The Novelty of Current Affairs
By Bob Kaehms
If I had spare time for reading, I would have picked up a copy of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged last week. It would have taken about as long to get through its thousand pages as all the editorial analysis of the you know what case, and in the end I still wouldn't be sure as to whether to compare Him to Hank Rearden. Rearden's metal was an alloy, stronger and lighter than steel, a symbol of strength and innovation in the industrial age -- the backbone of the nation. His OS -- well, you tell me. But the similarities are there, and I must agree with Him. Browser/OS integration is not the line to be drawing in this antitrust case. It's a natural progression that any good engineer would make. I bet the folks at Netscape are busy trying to figure out how to integrate Communicator right into Linux.
But I love movies, and my favorite this week was the real-life remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. In this version, Mudge from the L0pht lands in Washington, DC to warn that he and his associates could disable the entire Net in 30 minutes or less -- a claim made often, as a 1996 article in USA Today also points out.
Since much of the testimony was given behind closed doors, some questions remain:
1) Is this a denial-of-service attack waged from unsecured systems that would disable the backbone between major carriers?
2) Wouldn't this be like walking into a bank with a semiautomatic? Sure, they'd give you the money, but what would be the consequences?
3) What real impact would a major attack have on the Net's e-commerce now, and in one or two years? Wouldn't those who really need security have point-to-point dial-ups and leased lines to ensure continuous service?
4) If you had to redo the basic design of Internet operation from scratch, knowing what we now do about its adoption in the commercial marketplace, what one thing would you change?
Investigating, I poked around at the U.S
