UPDATED: Rogers outage caused by a cyber attack?

For hapless Canucks, Friday the 8th turned out to be even more distressing than Friday the 13th. The "Please stand by" graphic Ed. posted on the 7th turned out to be oddly premonitory, as Canadians struggled to cope with a massive disruption of mobile and internet "service" provided by Rogers (aka "Robbers") Communications.

Canada's telecoms market is dominated by just three "service providers". [You understand why Walt is using quote marks, right? Ed.] -- Bell, Rogers and Telus. Knocking out their networks disrupts not just mobile phone calls, but money transfers (Interac, using debit cards), data exchange (problems for airlines, pharmacies, banks, etc), wi-fi (disastrous for those working from home) and even 9-1-1 service. 

But that's what happened yesterday, as Robbers customers  found themselves unconnected for most of the day. Last night, the company said it had restored mobile and internet service for the "vast majority: of its customers. However, it added, some customers may experience delays in regaining full service as its network comes back online and traffic volumes return to normal. 

In a statement posted to the company's social media channels (which customers of other telecoms companies could read, one presumes), Rogers apologized for the disruption the outage has caused to its customers and said it "will be proactively crediting" all customers. Which means: don't call us asking for a refund, we're already doing it. 

Tony Staffieri, CEO of Rogers, said in an open letter that the company apologizes for the service interruption but offered no explanation for the outage or how many customers were affected. Staffieri says Rogers "is committed to understanding the cause and would make changes to meet and exceed expectations in the future."

As of this morning, Rogers still hasn't said what caused their service to go down. Mr Staffieri said they would investigate "the root cause of this outage." Walt humbly suggests they read "FBI director calls China 'biggest' US threat; authorities warn of North Korean cyber attacks", posted on ABC News on July 6th.

The story quotes FBI Director Christopher Wray as saying the Chinese government (not those nice Chinese people, especially immigrants) is set on stealing our technology. Speaking alongside his British counterpart in London on Wednesday, Mr Wray called China the "biggest long-term threat" to both the US and the UK. (He didn't mention Canada because, no matter what Justin Trudeau says, Canada's not important.) 

"The Chinese government is set on stealing your technology -- whatever it is that makes your industry tick -- and using it to undercut your business and dominate your market," said Mr Wray, adding, "They're set on using every tool at their disposal to do it." 

Canada's telecoms, including Rogers, already use Huawei equipment, although M Trudeau (a great admirer of the ChiComms' ability "to get things done") now says they won't be allowing any new Huawei 5-G technology to be used in Canadian networks. Is it possible the Chinese (or North Koreans) hacked the Rogers network as a test, to see how easy it would be to throw a country into confusion and chaos? Just askin'....

UPDATE ADDED 10/7/22: Rogers Communications Inc. says it believes the massive system outage it suffered on Friday occurred after a maintenance update to its core network, but critics are unimpressed with the explanation after the telecom’s second major service interruption in two years.

This critic -- yr obdt svt -- wonders if Rogers would say anything different, if the massive outage had indeed been caused by hackers working for a hostile foreign government, which they (Rogers) did  not expect and could not control. Given the panic that would likely have ensured had they admitted such a huge security breach, would they not have said, "Oopsy. Our problem. We fixed it. Nothing to see here." Just askin'....

High schoolers sexting nude pix... involving fruit!

CBCNews has an interesting report today from the eastern Ontario town of Napanee. Seems the Old Bill is thinking about charging some local high school students with, errr, something, after nude photos of teenage girls were allegedly swapped online. Our Canadian legal beagle (aka Agent 3) says the difficulty in knowing what charges to lay may stem from the sexting activity being (apparently) quite voluntary.

The Ontario Provincial Police have interviewed a number of students at Napanee District Secondary School, and the Limestone District School Board has suspended "about 15" boys and girls. Neither the coppers nor school officials would talk about the nature of the "inappropriate images", but the students were not shy about going public with what they saw.

Said one Grade 11 student, "There's some nudes being sent around between different ages and grades. It's pretty hard core. There's been some very inappropriate gestures, and some fruit used."

Students said the exchange of images has been going on for a long time. One kid told the CBC, "Everybody is doing it!"

Cue the inevitable expert on cyberbullying, one Rena Bivens, a sociologist at Ottawa's Carleton University. If teens won't stop sexting, she said, they should at least use precautions. Like what, Rena? Well, "you can cut your head out of the picture. That's one way to try to prevent your identity from being matched to that photo and being spread around."

Forces for Good in the community are rushing to help. The school notified parents in a recorded voicemail that it plans to discuss "cyber safety, and issues of respect and dignity".

And Krishna Burra, the school board's head of the "Safe and Caring Schools Program" said all students involved will need counselling. "Students who made bad choices on either side of this issue, they are going to need support and there's going to be the need for healing through all of this."

Walt is puzzling over how this "issue" can have two sides. What's the choice -- to sext or not to sext? How does a kid make a "bad choice on either side..." Strange...

As for the other buzzwords, let's see... "respect", "dignity", "safety", "counselling", "healing"... anything missing? Can't see anything about kids with raging hormones being allowed to be kids, but hey, this is the 21st century.

Note from Ed.: Surely you don't think we'd publish any of the pictures...especially the ones involving fruit! We don't want to get our dear readers into any trouble. In this era of political correctness, the Thought Police would probably jail you for even thinking about such things!