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Eric Raymond came to speak at NU the other day. He gave his freedom speach, which has changed greatly since 9/11. He said so him self many times. One of the points he maid, that I had put together my self, is that the US has not had any casulities on its on soil due to a war in over 100 years. Intrestingly enough it was the war of 1812. This is interesting as there is no one alive that can remeber the war of 1812. Politicians and agencies have no idea how to react to what has happend - where should they go from here? Heres my tid bit. I have met several politicians in my short life. I wouldn't say alot but a few. I have not met a politician I could ever truly respect. They all seem to be out for themselves, and only that. I'm sure there are a few good politicians, but all and all they don't seem to want to take the time to be at least partially informed on the matters they vote upon. I think thats where we come in. We as a community of geeks tend to be rather reclusive, we stay to ourselves. I could be mistaken but if you like at university setting you will never mistake a business major and comp major. Its a fairly distinct setting. So its not all the politicians fault. Who does the politician have to bring s/he up to speed on matters of this nature. Has any politician heard of Alan Cox, or how he will not give out security breaches to US citizens as it could violate the law. Have they ever heard of Theo de Raalt. Have they heard of Linux, or any of the BSD's. I would say probably not. I think what could happen, if it happens is partially our fault. We bitch about these laws - I see it on the UNIXies news sites. How many of us have told our politicians how wrong they are at this point. I certainly have not, and I would venture out so far as to say you probably haven't either. I highly doubt they read the news sites we keep our browsers on. So we are all to blame for what could happen. Sorry for the long rant, I don't even know if its true. At my first glance it seems to be true. Thanks, Anthony On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, John Chambers wrote: > ccb writes: > | Cool! Take down a couple of these "choke points" and you've nuked the > | internet! > > Yup. Maybe what we should be doing is teaching a history lesson. Way > back when the US Defense Department's ARPA (Advanced Research > Projects Agency) started funding development of what we now call the > Internet, one of the oft-quoted requirements was that the network > continue to function under battlefield conditions. This meant that > the software had to deal with multiply-connected machines (hosts, > gateways, routers, whatever), and if a path failed, the routing would > automatically switch to alternate paths. The idea was that if there > existed a path between two machines, the network would automatically > find the path and deliver messages. > > We have had more and more violations of this. The commercial world > prefers to avoid redundancy for cost reasons. And programmers often > ignore the multiply-connected cases because it's more work to > program. All these are violations of the Internet's design and > intended use. > > The FBI's proposal is directly aimed at weakening the Internet by > creating critical "choke" points that can be disabled by a single > bomb (hardware or software). We should be making a big point of this, > and demanding that the Internet's redundant, fail-safe design be kept > despite the desires of organizations (commercial and government) to > control the traffic. > > Maybe a good analogy for those who don't understand packet routing > would be the old comparison with highways. We have a huge grid of > streets that give you a lot of alternate paths. Suppose that the FBI > were to persuade the local highway departments to install barriers so > that all traffic is routed through a single intersection, so that > they can look into the vehicles for criminal suspects. So to go > between any two points in the greater Boston area, all drivers must > first drive to the Pike/I93 interchange, and then drive from there to > their destinations. > > This sort of explanation could get the idea across pretty fast. > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss at blu.org > http://www.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
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