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Anthrax To Kill Snail Mail
omnirealm writes "Steven Levy over at NBC expressed his opinion that the new anthrax thread in our snail-mail is going to be a major catalyst to a general switch to e-mail as the primary means of written communication."
I thought the 34-cent stamp took care of that pretty well.
I'm not exactly afraid of getting Anthrax in the mail.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
At least that would mean that our representatives in government might start actually reading email.
from an infected paper cut. Pardon me while I'm not worried. And until E-mail gets the same legal standing as snail mail (complete with legally recognized notarization, authentication, and proof of delivery) we can't replace snail mail.
Can someone help me, im trying to find out how to send a "written" letter using email?
Scott
I send you this Anthrax to have your advice. Bye. Thanks for stopping by.
!
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
I thought they were using powder...
Most mail is Spam.
Most mail is a BIll.
I toss them all in the trash anyway.
I've always felt the USPS should deliver only Three times a week. (They can't do that because there is so much SPAM and Bills piling up constantly.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_U.S._Election_c
I find it odd that we still use 'snail mail', atleast as much as we do. It certainly seems like everyone and their grandmother has an email account now (even if they don't have a computer or internet access in their home, an internet cafe or library or such near them almost undoubtedly does). The advantages of email to snail certainly seem to be enough that snail mail should magically disappear sometime when we're not looking...
Perhaps the anthrax scare will quicken the process, but I doubt it. I believe it'll happen soon, but that this won't make it happen any quicker.
<wik>/bin/finger that girl in the back row of machines.
More people are going to be using Outlook.
This is a good thing how?
someone unleashes anthrax.vbs against Outlook users worldwide.
"Read this, and other stories, in this month's edition of 'Duh' magazine."
Are they going to start giving free e-mail from usps.gov, or mail.gov, or some equivalent, or just slowly die? After all, almost nobody mails any packages through the USPS, just letters and junk mail, and e-mail has pretty much taken over the junk mail too.
Best Slashdot comment ever
In the interest of authentication, perhaps this would be a good thing. If more people used digital signatures, more people would likely find it easier to begin using encryption as well. NAI might be kicking themselves over selling off its PGP division after all. How do you know if the bill you got by email is really from your VISA company, and not from Evil Eve the Eavesdropper?
Most government officials would likely right this off as paranoia, and unnecessary because *nobody* would EVER want to wiretap its citizens and steal their credit card information.
It's interesting that Levy thinks the end of snail mail is in sight when digital means of authentication are rarely used -- when available. Now that Sen. Gregg and his like-minded compatriots have launched another offensive on crypto software, expect the issue to get even more snarled. It takes more than "Sincerely, Jim" at the bottom of an email to make me trust its source.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
Really, the average person doesn't need to be worried about getting anthrax in the mail. I don't think its much of an issue - at least its not for me.
... its still there and doesn't show any sign of disappearing.
People forget that snail mail is still very important to having an effective communications, as in many cases it can't be beat. The quickest way to get something physical from one place to another (barring courier services) is by mail. To say that the USPS is dead because no one will want to mail stuff is not only premature and unrealistic, but also quite sensationalistic. In most cases, this one especially you can tell when someone is making stuff up to make the headlines rather than writing stuff that actually makes good sense. Having read this article, it makes very little sense at all. As much as I use computers/email, I for one would be majorly pissed if one day I found mail service was no longer there.
People say time and time again the mail is dead. But just look
You would think that the FBI would do a lot better than this with regards to the Anthrax "crisis".
I think it is pretty damn scary that they can ignore something like this for as long as they did.
FBI did not test suspect NBC package for 2 weeks
NEW YORK: The FBI failed to test the suspicious powder sent to an NBC employee in New York for two weeks and it was a private doctor who raised the alarm over the new case of anthrax, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The report said that the FBI was notified about the powder on September 25, picked it up a day later but did not do any laboratory tests on the powder or take skin samples from the NBC employee who handled the package.
The report said that it was only after the NBC staffer - identified as 38-year-old Erin O' Connor - developed a sore on her chest, visited several doctors and was diagnosed with skin anthrax that the powder was tested.
The powder was eventually found to be negative. New York FBI chief Barry Mawn said that it was "unfortunate" the tests were not conducted immediately. Mawn said that the FBI had investigated dozens of suspicious substances since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Unfortunate, yes but for the first few days that this was coming up they really tried to downplay it like it was not going on. On 'Politically Incorrect' a replublican strategist said they were thinking of suing CNN for falsly creating a Anthrax scare.
Doesnt look false to me.
So far, we have reports of three letters supposedly laced with Anthrax. One death has resulted, and no more deaths seem likely. These are hardly numbers warranting an end to snail mail.
The news media seriously needs to stop trying to incite hysteria in the American public.
While many people may have to switch to e-mail if this anthrax scare continues, I doubt it'll completely kill snail mail.. People are sentimental, or at least I am. I love receiving handwritten letters from my friends and family.. not to mention photos I can hold in my hand and hang on my wall.. e-mail won't replace this for me..
Last night at my high school they recieved a shipment of SAT books for this mornings tests. Apparently they had some kind of powder on them and a squad was called in to investigate and contaminate a possible threat. I heard this from a few people today but nothing official from the school. It seems that security standards have been raised after the recent attacks. Better safe than sorry I guess.
Great. I'm looking forward to a whole Inbox full of "I send you this anthrax to have your advice...".
I found a bunch of interesting and reassuring information on Heathlinkusa.com.
The fact is, there exists both a cure for anthrax and even a vaccine. There's an article on ABCNews that explains how anthrax works, and that if caught early enough, it can be treated with penicillin.
My theory is that the anthrax infections we've been reading about are not the responsibility of terrorists, but just some nutcase somewhere in the country who is trying to scare the hell out of everyone, although I cannot fathom why.
Although nuking sites that are suspected to be infected with Anthrax would probably kill any virus, that is a very crude way to do it, yes.
This is one of the more extreme examples of ridiculous predictions over how life will change in the US after 9/11. The tons of reasons people have used actual written/printed communication in the past continue to exist, and will not easily be supplanted by *anything* electronic. (Think about all the documents we use that require witness signatures or notarizing and then are kept in archives for decades.)
In other words, this article is just one big troll.
Look at the money to be made! Maybe Symantec or McAfee can come up with a "virus" scanner for Snail Mail. Clearly its needed.
The only good weather is bad weather.
So minimum wage workers are going to get computers? Sure! Right!
Even the homeless can get free snail-mail addresses, but email?
We're not all middle class. Fewer are every day.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Like on the good 'ole USA? (There's no proof thus far that these cases are the result of any external terrorist group. It could well be a good 'ole boy here in the US pissed of at "the libral media's showing Osama bin Laden's videotaped propaganda" or the like).
... well, at least that's been the case in the United States of Microsoft.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Hey, where did you get the threading snail-mail client?
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Perhaps I have a Luddite streak in me somewhere, but I also have an irrational fondness for "old" media: LPs, newspapers, printed books. I suppose someday I can spend a Sunday morning at the local coffee shop reading over the electronic version of the Los Angeles Times on my Palm XVIII, but it won't be the same, and I will miss getting newsprint on my fingers. But I don't think I'm the only one who feels this way, and it will be used as justification to avoid change. E-mail has many advantages, but it belongs to a new generation, it seems. My mother might learn, but my grandmother never will.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
Someone targets airplanes, and people stop flying. Someone targets mail, and people stop using mail. Is this kind of a response reasonable? There's a lot of knee-jerk reactions which are not necessarily effective, and the economic effects of wholesale eschewment of mail and air travel are pretty widespread.
This suggestion reminds me of the panic surrounding the unibomber. People were afraid to send and receive packages, although millions of packages were sent through the FedEx, UPS and the mail every day.
It is upsetting that mail is something we can't implicitly trust after the events of the last week, but it is an extremely useful and, I think, necessary tool. Air travel is still quite safe and I expect to continue to fly when I need to without much thought of what if...
I refuse to live my life worried every minute about what might happen.
Frankly with 1 case of transmission of anthrax by postal mail I think the whole topic is foolish and a sad attempt by a columnist to get some attention.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Transmit Anthrax via modem...
But think about it...they found on that guys keyboard!
Mck
I mean first, metal music was forcing kids to kill themselves, then metal music was forcing kids to kill their parents. Then, Tipper Gore thought metal music was destroying America. Now, Anthrax is killing the USPS? Who'd of thought. I always thought the RIAA wanted to prevent music transfered over the internet. Now others want Anthrax transmitted over email. How weird.
In other news, Anthrax is going to change it's name to "Basket Full Of Puppies"
If mass-murders have not slowed the sale of hand weapons, then anthrax attacks will not slow the usage of paper mail.
so let me get this straight... people are going to move from snail mail to email because of anthrax? email has virii too. sircam anyone?
the predicted demise of snail mail is about as silly as saying that people are going to stop using microsoft outlook in droves because we all know how insecure it is. unforuntately, nobody is.
funk dat.
Insane. A handful of jackasses mail a handful of poison apples and one writer has an epiphany that an America will now forsake using the postal system.
I send or respond to hundreds of emails a day, as I am sure quite a few of us do, personally I find it is the differences between email and snail mail that make it cornerstone of society.
Email lets me communicate to someone using electronic representations of words or images. Powerful stuff, certainly powerful enough to conduct business and maintain strong lines of communication with family and friends.
But snail mail allows my kids, my wife, to create something for me physically and to send it thousands of miles away for me to hold in my hands, if you ever got a perfumed letter from your woman when you have been jonesing for her for weeks, you realize why email is not a final postal solution.
Never mind that I do 60% of my shopping online and receive parcels in a timely fashion from all four corners of this country and from a couple others. Never mind that if an old acquaintance wants to contact me the odds of him finding my physical address is greater then him stumbling into my email address. Never mind that letters written by pen usually have greater value both in terms of the thought that went into them and to the appreciation of the reader.
Yeah junk mail sucks ass and needs to be addressed and destroyed. I am not saying snail mail is not silly with flaws. What I am saying is this is horseshit. We lived through the unibomber and if you are old enough you might remember that in the early seventies mail-bombs were flying around in a near epidemic. Unibomber-boy (teddy K) did not invent it. And hey look, the problem is so bad most of the kids on slash dot won't have a clue about it.
Man when bored journalists with deadlines write shitty pieces I don't get upset, I know a job is a job. But responding/reacting to it is just plain stupid.
At least as a means of written communication, honestly within the last several years when have you actually sent someone a message via postal mail? Today everyone has a telephone and quick messages are probably either given over it or by email. It didn't take people long to realize how ineffective it is to communicate with your average person when you have to wait days or even weeks before they even read what you sent them.Email is already the cost effective way (for those who already have computers/internet service of course) to send lengthy messages quickly, but until they find a way to scan and encode physical items into an email attachment, snail mail is still going to be the way to send packages, which unfortunately is a convenient ways to send these hazardous items.
Okay, I'm very sick of the media and government trying to scare people by making them believe that they are at threat from biological and chemical weapons used by terrorists.
The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical. They are pretty fucking dangerous, I won't argue that. But they are very impractical as weapons of mass destruction.
For example, out of the thousands of people in the subway in tokyo where a bunch of wacko's sprayed sarin gas only 12 people were killed. 12 out of thousands. A success? I say no.
You see, first of all it takes a lot of money and people with very huge educations just to produce the stuff. Then it is incredibly hard and dangerous to transport it. You run the risk of infecting yourself.
But the real reason that we aren't going to see a whole lot of these attacks is because the payload just isn't high enough. After spending millions of dollars to produce the stuff, expending a couple chemists who died in the shitty-ass lab in afghanistan producing it you've only killed a couple people. It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.
But what about just making people sick? After all there was something like 5500 people pooring into the hospitals in tokyo after the sarin gass. Well what they didn't tell you is that 90% of those people were just people who panicked because they were in the subway that day and wanted to get checked out.
And don't forget that before that incident the same terrorist group had tried to use anthrax. They sprayed the shit off a building onto a group of civilians and no one was infected by it.
I read a good article about this written by a phd in microbiology. It contains many more facts that I haven't discussed. You can read it here.
--
Garett
It's about time that more people start using email as a primary form of written communication. But remember that not everyone out there has access to a computer with an internet connection or a wireless PDA to send mail at anytime. Don't forget about bill paying either, there are also a lot of people who are afriad to use their credit cards on-line. Unfounded as these un-truths about the internet are, they still exist. So in my opinion, were on our way to having email being the primary form of communication, but it will take a lot longer and more than the Anthrax scare to get people to switch for good.
~Shane
What does Anthrax (the band) have to say about all this? And even more importantly, when is somebody going to sue them for mental distress after seeing their name?
(Just saw on their web site they are actually still touring! Yeesh!)
The scare caused by the Unabomber didn't kill snail mail or the sending of packages. Neither will this.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Granted I'm not an American citizen so I can't say how fast the USPS is but personally I find that it's not that expensive to send things via courier and much quicker. The business that I work for sends most of its mail via a courier service or internally.
Anything that needs to get signed or where a hardcopy is needed (such as the yearly benefit summary) is sent either by the internal mail system or through a courier service. All other notices are done via e-mail. The only thing that I can think of that the company still uses snail mail for is if you don't want your paystub delivered at work.
I don't think that these anthrax cases are going to causes snail mail to die out but I think that slowly a government run mail system may be replaced by a company own service (such as FedEx).
Just a thought.
- Cuyler
It can't just be me that noticed that MSNBC's correspondents, and thus their articles, are generally associated with crack smoking. This article is no exception. Though I do think that snailmail will die eventually, it's going to require that a couple generations die off first. People, especially old people, like physical mail too much, and there's too many of 'em who won't use a computer.
So basically, until Generation X (and later) are the only ones alive, snailmail will remain alive and well. After that point, we have a chance to stop the murderous wholesale slaughter of trees, basically amounting to genocide against various plant species. Yeah, I know, I'm a tree hugger, but it seems ridiculous to me that trees die so that people can get catalogs. If it were cut down to only private correspondence, it wouldn't be so bad.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
While I have used and love electronic mail since the advent of BBS's and the Internet, nothing can every satisfy the comfortable feeling of curling up in a big comfy chair, compelte with a warm drink, a hot fire, and a big hardback novel. Or even that Victoria's Secret Christmas special.
My fear that the recent terrorist activity, along with printed media already moving towards an electronic format will force this issue more rapidly then we all might wish, is valid. But I also believe that people will never forget the satisfaction of the printed medium, even if eventually it cost's more to produce, market and receive.
After all, it's pretty tough to sneak a laptop into the bathroom to view http://www.victoriassecret.com, and much easier to stuff their catalog into your bathrobe.
uh, no.
Simply put the reps are all spammed out. Every single interest group in the country country can send thousands of email to a rep, complete with slightly varied names and subject lines, and content. It is a trivial programing problem to generate sentences and paragraphs out of a database with calibration for education level and other demographics. Any programmer competent in databases could set something like this up.
So the only way reps can verify that the input is legit is if it is postmarked from their district, hand written, etc.
You think you get Junk Mail? multiply what you get by a factor of a thousand or two for snail mail, especially if you live in an important district.
So the odds of them actually reading email are slim and none. Think of them being under a continous DDOS attack for the past 5+ years, if not more. They probably pick out one out of every 100 or 200 or so at random, and use that as a sample of what they get
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Snailmail is in no way "dying." E-mail doesn't have a reliable method of authentication (unless you count packages such as PGP and GPG, which almost nobody utilizes), so that makes it pretty much impossible to convert its legal equivalency to that of snailmail's.
;)
Sorry. Please stop with the "Snailmail is dying" trolls.
Do you like German cars?
to send a standard-sized envelope by junk mail to every house and business in America? Either we outlaw this threat, or we're likely to see a lot more notices on street poles promising ...
Make money at home stuffing envelopes!
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
In other news, it is now illegal to seal an envelope, and all mail sent in the U.S. is now subject to be checked for illegal substances, read, and censored. Tom Ashcroft: "This is necessary to prevent terrorism to protect our children. If we can arbitrarily tap phones and intercept digital communications, it stands to reason that we can read 'snail mail' too." Seems silly doesn't it? The DMCA seemed silly too until it passed. We seriously have to start classifying Email like snail-mail, illegal to open, read, and the cops aren't supposed to intercept/read it.
Email will replace snail mail when buses and trains replace flying.
It's not going to happen. Email is good for many things, such as personal communication, but it is not good for anything official. I can send a casual letter to my friends with email, but I can't sign a contract and send it back by email. Bits and bytes on a computer are great for transmitting information, but too often legal reasons demand you have something on paper.
This gives a new meaning to:
a) Mail virus
b) "Don't open that attachment, you might get a virus"
Ok, let's see, now that congress is passing all these laws that make it ok for the government to read everyone's e-mail (carnivore) it really makes you think. Anthrax isn't that easy to come by from what I've heard (even though it does occur naturally), but government labs seem to have quite a bit of it. Considering all the rights people are giving up already we might as well just add this to the list. Seriously, this kinda stuff scares me more than the terrorists do.
So when you add everything up, we'll have armed military guards in the street to "keep the peace", we'll have flying video cameras to record our every move, our phone conversations can be tapped, and now they want to force everyone to use e-mail. So it seems that the government will be able to know your every move if they want to.
It wouldn't be hard to play off a terrorist thing in order to get political power over everyone. Hitler did the same thing. Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it they say, it's just too bad most people didn't learn.
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
I have sent snail mail a grand total of three times in the past two years. Two of those were to a state government agency. Snail mail is junk mail until proven legit. All the anthrax stuff (which is statistically insignificant) means is that I wash my hands after I have taken my mail out of the mailbox and thrown it into the trash can.
All email will do is replace anthrax spores with ANTHRAX~1.VBS. No, thanks.
Liberty in your lifetime
First they kill metal, now they're killing the mail.
When will the madness stop?
If the day comes when the government says snail mail is going away, watch out. If you think Uncle Sam has opinions about your computer and the software you run now, wait until you see the regulations that will be imposed on email.
One thing that may happen as fallout is small business may get out of the private delivery business. The mail is now going to need to be x-rayed and electronically sniffed. Business such as a Mial Box Express or Joe's overnight delivery are not going to have money for the new array of equiptment that they will be told they must own.
The things that will work to reduce the amount of snail mail - Mail is about to become slower and less reliable. When a pathogen is discovered in the mail, any parcels that may have physically contacted it will need to be destroyed.
People are now uneasy to open a package or parcel they were not expecting. This will make it less likely for advertisements to continue to be sent via mail. Expect to see an increase in Spam, and a relaxation in laws that control it.
...Which the government wants to outlaw (or at neast neuter) now. I dont send any financial information over email, nor will I receive any bills over email (I either get it in hardcopy or I dont get it), and thats certainly not going to change if/when encryption is outlawed.
Liberty in your lifetime
Keep in mind folks, the USPS is chartered in the United State Constitution. See Article 1, section 8, "The Congress shall have the power to: ... establish post offices and post roads." Check out usconstituion.net. Now I wouldn't be surprised if the USPS ends up having to purchase fancy devices to look for questionable substances being shipped in letters and packages. Of course any changes made to their business will impact our service. Most obvious being an increase in the price of stamps ;-) I don't think the Supreme Court would find an amendment putting the USPS to sleep being Constitutional. That would be like Congress passing an Amendment that the office of the President of the United States be removed... Just look on the bright side; the USPS is going to _HAVE_ to do _SOMETHING_ to deal with this threat. Hopefully in the near future you won't have to be concerned about being infected with Anthrax through the Postal service. Now ensuring your drinking water is safe is another story ;-) -Bob
just keep an eye out for anthrax.win32
I seen several people say there was only one case of Anthrax sent via mail. It's not one, it's two.
http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/011013/n13112863_2.html
BTW, I doubt snail mail is going anywhere.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
One word:
AOL CD's.
This anthrax scare may kill snail mail letters with the newer tech savy generations, but we will still have those who are computer illiterate still using snail mail. Plus you can't ship T-Shirts, computers, electronic equipment, etc by email. It may hamper the postal system but it won't kill it.
"Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must first set yourself on fire." -- Fred Shero
Elementary Watson. The site indiatimes.com via a partnership with Overnight Express as USPS is all geared up to have people in america use email to send printed letters to people back in India. Read about it here.
I spent all of those years as Anonymous Coward and all I got was this lousy number (204976).
Anthrax is useful as a weapon because it's so damn deliverable. The spores are easy to aerosolize. They live forever on whatever they touch.
If someone successfully releases a cloud of the stuff in a public place, thousands of people could get Inhalation Anthrax. Wouldn't take contagion to spread.
Mostly in NY, but I know of several places that have told me and others that I know "Dont send us snail-mail. We wont get it. Hard to say exactly what will happen, but this isnt isolated.
I'm guessing the price of the stamp is going to go through the roof, however
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
... damned mail viruses ...
American State Terrorism
But as the original ISP told the webmaster of the website above: "If you want free speech you can go down to a street corner and shout."
Also for some really good stuff check out the Chmosky archive at zmag.org
I think the columnist may have an argument when it comes to *unsolicited* snail mail. This may have an impact on public figures who regularly receive unsolicited mail from lots of people, but that could be a positive impact. Right now a written letter to one's Congress-critter is considered more effective than email, but maybe this unfortunate situation will make public officials consider email more legitimate now since they might be reluctant to receive "real" mail.
Insightful? C'mon, you're best guess is that a good 'ole boy attacked a supermarket tabloid, Nightline News, and Microsoft?
Here's the MSFT link in case you haven't seen it.
I know we need to be fair but let's be honest, we have a prime suspect.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
From the article:
As I was ingesting the information the about the cutaneous rash afflicting Tom Brokow's assistant and workers in white bio-suits testing the New York Times newsroom, my office door opened.
Isn't that one too many "the"'s??
Actually, the wholesale slaughter of trees is not because of the paper industry, it's from the furniture and housing industry.
Most paper is made from crop trees, they are engineered to create better pulp and planted just like regular crops. Your average tree that you find in natural forests makes really bad paper...
All editorial writers ever do is come down from the hill after the battle is over and shoot the wounded.
There will always be snail mail! How else will we send resumes, packages, birthday and christmas cards, etc.
Until something is done about spam, email is going to have problems.
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Besides, milions more are infected, and tens of people killed, from common diseases passed around the classroom!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Though I'm sure yours could then also be labeled as a zionist troll post, but I guess we should just continue to use double standards as we always do.
-Angron
While I think that's b.s. and we won't be THAT affected by Anthrax. This could be good if it would force lawmakers to get off their lazy butts and pass some decent anti-spam laws.
Or just pass a law that says it's illegal to forge headers. That would be a start. Then I could handle spam in my own ways.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I have a number of friends that work for Microsoft. They have asked me whether Microsoft is likely to be the target of a terrorist attack, and after thinking about it, I had to answer, "no." Terrorists are interested in attacing things that Americans identify with. Coca Cola headquarters would be a better bet.
However on second thought, there are some areas of the world whick may associate Microsoft with foreign dominance and so the company could be a target, but not a serious one because its main function would be to secure more funds from discontented wealthy folk. I would be more concerned about the subsidiaries in the Middle East than at Redmond...
That is why I wonder about it being sent to the licnesing department. If there is one area that could represent foreign dominance, that would be it.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that a few cases of anthrax are going to kill snail mail. First of all, junk mail is a big business - it essentially keeps snail mail alive. Companies pay millions of dollars to send out bulk mail. E-mail just doesn't have the same respect as snail mail.
I suspect this will not only increase e-mail usage but especially telephone conversations. Just compare it to what happened after the September 11th attack - the nation-wide telecom network was nearly saturated. If an outbreak does occur, phone communication will most likely be the way loved ones communicate with the victims.
Just my two cents.
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
TO: Joe User
FROM: TrendMicro ScanMail Exchange Edition
RE: Re: Weather Report
Your attachment, ANTHRAX.DOC.PIF , has been intercepted by the firewall. Please contact your system administrator.
Please mention ticket number 0682090701ABS3724365.
actually, the story goes something like this:
1) MS Licensing mails a check to a vendor in Malaysia for work they've done for MS. This was a few weeks ago.
2) Said mail is received at Reno in original envelope marked "Return to Sender." The person receiving it notices the envelope has been opened and resealed. This was a few days ago.
3) Upon opening it, he/she finds original check sent a few weeks ago and the letter that accompanied it. Also finds pornographic magazine clippings with a "powdery substance" on one of those pictures.
4) First two tests the past two days come up with mixed results (one positive, one negative). Better tests on the substance come up positive. This last set of tests was today (Saturday)
My guess is an insider with the mail system between Reno and Malaysia did this (or at least had a hand in it). I dont think the Malaysian vendor would turn away money from Microsoft (especially since it's money they earned from them). Of course, there could always be an insider at the vendor who contributed.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
...as soon as we all convert our work to "paperless offices".
the very concept of ending regular postal service is akin to ending civilization itself.
This seems very similar to the fundamental premise of The Postman by David Brin.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Re; Aum Shinrekio (sp?) the sarin gat attack was actually their tenth attack using chemical and biological agents. It was the only one anybody actually noticed or died from. 10 attempts and 12 deaths. Not very effective.
But-- the threat is more dangerious than the disease. Would YOU drink the water if someone claimed to have dumped biological agents in it?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Mails main role is gradualy shifting towards e-mail being the primary medium of text, but with the movement of goods still a function of the post office. It's much easier to ship a bomb or a plague in a box, which in all likelihood is probably how this was spread.
I don't mean to sound like a troll or one of the incessant writers of flamebait, but I'm a little disappointed in Slashdot for this one. If this anthrax is an honest attempt at an attack, and it succeeds even in part, a lot more than snail mail is in serious danger.
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
-db
You don't *choose* what medium communications *TO* you take. If I get a CC bill in the mail, I mail a check. If I get a phonecall, I return the call. if I get an email I send an email. You can only choose the medium of conversations you initiate :) So the only way sending e-mail instead of snail mail is going to reduce your risk of getting anthrax is if you are the person mailing antrax to people :)
The only thing that could help would be for potential victims (companies apparently) to declare they only will accept email.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
First metallica killed napster, now anthrax is killing the postal service? Damned punk teenagers and their devil music.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Fact 1: A few people got diagnosed with Anthrax.
.gov.us (it should NOT EVER BE .gov - the US dosn't run the world (although it tries hard)) used it as propaganda against drugs, then noone would take them. If only they would stop tripping out on their own holier-than-thou attitude, they would stop supplying weaponry to known terrorists. Maybe they'd eliminate the debt they and the world bank are pushing onto most of Africa. Maybe if they'd stop trying to police the rest of the world and cram their 'American Way' down the throat of people who really don't want to have anything to do with America, this whole sorry mess of crap would never have happened.
.gov.us and their bitches would quit their hardon for the US and let everyone get on with lives, without having to listen to their bullshit, being spied on, or having advanced weaponry raining on their heads.
Fact 2: One of them opened a letter.
And so suddenly it's a worldwide conspiracy by Emmanuel Goldstein^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HUsama Bin Laden and Eastasia^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hthe Taleban. Who actually believes this shit? You might as well blame CJD on Saddam Hussein or Gulf War syndrome on the CIA. Ermm...
Fact 3: Noone in the US postal service contracted Anthrax.
The most likely explanation is that the people who got Anthrax bought some dodgy cocaine. Maybe if the
I just wish the
I am not a troll (braces for a karma plummet). It's just that the US scares me far more than a handful of middle-east extremists who
1) were given weapons by the US
2) were never proven to have attacked the US (read the so-called evidence yourself. There is not a single statement which could not have been falsified. Nor which proves Bin Laden ordered the suicide attacks.)
3) don't have the resources necessary to defend themselves against even one storming by the SAS. And yet are said to have chemical weapons. Right. Let's see those satellite pictures of where Goldstein is hiding. Which one of those caves has the chemical weapons plant?
Offtopic? Whatever - I'm far more worried about security in email than snail mail. I use GPG, but if the US outlaw it, that will make me a terrorist. Thanks US. I can sleep easier now.
"I think he was truly surprised at how little I cared about how big a market the Mac had" - Linus on Jobs
Am not trying to spread rumors here, but there are reports that M$ has received anthrax-laced snail-mail which was sent from a Moslem country.
Can anyone from M$ confirm this?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I just told a good friend who told me she had flu symptoms to phone the ER and see if she should go in, so I apologize if a dip in snail mail seems a bit on the trivial side at this moment.
Phone the ER because of flu symptoms? Sorry, but here in Ontario people going into their local ER because they had trivial things like a common cold or a regular flue is directly responsible for thousands or tens of thousands of deaths per year (because the guy who actually does have a problem gets deferred while the person with the headache gets treated). If you are saying "Stop the mail! Someone might die!" then that is absolutely, positively, grossly ridiculous and knee-jerkish: Did you know that every consumer good you buy has a "human cost" to it? Why not ban car travel, air travel, hell human interactions in general because people might die undertaking any of those? 96 people died building the Hoover dam? Do you think about that when you turn on your computer? The Empire State Building took 5 lives directly in its construction, and countless more in the mining, smelting and rolling of the metal to build it, in the transport to get items to and from the construction site, etc.
"On a long enough timeline the survival rate for all of us is 0." Fight Club - Narrator (Jack) The human condition is one where death is part and parcel with the terroritory.
My thoughts were to encourage the /. community help disseminate reports of anthrax outbreaks and possibly help the *world* be on guard - whether it be terrorists or just plain sickos doing this.
I guess my point is: with the great coverage by the /. community (and now, not as much credit to Taco and the rest) when the shit hit the fan on 10/11/01, how can we help the CDC stay on top and others to prevent a widespread panic (and applied to other forms of mischief) by doing our part?
What do you think?
db
Cig:
ôô
US forgien policy sucks - US embassies get bombed
World trade gets screwed at the controls of the US
Trillion dollar bet - WTC gets taken down.
Pentagon and supposed Capitol Building attack - Military and lawmakers
News Media Propoganda - Anthrax attacks (SUN and NBC - What did Tom Brokaw say that caused him to get a letter?)
Microsoft Licensings - Anthrax attack (Microsoft proven anti-trust with US and anti-competitive investigations in EU)
Hell, that's a pretty loud message system huh?
But by seeing the pattern and the message being Spelt across the US, concern about anthrax effecting US mail is less a
concern than mail bombs. Maybe there is more concern about just being fair.
I actually like getting those in the mail lately. Now that they come in those nifty DVD hard cases I'm working my way through all my DVD's that came packaged in a cheapo cardboard case and moving them over.
Now if I could find an easy way to get that darn mailing label off the back of them.
load "linux",8,1
Email does have reliable authentication, including OpenPGP and S/MIME. Postal mail has nothing but a postmark indicating which city/zip code the letter was sent from.
As for how many people use OpenPGP, a rough estimate can be obtained from the number of keys known to the keyservers: Number of keys: 1,577,742 according to a report from August, 2001. Also, keep in mind that not everyone who uses pgp or gnupg submits their key to a keyserver.
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
"Only the paranoid survive..."
They have those scientists with pretty silver suits to handle snail mail with viral attachments...
¦ ©® ±
The dangers of Anthrax and other bioweapons is hugely overstated. Anthrax is virtually harmless unless in powder form, and it is hugely expensive to create powdered Anthrax. It is also very difficult to deliver it, it tends to simply blow away and become so dispersed that it is harmless. Can Anthrax kill? Of course, but there are thousands of cheaper ways to kill people (letter bombs, guns, etc).
sort of how we all switched away from UPS and FedEx when people started sending mailbombs?
The thought occured to me, that if one motivation of sending mail with infectious agents is to have the parcel contact as much and many other parcels as possible inorder to maximize the probability of spreading the disease, the fastest and most reliable means of transmission would be paper money. Imagine lacing 1, 5, and 10 dollar bills with small pox, then distributing it to a bank, and allowing it to pass from hand to hand to hand, infecting even 50% of those who have contact with the money is a scary thought..
Not implausable though..
I agree with your conclusion, but almost none of your arguments:
Postal mail creates jobs
So did iceboxes. The ice men found new jobs.
packages - What's the point in all this e-commerce if nobody has anything delivered anymore?
I've had at least a dozen packages ordered online and delivered. Some used UPS, some used FedEx; none used the postal service.
Utility Bills - Until some laws are changed you must be provided with an invoice for your purchase and written notification of money owed.
I'm sure laws here vary from state to state, but I no longer legally have to get paper confirmation of every single stock trade I make, for one example, I just had to formally agree that email confirmation alone would be acceptable. There are a lot of non-utility services that are willing to go without sending you a written bill if they have a credit card number or checking account transfer information, and there are ways to pay many bills on line more manually if you feel the need to personally authorize each transaction. This is a good reason, but not a show stopper.
Taxes - Like anything done by the government, this ones going to be done the old world way for a long time.
Yeah, by people who want to do it the old world way. The IRS at least has been accepting electronic submissions on their most commonly used forms for years.
Books and periodicals - Some people (myself included) prefer to read anything of great length on paper.
Me too. But that's just an eyestrain thing with me; I'm really looking forward to seeing some of these "electronic paper" technologies being prototyped. Besides, most of my books come from a bookstore and most of my periodicals come online, nowadays.
Also there is a certain pride in owning a handsome book, admiring the cover as you put it away on a shelf, where you will never touch it again.
You have an odd sense of pride - this is really the sentence that prompted my response, as your psychology fascinates me. I have a couple untouched books on my shelves, but generally that status is a source of shame, not pride.
registered mail - any sort of mail that requires a signature is coming to you the old fashioned way. I know, there's a million technical solutions that would make this work as digital, but your written signature is an important legal tool that people will continue to hit you over the head with forever.
This you may be right about. Frankly, digital signatures are much harder to forge than the old-fashioned kind, but way too permanently stealable. Can you imagine if every instance of ILOVEYOU had installed a keyboard sniffer to grab passphrases?
Hi! How are you?
I send you this anthrax in order to have your advice.
See you later. Thanks
Seriously, though. Just about everybody with a computer has a modem, and a slightly smaller number of those people have a scanner. So why does he believe that e-mails are more advantageous than faxes?
As long as I still keep getting checks made out to me here in Florida and my bank sits in Texas, I'll always have at least one use for the USPSl.
207,882,000,000 anthrax-free parcels were delivered by the usps last year (that's 1/5th of a Trillion). Yeah, I think it's both pretty safe and here to stay.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
you know, digital pathogens such as melissa, iloveyou, the....tennis player one whatever her name is, sircam, nimda, etc. have cost us more (so far at least, hopefully it'll stay that way) than a few cases of anthrax. especially with people this alert, anthrax isn't so lethal any more. now now if only things like windows and outlook had an immune system...
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Chas, you might find one hundred megaton bombs impressive, but people with the blessing of Allah do not fear that at all. They are more willing to die, more than you are willing to live..weapons and death do not scare these people, which is why they are a VERY VERY dangerous enemy.
of course the next Outlook virus is named Anthrax.
Seriously, if USPS took some gamma ray emitters (i.e., the kind they use to sterilize food, hospital equipment, etc--Cobalt 60, I think) and "nuked" every letter before it got to the destination, wouldn't that solve the whole Anthrax/letter based bioterrorism problem?
This would probably be relatively easy to centralize.
I disagree somewhat.
I get bills in the mail, and pay them electronically. If the vendor does not support electronic transfer, my bank takes care of the check-printing and mailing for me, without my knowledge.
I get phone messages at work. (a nice button on my phone keeps it from ringing about 80% of the time.) I return those messages via email.
So when you say you return correspondence in the way initiated, I say you don't have to.
I certainly don't!
I get junk mail. I get spam. Personally, if I had to choose one or the other, I'll go with the junk mail any day.
The first thing that comes to mind is the fact that, for the recipient, junk mail is free. It may not be wanted, but I don't have to pay $20+ for the privledge to download it.
Secondly, there is an appreciable cost for the advertiser to send junk mail, while a spammer only needs an internet account. The fact that the advertiser needs to worry about costs means that they'll be more careful with who to send the advertising to. I don't think I've ever gotten junk mail, for instance, that wasn't in English.
If you get suckered into some shady deal through spam (bogus contests, pyramid schemes), about all you can do is ask their ISP nicely to please remove their account. If you get suckered into something similar through junk mail, the USPS has their very own law enforcement arm to hunt people like that down and prosecute them.
And speaking of postal laws, there are legal limits to what unsolicited mail can advertise. I can't count the amount of spam I get for sex sites, while the closest I've gotten to unsolicited pornographic junk mail was the ol' Victoria's Secret catalog (and even then I think it was addressed to the former occupant).
So, even though junk mail may kill the rain forests and is aided by the USPS itself, I still find it infinitely better than the spam that even now flods my e-mail boxes.
Seriously, if USPS took some gamma ray emitters (i.e., the kind they use to sterilize food, hospital equipment, etc--Cobalt 60, I think) and "nuked" every letter before it got to the destination, wouldn't that solve the whole Anthrax/letter based bioterrorism problem?
OK. So do you irradiate packages too? If not, then the pathogens get sent in packages. OK. So you irradiate packages. Now you cause problems for certain types of packages, so you deliver these in protective containers. OK. So now the pathogen gets delivered in these protective containers...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
The internet is doing it, not Anthrax. Considering that lots of people still do have access to e-mail, regular mail will not end any time soon.
Furthermore; there will always be a need for regular mail for packages, and larger items and some secure communication.
make Linux, not Microsoft. sin(beast) = -0.809016994374947424102293417182819
Hindsight is always 20/20. Unfortunately, knowledge of whether she's the person with the headache or the person with the problem is difficult to come by in advance. I'll spare the gory details, but suffice it to say that this isn't a runny nose.
Ultimately, they didn't ask her to come in, but they didn't tell her she was ridiculous and also suggested that they would notify her if their opinion changed. I also believe you have misdiagnosed the issue; several EMTs with whom I am friendly warn of how dangerous a phony or unwarranted 911 call can be, but I've never really heard of a phone call to the emergency room costing lives, certainly not in the numbers you suggest.
Your post interests me, but I am afraid I don't quite understand the link between it and "human cost." My sole point was that in the face of something which may kill dozens or hundreds of people, a jump in the number of emails seems unimportant to me.
-db
Anthrax is hard to come by, and easy to treat. Small penalty for using the postal service.
Carnivore, hackers, and new govermental controls (passed only this last week by Senate and House) are going to happen much much much more often, and there's no way to "treat" it.
Plus, unlike Anthrax, you have no idea you've been violated using e-mail. At least when you develop a rash, you know something isn't the way it should be.
without a court order thanks to the new laws they are passing now.
This makes perfect sense! I mean, there's no way to catch a virus through email. Right?
rooooar
Seems like someone needs to re-read the Advocacy HOWTO :)
Fryboy
I forsee that anthrax will kill off snail mail just as effectively as letter bombs have... i.e.. not at all.
As for email taking over from snail mail, I don't see that happening for many, many years to come. At least not while a large part of the population cannot even correctly operate things as simple as ATMs.
This anthrax thing is way overblown. One person is dead, and they were quite old and thus more vulnerable to infection. Anthrax is not contagious. It's treatable if diagnosed early. This is way down in the noise compared to auto accidents, AIDS, etc.
There is one case of an Anthrax infection that has been reported so far. One case, and that person has died. That particular case involved a non-GMO (Generically Modificed Organism) version of the Anthrax bacterium. The other cases are a completely different variety of the same bacterium (cutaneous). The one in Florida may very well be a completely natural infection which occured. Yes, there has not been a single case reported in the U.S. of an Anthrax infection in 25 years, and within one week, there are over 7 cases on the books, so you can guarantee that it's intentional, but do not continue to spread the FUD without some knowledge behind you.
The others may not be, but nobody else has been infected with Anthrax to date except this Florida case. The other people you are hearing about have only tested positive for the antibodies which the body produces naturally to fight off the presence of Anthrax.
There's too much FUD in the news right now.
Lastly... there's an interesting quote from al-Queda spokesman Suleiman Abu-Gheith today saying:
This is far from over. Please feel free to print and post this mail warning in high-traffic mail areas within your business if you believe you may be in one of the "Icons Of America" that these letters seem to be hitting.Irradiation of hand-written mail would sterilize anything passing through the irradiator and leave no radioactive residue. It would mean an end to sending live things (I've traded sourdough via email) and radiation sensitive items like electronic parts or film would have to be marked specially or sent another way -- but routine irradiation would make it much, much harder to sneak live anything into someone's mail.
Actaully this just levels the playig field. Now we can worry about getting a virus from opening both types of mail. Esp Microsoft mail with porn attachments.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
T Ms svV4lfKwCfcFZ8
Hash: SHA1
If news reports are to be believed, the U.S. mail has already proved to be viable way of spreading two different kinds of anthrax.
Actually, there are three kinds of anthrax (two of which have occurred in the United States, probably delivered by US Mail). However, all are caused by the same type of spores. The difference in only one of how the disease is contracted, i.e. through a cut or scratch in the skin vs. inhilation vs. consumption of diseased meat. Only one type of spore was delivered (though whether all the attacks were of the same strain or not remains to be determined).
You are absolutely correct about the viability of cantagious agents such as smallpox and plague, particularly given the fact that the terrorists are perfectly happy to die in the delivery of the product. Imagine bus boys sprinking a tasteless powder on meals in a restaurant. Several hundred people in a single city infected in a single night. Depending on the incubation period and period of contagion we could be looking at tens of thousands of infections, scattered around the country, before even a hint of the outbreak reaches the CDC.
We are, in many respects, lucky it was only anthrax, which is not contagious between people.
There is reason and evidence enough to be concerned. Panic stricken, no, but concerned, yes. Dismissing the notion of biological attack merely because the idea is unpleasant is silly -- attacks are possible, and delivery on a wide scale using unconventional means (infecting terrorists and having them move about through crowds, spraying infectious substances on doors or escalator handholds, dusting food in restaurants, etc.) are all eminently feasable and potentially deadly.
Some degree of reasonable vigilance and diligence is both constructive and warranted. Denial and blithe dismissal of the possibility are both foolish and unproductive.
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Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org
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The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
More likely Oracle so they can push their ID cards, just look for the marketing line item in the annual report where it says "Biological marketing campaign".
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
the psychological research consistently shows, people are more sensitive to (perceived) control of risk level, rather than absolute risk level.
:) ) or be afraid of flying but ok with driving (since they are the ones at the wheel).
hence people will vigorously protest the opening of the local nuclear waste dump while smoking cigarettes (they can stop smoking anytime
There is a flaw in Mr. Levy's reasoning. He claims that with people will switch from snail mail to e-mail to avoid the risk of getting anthrax in the mail.
But the person who determines the mail format (e- or snail) is the sender not the receiver, and I don't see how you would get anthrax sending mail (unless, of course, you were mailing anthrax, in which case e-mail wouldn't be an option anyway.)
So I don't see how the anthrax scare could be responsible for an increase in e-mail and decrease in snail mail.
By the way, how long do you think it will be before some hacker figures out how to send anthrax as an e-mail attachment. With all the security holes found in Outlook to date, it wouldn't surprise me if people start dying. Wasn't one of the Florida anthrax cases caused by bacteria found on the keyboard? Something to think about.
...because now he can use his new super powers to deploy carnivore to your ISP (without a warrant, by the way) and spy on *all* your correspondence.
This terrorist hysteria is far too convenient for the reactionary elements of our country. I smell a rat.
"You done taken a wrong turn."
-Bill McKinney, in Deliverance
Influenza kills 10-40 thousand people per year in the United States. It may not be a big deal if you are young and healthy, but it is a serious illness for many people.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Well, I keep trying to think up reasons why someone couldn't do a mass-mailing of anthrax, and I can't think of any. Businesses do mass-mailings all the time, what would stop someone evil from adding a few spores in with the spam? The toughest obstacle would be the production of that much anthrax, AFAICT.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Oh I'm not from the US. In fact I think the USPS is pretty terrible, I'm only here as a student. But just because the USPS is slow/inefficient doesn't mean that they don't perform an essential service. Take them away and what have you got left?
...the less junk mail and 7365.54% APR credit card offers I get, the better. I say, let it die! :P
Let me first say that I don't think Snail Mail should ever be abolished. If USPS had a policy of granting an email address of some kind to anyone who could show proper state identification, as well as PGP public/private keys, and then when someone sends you email, it would be signed via the USPS, authenticated in that manner, the major impact I see is a dramatic reduction in spam. Current SMTP protocols would have be modified to support this feature. One could bounce all incoming mail that was not signed via the USPS address.
I'll be sending real letters until they pry my fountain pen out of my cold dead fingers.
Unfortunately, no system is immune to attack. If we switched tommorrow to email instead of snail mail for everything, terrorists would have a tempting target for electronic attack, since vital documents would depend on our electronic infrastructure. Really the only solution is to secure any system as much as possible.
I thought email was the primary means of written communication nowadays. Snail mail is of course still used for business letters, especially form letters, contracts, junk mail, etc. Email is the preferred medium for just about everything else though. Why would anyone want to send a paper letter to someone when they didn't have to? If you ask me, email ranks up there with the invention of the radio, television, telephone, and written language itself.
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
...encryption technology. Reliable. Without backdoors.
Why?
- Because legally binding digital signatures are the only way to shift much snailmail to email.
- Because strong encryption is the only way to achieve anything like the same level of expected privacy
Oh, hang on - the USA was about to outlaw encryption, wasn't it? Never mind, better stick to snail mail.
Not only that.
Given the hour+ wait times on telephone help numbers for just about every single company I need help from, and given that the same companies do NOT have any online feedback forms at ALL, it's actually a lot less painful to send them a letter and ask them to call you.
Plus those phone operators usually don't have the knowledge/power to help you and put you on hold again while they ask a supervisor!
Virus, now you cna get them in both your e-mail and your snail mail.
What about some antivirus checker for your snail mail?
Before long, people will figure out how to send viruses by e-mail as well as snail mail. Uhm, hang on...
Imagine bus boys sprinking a tasteless powder on meals in a restaurant.
Or putting a tasteless white powder in the salt shakers.
The ways to deliver biological agents appears to be only limited by your imagination and your willingness to contract the disease yourself.
I may start bringing my own condiments when I dine out.
It's far more likely that the US Postal Service will be pushed over the brink of bankruptcy, as people will not want to send letters anymore. They've been in severe economic troubles for years now, and the government continues to bail them out as a service to the nation.
I see stamp prices rising to 50 cents (like payphone calls), or even a dollar or two.
- passion
Fedex and UPS have better security in some ways, better email and web notification already of when packages are about to arrive, and are more expensive. All of these things make them less attractive to terrorists.
I'm the stranger...posting to
the rest of the world would not be happy with that
You could order anthrax over the net before 9/11 as long as you showed that you had credentials that said you were a university researcher... hell, you could order it over the net.
How many of our fundamentalist Arabic friends are in college right now? Probably all of them that don't have full time jobs in the USA. How many work at biotech firms, or have the resources to make fake credentials? So how much real efort do you think it really takes now to get a sample of Anthrax? Just admit you don't know the facts, so therefore you don't have a clue, and that your paranoid little mind went for the big conspiracy.
Yeah, its a conspiracy for America to kill its citizens... from a nation that sends troops to stop other nations from killing their citizens. That would be cost prohibitive, wouldn't it? That would be the opposite if the objective was to subjugate our citizens... would it not?
Honestly, is there one thing that we want from Kosovo or Bosnia? Name one resource that we can't produce cheaper over here. DO IT. Conspiracies have reasons. NAME THEM.
The stuff I get on eBay arrives sooner and for a lower fee via USPS than it does via UPS. If the only shipping offered is FedEx, I don't even bid because of the higher fees, might as well go to the store and buy it new.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Think about it. The idiots doing this - be they terrorists or regular homegrown wackos - would have a hard time knowing how effective their production process is. Wouldn't sending samples of the powder through USPS be a good way of testing effectiveness? It's not a large enough outbreak to cause the sort of massive response that might get them caught faster, but it WOULD make the news, so the perps could know what had worked and what didn't.
Based on that information, couldn't they then refine their process and launch a more massive attack? For example, consider "Sick Building" syndrome - basically, highly advanced circulation systems in office buildings and skyscrapers blowing germs all through the building. There was a Robin Cook novel (don't laugh) based on the idea of terrorists using building circulation systems to distribute anthrax powder - could this be done? I know, getting the powder fine enough to cause a really nasty case of inhalational anthrax is a bitch, but just making it fine enough to make a lot of people very sick ISN'T that hard. With a few thousand people in a building, people - delivery guys, contractors, janitors - walking in and out all day, how long would it be until someone realized there was a problem? And even though anthrax cannot be communicated directly from person to person, couldn't someone in the offivce building get the spores on their coat, and just track them all over the place?
Of course, there's a difference between making a few grams and a few kilos of anthrax powder, but it's not really a fundamental one - just one of scale. In fact, couldn't the relative crudeness of the anthrax powder simplify the production process? If it isn't fine enough to cause inhalational anthrax, then the terrorists (or whoever) might be willing to risk exposure to the powder, and just trust a course of high-powered antibiotics to keep them safe.
I am not an MD, or any sort of medical professional. In fact, I am simple a pimply-faced youth. But are any of these thoughts legitimate?
I'm the stranger...posting to
How am I gonna get that $9 Isreali gas mask that I just paid $62 for emailed to me?
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
what a good troll ... nbc rulz ...
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
"Really, the average person doesn't need to be worried about getting anthrax in the mail. "
I bet the guy who died in Florida thought he was pretty average. It amazes me how many people in this discussion are so confident at assigning probabilities to events when so little data is available and the situation is changing so rapidly. Mental intertia, I suppose.
I've got really, really bad writers cramp... only its more like carpal...
You're nothing; like me.
What we need is some kind of electronic signature for physical packages. This way, I can know which packages come from a trusted/known source. If I order something from Acme, I can at least tell that this package came from there.
You can then give more scrutiny to packages that you're [a] not expecting, and [b] don't come from a trusted source.
Furthermore, even in a corporate environment, shouldn't you perhaps be susipcious of a package that you're not expecting? What if you could notify the mail room that you're expecting packages from 1) Geek-Master, 2) Computer-Wizbang, and 3) Porn-World. Then when a package arrives, that isn't on your "expecte" list, they don't forward it to you without asking you if you are expecting this package. Unexpected packages should always be treated with more scrutiny.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I predict that terrorists will start contaminating junk mail next. It is delivered indiscriminately and widely, and people always tear it into a million pieces and stomp on it before throwing it away, thus ensuring thorough contact. Stop junk mail before it stops you!
On the other hand, some people do actually send things other than letters through the mail.
You are so right. After my grandfather died earlier this year at age 87, my grandmother found among his effects a love letter he had written in 1942. They had just been married in California three days before his unit was shipped out to the South Pacific. She had riddden the train out there by herself from her home in the Southeast U.S., a big undertaking in those days. The letter was rejected by military censors because it described the traditional merrymaking and ceremonies when the ship crossed the Equator. (No one was supposed to reveal their location; in fact, they were headed to New Caldedonia.)In the letter he talked about how much he loved her and that he was glad they were married, and how nothing, not even death, could ever separate them. Finding this letter after his death was a powerful comfort to her. (They had burned all their other love letters after the war to preserve their privacy) I don't think an ephemeral email could ever have topped this.
Yes, companies really do this.
Not Meta-modding due to apathy.
Wow! What kind if internet connection do you have? :-)
NOT. Let's get all those dirty potential terrorists (aka citizens) to switch to e-mail where we've established the infinite right of the Fed to snoop at will. In the meantime lets start an Anthrax scare and then pass it off as the next country we want to bomb the hell out of (Irag) being the perpetrator.
SIGH. The plot sucks but the people are infinitely gullible and utterly apathetic.
But they are very impractical as weapons of mass destruction.
For example, out of the thousands of people in the subway in tokyo where a bunch of wacko's sprayed sarin gas only 12 people were killed. 12 out of thousands. A success? I say no.
Yeah, but I can spell Shoko Asahara and Aum Shinrikyo, while I don't remember any manga or anime artist. Maybe it doesn't kill many people but it sure frightens them and helps making your name and ideas (distorted) well-known.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
I thought occurs to me that suspicious letters would be easier to trace back to their origins if each mail-sorting machine stamped letter it sorts with its unique identifier and the time of day. This would be better than just the city & date and would allow tracing back to approximate pick-up routes.
Perhaps, but I doubt bin Laden is a big Marx fan. Besides, it's a cause and effect relationship. You can't get generate the critical mass necessary to "undermine the public's faith in the target government" in the western world without causing a media sensation. So, this is really a pedantic argument.
Also, bin Laden's specific goals can be found in his interviews and "press releases":
"We say to the Americans as people and to American mothers, if they cherish their lives and if they cherish their sons, they must elect an American patriotic government that caters to their interests not the interests of the Jews. [...] This is my message to the American people. I urge them to find a serious administration that acts in their interest and does not attack people and violate their honor and pilfer their wealth." (more here)
So, it can be surmised that bin Laden's ultimate goal is not to cause a revolt by American people against the US government, but rather to draw attention to the policies of the US government that he disagrees with, in the hopes that the American people will agree with him, then use the existing system, as it was designed, to affect changes in those policies. A subtle, but very distinct difference.
Perhaps the most disturbing outcome of this whole affair (besides, of course the deaths of thousands of innocent people), is the opportunism (as you mentioned) that we're seeing in its wake.
I write trance music.