[OT] NTK now, 2001-09-14 (excerpt)

J.D. Falk jdfalk at cybernothing.org
Fri Sep 14 17:48:32 UTC 2001


http://www.ntk.net

In these terrible times, it's good to watch the tech
community put its problems aside, and supply what we were
all so desperately short of: plenty of wild unsolicited
opinions. After those first few hours of awful shocked
silence - what a relief to be interrupted by the CEO of
CoffeeCup Software, producers of an innocuous Windows HTML
editor, e-mailing his 1.2 million customer base to "call for
[the responsible] country's complete destruction and
annihilation". And at the end of that fateful day, noted
hacker Eric S. Raymond rained his thoughts like fresh water,
revealing that those who "disarmed all the non-terrorists on
those airplanes ... bear some moral responsibility". Thanks
too to BYTE's Jerry Pournelle, who slowly toughened his
demands from an early request that /usr/bin/laden be handed
over "bound and chained", to Thursday's demand that Nablus,
Gaza, Baghdad *and* Damascus be razed to the ground; to the
Evening Standard infowar expert who warned that "inflamed
young men" could escalate the conflict by releasing "cyber
viruses, crashing our computers ... from council houses in
Bradford"; and kindly John Keegan in the Telegraph, who
wrote that ISPs should ban encryption among their users, and
those who refused must be "destroyed with cruise
missiles". And on through the lonely nights, as net.folk on
chat traded credulous rumours and confused geopolitics, and
Nostradamus buffs mulled seriously over a quatrain that,
sadly, was probably invented by a skeptic to show how *any*
random phrase could end up a doomladen prophecy. But be
assured that the crisis is not yet over. Please help:
opinions are still desperately needed - and bloggers,
columnists and sleep-deprived newsreaders are running short
of ideas. So: do you have some minority you'd like to
haphazardly blame? Some half-arsed genocidal theory you'd
like to insist become global policy? Some simplistic
demonisation of a country's recent history that needs to be
waved in the faces of everyone you know? Mail it to our
hotline on devnull at spesh.com, and we'll pass it on to those
who must fill the useless silence which would otherwise be
wasted on slow, methodical grief.

http://www.coffeecup.com/attack/
- "many e-mails thanking me for removing the word 'annihilation'"

http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/9/12/102423/271
- Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/war/whattodo.html
- "There may be other places."

http://www.dailytelegraph.co.uk/dt?pg=/01/9/14/do01.html
- also, if their contention ratio goes above twenty, nuke 'em

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/news/top_story.html?in_review_id=456910
- no hidden meaning in using Bradford as an example

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.ed.brocku.ca/~nmarshal/nostradamus.htm
- search for "abstract"

----- End forwarded message -----

	And, for the record, I agree that political stuff should be
	moved off of NANOG -- though I greatly appreciate the efforts
	of Sean Donelan and others to keep us all informed on how the
	disaster affects the Internet.

-- 
J.D. Falk                                   all good dreams return in time
<jdfalk at cybernothing.org>



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