Phill warned Adam:
I suggest unless people want to hand the FBI an excuse to harass everyone that they don't enter into this discussion.
The WSJ reported recently on the comparatively lax security of the principal US nodes of the Internet -- MAEs and such. The reporter located the facilities and spoke to several of the sys admins, most of whom were surprised at being IDed, and were reluctant to discuss security. Some did, though, and shook their nogs at the ease with which the whole shebang could be trashed, claiming that for now it was only obscurity that saved the net -- or at least its facilities -- and asked the reporter not to tell the full story. A similar report was written in a mag a few months back, with a focus on the New Jersey facility (with photo), MAE, I think. There was a discussion here in 1994 or so on the location of the landing points of transatlantic cables, many of which come into New York City at obscure points along the coast, into huts and shacks, actually, easily located by following the cables shown on coastal maritime maps which neatly diagram every one of them to warn off shipping and dredging. At that time some of the cpunks associated with the telco and financial industries here (NYC) hinted at even worse security, especially the facilities kind, at the humongous hi-rise switching banks and highly accessible local distribution cablings into dank "secure" cells. I pray that none of these remarks are seen as darkly conspiratorial, but merely chit-chat, like Phill's bark. -- Now officially an EAR violation... Have *you* violated EAR today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/ print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`