Verizon to prosecute anons for communications sabotage
Can you hear this?
Verizon's mad as hell, and it just doesn't know who to take it out on. Yet.
The US's largest mobile telco has reportedly filed a lawsuit against vandals who plunged large chunks of Silicon Valley into communications darkness by sabotaging a fiber-optic cable.
The catch? US authorities investigating the incident have yet to identify or apprehend the attackers.
Verizon's filed a John Doe and Does case with a court in California, and said it will amend the complaint once the wrongdoers have been identified.
The attack on a section of AT&T fiber saw 100,000 Verizon Wireless customers cut off from each other and the outside world for 20 hours last week. The initial attack took place on Thursday afternoon and was followed up by a further assault on fiber owned by Sprint Nextel.
The action saw cellphones, landlines, emergency service calls, call-center operations, credit card and ATM transactions across southern Silicon Valley blacked out for hours.
AT&T has offered a $100,000 reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrators.
Normally, a network outage can be attributed to Steve the builder inadvertently putting his JCB digger or Kango drill through some cable. In this case, though, there was clear intent.
Authorities reported the vandals had to lift up some heavy manhole covers using a special tool, climb down a shaft and then chop through heavy cables. The four AT&T cables were encased in tough plastic sheath, with one cable containing 360 fibers and the other three holding 48 fibers each. ®
COMMENTS
Re: Apostrophes
Your case 1 (possession) is actually an archaic form of case 2 (missing letters) because Old English appended "es" in the genitive case (not unlike modern German, which draws from a similar linguistic ancestry).
Not useful, I know, but if you're the sort of person who cares about apostophes then you might find it interesting.
Apostrophes
There's an apostrophe in aren't because there's a letter (o) missing.
Apostrophes have two jobs:
1. They indicate possession (John's hat, the dog's b*ll*cks, assorted ladies' underwear)
2 They indicate missing letters (aren't, haven't, pick'n'mix)
The poor things are seriously misunderstood, even more seriously misused, and find themselves in some really unpleasant places (the plural of tomato is not tomato's, or even tomatoe's).
Signed: One who knows.
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