieves.
People, learn a little bit about Armenia before you judge this woman as a criminal. I've been to the country several times. You will see phone lines and cables draped through treetops and laid along the ground with no care to secure or bury them. It's not unlikely that this woman did, in fact, sever the line by accident.
Armenia has only been independent for a couple decades: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Armenia
Being a land-locked country surrounded by not the friendliest of neighbors, having allegedly much government corruption, and dealing with their history of genocide, ... burying fiber optic cable has not been high on the list of priorities for the country. You might actually want to applaud the person that thought far enough ahead to consider using fiber instead of copper as he uncoiled the roll through the woman's garden. As the country matures and modernizes, silly problems like this will hopefully go away.
But we're not talking about a rich western nation are we? We're talking about a country
Right. In my "rich" country, we don't waste copper. It's too expensive for that. With all our "wealth," we can't afford it.
But you're saying that in this "poor" country, they have so much extra resources that people can make a legitimate living just picking it up off the ground. Do they also have to sweep the piles of diamonds off of their front walk every day? Do their toilets get stopped up with the hundred-dollar bills they use to wipe their asses?
"The "war" has lasted a week, with a grand total of 160 military and 60 civilian deaths on Georgian side (and about 1000 wounded). The amount of damage from that was very limited on both sides of the conflict - and that was more than 2 years ago by now."
Yes, and the US stormed through most of Afghanistan in a similar period, and Gaddafi's airforce was completely disabled in a day or two recently, what's your point? Modern armies are fast and efficient, in that short week Russia went from Georgia's borders to within short distance of it's capital city. I think you completely misunderestimate the amount of damage to infrastructure that occurs in such a short period in such modern wars involving super power militaries.
Those 2 years since the war have been years in which even the richest nations on the planet are struggling to pay for the upkeep of their non-war damaged infrastructure. Christ, it's taken a couple of months for our local council to find the resources to even fill in a handful of large potholes in our local area here in the UK.
I spent a couple of weeks in Armenia 6-7 years ago, at which point the ENTIRE country had a total bandwidth of something like 6mbit. There was only one state-run ISP (no competition was allowed at that time, that has changed it seems), and the company I worked for had somehow managed to get a 640kbit line from them, so we had roughly 10% of the entire country's bandwidth (for 2-300 people). At one point I stupidly did a apt-get upgrade which started downloading Evolution and lots of Gnome stuff, which in turn chocked the entire office's internet access. When I stopped the download it was running at roughly 600kbit, so at that point I was using 10% of the entire nation's bandwidth :)
The state communication monopoly also meant that I couldn't use my phone, since my provider did not have a roaming agreement. If you got really close to the Turkish border it did work though, if you could connect to a Turkish provider.
This said Armenia was incredibly beautiful, with very friendly people and great food, and I would really encourage anyone to go there!
(Elmer Fudd voice)
Be veewwy veewwy quiet. I'ma huntin' fibah!
(/Elmer Fudd voice)
There's a reason server ops gets nervous when a backhoe shows up in the neighborhood...
For the 95% of the world that does not use such archaic measurements:
Let's do some calculations. Cat-5 cable has eight strands of AWG 24 wire, which has 385 metres per KG, that means the cable contains one KG of copper per 48 metres.. Scrap copper is worth approx $8 per KG (Approx price of scrap copper in Sydney, AUD is 1.04 USD), meaning 8 metres of cat-5 are worth $1.
Ignoring this, buried copper is almost guaranteed not to be CAT 5, probably only 1 or 2 twisted pairs but it will include a lot more shielding then CAT5 and there will likely be more then one cable laid side by side. Not sure how the Soviets did it, but in OZ, cables were laid in pits and ducts, meaning you only need to break into a duct to get easy access to copper.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
In Soviet Georgia, cable cut you.
OK, maybe it really is "you cut cable", given the number of wire cuts I've had.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
she didnt steal anything (or hadnt yet). she used simple tools to expose a fatal flaw in a complex system. She would be admired by richard feynman, and should be hired by the armenian govt to find more weak points in their infrastructure. She is of course a hacker, having LITERALLY (and by that i mean LITERALLY) hacked her way into the network...
Where do you live? Here in the United States we have all sorts of homeless people running around scavenging metal. You often see them walking around with grocery carts full of aluminum, copper, sometimes steel.
Also, you might be interested to know that in many areas of the world diamonds can be found just lying around on the ground. Or at least they could be until Europeans started cordoning off areas that were rich in diamonds, and shooting anyone that tries to walk away with a diamond they found lying on the ground.
but I find this kinda funny.
Yeah, she's a thief. Yeah, it was disastrous.
It was a lot of bad things, but hell, an old woman with a spade just BROKE THE FUCKING INTERNET. This'll keep me giggling for at least a couple horus.
In the continuing worldwide game of rock-paper-scissors, backhoe beats cable every time. Thanks go to Georgia for reminding us how wide the definition of "backhoe" is.
Words, words, words