I was mildly amused to note that Internet connections to Georgia (Eastern Europe, not the US) and Armenia were cut off by a 75-year-old woman (though if I'd been working out of one of those countries myself, I might not have been amused at all).
This wasn't, it turns out, a Luddite protest at a world that hasn't always been changed for the better by escalating connectivity, or even a field test for Marcus Ranum's Perfect Firewall/IPS/Deep Packet Inspection and Application Security System. A pity: as someone whose journey through life is only a decade or so behind the lady in question, I sometimes feel pretty Luddite myself, and as a security nerd, I'd probably feel safer behind Marcus's appliance.
It turns out, though, that the lady was merely collecting scrap metal when she came across the cable and cut it in an attempt to steal it. As an entrepreneur of sorts myself (or consultant, as freelancers like me tend to be known in this business), I can understand the temptations that accompany scratching a living in a permanently depressed economy, I guess, but I hope never to be brought that low myself. Though it sometimes seems that the Third World is becoming the only one we have.
I do have to wonder though, what happened to the principle of media redundancy. (That's infrastructural redundant/backup communications pathways, not too many celebrities.)
Are there really still nations with just one wire connecting them to the rest of the world? [Insert your own moral homily about the importance of physical security here...]
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
ESET Senior Research Fellow
