Vulnerbilities of Interconnection

Mon Sep 16 11:14:01 UTC 2002

>

> That's a good question. Is the net really a criticial resource? If a 
> life
> gets saved through involvement of the internet, it is news. Lifes are
> saved by calling for assistence through the telephone network every day
> all over the world as a matter of routine.

Well, it's more a question of what you want the Internet to become? We 
can't expect to
have better quality than the most critical application that we run over 
it....

> It's not how much something is used, but how bad it would be to go 
> without
> it. During september 11th, the phone service didn't work very well, and
> the internet did a lot better. I think just about anyone would have 
> traded
> the latter for the former in a second.

I think we are using the word "emergency" with different meanings here. 
Assume that a nation is cut of from it's
Internet access in one way or the other due to war, natural disasters 
etc. In these scenarios a not functioning
Internet might actually be a problem due to the time of the outage.

>
>> In the event of a emergency, I would very much like to be as
>> able to reach my bank via the net as walking into their offices.
>
> Yes, because banks are such a critical resource when there is an
> emergency...

If there was a natural disaster and I could not reach my banks office I 
would very much like to
be able to use the on-line bank instead...
>

>  that was in the good old days
> when business was booming. I'm sure they're cutting corners left right 
> and
> center at the moment.
>
>
Agreed - and this is where I think we have real problem....

- kurtis -