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.
assuming her goal wasn't to steal copper wire
"Scavenging for copper" is a euphemism for exactly this. The only copper you find 'just lying around' is copper being used for power or data transmission.
How many Americans are thinking "I didn't know that Armenia was anywhere near the South-Eastern States"
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.
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Maybe you missed the part of the article that stated what countries were actually cut off. Armenia is a country with an entire population of just 3.2 million people. Shoot, many countries have cities that have a larger population than this. Granted, this does make it a fairly densly populated area as far as former Soviet states are concerned, but its still a small, poor coutry (the GDP is just around $2,600 per person, compared to the US at $46,000 per person). Azerbaijan, who also lost some internet, is a country of about 10 million and a GDP of just $10k. In other words, the fiber laid was very likely not from a business standpoint of providing broadband to these countries. It sounds like a business laid the line between distant offices, and decided to sell off some bandwidth to help subsidize the cost (or a humanitarian effort, depending on how you look at it). In either case, there would be almost no redundancy in the line. It is probably, from a business standpoint, cheaper to send a crew out every few years to do a splice than to pay all the money up-front for redundancy. And if it was a business trying to connect outlying offices, they are probably just going to connect to the closest High-speed hub and who has it for the cheapest - probably Russia or one of the other former Soviet States. Granted, it would make sense for Armenia to get their Internet from Turkey, but, once again, this probably wasn't a government-sponsered broadband roleout or a telecom roleout, but rather just hooking into a business that already had their own fiber line laid.
Point is, in Armenia, their capital city is in the western part of the state, and probably does get broadband from Turkey, but the rest of the coutnry probably gets theirs through this line. Azerbaijan probably has redundancy, but wouldn't be surprised if this came from an Arabic country - such as Iran.
Just because many countries have redundancy doesn't mean that everyone does, and I am sure many places have fiber lines laid out by the cheapest means necessary.
I think they probably have wooden poles because it's cheaper, lighter and warmer to the touch after it's been left out in the cold all night. I've never seen a wooden handle spade marketed as safe to slice through electricity-bearing cables.