You are right, it does encourage kids to do worst. Probably someone will turn this story into a movice or write a book with the assistance of that kid: How to become rich with negative acts that affected others.
Are we going to remember the damage of US$1.7 billion that Mafiaboy did? Most of the people seems to forget rapidly these costly acts.
Thank you for your mature comment.
Gilles Lemieux
Sales Representative – Conseiller en communications
Service aux télécommunicateurs de Bell Nexxia
Bell Nexxia Carrier Services Group
Re: Internet Under Attack (Sept. 12)
Do you think that the Internet was designed as an alternate way to communicate between governmental institutions, universities, etc. in case of emergency (see the obligation to declare absolute coordinates to CERN when asking for an IP Class C)? The Internet is not obliged to support fun or curiosity when a disaster or emergency situations occur.
Do you know the meaning of the French word “civsime.” (Editor’s note: the definition is public-spiritedness, altruism.)? For example, we asked our students not to surf unnecessarily on the Internet for the whole day on Tuesday and as a result the bandwidth increased from 2k a second to 127k after our intervention (300 computers on a fiber network). The 120k may have possibly been used by other curious people, but they may have been as well used by the authorities!
Remember, Internet is not free. We pay 12 000$ a year to let people have “instant access” to CNN.com.
Claude Berthaud
Responsable du service de l’informatique
Collège de l’Assomption
Re: Internet Under Attack (Sept. 12)
I agree with your assessment, however, I found many people forget the Internet is a global tool and that CNN, CBC and MSNBC are not the only sources of information. Just like in radio and television, media outlets have affiliates who are also on the web. In our office, people were able to listen in to streaming audio from KIRO news Web site in Seattle (which is an affiliate of CBS) after only a few attempts.
Additionally, Australia was still asleep, but their media outlets were awake. The Sydney Morning Herald (www.smh.com.au) provided a great deal of information with very little wait due to very low traffic from domestic users. As well the Guardian newspaper’s site in the UK (www.guardian.co.uk) had very little traffic – as it was the end of the work day in England – and was one of the first places I was able to see streaming video of the disaster. Although it was not true real-time, many of us who use the Internet and email on a daily basis are used to having a five to 10 minute delay in communications, and it allows us to multitask during our day.
On a final note, I do commend CNN for their scaled down approach, and a new “killer app” for Web servers might be to develop a system which would automatically support a hit-rate dependant URL.
Mike Hilton
Director, In-Building Technologies
Radian Communications
Re: Internet Under Attack (Sept. 12)
One can only hope that in your next column you give it a little more thought and provide some hard data about how exactly the Internet failed — or whether it was the content providers and their bloated sites who proved inadequate.
Something to consider: why would any site clutter its bandwidth with video streams? With saturation TV coverage, Real Player and Windows Media hardly seem significant as a visual medium in the circumstances. I wanted the data that TV couldn’t deliver to me quickly enough.
Bruce Winning
Re:Call me Internet News Overlord (Sept. 7)
You mentioned in a story about odd job titles:
“From the business card of Melissa A. Campell. She worked for Netera, which promised Network Solutions for the Interprise Era. No, I didn’t spell ‘enterprise’ wrong. And no, their URL no longer works.”
I wonder if you could clarify that you weren’t talking about Netera Alliance, a registered not-for-profit corporation using this name in Canada — we are Alberta’s advanced Internet organization (the provincial peer to CANARIE) and we do still exist, and our URL does work. Go to www.netera.ca.
Since we are a networking organization, confusion could come up (I was sent the article by someone who thought it was funny that we were said to no longer exist.
Mary Anne Moser
Director of Member Relations
Netera Alliance
Editor’s note: I was not referring to Netera Alliance.
Letters to the editor must include the writer’s name and company name along with an e-mail address or other contact information. All letters become the property of ITBusiness.ca. Editors reserve the right to edit submissions for length and content.
