Macferno: Cable Modem explodes destroying PowerBook

That's Comcastic!

"Umm, besides the fact that if it exploded, it would look nothing like that, and the fingerprints everywhere, sure, it looks real...
This is so fake, it's funny."

So you are an expert in what happens when you put household AC current (quite likely completely un-breakered) through a low-voltage DC appliance, on a conductor that was meant to receive signal data, and nothing more, derek?

Come on, give me a break. The fingerprints: duh. They handled the hard drives and Mac after the incident. That proves, uh, what, exactly?

It looks very much like a huge amount of current went into the modem (probably 10, 20, 50 amps, who knows, over a pretty brief period of time, probably at 120 volts AC), until the conductors (and other parts) on the cable modem's PCB literally got enough extra energy imparted to them by surging electron collisions that they vaporized/exploded/burned-up, whatever. It obviously left behind a bunch of soot when it did so.

Telephone and cable lines have to be grounded. My guess is that the tech hooked up the grounding in the cable box to a live AC line at 120V. He thought it a ground, but it was not. The grounding conductor at the box hookup will look nothing like coax, so this is an easier mistake than you might think. (It should be a bare conductor, so the tech still screwed up pretty badly if that is what happened, but whatever). That seems the most likely explanation to me, but that is complete conjecture, of course.

But have you folks ever seen arial wiring up close? I've never monkeyed with cable stuff, but I've seen phone and power arials up close, and in older cities they can be amazingly messy.

I still see absolutely no reason to say this is a hoax.

It's not, in all likelihood. It's just a bizarre accident caused by bad overhead wiring and a rookie cable tech.

DSL... thats all im saying!

Article is interesting, but please learn the difference between affect and effect.

Hey "look at the fingerprints! its fake!" dorks...

Those fingerprints were probably there before the incident. (I know my MBP is covered in oily fingerprints. The oil from the fingerprints will still show through the chemicals that are thinly spread across the pbook.

This is completely believable.

You should have changed the title to "Whiners make me change a perfectly good headline because they're nitpickers. Oh, and a cable modem blew up, too."

Umm, besides the fact that if it exploded, it would look nothing like that, and the fingerprints everywhere, sure, it looks real...
This is so fake, it's funny.

Hoax, maybe not, it does look pretty real, but how the hell did the cable company tech not realize he wasn't tapping into coax cable. I think he needs to go back to school. Plus shouldn't he of had a voltage tester out to check his lines if he was unsure in the first place. Or called the power company to verify, or there is so much that could have been done to prevent this. And I'm going to school for networking, and we are taught to avoid doing this, by making a positive ID on all cableing before splicing, and such.

This connection to the electrical main was done outside the house, on the roof. I've never looked inside the average pole- or roof-mounted cable box, but it is not at all uncommon for them to be near power transformers (the cable interface on my house runs a coaxial cable through the air, within feet of a the 3 wire AC main to my house, and it lives on a pole a couple of feet away from the utility power transformer). I could imagine old, bastardized arrangements that might let a rook installer really screw up like this; but I've never worked with that gear, so I dunno. i guess it would all depend on the nature of the interconnects inside a cable junction box. You should see some of the horrors of ancient ariel wiring. It's amazing.

It's odd that so many are calling this a hoax. It didn't set off any of my hoax detectors. *shrug* If it's a hoax: what the heck is the motive?

I don't see why everybody is complaining about this article or its title... The modem exploded... The PowerBook got charred and lots of other connected electronics... The end.

BTW, there was a follow up posted yesterday that perhaps will shed some light on some of the questions people are asking...

http://www.macwork.com/2006/12/09/macinferno-part-ii-the-full-story-of-how-the-cable-company-incinerated-my-powerbook/