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Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2002 11:24:48 -0800
From: "IronMan Mike Curtis"
Subject: Re: Notice: Yahoo groups down.... along with all the other
harmonica email groups.

>

We still have the newsgroups, which are 1. noncentral, and 2. run
under nntp protocol instead of the centralized listserver protocol.

This is quite the paradox. One of the goals of the original
DARPAnet/ ARPAnet project was to be the elimination of central points
of failure. With Yahoo et al gobbling up everything in site (excuse
the pun), and MicroSoft foisting on us that abomination they have the
nerve to call an OS, WinDoze, we're right back to the "central point
of failure" that the military was seeking to eliminate with the
tcp/ip suite of protocols.

The Internet is USUALLY reliable. But when we put ALL our eggs into
one basket, when that one basket fails, it's disastrous.

I'm not talking about the harp lists. That's trivial, even for us
hard core raving harp maniacs. Businesses depend on the internet.
Some phone systems are using internet for long distance and such.
And there are a lot of things going on that most of us would never
even think of.

On ham radio, we have computers. In fact, we have a worldwide
network of bulletin board systems, via which we send general
bulletins, news items of interest to hams, emergency traffic, and
such. Most of the stuff is trivial, but it's part of "staying in
practice". When "the big one" hits, this network is there in
splendid redundancy to pass along health and welfare messages,
emergency communications for various agencies, and such (so when you
see one of those "huge ugly antennas" in your neighborhood, don't
complain - instead, make friends with the one person who might be
able to get your messages out when all else fails).

One of the shames about this network is that there are people who
sabotage it by using the neternet to forward messages. While it's
cheaper (radios and antennas cost big bucks!) and faster (much of the
network uses 1200 baud, 300 baud, and even slower radio paths), it's
also going through a "central point of failure".

This outage of Yahoogroups is a very good argument for having
multiple listservers and not just one central server that can glitch,
be sabotaged, shut their doors on a whim, etc. The Internet should
be diverse, and anything but homogenous.

We should also have a diversity of hardware and operating systems.
Virtually all viruses are directed against MicroSoft. While I have
no direct proof, only a suspicion, I suspect at least some is from
programmers and developers that MicroSoft has monopolistically put
out of business via barely legal (or outright illegal) tactics.

This is one big reason many of us are so excited at the emergence of
the Linux OS - and MicroSoft is so afraid of it. Being open
architecture, all the source code is freely available for programmers
to work on, debug, etc. (MS stuff is closed architecture - if you
need to mod it or fix bugs, tough). The good improvements get
adopted into "approved" releases. The bad ones don't. And with
different releases, it's nigh impossible to "hack" the whole internet
the way MS specific virii do.

- -IronMan Mike Curtis http://www.IronmanCurtis.com Jam w/ IronMan
& Band Tue 8pm-mid - Starboard Attitude 202 The Pier, Redondo CA
See Mik~Santa Monica 3rd St Promenade - email for times
Songs, reviews, pix, Web Vide~http://www.mp3.com/IronmanCurtis