Thursday, April 9, 2009

Idiots destroy their credibility with a dumb post

Read a disturbing story titled 'Destroy the internet with a hacksaw' It is disturbing in the sense that the complete idiocy expressed by the people writing it failed to prevent it from getting published. For starters, pouring gasoline into a fiber conduit and setting it on fire will not cause "bright pulses of light to pass along the fiber blowing out the very sensitive sensors (optics) on both sides of the network." It will just cause the fiber to melt and then you go in and repair it. The baltimore tunnel fire had this precise failure mode and it didn't affect the optics on either side in the slightest.

Another choice tidbit: "Or if they got fiber maps off the Internet and rented a backhoe in the middle of the desert and turned our long-haul links into swiss cheese." Have you tried renting a backhoe and driving it into the middle of the desert? Train derailments and washouts do more damage and yet somehow the internet continues to survive. A far better read than that tripe would be Sean Gorman's PhD thesis on fiber concentration and vulnerabilities.
Here is a freebie: 60 hudson in new york.
Edit: the wording on the original post was made less idiotic after this entry