posted by
LaminatorX
on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:03PM
from the Whatever-happened-to-three-way-redundant-connectivity? dept.
from the Whatever-happened-to-three-way-redundant-connectivity? dept.
Someone knocked out much of Arizona's Internet using detailed knowledge of the location of a single crtitical data line, some digging equipment, and a hacksaw. Freebeacon.com has the story:
Cellphone, Internet, and telephone services across half of Arizona went dark on Wednesday after vandals sliced a sensitive fiber optic cable
In addition to the question of "why?", this event also highlights the fragility of modern US infrastructure and the consequences of such fragility for both private individuals and government agencies alike.
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Modern Communications Denied to Half of Arizona after Single Cable Maliciously Cut
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by githaron on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:09PM
Why does half of Arizona's phone/cell service shut down with the loss of one line? We are talking about something that is used for emergency communication. It seems like gross negligence.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:19PM
Hey! That's a place that you people are preventing Verizon from innovating!
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Fauxlosopher on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:31PM
Arizona is not alone in its lack of communications redundancy (and/or resiliency), though you will forgive me if I do not elaborate.
Redundant data links are costly, and as long as nothing breaks, it is rare for someone to get in trouble for the oversight. In my own experience, redundancy typically becomes a concern only after a problem occurs, which can on occasion be due to someone being negligent in their routine checks to ensure that the redundant link(s) is available.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:39PM
In my own experience, redundancy typically becomes a concern only after a problem occurs ...
That's pretty much how everything works. Hind site is always 20/20.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:29PM
We had plenty of hindsight before this. It's called history. People who ignore history often fall back on the "hindsight is always 20/20" excuse.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Sunday March 01 2015, @10:20PM
People who ignore history often fall back on the "hindsight is always 20/20" excuse.
I believe that was the earlier poster's point. After all, who could know that an easily foreseeable single point of failure would fail?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:37PM
Hind site is always 20/20.
Yes, but some prefer another location.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:53PM
But, was a redundant link more expensive than the true cost of this outage?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by Whoever on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:36PM
The managers who decided that there was no need for redundancy already got their bonus.
People make decisions, and they tend to make decisions that benefit them personally, often at the expense of others.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:12PM
Not to worry. They were snoring at the switch. This was a quick elbow to the ribs but they'll be back to snoring in minutes.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday March 02 2015, @10:30AM
I know several places in my home state is the same, including my home town as we had zipola for communication for nearly a day because some dumbass farmer digging a ditch never bothered to call anybody before he started using a backhoe. I bet he regrets that now, seeing as how I heard he got handed a high 5 figure bill for having to call out a team to repair a giant fiber optic trunk!
As for why it happened? Really wouldn't be surprised if the magic word? Is Meth. Them burnt retard methheads still think everything is made of copper and with the price of copper as high as it is? yeah really wouldn't be surprised if they started hacking away expecting if they just kept cutting they'd find a thick copper core they could steal and turn for some rocks. I've heard in some places they have actually took to sticking up signs saying "Lines only contain worthless plastic" to try to keep the damned meth junkies from cutting through shit so it really wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be junkies.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:39PM
Why?
Because you can either have backups for critical infrastructure or monetize all your assets at 100%, not both. Wanna guess which one telcos choose?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:48PM
(Score: 1) by TWX on Monday March 02 2015, @03:04PM
My guess is that this is have of Arizona by area, not by population. Phoenix certainly isn't down and Phoenix is the vast majority of the population of the state. Tucson also isn't down and neither is Flagstaff, so my guess is that a huge chunk of rural area with very few people is affected.
As for why there's no redundancy, if there's very few people to serve, how much damage does this truly do?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS...
and everywhere the language went, it was a total loss.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @03:45PM
"cyberwar" done right!
everything else is propaganda, fear-mongering and undermining privacy!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by marcello_dl on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:55PM
This is not cyberwar, this is a demonstrative action. Cui bono? I guess those wanting to sell you a backup cable, which incidentally are also likely to know what the first cable was for. Of course there are many other possibilities, yet a single action on arizona does not make a useful cyberwar campaign.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by caseih on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:07PM
The summary is incorrect. At the place where the line was cut, it was laying on open ground in desert, unburied for a few feet through a wash, in a remote area. The criminals who sliced the wire needed no special tools, and really needed no special knowledge. So really this was probably a crime of opportunity. Some idiot may have thought there was metals to steel, only to find out it was fiber.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Techwolf on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:55PM
I read the articial, (I know, I know, not supposed to do that :-), seen the video and it appears just like you said. I think what may have happen is some campers or hunters stumbled across this large, but not huge, pipe and was thinking of there may be a couple hundred dollars of copper cable in there. So went back to there camp, found a hacksaw and whet slicing away, only to be outraged when it was fiber that can't be sold or recycled.
The bigger questions is, why is the government and/or media playing this up as some huge criminal thing or terriest act? Another question is this just a symtion of the huge divide between the poor folks and the rich, where the poor would go though all that labor for a few dollars, are the poor that desperate to find a few dollars?
(Score: 2) by slash2phar on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:01PM
Well, you can't expect to get that sort of objectivity from free beacon [wikipedia.org] now, can you?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:20PM
So that the latter is the former. Just another step in demonizing/criminalizing the poor.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:56PM
> Some idiot may have thought there was metals to steel
Another idiot may have intended to say medals to steal.
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:59PM
> Some idiot may have thought there was metals to steel
Another idiot may have intended to say medals to steal.
And still others may have been committing mendacity to a stele.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 02 2015, @04:47PM
Metals to steal might even be correct. ;-)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 1) by Fauxlosopher on Sunday March 01 2015, @04:59PM
Ouch. I took the line above from the article to mean that someone had to dig up the line. If it was more or less just lying exposed on the ground, that's even worse. Got a source for the additional details you mention?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Arik on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:58PM
Totally idiotic to have a single link like that, let alone leaving it laying out on the desert where it can be seen.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Funny) by anubi on Monday March 02 2015, @08:34AM
Here's a movie clip ( warning: scripts and ads ) [usatoday.com]
Looks like somebody thought they found scrap metal to me.... "Malicious" my eye! This so-called precious cabling was laying out in the open in a wash in the middle of the desert! Looked like fair pickings for any scrap collector.
Anyway, that's my take on it after seeing the footage...
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday March 02 2015, @08:16AM
Exactly the same story I get from WTAQ News [wtaq.com], caseih...
It sure looks to me like a couple of blokes thought they had found some discarded pipe left by some oil company, and probably tried to recycle it, They were probably just as pissed over making a fruitless discovery that it was full of plastic crap and would be so much work to remove that its not worth their while. They would not have discovered that until they made the first cut through.
It would take a lot of convincing to make me believe this was in the slightest an act of malicious mischief. A big piece of pipe laying in the middle of the desert in a wash? Heck, if I saw such a thing, I might try to haul it to the recycle shop as well and make a few bucks.
I wonder how much I can trust news services if they distort a story so bad it sounds like we had an organized attack on our hands and all we had was somebody who thought they had found a piece of old junk pipe. I sure hope they don't trump up a bunch of charges on some kid. God knows how I would have likely done the same thing upon encountering what appeared to be abandoned junk. I would have figured I would help clean the place up by removing the scrap, and make enough money doing it to enjoy a couple beers with a friend.
Leave an old car in the middle of the desert and someone is apt to mess with it too.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:09PM
Wasn't this just what the Arpanet was designed to prevent?
And they broke it without even using nuclear weapons?
(Score: 2) by tynin on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:47PM
Nope, that was a misconception [wikipedia.org].
Besides, no matter the intent of ARPANET, it sounds like they only had one physical route they were taking with no peering/transit agreements to increase redundancy... likely due to costs / them being cheap. But even then, it isn't like you can secure all of these communication lines from being tamper proof, it would be astronomically expensive. I'd bet there is hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber / cable ran in the US alone.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:29PM
Technically, it wasn't SPECIFICALLY designed to deal with nuclear war, but it most certainly WAS supposed to survive single failures and even multiple failures to some degree.
Sure, a concerted effort could isolate an area but non-negligent network design should have kept this single cut from downing half the state.
Even my home network has better redundancy than that, though admittedly it is a manual failover.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 02 2015, @09:46AM
I don't know that this is still the case today, but in 1990 or so I read a detailed document on the topic of what was illegal to export. There was a lot more in that document than just encryption; one was also not permitted to export self-healing networks.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by slash2phar on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:23PM
Police believe the vandals were looking for copper wire — which can fetch high price as scrap — but didn't find any after completely cutting through the cable, probably with power tools, Holmes said.
The part about copper theft conveniently diappears in the freebeacon version, instead becoming:
Police say vandals must have used heavy equipment to expose the cable.
Nothing about cable needing to be exposed in the original story, as noted earlier.
Then freebeacon enhances the report with speculation:
“This doesn’t look like ‘vandalism’ but rather like sabotage,” said Rachel Ehrenfeld, the founder and CEO of the American Center for Democracy (ACD) and its Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). “Next time it could be both the fiber optic cables and a cell-tower or two.”
The American Center for Democracy? [irc-online.org]:
The American Center for Democracy (ACD) is a Manhattan-based nonprofit that claims to be "exposing and monitoring threats to the national security of the U.S. and Western democracies." Although the center has hosted a number of scholars and fellows, it appears to serve primarily as a publishing vehicle for neoconservative writer and activist Rachel Ehrenfeld, its founder and director.
(Score: 5, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Sunday March 01 2015, @05:39PM
The American Center for Democracy?
If I were them I'd drop the question mark from their name. It doesn't look good.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:51PM
From AP's page: [ap.org]
Another name for that is arroyo. [wikipedia.org]
Those can be dry for a long time then get really wet when rain comes.
A cloudburst could have washed away what earth had been backfilled when the crew buried the cable.
If the installation crew was lazy and didn't bury it especially deep, it wouldn't have taken heavy equipment to have exposed it.
Mother Nature might have done it unassisted.
The "rivers"[1] in SoCal are these piddly little trickles most of the time.
...then a big rainstorm comes along and they become a deadly place to be.
[1] Now just concrete ditches since the Army Corps of Engineers completely destroyed those ecosystems.
-- gewg_
(Score: 5, Insightful) by redneckmother on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:09PM
From the AP report:
Surely they possess a Time-Domain Reflectometer (TDR)?
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Justin Case on Sunday March 01 2015, @06:50PM
> Surely they possess a Time-Domain Reflectometer
I don't know what really happened. But consider these two hypothetical scenarios:
1. We were just as astonished as everyone else when criminals somehow obtained the secret location of our buried cable and maliciously dug it up using heavy earthmoving equipment. How could we have possibly anticipated such a dastardly attack? Our brave employees immediately rushed out into the desert searching diligently mile by mile until they found the break!
2. Engineers, who had been warning management for years about the lack of redundancy, received an automated alert that a line was down. Using some fancy equipment most people (i.e. TV news anchors) can't even pronounce, much less understand, it took them about 30 seconds to pinpoint the break to within 100 meters. They grabbed their kits and ran to the truck, but it wouldn't start. Looking for another, they realized management didn't believe in redundancy there either. The next nearest truck was in Kingman, but all communications were cut off. So a technician drove his own car to Kingman to get the truck, then back to where the break was.
Which version shows management for the cheap shortsighted bastards they are? So which version will get told?
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:15PM
I live in the Phoenix area, and apparently this affected areas north of me. My internet was fine.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 5, Funny) by nightsky30 on Sunday March 01 2015, @08:27PM
Someone was inspired by Dilbert the other week!
Exhibit A:
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-17 [dilbert.com]
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-18 [dilbert.com]
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-19 [dilbert.com]
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-02-20 [dilbert.com]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday March 02 2015, @04:51PM
That was Awesome, thanks for sharing. :-)
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2, Disagree) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:39PM
I was unable to ping the name servers for two different domains, seven name servers total. I was concerned my cell service would drop so I went to a payphone and dialed 8-1-1 - the "Call Before You Dig" number. It was closed for the day, I could not leave a message so I called 9-1-1.
The emergency dispatcher did not know what I was talking about and hung up on me when I asked to be connected to a network operations center.
Smack in the middle of silicon valley.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @12:27AM
You called 911 for a network outage. You should be glade all they did was hang up on you.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 02 2015, @12:32AM
Please do not call 911 unless someone's life, limb, or eyesight is in jeopardy. 911 operators aren't there to route your calls to random datacenters.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 02 2015, @02:47AM
what if someone had a heart attack, someone else dialed 9-1-1 for help, only to find that the fiber had been cut?
A cut in telecommunications is quite clearly life-threatening.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by btendrich on Monday March 02 2015, @03:16PM
A power outage could also be life threatening, but you don't call 911 to report those (unless there are live wires on the ground posing an imminent threat to life)... I think the difference they were trying to point out was that you shouldn't call 911 unless somebodies life is in imminent danger... Usually there is some non-emergency number that also goes to the same place, but with a lower priority attached to it, that's the number you were looking for.
(Score: 3, Funny) by meisterister on Sunday March 01 2015, @11:43PM
... department of redundancy department:
A message from the department of redundancy department:
Redundancy is extremely useful for dealing with the unusual. Improbable events can be handled very well with redundancy.
Redundancy is your friend. Your buddy is redundancy.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by aristarchus on Monday March 02 2015, @07:09AM
And nothing of value was lost. I mean, it's Arizona! Home of the "paperie bitte" laws (that's German, for those of you from Arizona) and the secretary of education who is opposing education, not to mention Sheriff Joe Arpaio. Why would anyone want to communicate with Arizona? And if Arizona had access to the internet prior to this outage, it certainly did not seem to have a beneficial effect. I say cut 'em loose. Sell Arizona back to Mexico (the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was rather unfairly imposed upon our Neighbor to the south. And It would really be funny to see all those Arizonians who don't speak Spanish having to prove they are Mexican citizens or face deportation to Texas!