Slashdot Mirror

FearlessFritz writes "UUnet seems to be having a bad time recently. Several sites in the SouthEast of the US have been slow or down. Here is Worldcom's quote from their web page: 'WorldCom is currently experiencing an interruption of service in various hubs in the U.S. We are working to restore a routing anomaly, and making necessary progress toward resolving this disruption in service.' There are several rumors abounding, but the best is that they performed a hardware upgrade that failed. Is anyone outside of the Southeastern U.S. experiencing the effects of this outage? (I am peered to several providers so I can post!)"

If anyone can claim to have "invented the Internet," (or at least to have co-invented it) it's Vint Cerf, who never makes this claim himself. But he's certainly had a hand in shaping most of what we call "the Internet" today, and is now working on taking the Internet or something like it to Mars and other planets. A Google Search for "Vint Cerf" brings up thousands of responses, so you should have no trouble coming up with a unique, interesting question for him. (As is usual with Slashdot interviews, we'll send 10 of the top-moderated questions to Dr. Cerf about 24 hours after this post, and publish his answers shortly after he gets them back to us.)

Uncle Humph1 writes "There's an interesting article at NewsForge by Robin (Roblimo)Miller about Vint Cerf giving a presentation to NOVALUG about the Interplanetary Internet and having lunch with them afterward. An interesting read. One of the quotables by Vint with regard to security reads 'We're building in security from end to end,' he says, 'because we don't need headlines saying, '15-year-old takes over Mars.'" Here is some more information about the interplanetary Internet.

Uncle Humph1 writes "There's an interesting article at NewsForge by Robin (Roblimo)Miller about Vint Cerf giving a presentation to NOVALUG about the Interplanetary Internet and having lunch with them afterward. An interesting read. One of the quotables by Vint with regard to security reads 'We're building in security from end to end,' he says, 'because we don't need headlines saying, '15-year-old takes over Mars.'" Here is some more information about the interplanetary Internet.

So, as today is a somewhat slow day, and I've had the galling experience of dealing with the phone system today, I thought I'd give a small piece of my mind about that wonderful practice known as phone slamming, and what wonderful practices Big Business likes to engage in.

I've recently moved to Boston, as those who've been on IRC with us, and watched the news lately have seen. It's great -- I love the city, and I like where I live. When moving, I had to do the typical thing of signing the house up for electric, gas, water and all that good stuff. One of the interesting things that Boston differs from Holland in is that you can have different local phone providers. Not being very happy to start with concerning Bell Atlantic/Verizon, I opted instead for another giant media company, MediaOne. They only offered local service, not long distance, so I selected MCI Worldcom as my long distance. I'd been happy with them before, and they offered me frequent flyer miles.

I'm happily going along this morning, deleting submissions when I get call from MCI Worldcom wondering why one of my lines has left MCI. After spending the 30 minutes to convert my line back, I become progressively more frustrated.

You see, the FTC had given MediaOne and AT&T permission to merge, which they did recently. Since then, I've gotten a call a day on my lines, asking me to switch to AT&T for long distance. I refuse. It costs more, and I don't get frequent flyer miles. I've told them this, but they somehow persist, thinking perhaps that they can wear me down, like so much water on rock.

But they evidently decided that me saying No meant Yes, and so slammed me. I hate this practice. What a waste of time and energy. And they know that they'll lose my business, and that if I get my gumption up I'll call the State AG's office. I think is illegal. If not, it should be.

How many other people have had problems with this?