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.
In other words, some old granny succeeded where even 4chan would fail?
ANd as you see "Scavenging for copper" can cause a lot of damage
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.)
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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.
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".
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.
I say pay her room and board, and free internet, until she dies.
At her age, she probably gets a pension from the government.
However, if you consider that the Armenian per-capita GDP is about one tenth of that of the USA, that must be a pretty small pension.
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.
"The only copper you find 'just lying around' is copper being used for power or data transmission.
Clearly you've never been in an office building or an industrial site. There's literally hundreds of km of unused and abandoned copper wires in buildings around the US. The basic practice of leasing a building with no network services, installing network services, and then when the lease is up reaching into the wall and cutting cables short so the next company can't benefit from your expense has caused all of this. In many places decommissioning is another way of saying get rid of the equipment and just cut the cable at both ends and leave it buried. We serviced an antenna mast a few weeks ago and pulled some 9 40m lengths of LMR-900 off the tower, all cables were traced from dead antennas to either loose connectors in the buildings or had been cut off in the building or on the tower. After the decommissioning we took the cable with us and someone sent it down to the recyclers. The metal in it was worth a fortune and no one could even tell us why it was there.
Saying that they cut the copper to prevent others from using it... is somewhat unfair.
Last time I was involved in renting a building, when we moved out we were REQUIRED to cut the cable, by zoning regulations and our lease agreement. This was in Santa Clara, CA.
Wow, that's messed up. Cable is treated the same as plumbing in Minnesota: A basic part of the infrastructure of a building. The company I work for recently moved about 2,000 people into a new building. We chose to re-use the existing cable plant instead of wiring all new.
That's not normally our practice because we have frequently found that the old cable didn't meet our needs, but still. We've always had the option here and in most other states where we've moved people into an existing building.
Sounds to me like the cable pullers must have quietly greased a few palms in California a while back. :-)
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.
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.
Not only that. At that age a 3 year sentence could easily be a life sentence.
She's 75 and she's running around the countryside digging up copper cables for a living. She may be in better shape than you are.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
So that 3G is magically fed Internet over the... aether? Or something? The 'net access has to get to the towers somehow, and they don't have THAT long of range.
WTF Slashdot... how technologically ignorant do you have to be to say something like this or mod it up?
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