Federal Reserve Risks Collapse Re: Risk of Internet collapse grows

Fri Nov 29 02:24:37 UTC 2002

      On Thu, 28 Nov 2002, Sean Donelan wrote:
    > ...The US banking system would collapse, ATMs would stop, paychecks
    > wouldn't get cashed, checks couldn't be cleared, etc.
    > The Federal Reserve system does have vulnerabilities.  So does the
    > Internet (and the post office, and the telephone network, and ...)
    > But misunderstanding the risks and vulnerabilities is worse because
    > it diverts resources away from the real ones.

Another interesting footnote, as long as we're on the subject of
footnotes...  You remember when Bob Metcalfe came and preached doom and
gloom at the D.C. NANOG?  Specifically, he was predicting a "gigalapse,"
his neologism for a billion person-hours offline, before the end of 1996,
and he was basically saying that no more of this engineers-without-ties
foolishness would be permitted after a debacle of _that_ scale occurred.
Of course, nothing happened, and we all got T-shirts to commemorate the
non-event.  _However_, the footnote is that I went and dug that up a few
years later and ran the numbers on a few of the bigger subsequent fiber
cuts and (more to the point) ATM switching failures, and he was off by
about two years, but the actual big cuts were _an order of magnitude_
larger than he predicted, and they _still barely even made the mainstream
press_.

So catastrophic failure doesn't appear to actually interest folks much,
even when it does happen.

                                -Bill