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

--
Suresh Ramasubramanian (ops.lists*******)

Back hoes, tsunamis, earth quakes, ship anchors and now 75 year old women
with spades.
Moral of the story....have another cable and not next to the one that the
old lady will get to.
It's interesting that the article indicates that the cable is heavily
protected but apparently not from "spade hackers"
Raymond Macharia

Babushkas can be quite mean, though mostly it's shopping bags that are
their preferred tools of assault. ;-)

From TA:
"The cable is owned by the Georgian railway network. It is heavily
protected"

I don't think that's true, you can't really heavily guard every stretch
of cable since it spans such a long distance. There will always be weak
spots.

From TA:
"Pulling up unused copper cables for scrap is a common means of making
money in the former Soviet Union."

This is common in the Netherlands too nowadays and other countries too I
am sure. Because copper has gone up in price considerably. In the
Netherlands especially copper lines along railroad tracks are removed,
disabling alert systems with obvious dangerous results.

Regards,
Jeroen

-- http://goldmark.org/jeff/stupid-disclaimers/ http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html

Say now, that might be one way to force the issue of FTTH.

Mike

Sent from my iPad

As the recipient of a number of umbrella tips while trying to catch up to m fiancee (at the time, ex-wife now) in a meat shop in Moscow, I have to difer with you here. They seem quite adept at the use of an umbrella rather thn a shopping bag as an effective weapon.

Once we finally got out of the shop (I was a full 10 minutes delayed behind y fiancee), we figured out that her effort to move efficiently through the rowd (which virtually parted before her) combined with my effort to keep up (=
or catch up as rapidly became the case) had been interpreted by the babushks as her trying to get away from my unwanted attentions. I must say, they wre impressively effective and well coordinated in impeding my progress whil expediting hers considering it was a random crowd of seemingly unconnected eople.

Owen

That won't prevent outages due to cable cuts.  I've heard of people
cutting spans of fiber, thinking it was copper, and then throwing by the
wayside once they realized there was nothing in there that a recycler
would pay for.

jms

We had someone come into a cell site and strip out all the outside
ground leads. Oddly enough they left the ground bars themselves, which
would have been much more worthwhile. Maybe they came unprepared and
only had clippers.

Also, several years ago a building in our area was being renovated, and
someone snuck in during the night and stripped the wires from the main
service panel. I wouldn't think the amount of copper there would be
worth the time, but some people aren't too bright.

We also had a 180' monopole that we replaced, and the crew laid the old
monopole down on the ground with all the equipment still in place. We
didn't get to it to remove our antennas for a few weeks, and when we
did, we found that someone had stripped out 3 runs of 1 5/8" coax from
inside the tower.

Needless to say, all of our copper reels are locked up to keep them from
walking off during the night.

I'd think that unless someone could get access to a LOT of copper all at
one place, and fairly easy to get to, that it wouldn't be worth the time
and effort.

Jason

I guess we have another gem for DeLongFacts.com (in the vein of
SchneierFacts.com): He is one of the few natural enemies of the Babushka.

      Jima

Every once in awhile there is also a story about either a disgruntled
(former) employee or an outsider managing to get into a CO or other
technical space and electrocuting themselves when they try to cut out live
power cables.  One group does it for salvage value - the other
(presumably) does it to make some kind of statement or cause their
(former) employer headaches.  Neither is particularly bright....

jms

A nearby city that also serves as the local electric often has to go to the local metal recycler to buy their own cable back.

Did anyone else suddenly have flashbacks to the VMS Wombat?