Elderly lady cuts off Internet in Armenia | Hacker News Reader

Elderly lady cuts off Internet in Armenia

engadget.com

37 pointstunaslut16 comments

Not just Armenia: In addition, areas of Georgia and Azerbaijan were also taken offline.

Much more detail in The Guardian article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-c...

Here an interactive map: http://grt.ge/?m=static&s=6 , mouse over the nodes to display a summary of the available connections. See Armenia, Azerbaijan, etc... south of them.

The one wire to rule them all?

Seriously, invest into a second wire going overhead. Perhaps a third going a slightly different rout just incase.

‎"Our fibre backbone conforms to the highest level's of physical security", Mr. Ionatamishvili later said - calming worries that any curious eavesdropper could Man-in-the-Middle his countries communications. "We hide at least 70% of it under train tracks or shrubbery."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/06/georgian-woman-c...

"An elderly Georgian woman was scavenging for copper to sell as scrap when she accidentally sliced through an underground cable and cut off internet services to all of neighbouring Armenia"

Emphasis mine.

I like the euphemism 'while foraging for copper wire'. Maybe we should use that phrase for torrents 'piracy?!? - no, don't be silly - I was just foraging for movies'.

The guardian articles seems to explain it better:

  Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making money in the former Soviet Union. Some entrepreneurs have even used tractors to wrench out hundreds of metres of cable from the former nuclear testing ground at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

And stealing pipe is a common way to make extra cash in Ireland. Stealing is stealing.

It might not be lawful, but I see it as somehow less wrong than stealing cables in use, or starting the trend.

Related video, though I don't endorse this guy's actions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkLI2ywzRsA

"I steal copper, not [from] family men. And send me my 20% [of this recordings profits] later."

It's a weird world we live on.

They'll probably reinstall that cable, now, with one small addition: an off switch, and a soldier on post nearby. "Hello, Sergey, headquarters here. there's another insurrection. Throw the off switch." Sergey throws off switch "Okay, done." no signal "Hello? Hello?"

Poor lady faces prison. What about people responsible for laying a cable like that, accessible to anyone with small scissors?

She was digging for copper wires, and not even in her property. The photo you see with a small scissors is just a stock photo.

Small scissors were a sarcasm on my part :)

The point I was trying to make was that whoever lays "critical fiber optic cable" in a way than an elderly lady comes with any kind of a tool, should be put to trial instead of poor woman who is probably living in poverty trying to survive.

If the story was about a dog that dug some wires I would agree, but people are capable of a lot of things, even at old age. God knows how long she'd been digging.

Also, on the Guardian article:

  The cable is owned by the Georgian railway network. It is heavily protected, but landslides or heavy rain may have exposed it to scavengers.

If that's just an excuse or not, we will never know.

What puzzles me is that Georgian Telecom didn't put in place any secondary line/s to provide an alternative path in case of issues on the working path.

Update: Checking Railway Telecom site http://grt.ge/?m=static&s=5 (here for the interactive map: http://grt.ge/?m=static&s=6) looks like it's an optical network based on CWDM equipments with links that provide a bit more than two 10GE between the nodes, definitely not a top-notch network. Automated path protection facilities couldn't even be available for networks of this type.

Update 2: Just noticed that the two bigger 10GE paths create a channel only from Poti to Tbilisi, so bandwidth for communications between internal nodes is provided by the other links (slower optical links and the ethernet ones (copper? hm) shown on the map).

I was affected by this outage. During that time I realized that Internet has became vital part of out life, like electricity or water.

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