On Sun, 25 Feb 1996, Jeffrey I. Schiller wrote:

Yeah, from several of ISP's and others (including one un-named government organization that wanted to FAX us the message, for security reasons, didn't want to send it over the network).

As a matter of interest, I wonder how much of the internet could be shut down by concerted effort; obviously individual services can be trivially disabled by jamming listen queues (not really stoppable by anything short of IPSEC w/photuris). The BGP backbone could probably be disabled from within by a traitor planted in one of big companies, and a confused backhoe around the MAEs could probably do a lot more damage than people would like to admit. It seems that the internet is getting pretty brittle- I wonder if it would be worthwhile having some sort of infranet with a bunch of backups links using dial-up lines or spare transponders (with a filter to block port 80 :-) It's probably not possible with todays routing technology (slow, flappy links with nightmarish convergence times), plus it's not sexy like a nice OC-12 SONET. This is the sort of thing the NCSC should be working on- something to keep the essential services flowing in the early stages of an info-war, or an info truck-bomb --- They say in online country So which side are you on boys There is no middle way Which side are you on You'll either be a Usenet man Which side are you on boys Or a thug for the CDA Which side are you on? National Union of Computer Operatives; Hackers, local 37 APL-CPIO