or whatever her name was. A dangerous radical named Steve allegedly typed:
Seems to me that having only a few, heavily trafficed, NAPs is a topological weakness in the Net which needs to be delt with soon.
The problem is economic. During info-peace-time non- robust networks are cheaper. Redundancy and other robustness techniques are an expense that doesn't pay back. During info-peace-time. Under duress-- be it accidents, load, or info-war-- such designs are inadequate. What's the solution? I dunno. Here're some options: A. Make design which is robust under attack but still cheap for everyday use. Not sure if it is feasible. B. Convince people to spend more on robustness of systems. But this is infeasible on a huge scale and in anarchic and uncoordinated social system e.g. Internet. C. Hire info-warriors to attack systems, hopefully doing as little permanent damage as possible but achieving enough penetration to convince even the most thick-headed manager that his system is weak. Hence I propose a fund, The Randall Schwartz Memorial Cracking Reward Fund, which will regularly award dcash payments to the cracker who most illustriously exposed the weaknesses of system. Scaring the pants off of the managers and leaders is a plus. Enlightening the public about the dangers of a specific system or technique is a plus. Scaring the public into thinking that all systems/networks/computers/software are dangerous is arguably a plus or a minus. :-) Doing permanent damage or unnecessary disruption of service is a big minus. Usually a calling card saying "Soo Do Nym was here" is sufficient. The pay-off could be instituted by way of an "Assassination Systemics" scheme (which is merely an application of Idea Futures, of course), in which the bettor who most accurately predicted the time and other details of the target system's penetration receives the bulk of the winnings. I hereby bet 10 cyberbucks that no clever hacker will be able to redirect "www.internic.net" to point to AlterNIC. Zooko Journeyman "We are an internation of code and not of laws."