Jones told The Register that attacks range from simply chopping through fiber-optic cables in an underground duct, to lifting the cover of an access chamber, pouring in petrol, and setting the whole lot alight.
The motives for these attacks are thought to be simply vandalism or people with a grudge against a particular provider, rather than being a case of network operators aiming to sabotage their rivals, Jones claimed.
“You find instances where a chamber containing equipment for multiple providers has been accessed, but only one provider has been attacked,” he said, adding that it could be ex-employees with a grudge and that some attacks have even been 5G protesters simply targeting any digital infrastructure.
Huh. It’s The Register, which is a British piece of media, with a London-based author writing about an event in the UK and they’re using the traditionally-American English spelling. Maybe the UK is going towards “fiber” rather than “fibre”.
hits Google N-grams
Ah hah. Yup, apparently it’s at about 50-50, but the majority in British English just switched to “fiber” within the last ten years.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=fiber%2Cfibre&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-GB-2019&smoothing=3
There’s a few things going on here, in addition to a general Americanisation.
Firstly El Reg obviously wants to attract those sweet sweet American clicks, so they could well have American English as their style guide (I’m a bit doubtful, I bet they use colour).
Secondly there’s long been a tendency to use American spelling in IT journalism for technical objects. So “optical fiber” but “dietary fibre”; “floppy disk”, but djs “spin discs”. “TV programme”, but “computer program”.
It’s been that ways since at least the 80s, quite possibly earlier.
goes to investigate
Google search for: site:theregister.com color:
Google search for: site:theregister.com colour:
You appear to be correct.
Interestingly, quite a few of the ‘colors’ are from articles written by US editors/correspondents - so it looks like the Reg doesn’t havw a consistency-obsessed subs desk and will let the journalist go with whatever they are most comfortable with.
Quite a few of the others are forum comments.
Disk vs disc I believe is down to the type of medium, magnetic disk vs optical disc
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It’s the best characteristic of English, I think. It’s alive, it changes and we do very little to prevent that from happening (unlike French or German).
You do so little that the spelling and phonetics of words have been drifting apart for couple centuries and nobody cares. Then people who only speak English think every language is as a Frankenstein monster as much as English.
Like all reasonable people interested in linguistics, I’m a descriptivist. However, something about the idea of language being adapted to cater to an algorithm turns my stomach.
I know it’s hypocritical. The Attention Economy shouldn’t be any less valid a linguistic influence than the Norman Conquests, just because they occurred a millennium ago.
I genuinely think we’re lucky in Britain that the soft power we have (for the time being) has prevented our culture being entirely supplanted by the United States.