Re: What Worked - What Didn't

[Strata Rose Chalup <strata () virtual net>]

Yes, very.  The #coverage channel on slashnet had folks watching/listening
to various conventional media, as well as monitoring international news
sites, and posting updates and links via moderators.  A tremendous amount
of info came in that way, and usually scooped any individual media station.

I'd guess that setting up an IRC net for nanog-type operational traffic
would be very helpful.  Equally helpful would be gatewaying that net
via packet radio on amateur frequencies.  "Commercial" traffic is
prohibited, but in a disaster this kind of thing would be equivalent
to health-and-welfare traffic.  

In fact, now that I recall, SANS was asking for amateur radio
operators to send in contact info in June or July.  They were talking
about putting together a non-internet communications network to be
used in case of serious virus/DoS/etc slams on the net.  It doesn't
take a rocket scientist to see that they're thinking InfoWar type
scenarios.  I don't know if the project was abandoned or if it got
complexified into something more formal and thus slowed down.  We
never heard back from them. 

> Ham Radio Operators?
> The threat to critical Internet resources from distributed denial of
> service attack tools continues to increase. An effective emergency
> communications network may be of great value if damage is done to both the
> Internet and to phone systems. SANS is looking for ham and packet radio
> operators who are willing to take a leadership role to help establish and
> maintain an emergency communication channel.  If you are qualified and
> interested please send an email telling us about your ham radio and
> computer security activities. Send it to info () sans org with Emergency
> Communications Network in the subject line.

It would be worth bringing back FidoNet or similar in parallel
with packet radio networks.  A lot of packet radio is BBS-based,
and doesn't necessarily network between BBS's.  I'm pretty new to
packet, so go check out some of the packet links on http://www.tapr.org/
(Tucson Amateur Packet Radio), one of the best sites on the net
for packet stuff.  These folks have been real pioneers in it. 

If folks are interested in discussing this (packet nanog for emergencies,
and/or irc comm net ditto) more, I'd be happy to host or set up a mailing 
list for it.

SRC

PS- And whether it was officially sanctioned or not, hats off to whoever put
CNN's close-caption feed onto IRC as well.  Low-bandwidth news w/o the
talking heads.


Miles Fidelman wrote:
> On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Daniel Golding wrote:
>
> > 1) The Internet, as currently constituted makes a lousy news propagation
> > method, for large audiences. The one to many model in unicast IP puts too
> > large of a load on the source. Good multicast (which we don't have yet) may
>
> one comment on this: email-based news seemed to work VERY well - both very
> focused news (such as operational material on nanog), and more general
> news (I found CNNs "breaking news" email list to be very informative - in
> fact, I first heard about the initial airliner crash via that list)
>
> Miles
>
> **************************************************************************
> The Center for Civic Networking             PO Box 600618
> Miles R. Fidelman, President &              Newtonville, MA 02460-0006
> Director, Municipal Telecommunications
> Strategies Program                          617-558-3698 fax: 617-630-8946
> mfidelman () civicnet org                      http://civic.net/ccn.html
>
> Information Infrastructure: Public Spaces for the 21st Century
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Strata Rose Chalup [KF6NBZ]                      strata "@" virtual.net
VirtualNet Consulting                            http://www.virtual.net/
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