Interesting things to consider. 1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? 2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!
There were gunshots sounds but we're not sure if it was audio from the RV or actual gun shots
This makes for such a fascinating story. Supervillain type stuff. Except fortunately in this case a supervillian with some sort of code of ethics.
Tragically there was nothing simple about ISDN. A customer would have to know their switch type at the CO and there were a number of other things that could break it. At least with a T1/DS1 you only had to worry about SF/ESF, B8ZS/AMI and number of channels.
ISDN was pretty much plug and play when I had it back in the day. The gateways were available off the shelf (IIRC mine came from CompUSA) and you could get them with either one or two B channels, as I recall.
That's BRI ISDN. PRI has a lot more channels. Also, there was dial setup and PPP vs IDSN bonding. So it can be complex.
Local TV News managed to interview a neighbor from directly across the street where the explosion occurred[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8
Interesting things to consider. 1) I heard something about "fake reports" about gunshots. But maybe the perp shot off some guns just to get the cops to show up? 2) This woman stuck around for 15 minutes or a half hour while this thing was saying "you need to evacuate, this has a bomb"??? 3) This woman recalls a male voice but the news played a female voice. This goes to show how bad our memories are!
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
In the UK I've only ever encountered diesel fuelled generators with tanks usually long enough to run the DC for hours if not days. Easy to see in hindsight, but I guess I'm slightly surprised at the use of generators running off mains gas for this very reason. Does anyone know how common this is in the USA? Liveleak actually has some security camera footage with audio of the recording: https://www.liveleak.com/view?t…
Anecdote: In my experience, a small but sizeable number of homes in suburban areas that are still outside the city enough to be affected by weather-related power outages every several months have whole-home generators connected to city natural gas lines. Growing up in one of these areas, there was the occasional power outage (once a year or so at most) but I can't recall any gas line outages. Those who had whole-home generators experienced no real outage, although in a colder climate having a gas heating system and a gas stove with a backup lighter/match are definitely more essential than keeping the lights on.
Tragically there was nothing simple about ISDN. A customer would have to know their switch type at the CO and there were a number of other things that could break it. At least with a T1/DS1 you only had to worry about SF/ESF, B8ZS/AMI and number of channels.
Interesting. In many European countries ISDN was widespread in the mid-to-late ‘90s. There were millions of customers in Germany alone, I think. It was slow compared to the DSL connections that replaced it, but I don’t remember hearing too many negative things about ISDN reliability. (I bet the only real legacy of this technology is the album by the Future Sound of London which is named ISDN.)
I could have this wrong but we had offices in Amsterdam and Berlin and ISDN in Europe wasn't nearly as polluted with old standards as it was in the US. I don't even think a 56kbps B channel was an option in Europe. I stood up dial plants in both continents and I distinctly recall it being plug and play over the pond.
We also used the ISDN to back up our circuits and Cisco had a pretty cool demand system that would just use what was needed to service the demand.
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
In the UK I've only ever encountered diesel fuelled generators with tanks usually long enough to run the DC for hours if not days. Easy to see in hindsight, but I guess I'm slightly surprised at the use of generators running off mains gas for this very reason. Does anyone know how common this is in the USA? Liveleak actually has some security camera footage with audio of the recording: https://www.liveleak.com/view?t…
Very common for residential buildings - the house I grew up in in Ohio had an automatic standby back up generator than ran off of piped in natural gas. The idea was to protect against weather-related power outages. (Generally snow or wind causing trees to fall on power lines)
I’m not sure how common this is in commercial buildings. Mains gas powered generator doesn’t seem like a very good idea for anything critical.
Reportedly, there was a visible countdown timer on the vehicle that exploded, and an audible warning played for 15-20 minutes prior to the blast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nygTJeu9fU
That voice announcing evacuation sounds very professional, not like a computer synthesized voice... I wonder if they will try to trace that.
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
In the UK I've only ever encountered diesel fuelled generators with tanks usually long enough to run the DC for hours if not days. Easy to see in hindsight, but I guess I'm slightly surprised at the use of generators running off mains gas for this very reason. Does anyone know how common this is in the USA? Liveleak actually has some security camera footage with audio of the recording: https://www.liveleak.com/view?t…
Very common. Short of something like this, it's unlikely your natural gas and electric service will both go out at the same time. Natural gas turbines fed by the city service are a common backup source. Some sites will also have provision for running off bottled gas, some won't.
AT&T says that their services went down along with the gas & power in the area, as a side effect: the gas shutoff cut off their backup generators. That doesn't sound all that targeted.
While that's true, I think two factors strongly indicate that this was targeted at the ATT building. The first observation is, of course, that the ATT building was the closest to the explosion. A direct witness to the RV broadcasting the evacuation message, who lives across the street, describes this fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iag6cTWpgq8 . The second observation is the evacuation message itself. How often…
Obviously the primary intent was not loss of life. But there are multiple possible intents, one being obviously to instill fear: "We didn't kill you this time, but we totally could have". Imagine living in the area now.
Anyway, it's better to wait for more information than to speculate.