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75-year-old woman with shovel accidentally took down Armenia's internet (2011)
- dang 7y agoDiscussed a bit at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2418804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2418804
- noelwelsh 7y agoOn one level this is a funny story, on another level it is a great example of poverty and lack of opportunity leading to choices that turn dollars into pennies: destroying a resource that can generate a huge amount of value for a much lower value but more accessible use. Same thing with ripping up train tracks to sell for scrap metal, which happens in some parts of the world.
- paxys 7y agoPennies in your pocket is still preferable over dollars in someone else's when your kids haven't eaten in a week, which is the reality in a lot of these situations.
- macintux 7y agoSeveral years ago someone stole copper from outside a local food bank; the impact was tens of thousands of dollars of spoiled food when they broke the refrigeration. https://www.wndu.com/home/headlines/8842842.html https://www.wndu.com/home/headlines/8842842.html
- fastball 7y agoI don't believe GC was trying to make a moral judgement here.
- est31 7y agoIn other words, giving people pennies lets others keep their dollars. So even if you are selfish you should support social programs.
- nickff 7y agoThis sounds a like an argument that social programs are extortion, which everyone should support. I don't think that's a good argument to make in favor of any government program.
- STRML 7y agoNo, it's an argument that social programs are smart, and prevent pain in the future. Long-term benefits are not extortion. Is eating healthy and exercising extortion? Is investing in education to get a better job extortion? Is saving money to take advantage of compound interest extortion? No, it's all just long-term decision making.
- nickff 7y agoYou're describing a protection racket.
- vmh1928 7y agoOnly if the people getting the pennies demanded them in exchange for not cutting internet cables. Countries in the early 20th Century that did not have social programs, Russia, Germany after WW1, found large masses of discontented and starving people were fertile ground for populist messages. If those people had been well fed history might have taken a different course.
- hkai 7y agoSomehow rich elites are fertile grounds for socialist message no less than the discontented starving people.
- igorkraw 7y agoWell, not rich elites, mainly educated but not rich elites. For some reason, being on the winning side of capitalism seems to inoculate people against ideas of socioeconomic justice
- rmason 7y agoIn Detroit thieves stripped all the wire and plumbing from abandoned houses, even furnaces were carted off. When the supply of houses ran thin they started stripping factories. When the freeways of Detroit flooded they found the pumping stations that were supposed to get rid of the excess water had been stripped. https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/08/13/copper-theft-a-possible-factor-in-metro-detroit-freeway-flooding/ https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/08/13/copper-theft-a-possi... Finally several hapless guys tried to get at the copper wiring in a power substation and were electrocuted. https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/men-electrocuted-with-24k-volts-trying-to-steal-copper-wire https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/men-electrocuted-with-24k-v...
- mschuster91 7y ago> When the freeways of Detroit flooded they found the pumping stations that were supposed to get rid of the excess water had been stripped. What the... this should have been caught by some form of monitoring or other security alerts.
- michaelcampbell 7y agopaid for from tax revenues, which had long since ceased to be.
- perl4ever 7y agoHave you ever read about the chronic oil pipeline explosions in Nigeria? https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/nigeria-dozens-petrol-thieves-killed-aba-pipeline-blast-181013132945716.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/nigeria-dozens-petrol...
- z3t4 7y agoThe solution is to get the country out of poverty. Using modern technology in the food industry, so that children can go to school instead of working the fields. And improving the child safety and health-care. The sad truths is that people get a lot of children because half will die. So by stopping over-population, you make it so that more people can survive. To solve this problem we have to give up some of our wealth. We will however git it back once they are out of poverty as we will get increased demand for modern services.
- vikramkr 7y agoIs it a choice if she didn't even know what it was?
- sagarun 7y agoMy dad used to tell me this story, In rural India in the 60s the Federal Government would lay copper cables to bring electricity to the town. Some locals would bring down all the cables overnight and sell it in black market to some quck money. For them electricity wasn't that important compared to food on the table.
- vmception 7y agoI heard that story about fiber optics somewhere on the African continent 15 years ago so now I don't believe either story, unless this is a common entrepreneurial endeavor I've been sleeping on
- onion2k 7y agoSome basic research goes a long way to augmenting what you might or might not believe about the world - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft
- vmception 7y agoI heard they were being used for fabric / fashion I haven't thought about it for 15 years, and now with "basic research" and I couldn't find anything about either fiber optic or copper metal theft being used for fabric in Africa nothing on snopes, nothing in your wiki page. in my prior comment I felt either was equally likely it did nothing to augment what I might or might not believe, thank you for the contribution about general metal theft
- hrydgard 7y agoIt's absolutely a thing, even in developed countries people will steal cabling for scrap metal, even if it's getting rarer. Copper roofs on very old churches are also commonly stolen for scrap value.
- fastball 7y agoThe issue is that you didn't mention fabric / fashion in your first comment, and nobody can read your mind. Your initial comment came across as saying you just didn't believe that people steal metal.
- GuiA 7y agoHighly recommend the documentary “Honeyland”, about a poor Macedonian beekeeper.
- skrebbel 7y ago> Same thing with ripping up train tracks to sell for scrap metal, which happens in some parts of the world. This happens at times in the Netherlands too, and I bet many other affluent places, which sort of half invalidates your point. It's just theft. Theft also happens in places where most people aren't poor. I don't know a single place in the world that managed to distribute sufficiently much wealth sufficiently evenly that crime never pays.
- mandelbrotwurst 7y agoThere is nuance if you're willing to see it. That you can't get to a point where it "never pays" doesn't mean people don't become more willing to steal as situations become more desperate and vice versa. You see a lot more copper getting ripped off during a recession.
- restalis 7y agoDesperate people steal food, not cooper. Turning cooper into whatever they're supposedly desperate for requires patience and business-like level of effort organization, which goes beyond what desperation can explain. People chose to steal cooper because it's likely that they will get away with it, as there isn't much security in the areas of "work" to be taken into account, and probably also (cooper being a relatively cheap commodity) because getting get caught doesn't carry that much of a penalty risk.
- ashtonkem 7y agoSelling stolen copper isn’t hard, there already is a network of scrap metal dealers that exist to purchase legitimately collected metal scrap for eventual reuse. All one needs to do is find one that’s willing to turn a blind eye to suspicious volumes, which is basically just the process of finding a fence in any other criminal enterprise. It’s not exactly rocket science.
- literallycancer 7y agoDoing it effectively requires organization, yes. Stealing manhole covers, taking them to the forest and breaking them with a club, then selling them at the scrap yard as damaged -- only requires stupidity. Guy probably spent more on gas alone. And this actually happened if you were wondering. People will literally rip out metal wires from reinforced brick towers making them collapse while they are still inside. You can't make this shit up.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoHappens in the developed world as well I worked for a UK telco and they had internal security people dedicated to this sort of crime - its also a problem for railways.
- spapas82 7y agoHere in Greece it's common to steal power transformers for their copper.
- cpascal 7y agoHalf as Interesting has a good YouTube video about this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wg_uXCYeZ30 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Wg_uXCYeZ30
- d1str0 7y agoCame here to link this. HAI is a great source of these simple stories.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Zenst 7y agoThat must of been one heck of a root cause analysis report. Did find this though: http://root-cause-analysis.info/2011/04/14/75-year-old-woman-cuts-internet-service-to-armenia-with-a-shovel/ http://root-cause-analysis.info/2011/04/14/75-year-old-woman...
- zipwitch 7y agoHuh. And here I had always thought that backhoes were the internet's natural predators.
- Metacelsus 7y agoMore like squirrels
- jeffrallen 7y agoThe worst enemy of a SONET ring is a tech with a test set. He/she seems to have an above average chance of taking the remaining direction of a ring down instead of fixing the failed one.
- jimmySixDOF 7y agoSharks [1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/sharks-are-chomping-underwater-fiber-optic-cables https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/sharks-are-cho...
- ggm 7y agoI was told by a telco engineer that commissioning new services in rural economies sometimes included paying somebody to cycle the run, finding somebody who will take a small ground-rent to defend the 1km stretch so that you have local guardians. I pointed out that once the model was understood you had just invited a protection racket into the room. he shrugged.
- distant_hat 7y agoIf you stretch it far enough all taxes are a protection racket.
- MivLives 7y agoYou could say the same thing about security guards too though.
- projektfu 7y agoI consulted for a company once that made very expensive field equipment that was ruggedized and placed in locations that were often difficult to supervise. Their customers would often lose devices that were stolen, the $10,000 guts dumped out, and the metal housing used as a pot.
- paypalcust83 7y agoPhysical security is about making things more time-consuming/expensive to defeat or steal than they're worth. Scale the amount of concrete poured on/around and lock devices/armoring of such devices per local economics.
- zdkl 7y ago> more time-consuming/expensive to defeat or steal than they're worth. Do not underestimate the dire needs that drive some parts of the world.
- projektfu 7y agoDefinitely a good idea, but these were devices that were, by their nature, mobile. They had to be dropped for a couple weeks at most, then recovered and dropped again in a different location. Physical security would be a guy with a rifle and binoculars.
- baybal2 7y agoMore or less the same story with a water vending machine. The more rugged the machine was, the more did it cost when it was vandalised. It makes no sense to make a $10000 ATM if it will get vandalised, and broken anyways.
- dghughes 7y ago75? Happy birthday?
- Electioko 7y agoWhats up with the article page. Doesnt even load and glitches up
- cormacrelf 7y agoAn 84 year old woman took out IEEE’s entire site with a shovel.
- AzzieElbab 7y agoSame woman with the same shovel has been spotted around Bloombergs undersea cables
- pachico 7y agoIn Spain, several years ago, a group of robbers stole a truck loaded with wire just of its copper. It turned out it was all fiber optics cable...
- Cthulhu_ 7y agoI want to believe fiber is cheaper than copper, but that should still have some value, right? Of course, it only has value in its complete wire format, while copper is easily melted down. If it has to remain intact it's likely more traceable.
- Haga 7y agoSecurity by obscurity with a biometric feature (location) and no backup system.. what could go wrong. And surely more punishment will deter the poor from eating tomorrow's food today.
- ioncube 7y agoIf cable gets cut somewhere, how they find out where it happened?
- thdrdt 7y agoI believe they use devices that act like some kind of radar. They send a signal across the wire and measure how long it takes to bounce back. They can get a really good estimation of the distance between the ping and the cut. But maybe others can explain how this works. Edit: this website explains other methods very well https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2015/06/cable-faults-how-to-locate-faults-in-cables.html https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2015/06/cable-faults-ho...
- daemoncoder 7y agoTime-domain reflectometry
- Koffiepoeder 7y agoAlso, fiber optics needs repeaters, so as a first rough estimate resource you can very quickly determine between which two repeaters the cable was broken.
- LuxuriousCheese 7y agoISPs or dark fiber providers have detailed maps aligning with road networks. If there’s a suspected fiber cut they’ll run an OTDR from the ODF box or the source photonic equipment which will show high reflection/ signal degradation where the break occurred to the nearest 100m dependant on test granularity.
- swarnie_ 7y ago> ISPs or dark fiber providers have detailed maps aligning with road networks. Most of the time. I worked a summer for Virgin (UK) basically digging holes to run cables. I'd say 1 in every 6-7 jobs we dug the hole and found no existing Virgin inf. in the ground. You'd have to come back the next day hopefully with better information to try again.
- dsamarin 7y agoI'm curious. If I ever found some fiber optic cable lying around like this, would I be able to splice into it and get my own terabit internet without too many people noticing?
- RKearney 7y agoAbsolutely not. They're likely running DWDM, meaning you would need very expensive equipment to split the channels apart. Once you do, you're probably going to see some type of MPLS underlay network which doesn't use IP addresses. Either that or encrypted tunnels used by larger corporations.
- LaurentS 7y agoA few years ago, while strolling along the beach in Myanmar, I happened upon SeaMeWe-5, which was accessible to anyone willing to peek into a manhole (why I peeked down that manhole, I'll never know). At the time, the cable was pumping about 90% of the country's internet traffic, if I recall correctly. I thought it was quite worrying that it was so unprotected... With a shovel, I could have been that woman too. https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/landing-point/ngwe-saung-myanmar https://www.submarinecablemap.com/#/landing-point/ngwe-saung...
- msravi 7y agoGenuinely curious - how did you know that it was a trans-national submarine cable? I mean, I would probably have dismissed it as a local fiber optic cable or something...
- prmph 7y agoIsnt the internet architectured to be resistant all sorts of attacks? Then why are several of these cables not laid down to all regions for more redundancy? Or does this situation only pertain to regions that are on the periphery? If all it takes is for one cable to severed for an entire nation to lose access, then in what sense is the network resilient to attack, much less a nuclear war, as is claimed?
- rcxdude 7y agoJust because the protocols are designed such that it's possible to make the network redundant it doesn't mean that all parts of it implement that. And it's worth considering that the network was resiliant: despite an entire country being disconnected the rest still worked. Quite a few network architectures predating the internet would not be able to cope with that.
- abalashov 7y agoArmenia is landlocked and most of its land borders are closed, as they are with Turkic neighbours with whom relations range from frosty (Turkey) to actively militarised (Azerbaijan). That leaves only Iran and Georgia as outlets to the wider world, and the mountainous geography considerably limits options in other respects. I’m given to understand that Armenian external IP connectivity is somewhat more redundant now than when this story was reported, but still, it merely mirrors the overall precariousness and fragility of Armenia’s existence, or what remains of it. For what it’s worth, I have Armenian ancestry and lived in Armenia 2012-14. Based on my experience this story is mostly believable, but probably lacks some vital additional details.
- C1sc0cat 7y agoI was told that virtually all of the cables running into Carney Warf in London went over this one bridge - including the backup cables :-)
- etiam 7y agoWhat do people make of the 14 April update? [Sydney Morning Herald] states the woman, Aishtan Shakarian, who is accused of damaging the fiber-optic cable, denies doing it. Ms. Shakarian is quoted as saying that she isn't strong enough to have damaged the cable: "I did not cut this cable. Physically, I could not do it." The Morning-Herald says that the Georgian Interior Ministry notes that all claims of innocence aside, Ms. Shakarian "has already confessed to cutting the cable." The Herald also states that ".. Georgian Railway Telecom insists that the 600-kilometre cable has 'robust protection' ..." False confessions under pressure are certainly not unheard of. And some of the alternative causes would have associated with them interests of keeping the real cause obscured. Just how (im)plausible is it that Ms. Shakarian would be able to break the cable?
- Misteur-Z 7y agoSide-note: you don't need to completely severe a cable to lose signal, you just need to damage enough the fiber core inside. Although recent cables are a lot more flexible, bending or stretching will still do. Some electricians are still killing fiber optic cables these days installing/manipulating them like copper cables.
- delibes 7y agoPerhaps co-incidentally, today (24th April) is the day of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide
- konfusinomicon 7y agoI lived in rural Wisconsin around 2013. A farmer burying a dead cow took out the town's internet with his backhoe. Also atleast 2 times a squirrel got fried on a nearby substation and killed the power all day. Glad to finally live somewhere with a few redundant systems in place
- jbeales 7y agoA squirrel did the same thing and brought down the computer systems of a 3-year-old, CA$1.3B super hospital complex in one of Canada's biggest cities: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/how-a-squirrel-brought-down-the-muhc-s-computer-network-1.4725246 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/how-a-squirrel-broug... Don't rely on systems being redundant just because you're somewhere they should be!