If you haven't overdosed on the Observer articles yet, you can read their defense on http://www.observer.co.uk -- it is rather self-serving, but it could have been worse. The only revelation is that Demon (the major Internet provider) plans to block access to some newsgroups/sites. Also, assuming I read between the lines correctly, Demon receives three billion (with a "b") e-mail messages per day. I can never remember whether British usage is "thousand million," or "million million", but the numbers seem a bit large in any case. Perhaps they mean "3 billion bytes of e-mail." (Assume ten million Demon subscribers and three thousand million e-mail messages. This implies that the average subscriber receives 300 e-mail messages per day. Are they all subscribing to Cypherpunks?) Some other numbers: -- 180,000 newsgroup articles received per-day (per server). -- "tens of terabytes of data, (each equivalent to 750,000 floppy disks) move across a network of about 10 million machines." This seesm to refer to all of the Internet. Martin Minow minow@apple.com