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Vandals snipped another fiber optic cable line in the San Francisco Bay area this week, the 12th incident of its kind in the region over the past year.
The latest attack occurred in the San Joaquin Valley town of Stockton, disrupting Internet, mobile phone, and 911 service for tens of thousands of AT&T and Verizon customers in three counties east of San Francisco. Service was restored about a day after the Tuesday incident.
The FBI, which is investigating the attacks, has not stated a motive, but it said the attacks usually occur in remote areas where there are no surveillance cameras. The initial attacks on California telecommunications lines began in July 2014. Whoever is responsible appears, for the moment, to be operating with impunity.
It would be funny and appropriate if they kept snipping the cables running to the Wall Street high frequency traders that keep front-running everyone's trades. Also, potentially lucrative if you go long in Depends adult diapers first.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:00PM
Front-running trades is illegal, but the high-frequency traders who do it nowadays use fiber and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and algorithms too complex for the government to begin to pretend to crack down on it. So the Wall Street traders commit millions of crimes per day (because we're talking about transactions that occur in milliseconds or fractions thereof) with total impunity. As such, if the fiber lines to their operations and their operations alone were cut, it would in fact be something done in defense of law and order and civilization.
For me, and perhaps others, it would also be funny because those traders do tend to be quite cock-sure and the look on their faces as all their systems say [CARRIER LOST] would be priceless.
Even more fundamental an infrastructure than fiber cables or roads are the rule of law and financial infrastructure. Wall Street traders and all their ilk who commit crimes with impunity (LIBOR rate fixing, money laundering for Mexican drug cartels, bribery, corruption, take your pick) and steal from you and yours in a thousand ways you don't even see strike at the heart of the civilization that produces those roads and fiber networks. They are tampering with that infrastructure.
You don't like cheek. Fine. The Wall Street banks are the central existential threat to the civilization you're talking about. The government won't move against them because they the banks have completely co-opted that government. They own it. They own it more now than JP Morgan did 120 years ago. They have erased trillions of dollars of wealth of every American while siphoning more wealth to themselves. They have done enormous damage to the future of every single citizen in this country.
Still think they wouldn't deserve somebody snipping the fiber cable to their office?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:23PM
Holy crap, dude. No one gets away with talking so bluntly and honestly. You better join a witness protection program!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 21 2015, @07:38PM
My life they may take, my integrity never.
We should all stop pussy footing around and talk about this clearly. Others are [huffingtonpost.com]. Like Huffington Post or not, it's a media outlet a lot of people read and that's on the front page. I've seen similar sentiments expressed in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. The 1% fear it, but we know it. If things in America (and the entire developed world, frankly) don't turn around abruptly and for the better, severed fiber optic cables will be the very least of the 1%'s problems.
Of course they won't turn around because the 1% think everything's just dandy. Everyone they know tells them so.
It's going to be a rough couple of decades.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @02:36PM
Why would a wall street trader looking for extremely low latency trades put thier office on the other side of the continent?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 21 2015, @09:13PM
They don't. The colocate in the same datacenters that the markets themselves use. They have fiber back to home office, but they also have microwave redundancies.