Web expert on his 'catastrophe' key for the internet

Wed Jul 28 00:38:42 UTC 2010

> Those of us who lived through the Morris worm fragmenting the Arpa/Milnet  in
> 1988 and things like major worm-induced outages remember what a hassle it was
> to *really* restart the net. Calling up your upstream on the phone asking if it
> was safe to turn up the link again, or looking for help in cleaning your net
> before you reconnected, etc...)

Weren't the FCC and at&t recently suggesting that VoIP was the future of
telephony?

I can just imagine how it'll be trying to call your upstream to have
them reconnect you...

"Your call could not be completed at this time.  Your circuit is not
connected.  Please hang up, connect to the Internet, and then try your 
call again."

Ha.

Now, seriously, at what point do we lose visibility of the bigger
picture?  Twenty years ago, the PSTN wasn't horribly hard to grasp
and was sufficiently distinct that one could understand the set of
circumstances that would render both phone and data unusable.

As wonderful as the new communications paradigms are, do we also 
have a situation now developing where it might eventually become
very difficult or even impossible to ensure out-of-band lines of 
communications remain available?

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.