The Members Forum

According to the Guardian, one little old lady in Georgia managed to cut off an entire country, Armenia, from the Internet for five hours Her weapon? A shovel.

No, I’m not kidding.

The story goes that the woman was hunting for copper, which is worth real money these days everywhere, when in mid-dig, her shovel cut the fibre-logic cable which carried 90% of Armenia’s Internet.

 Whoops.

The so-called “spade-hacker” with one slice managed to cut off Armenia’s Internet for five hours on March 28th. Who needs a back-hoe to kill off the Internet, when a shovel will do?

It’s all better now, but I think this brief little story makes an important point. We may still think, even after what has happened in Bahrain, Egypt, and Libya, that the Internet is nuclear-war proof. It’s not.

Yes, that may have been the Internet’s design spec. but that’s not the reality. Sure, in Japan, as we just saw in the aftermath of disaster, or the U.S. 0r Western Europe, the Internet can stand up to a beating, but, in all too many places, the Internet is dangling from a single slender spider’s thread of connectivity.

ZDnet has the story HERE!