Filed under: Hardware, Troubleshooting, Security
Macferno: Cable Modem explodes destroying PowerBook
On November 16, an OnDeckTech 24x7 help desk technician received a call from a distraught PowerBook owner whose laptop had just been destroyed, trying to see if she could recover any of her data. Her 80GB 15-inch PowerBook, her two Maxtor external 300GB drives and her 160GB LaCie Porche drive had all been affected by the explosion of her new cable modem.
The details described by the technician, who posted both pictures and a detailed account of the explosion, reminds us that proximity--or a lack thereof--can be an important component in safeguarding your backup drives.
The data, fortunately, survived.
Thanks Andrew
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
David said 4:59PM on 12-10-2006
TUAW, you realize with a title like that, people are gonna Digg this and it will hit Engadget without people realizing it was a cable modem that caused the fire??? Nice job starting some anti-Apple propaganda.
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Lon said 5:02PM on 12-10-2006
Move along. Nothing to see here. Simple hyperbole to drive pageviews. It should have been titled, "Keep your Powerbook away from exploding cable modems".
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GJeffery said 6:06PM on 12-10-2006
Wow, I wonder what all those GBs were storing?
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Ed said 6:14PM on 12-10-2006
It wasn't the powerbook that went "boom!" Erica. You may want a sensationalist headline, but keep it least close to the truth!
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Nick said 6:14PM on 12-10-2006
I don't frequent Digg, although I have ended up there before, so I can't comment on their users. But if you're right, David, and Digg users are stupid enough to post articles without reading them, then if I were you I wouldn't waste my time going there. Come here instead.
Thanks for posting this, Erica. It's interesting - and, as you say, a dramatic illustration of the value of multiple backups in different locations.
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Erica Sadun said 6:18PM on 12-10-2006
Out of professional courtesy, let me point out that the majority of the headline is actually via my three year old. "What go wrong?" He pointed to the picture. I responded: "The computer got an owie." "Oh," he replied. "It went boom!"
Digg readers will need to translate from the threeyear-ese.
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teece said 7:10PM on 12-10-2006
I was wondering how the heck the cable modem exploded.
From the link, it sounds like the cable coax was accidentally hooked up to the electrical mains by the cable tech (I wonder what voltage it was hooked up to, and if there was any circuit protection? I'm guessing no on the latter, and at least 120 on the former).
Amazing. Luckily the lady was outside!
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Sherman Homan said 8:21PM on 12-10-2006
Please change the headline!
The PowerBook did not go boom.
The part of the story that makes no sense is that this happened in Chicago, there is no electrical service in the USA of any kind that would use 110 AC through coax. None. I don't even see how it could be done accidentally. Is this an urban myth? It will be interesting to see what develops over the next month...
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thomas said 8:43PM on 12-10-2006
Out of professional courtesy, how about you use a more professionally appropriate title?
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lifix said 9:03PM on 12-10-2006
Out of professional courtesy, let me point out that the majority of the headline is actually via my three year old. "What go wrong?" He pointed to the picture. I responded: "The computer got an owie." "Oh," he replied. "It went boom!"
>> So the Macferno was from the original article, and the "Go Boom" was from your three year old son. Well... then that makes it ok to print then I guess, ethics be damned, it was my son!
Digg readers will need to translate from the threeyear-ese.
>> Clearly you don't read digg, or understand that they won't translate. Seriously, you can't think this is an appropriate title, it's not even relavent to the point of the article (the need for multiple backups that aren't in close proximity to the originals.)
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Ellipse said 9:28PM on 12-10-2006
First off... Nice name change... :S I don't find the original offensive at all but anyways... That Looks like a load of crap. Looks as if somone went and stuck their hands in some charcoal and rubbed them all over the macbook, you can even see the fingerprints.
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Daniel D said 9:28PM on 12-10-2006
Just dropping by to say that the title change is hilarious! Good on you!
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teece said 10:33PM on 12-10-2006
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?
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James Whited said 11:43PM on 12-10-2006
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.
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derek said 1:00AM on 12-11-2006
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.
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Chaz said 2:45AM on 12-11-2006
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/
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Nitewing 98 said 4:39AM on 12-11-2006
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."
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LittleJoe said 5:55AM on 12-11-2006
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.
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Pedro said 9:53AM on 12-11-2006
DSL... thats all im saying!
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teece said 11:56AM on 12-11-2006
"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.
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