Internet Giants Prepare for WorldCom 'Storm'

swight1701 writes: "MSNBC has an article about how E-bay and others are enacting contingency plans in case WorldCom goes under and no one steps in to run UUNet right away. Also talks extensively about how this is happening already in Europe with KPNQwest, who is telling their customers, 'During this week you can already expect outages to happen that we cannot solve any more. At the end of this week we expect that larger parts of the network will be down.' Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

Comments

Slashdot users get ready for censorship 'storm'

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

And jedie, your mom sucks your cock and bites it with her false teeth until it bleeds!

Re:Slashdot users get ready for censorship 'storm'

[linuxislandsucks]

He troll shut the f'ing up..

Now back to slashdot!

Re:Slashdot users get ready for censorship 'storm'

[Anonymous Coward]

fp too :)

Redundancy

[southpolesammy]

I can't think of a better example why every business needs redundant networks than this.

Re:Redundancy

[GigsVT]

Yes, but that's difficult without portable address space. Even if you have redundant links, if you need to push through a DNS change to activate incoming connections on the alternate line, then you are screwed for several days, unless you keep your SOA TTL very low at all times, which is inefficient.

Re:Redundancy

[WetCat]

Is it? If I have SOA TTL=600 is it THAT bad?

Re:Redundancy

[keiferb]

BGP! If our UUNet link goes down, we might drop a couple of packets, but we're instantly flipped over to our backup provider.

Re:Redundancy

[GigsVT]

It's not that bad if only you do it, but if everyone on the Internet did it, DNS traffic would increase a lot. It also might slow down lookups somewhat when people access your site, since their local server won't cache your DNS info for very long. It also means if your DNS server is down, your site will become inaccessible in short order.

Re:Redundancy

[ThesQuid]

There are services that will enable you to change DNS records with world-wide propagation in under 5 minutes.
Take a look at UltraDNS for an example.

Re:Redundancy

[onepoint]

That is if all goes well, but the truth get's weird about BGP. Last month, with the Mae-East part of Genuity going down ( for about 3 hours ) our BGP kicked in and had packet loss of about 12% to 20%, Why? Weird peering agreements.

During those 3 hours I had the joy of running traceroutes all over the nation and watching the interaction of different carriers. it was weird to watch traffic start with one carrier go on then hit genuity then jump off to another carrier and then make it to the web servers. ( sometimes from the other side of the world LOL )

-Onepoint

Re:Redundancy

[Alrescha]

"Yes, but that's difficult without portable address space. Even if you have redundant links, if you need to push through a DNS change to activate incoming connections on the alternate line, then you are screwed for several days, unless you keep your SOA TTL very low at all times, which is inefficient."

Umn... I don't think so. The routing of the IP addresses has nothing to do with DNS. There is no requirement that you have to use the ISP which assigned your IP addresses to get your packets to you.

This is what routing is all about. Another poster mentioned BGP. It and other routing protocols do this sort of thing every day.

There *are* situations where your IP addresses could become unreachable (the dying ISP insists on distribuing bad routing information, for instance). This is the exception rather than the rule.

A.

Re:Redundancy

[dsb3]

Who owns your primary IP range, though?
UUNet or your backup provider?

Re:Redundancy

[jhines]

And if your redundant carriers were MCI and UUnet?

is your CURRENT redundant connection going to buy what is left of Worldcom? (or global crossing, or etc, etc)

It is easy to talk about redundancy when there are options that you can make use of.

We are heading towards a world where there just aren't any alternatives to choose from. Try and configure service that DOESN'T go through the local phone company CO.

Re:Redundancy

[flonker]

That can be done with standard DNS easily enough, but the problem is DNS caching. When you request a DNS record, it gets cached for an amount of time, as set by the SOA record. Setting this to five minutes means that your DNS servers are going to be pounded pretty hard, as anyone viewing your website(for example), has to rerequest the DNS info every five minutes. Not to mention, it slows down their browsing experience, as they have to wait for the DNS resolution every five minutes. Setting it to 24 hours means that your DNS servers don't get as much traffic, but any changes you make to the DNS record can take up to 24 hours to propogate to anyone who may have the DNS info cached.

Re:Redundancy

[glitch!]

It's not that bad if only you do it, but if everyone on the Internet did it, DNS traffic would increase a lot.

Yes, DNS traffic would increase, but that would not affect the general bandwidth much. What is the cost of adding a couple hundred bytes of DNS to an HTTP session? It would hardly be measurable. The overhead for an email might be as high as a few percent.

It also might slow down lookups somewhat when people access your site, since their local server won't cache your DNS info for very long.

That's true. The first lookup may add a few hundred milliseconds to the web session, and that might be enough to be noticable. Nobody would notice with email, though.

It also means if your DNS server is down, your site will become inaccessible in short order.

That's why you are supposed to have multiple DNS servers in different locations. Now, many of us don't do that because of various reasons, and that means that we do not allow our DNS servers to fail.

One other common objection to small TTL times is that the DNS server will not be able to keep up with the load. Keep in mind that each DNS query represents many web server or email sessions. If you simply scale up your DNS servers along with your other servers, load should not be a problem. At some point, you will need to move DNS off that 100mhz 486 box :-)

According to our good friend Dan Bernstein, a Pentium-III 550 with 350 megs of DNS data was serving 500 DNS requests per second, which is 30,000 per minute. How fast are your webservers :-)

Re:Redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't this comment be scored redundant?

Re:Redundancy

[Cato]

The trouble with multi-homing using BGP is that it is highly unscalable for the Internet's core routers - every site that has two or more ISP connections can't be summarised under a single ISP's routing (see 'CIDR routing' on Google). And 'smart routing' companies like netVmg only make this worse by making multi-homing more attractive for performance reasons, not just redundancy.

The IETF is trying to fix this in its ptomaine working group - see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/ptomaine-charter .html

Re:Redundancy

[LiMpIt]

As far as i can understand from the original post he dosnt mean to update the dns for clients every five minutes.

Re:Redundancy

[A.Gideon]

Even if your redundant connection is with some completely independent provider, do you know who owns - and who is running - the fiber over which that redundant link travels? What about the fiber that your independent provider uses to connect to its upstreams/peers?

Re:Redundancy

[photon317]

That's why you get your own AS and participate in the global BGP. You then get your own netblock which is simultaneously visible through all your redundant connections.

Re:Redundancy

[GigsVT]

It's difficult to get that with a /24 or smaller, and with NAT and the like, convincing your ISP you need more than a /24 can be tricky. Qwest, for instance, gives out a /31 by default, and you must justify the need for more.

Re:Redundancy

[guacamolefoo]

> That's why you get your own AS and participate
> in the global BGP. You then get your own
> netblock which is simultaneously visible
> through all your redundant connections.

Have you tried getting ARIN to cough up portable address space lately? I own part of a rinky-dink ISP in BFE, and we are simply not large enough to get our own addresses. As a result, we've had to seriously consider the financial viability of the providers we do business with in order to guess/estimate if they will continue to provide service in our area.

We've gone the AS route, but what if your provider goes chapter 11 and then looks at your particular contract and disavows it as is permitted under bankruptcy law and takes back their IPs that they had assigned to you? You are confronted with a highly disruptive problem in that much or all of your network may need to be renumbered. That is not a pleasant task. An AS number does not eliminate that risk.

About the best we have come up with is to get IP numbers from our most financially stable upstream providers, have an AS and do BGP, and keep tabs on the financial conditions of our providers.

As a final thought, even this sometimes is not enough. One of our financially sound providers recently threatened to jack up the price on a T-1 contract we had (upon expiration) by over 60%. Some fancy footwork got us a renewal at the old rate, but the threat was there -- even with a sound company, we were relatively at their mercy because they owned our upstream IP numbers.

The moral(s)?
1. Redundancy
2. Keep tabs on your suppliers
3. Negotiate contract renewals well ahead of time
4. Don't put all your eggs in one basket (use IPs from a variety of upstream providers)
5. Have a plan in place in case you need to suddenly switch from one provider to another

man that'd suck

[silicon1]

fp?

Market forces

[saphena]

Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

So, I provide a service - demand for that service is increasing daily ...

Looks like I'll go bankrupt then!

Go figure

Re:Market forces

[Angry White Guy]

It reminds me of the Southpark with th "IT". If you remember, the government outlawed the it to prevent the airline industry from crumbling from it's own ineffiencies.

I think that it's time for these telecommunications to seriously look at revamping their current technology to meet future needs.

Circuit switched networks are dying, and for good reason!

AWG

Re:Market forces

[cat_jesus]

Circuit switched networks are dying because the telcos are killing them. Standard LD telephony is still a cash cow but the telcos were spoiled with huge margins that no other business had. With such huge margins they got into the habit of wasting their money. Having worked at a major global telco I got to witness this insanity first hand. This telco was making a billion a year in ld in the US but decided to quit selling it and marketing it in order to pursue internet technology. So now they have lost billions of dollars in investment and let their main revenue stream atrophy mainly because "the internet is sexy". Yes, I actually had a marketing exec explain it to me in those terms.

Many of the customers that this telco has are small businesses who simply want detailed long distance bills in order to keep track of client calls for their own billing purposes. They don't care if their call is routed over IP or over a switched network. All they want is detailed billing and call completion and they are still willing to pay for it.

The telco executives bought into their own hype, failed to understand what a reasonable profit margin looked like and got a big bite in the ass from the reality of business.

Cat

No problems yet

[Heghta']

It seems to me the internet is fairly resistant. If it wasn't in the news I would not know about KPNQwests problems, I have yet to see problems with my traffic. Not to say those do not exist, but I don't think they are too big.

The other network providers have enough capacity to take the additional traffic, since they all built huge lines (and thus have financial issues) and are operating nowhere near 100%.

Re:No problems yet

[LinkDJ]

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all and in the Darkness bind them.

Re:No problems yet

[spongman]

oh yeah? we've been told that our UUNET T1 could be cut off any mi

Me???

[the_argent]

"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

Wow, didn't realize my desire for a faster internet connection threw Woldcom in the crapper! Damn my need for lower pings! Here and I thought it was a socially irresponsible management and a poor decision to use "Creative Accounting" choices to make the immediate stockholders happy.

Re:Me???

[dubl-u]

Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

The Economist had an article this week saying that Worldcom was the source of a much more sinister problem, too.

During the boom, Worldcom repeated suggested their traffic was doubling roughly every 100 days, or circa 1000% annual growth. (Since 1996 or so, it was apparently more like 70% to 150%.) This puffery became industry "fact", so much so that when other companies discovered that their traffic wasn't growing like that, they concluded must be a sales problem.

So to keep up with Worldcom's fictional growth, everybody built out their networks at fantastic rates. Thus, the problem wasn't the public's appetite for bandwidth; it was again Worldcom's (and others') appetite for apparent growth to prop up stock prices.

Public's need for ever-growing bandwidth?

[Kierthos]

They have themselves to blame for a lot of this, considering the amount of advertising the telecom giants have been doing to get people to hop on the cable/DSL/whatever band(width)wagon. So you have all the costs incurred with the advertising, the support structure, etc. and considering some of the price wars they have been having, it's not overly surprising that when one of the big ones should declare bankruptcy (okay, they haven't done that yet, but it's damn near a certainty come Monday), everybody else starts getting nervous...

Take a look at various telecom stocks and see if you don't see a lot of lack of trust in those stocks....

Kierthos

Moderate this if you want your rights taken away

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

linuxisland sucks sucks donkey cocks and so does jedie

Qwest is being investigated too

[GigsVT]

We have a T1 from Qwest at work, and they are also being investigated. My agent at bandwidth.com keeps sending me unsolicited reassuring emails, but that makes me more nervous than anything else.

Any Qwest insiders care to comment as AC?

Re:Qwest is being investigated too

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell anyone, but we're fucked. Those who haven't seen it coming: too bad.

Re:Qwest is being investigated too

[swb]

Qwest may have to sell off some businesses, but they own too much local loop to dry up and blow away.

I just don't see the former US West infrastructure being junked.

Re:Qwest is being investigated too

[buckeyeguy]

I briefly worked at Qwest... it was such a messed-up organization that I quit (before mgmt started laying off post-merger headcount). Yes, they overbuilt, not just fiber, but the CyberCenter concept (managed hosting) which never quite took off; think that may have been sold off. (?) Then of course the USWest merger, which allowed the PUC regulators in 14 states to get back in the game and address what was seen locally as poor service by US West.

Interested parties can check out Q complaints at 'Tsewq'.

IMHO: it'll be decades before all the built fiber capacity is used up, because not only did the telecoms install it, but non-telecoms, like Williams (later WilTel), and electric utilities with existing right-of-way space, like AEP, also laid fiber with the intention of marketing it. But Q won't go under; the RBOC will keep them afloat, and sale of their Yellow Pages asset will generate cash (as opposed to WCOM, who lists assets of $104 billion, half of which is intangible/goodwill, and the rest of which will likely be undervalued if sold).

Re:Qwest is being investigated too

[JebusIsLord]

Yes, decades before the fiber is used up, but it still costs $$$ to light the existing fiber, lasers don't grow on trees you know. Money will still have to be spent.

Supply+demand: Not only a good idea, it's the law

[Wudbaer]

Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

Sure they can. They didn't go bankrupt because they experienced strong demand for a product in short supply. All of them built up huge capacities of connectivity, literally burying billions of dollars in the ground with huge fibre networks noone wants to use now. They probably thought the dotcom boom would go on forever. No doubt some day people will request and pay for all that dark fibre, but until then they will be broke.

Same for new mobile phone standards like UMTS in Germany: The telcos shelled out billions of EUR for UMTS licenses of doubtful value, now there is no product, no demand and soon several telcos fewer.

Dont moderate this post

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

can telecom companies afford it?

[BigMike]

Telecom companies don't fund installation broadband capacity, telecom investors do. Apparently, cheap bandwidth costs more that we consumers have been paying. We all owe a big "thanks" to the investors getting hammered (hey, that inclueds me) for throwing money into the hat and then walking away from ivestment empty handed, so that the public can keep getting unlimited spam for free ...

Re:can telecom companies afford it?

[King_TJ]

Bandwidth doesn't "cost more than we consumers are paying". Not by a longshot!

The problem is, telcos are over-estimating how much profit they should be able to generate, per consumer, for a given amount of bandwidth.

EG. A single 128K ISDN circuit in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) currently costs a home user roughly $130 per month. My July phone bill just mentioned a rate INCREASE on ISDN circuits, starting next month. Why? ISDN is quickly losing popularity since most residential ISDN customers switched to DSL or a cable modem already, as soon as one or the other became available in their geographic area. I suppose they'll start complaining about the "lack of demand for our high speed services" soon, too.

They recently RAISED prices on their DSL service too, as soon as a couple competitors died off. It's not like they were losing money on the service at the previous prices - and if anything, costs should be dropping on this stuff so they can take away customers they currently lose to cable modems.

Speaking of their previous DSL competitors (EG. Northpoint and Covad), even their own employees were seen on old Slashdot discussions saying they were way overpaid for the work they performed.

Mismanagement seems to be the primary reason we don't have cheaper bandwidth already. The "light at the end of the tunnel" will hopefully be a new generation of businesses buying out the dead and dying and making better use of the resources.

If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

At one time AOL access was via UUNET POPs. AOL didn't actually have a network itself. Is this still the case, or did AOL actually build a network and/or diversify carriers?

Re:If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[The Turd Report]

AOL still uses UUnet POPs.

Re:If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[grahammm]

Didn't AOL buy CompuServe mainly so that they could get access to CompuServe's excellent network? Wasn't the CompuServe network one of (if not the) largest data networks in the world?

Re:If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

a hundred years ago it was

Re:If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[Anonymous Coward]

According to WorldCom, AOL in deal for CompuServe

"WorldCom (WCOM) said today it would buy CompuServe (CSRV) for $1.2 billion in stock from H&R Block (HRB) and then shed CompuServe's interactive services division to America Online (AOL). As part of the complex three-company deal, WorldCom also will pay AOL $175 million and receive AOL's ANS Commmunications division. Under a five-year contract, WorldCom will become AOL's largest network service provider."

WorldCom wound up with the Compuserve network and AOL's network (ANS). AOL wound up with the Compuserve subscribers and likely the servers.

This might explain a lot about the departure of Pittman and why the AOL Time Warner stock price values the AOL division at a negative couple of bucks per share. Note also that the 5-year contract is just about to expire. I wonder whether it has been renegotiated.

Re:If UUNET shuts down, what happens to AOL?

[constantnormal]

I believe that AOL has a number of suppliers of bandwidth. They recently inked a deal to buy transatlantic bandwidth from Level 3, and used to (and may still) get a lot of local domestic bandwidth from Metromedia.

The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth

[johnnyb]

The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth. Although _local_ bandwidth is getting increasingly fast, the nonlocal bandwidth to support that just isn't there - it costs a lot of money to manage interstate lines.

Internet access is great, but it's not worth more than cable. When your internet bills outweigh your cable bills, you start losing customers. Therefore, companies that try to provide access for everyone find they have to have a very low price to have any volume. The large carriers, then, aren't getting a lot of money out of the deal either - they didn't think about how little money there would be in the game. They have to sell the bandwidth or else their investment is totally lost. However, so many people made these large bandwidth infrastructure purchases that there is a lot of competition, therefore the prices have to be low (and they have to be low to enable enough users on the system). Thus, the telecom providers are stuck in a situation where it is hardly able to pay its bills.

Anyway, this is mostly a guess, but I'd bet that it's pretty close to the truth.

Re:The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth

[grahammm]

The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth. Although _local_ bandwidth is getting increasingly fast, the nonlocal bandwidth to support that just isn't there - it costs a lot of money to manage interstate lines.

I thought that the problem was the other way round, at least here in Europe. Every teleco and wannabe teleco has been laying fibre both nationally and internationally. The problem is that there is not enough traffic to use all the bandwidth, so the companies are not taking as much revenue as they had planned - so are going to the wall. Like the recent collapse of KPN QWest, whose network was international.

Re:The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth

[WolfWithoutAClause]

Yes, you're basically correct in both Europe and the US.

The telcos made decisions on how much bandwidth to install more or less independently from everyone else- they all multiplied up their capacity by perhaps 10x; but they projected that the price per bit wouldn't go down much initially; only problem is everyone else had done the same thing, so the price fell through floor.

However, the rule of thumb is that growth in datatraffic in the middle of the network is doubling every 12 months or so. So 10x more bandwidth is enough bandwidth for more than 3 years.

And in the meantime the bandwidth requirements if anything slowed down after the dotcom crash. Before the dot com crash some companies were buying 4 OC3 lines when an ADSL line would have done fine.

Right now, bandwidth cost (c.f. price) is cheap and if anything getting cheaper- you can buy the equipment on ebay because companies are selling it off for pennies on the dollar. Right now, telecom equipment manufacturers can't sell much at all. And the overcapacity isn't going away much even though the network companies are going bankrupt left, right and center.

Mind you that's the cost of the bandwidth to the telecoms companies- many telecom providers were unable to make profit during the dotcom boom times, so they are raising prices now to get a chance to turn a profit. So they have pushed their prices up, and they're going to try to keep them there for a while I think.

As the growth curve on the bandwidth carries on going up- I don't think there's anything to stop it, the cost and price per bit will carry on coming down- but it may slow slightly as the bandwidth providers have to buy more kit to provide backbone when the current overcapacity comes to an end.

Re:The problem is the myth of cheap bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends. Constructing roads is very expensive too.

I expect from the government (which collects the taxes) to consider "e-highways" the same as highways. Just like the government has an agency for constructing roads, there should be another agency to construct digital data links with cables.

With tolls, no problem.

But you see, *companies* prefer to collect monay from "there's no inexpensive bandwidth fellows" rather have the government provide a non-profitable network.

It boils down to the fact that we are assholes.

If you don't like linux you will be censored!

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

readme, re-postme, support-me, but dont moderateme

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

WorldCom Storm

[evestrum]

The question is: Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

Most certainly, if executives can be satisfied with a couple of hundred tousand dollars a year each instead of tens and hundreds of millions of dollars a year each, and if stock holders can be satisfied with modest but steady returns on their investment. Greed ends up killing all it touches.

Re:WorldCom Storm

[forged]

Fair comment regarding greed. It isn't for nothing that greed is a capital sin.....

Re:WorldCom Storm

[Restil]

You're partially correct. However, it isn't the amount of the exec salary that is the problem. Its the salary cap. Exec salaries over $1 million can't be deducted. Now you can debate until you're blue in the face what a proper exec salary is, but in the end, it comes down to, whatever the company is willing to pay and whatever the exec is willing to work for. The marketplace at work.

However, by implementing a cap on the salary, the corporations are forced to find alternative ways to make up the difference. They're not going to throw money away to the government, so they pay the execs with stock options instead. Now, stock options for the regular employee aren't always a bad thing. It builds company loyalty, and gives the employees an extra reason to go the extra mile. However, with execs, the situation is different. A lowly employee typically would be unable to cause a massive shift in the stock price by anything he/she is able to do. However, execs can. They have full control over the corporation, including what the public finds out about. And since they also have control over how the accounting system works, and their salaries depend on the stock price always going up, they're going to manipulate (to the razor's edge of legality if necessary) the accounting to maximize the value of their options.

There might be another reason why this happened, that didn't have much to do with executive greed. Worldcom screwed up, but its possible that they didn't actually do anything illegal. A lot of expenses CAN legitimately be expensed over 10 years, even labor in some cases. Ultimately, it wouldn't matter, they just pay the expenses over a longer period of time. In the dot com boom, they had a desparate need to expand quickly, so they depreciated the expenses, which is permitted, and wouldn't have had such a dramatic effect, except for one small problem. The bubble burst, and their steadily increasing revenue stream suddenly fell far short of where it should be.

Now, Worldcom isn't in bad shape, they're just deep in debt. Its still a viable corporation with a healthy revenue stream, and given enough time and some responsible financial management, it would recover from this without any problem. However, in the wake of Enron, there was a pressing need to find and disclose all potential problems, and with these new startling revelations, the creditors are suddenly panicing and pulling their lines of credit. Hence their
current situation.

What's potentially scary about this, as of yesterday, you could purchase a controlling share of Worldcom for about $10 million. Of course, the low price is due to the impending bankrupcy. However, as daunting as the billions of dollars of debt might seem, Worldcom is still a viable company for someone who might be able to refinance the debt. Know of any large software companies that have that much working cash available?? Who might want to own a significant percentage of the backbone? Think its too far fetched??

-Restil

Re:WorldCom Storm

[Anonymous Coward]

--therer is an extremely easy solution for this accounting mess and stock marjet mess. You actually place limits on stock buying and selling that reflect "investment" over "gambling".
Place a time limit on selling stock, a minimum of ONE YEAR from purchase date. You also place a fractional buy back guarantee of at least 10 cents on the dollar, to be covered by the BROKERS, the lying carnival barker shills who insist you buysellbuysell RIGHT NOW! Make them the insurers out of their pocket and you'll see this stuff drop to a relaistic business is real level. They won't be so eager to push lemons, they will insist on scrupulous accounting opractices and redundant independent audits, and the execs in the company can concentrate on becoming profitable by actually building decent widgets and/or servicing widgets, and the market itself will tone down tulip dot com mania with the time limit constraint on selling.

Of course, the fatcat gamblers and schemers and liars and manipulators in the market who make their livings off of being parasites will howl in protest, but we won't see messes like enronworldglobalcom near as much, either. And the execs won't be forced to come uyp with accounting fraud merely to try and make money.

really, "stock" is over rated, companies can get by with private offerings and investors who tryuyly believe company A has a product they wish to support. Right now it's 99% manic gambling, and everyone knows it. And when it's gambling as opposed to actually working for a living, then the gamblers get to that "easy money" mindset which leads to greed and crime. Eliminate the sheer pure gambling aspect and base stock "investing" on the ancient traditional model like it used to be. It would certainly be a step in the right direction. the way we are doing it now will just continue to corrupt society, de value the actual economy, and continue to reward crookedness. All that is happening now is that the high level crooks will learn to be smarter in covering their tracks, because the rules really aren't changing all that much.

IMO of course, AMMV

Erroneous Question

[chicagothad]

At the end of swight1701's post, they state "Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?". This is incorrect. WorldCom is not going under because of the decreasing price of bandwidth. WorldCom is going under because of bad management.

Take Sprint for example, they also carry a large percentage of Internet traffic and yes, they posted a loss. But not from the "large pipe" business, from the long distance business! This is also what hit Worldcom. All companies that are relying on long distance billing to be their bread-and-butter are going to be taking a hit. In WorldCom's case, they use some "creative accounting" to avoid this impact.

The only exception to this may be Qwest. Which in my mind is a simple case of too much dark capacity (over construction).

Redundancy is the key, thats why you see this post

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002)

Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work!

Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!

Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you

They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!

Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls.

The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot!

But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!

We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!

Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!

MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
Xfree86.org

There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.

Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge

The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.

Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP

Don't forget to sign the petition!

It's lot worse in Austraria...

[bluelarva]

According to a friend of mine, about 40% of the internet traffic in Austraria goes through WorldCom's subsidiary ISP. All the small service companies that work for ISP want cash up front before work begins because the credit is no good anymore. Of course the WorldCom's money is in limbo now so they can't cut a check out to them. As a result routine maintenance or repair work doesn't get done. The infrastructure situation is a complete fubar over there because of the WorldCom mess.

Re:It's lot worse in Austraria...

[Random Bystander]

Any clue on where Austraria is? Even google suggested that I should look up Australia instead

Re:It's lot worse in Australia...

[bluelarva]

Opps. I spelled Australia wrong. I guess that's what happens when you pull an all nighter and brain is low on caffein.

sheesh

[romey]

worldcom isn't going to turn off the lights... if/when they file for chapter 11 bankrupsy protection, it reduces their debt, and they will probably do another layoff, or sell chunks of the company. chances are worldcom will survive, abit their reputation will be extreemly tainted.

the internet is NOT going to be turned off...

Re:sheesh

[Brownie the AssClown]

Actually, WorldCom won't survive, I hope. My bet is that wcom will go chapter 11, they will sell off everything except UUnet and MCI, then once things get setled, UUnet and MCI will become seperate companies. The WorldCom name will just go away.

Nature of Supply and Demand

[div_2n]

All things being equal, if there is a demand, someone will meet the supply. That is simple economics. There is no mystery about it and high demand and low supply usually mean higher prices.

As for businesses being affected by one company's problem -- if you don't have redundancy for every critical piece of your business model, then you deserve to go bankrupt. Don't think you can afford that extra T1 from another Telco? Bet you don't think that after being down for 2 weeks straight cutting your revenue stream in the process.

It really isn't rocket science. If your downtime costs you more than redundancy, the choice should be clear.

Re:Nature of Supply and Demand

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002) Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work! Sign this petition, let your voice be heard! Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION! Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls. The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot! But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE! We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does! Inportant imformation for users Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die! MSNBC BBC NEWS News.com Linux online Linux daily news network Weird news from dailyrotten.com Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too! CNN.com New york times (free registration required) LINUX.com News forge K5 Mandrake forum Toms hardware The register Kde dot news The linux kernel Archives Adequecy Xfree86.org There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from. Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them! Rob malda Jamie Macarthy ChrisD Hemos Micheal Pudge The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ. Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP Don't forget to sign the petition!

Re:Nature of Supply and Demand

[Penguin]

All things being equal, if there is a demand, someone will meet the supply. That is simple economics. There is no mystery about it and high demand and low supply usually mean higher prices.

Unfortunately people tend to misunderstand the meaning of this. It's not unusual to hear somebody utter: "Well, but there is CLEARLY a demand for this product, surely it might be profitable...". Well, yes, but demands of T3's for $1/month or a new Audi for $10 are also high. It doesn't make these products profitable as well.

time to invest in.....

[H3XA]

.... alternative communication technology like.... carrier pigeons and smoke signals - they are wireless so they MUST be good....

if you invest now you get FREE management monkeys and emu auditors

- HeXa

Re:time to invest in.....

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Nah they reveal their SSID's on my car every morning. So they are insecure,

It's how we do infrastructure

[Tim Ward]

The big investments in infrastructure (roads, bridges, cross channel tunnels, whatever) never pay back fast enough for the original owners to survive.

So they go bust, the banks sell off the assets minus debts to new operators, who do fine (after all, an operating profit was available, just not enough to service the debt).

The bill is picked up by the banks, private investors and/or government, depending on your local system.

Re:It's how we do infrastructure

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002) Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work! Sign this petition, let your voice be heard! Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION! Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls. The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot! But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE! We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does! Inportant imformation for users Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die! MSNBC BBC NEWS News.com Linux online Linux daily news network Weird news from dailyrotten.com Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too! CNN.com New york times (free registration required) LINUX.com News forge K5 Mandrake forum Toms hardware The register Kde dot news The linux kernel Archives Adequecy Xfree86.org There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from. Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them! Rob malda Jamie Macarthy ChrisD Hemos Micheal Pudge The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ. Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP Don't forget to sign the petition!

Bad news down the road

[FirstOne]

Since it looks like Worldcom has secured debtor-in-possession financing, Sources: WorldCom May File ... .

The typical exit strategy for a bankruptcy like this, chapter 11, is a debt for equity swap.
Where the bond holders and banks become the new stockholders.
And existing stockholders get the short end of the stick !!

The only questions which remain are.....
Will the emerging DEBT FREE comm giant, OUT COMPETE, the remaining DEBT LADEN survivors?
Trigging a cascade of bankruptcies? AT&T, Sprint, etc. who is next?
Will the same thing happen to airline industry?
Kinda like musical chairs, the first company to bankruptcy court wins?

Re:Bad news down the road

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope you aren't implying NTL will crush all competition?

Re:Bad news down the road

[JordanH]

• Will the emerging DEBT FREE comm giant, OUT COMPETE, the remaining DEBT LADEN survivors?

It's very unlikely that the debtors will want to run Worldcom. First off, all the major debtors, and there are a number of them, would have to agree to this. Otherwise the other debtors would have to buy out the debtors that didn't agree and the one's who didn't agree would want as much as they could get for their share.

The debtors are not going to want to run a telecom, there's no money to be made there. They'll want to sell off the assets at any price they can get to secure something and write the rest off as a bad investment.

It's more complicated that this, really, but I'm not reading where these banks are going to want to run Worldcom.

The best thing that could happen is that the banks, in cooperation with the relatively healthy telecoms (Verizon, SWB), would finance the purchase of the major assets of Worldcom. There's going to be big disruptions as Worldcom customers move around, but this scenario keeps all the infrastructure up and running.

The worst thing that could happen is that the Worldcom debtors can't afford to sell the long-haul telecom assets for what the market is willing to pay and shutting down is their best option. I certainly hope the Fed would pressure them not to do this.

Wish the story were unique...

[smittyoneeach]

Railroads prophesied all these telecom events. But were railroad-car packets too small to see?

The original Denver and Rio Grande Railway created by the honorable General Palmer in 1870 became the target of eastern finacial influences and the eventual pawn of ruthless railroad barrons, banks, corporate subsidiaries and the courts for more than a century. As other railroads died off in boom and bust cycles the still functioning pieces were absorbed by any survivors along the way.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity... (Solomon)

Re:Wish the story were unique...

[Pig Hogger]

Railroads prophesied all these telecom events. But were railroad-car packets too small to see?

Railroads prophecized many aspects of the internet/telecom/computer networks. They were the first entreprises that were widely distributed geographically that needed good and fast communications (on the order of seconds) for it's daily operations.

So they developped more than 150 years ago the technology to transmit information and to manage operations that were spanning a very wide territory.

Reduntancy, checksums and whatnot were all technologies developped by railroads:

• Reduntancy: telegraphed train orders from the dispatchers were repeated by the telegraph operators in the stations;
• Checksums: whilst the orders were transmitted and repeated, every other station on the line listened, to check for errors in fact or retransmission;
• Master control: only one man ran a line at the same time; he alone had the authority to order train movements. This way, there was no chance of miscommunication, since every information was in one head at a time.

Three step plan ....

[RebelWithoutAClue]

1) High demand for your product.
2) ...
3) Go bankrupt!

Re:Three step plan ....

[pieterh]

You're repeating the falacy that caused the telcos to throw their fortunes into holes in the ground.
'High demand' is meaningless when supply exceeds demand by 100 times or more. There is a high demand for air to breath but no-one makes money selling it.
Economics 101: you can only make money in a market when demand and supply are balanced. To reach that balance, you can cut supply (e.g. OPEC, De Beers, etc.) or you can allow prices to fall (e.g. WorldCom shares). Presumably traffic prices will have to fall by an order of magnitude or two before the market is stable again.
The question is: what killer application will soak up that capacity? Voice? File sharing? Video on demand? /.?

Re:Three step plan ....

[Pig Hogger]

There is a high demand for air to breath but no-one makes money selling it.

This statement is blatantly false. Some people DO MAKE MONEY selling air.

Re:Three step plan ....

[pieterh]

:) Yeah, hmmm, assuming 7500 divers paying for air at any moment, this comes to 1/1000000 of the market. Not statistically significant.
In any case, the divers don't pay for the air, they pay for the time and effort required to package it.

Re:Three step plan ....

[AnotherBlackHat]

hospitals, wielders, chemists, cryogenics researchers ...
All buying specially packaged and prepaired air.

You don't pay your ISP for the data, you pay for the pipe.

Re:Three step plan ....

[RebelWithoutAClue]

Relax, dude.

It was meant to be _funny_, poking fun at the headline. :P

testing 195.60.14.23:8080

[Anonymous Coward]

can i post to this page?

Demand and supply have not increased together

[pieterh]

WorldCom was principally responsibly for the myth that Internet demand was doubling every 100 days when in fact it was doubling every 12 months, from the period 1998-2001.
Capacity, OTOH, doubled about every 100 days thanks to lots of new cable, and much more efficient use of existing cable (up to 100 times gain).
As a result, there is massive overcapacity. The result? Lowering prices at a time of incredible debt thanks to stupid 'investments' in things like 3G.
When companies like WorldCom go bust, the capacity stays in place. Without the burden of servicing their debt (cause they generally go into chapter 11 or somesuch), the 'bankrupt' capacity gets sold at new low prices, forcing the rest of the market down, and so on and on.
Conclusion a: we can expect a new era of really low prices, as the survivors of this period (probably the Baby Bells in the US, and the old monopoly telcos in Europe) get control of huge amounts of cheap capacity. I predict this will fuel the next boom.
Conclusion b: whatever the next boom is, do not expect it to come from the telcos. They have failed to predict a single one of the successes (demand for fixed net links, text messaging, etc.) of the past. I predict the next boom will be based on commercialised P2P with links to portable phones for roaming control. E.g. I can rent a game or movie or TV programme during the day, pay with my mobile phone, then my PC will download the stuff through P2P.
Conclusion c: this is going to be the biggest test of the Internet's strength in tough times. Many of our customers host their e-commerce apps at UUnet. What happens next week if UUnet shuts down? How fast can we get their servers onto another ISP? All interesting questions that will set the tone for the architectures of tomorrow.

Re:Demand and supply have not increased together

[Lonath]

Damn. It makes me wish that I had patented a method and apparatus for moving your website to a new host when your old host turns out to be a lying sack of shit and goes bankrupt.

Re:Demand and supply have not increased together

[Zeinfeld]

While you are partly right in saying that the capacity grew faster than demand this was not the reason for the bankrupcy and not due to bad planning. The principal cause of the overcapacity is that when you lay fibre the cost of the fibre itself is pretty much lost in the noise. It costs little more to lay 10 strands than it does one. If you are going to dig up a street etc you might as well lay as much fibre as you think you might need.

The reason WorldCom is in the crapper is FRAUD. They basically borrowed money on the basis of false accounts. They were charging the amounts they spent renting bandwidth from other companies as a capital expense. At least at Harken and Enron they only deliberately produced misleading accounts, the Worldcom accounts were fraudulent. As a result of the fraud the banks and bondholders have the right to call in their debt immediately.

The failure of regulation in this case brings to mind George Sorros' book 'The Alchemy of Finance'. Essentially he puts forward a Hegelian theory of government regulation which leads to the prediction of a regulatory cycle. Regulations are gradually relaxed allowing greater and greater productivity until there is a msssive fraud that causes confidence in the markets to be lost and a reintroduction of regulation.

The US fetish for avoiding regulation is pretty odd to europeans. Most businessmen would much prefer to have EU style government regulation than the arbitrary jury awards that have substituted for regulation in the US. Equally regulations that require honest accounting can hardly be called 'anti-business', they are pro business. What it really comes down to is whether the Congress and the whitehouse going to be pro-Shareholder or pro-company insiders.

Re:Demand and supply have not increased together

[anthony_dipierro]

I'd say the main reason for the bankruptcy was lack of inflation. Worldcom was banking on the value of its infrastructure to rise so that it could continue to act as collateral against its massive debt. Instead the value of its infrastructure fell, partly due to misjudgements in demand, but largely due to the downturn in the economy as a whole. During the boom Greenspan raised rates too much, which kept inflation far lower than expected, something which is good for banks like Greenspan runs, but bad for debtors like WorldCom. He got away with raising rates because the stock market was soaring, however, the stock market was a bad indicator of the economy at the time. No amount of interest rate raises are going to stop a speculative bubble. Greenspan should have focussed on the economy, and let the bubble burst itself (which it did).

The fraud was not the reason for the bankruptcy, the fraud merely covered up the inevitablility of the bankruptcy long enough to take a few more suckers down with it.

www.worldcom.com

[Spicy Bisquit]

'Welcome to WorldCom - the pre-eminent global communications company for the digital generation.'

sign me up.

Re:www.worldcom.com

[Anonymous Coward]

version 1.2.1, (last updated 20th July 2002) Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA. Moderating this post will only waste mod points, and will not work! Sign this petition, let your voice be heard! Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!

• Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
• Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
• Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.

The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.

• Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
• Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
• Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!

Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION! Pink page of Death, This censors people who use legitmate proxys or firewalls. The Bitchslap! An unethical punishment which is applied to moderators who fight censorship against this site! In addition the Editors use their un-limited mod points to create a communist style censored discussion on slashdot! But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE! We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does! Inportant imformation for users Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die! MSNBC BBC NEWS News.com Linux online Linux daily news network Weird news from dailyrotten.com Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too! CNN.com New york times (free registration required) LINUX.com News forge K5 Mandrake forum Toms hardware The register Kde dot news The linux kernel Archives Adequecy Xfree86.org There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from. Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them! Rob malda Jamie Macarthy ChrisD Hemos Micheal Pudge The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ. Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP Don't forget to sign the petition!

Re:www.worldcom.com

[Zeinfeld]

Whenever I have mod points and read a post that starts 'don't mod this down' in bold font I can be certain it is offtopic, flamebait and a troll.

Sounds somewhat derranged to boot. There is a loony old woman callend Helen Pick who writes letters to everyone who gets a letter publshed in the London Times calling herself the new adam smith and einstein combined...

Perhaps the reason the demand for bandwidth dropped off is that the minute the Internet started every derranged loon on the planet raced to get access and started sending out loonygrams. WE are running out of loonies and so worldcom goes in the crapper.

Or maybe they just had Arthur Andersen audit their accounts.

The new new new new new economy

[ZahrGnosis]

"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever- growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

I love that question from an economics standpoint. How can over-demand for a product cause a company to go bankrupt? You don't think we're over regulating the telecom industry or anything, huh?

Re:The new new new new new economy

[qubit64]

I guess if the demand is only existent in a price range where it is very difficult (but not impossible) to make money. Good point though.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[crawling_chaos]

You don't think we're over regulating the telecom industry or anything, huh?

Puh-lease. WorldCom's financial problems have little to with over-regulation. They are in trouble because they committed F R A U D. Y'know if the accounting industry was more carefully watched, this major implosion might never have happened.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[chicagothad]

I got one word for you: "Ginsu".

Re:The new new new new new economy

[Anonymous Coward]

Riiiggght. Over-regulation is the reason why there's no competition in the telecom industry. sure it is.

boy, anyone who can still beat the drum of deregulation after the California energy fiasco, Enron, WorldCom, and Arthur Anderson ~really~ has my admiration. not.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[donutello]

No. WorldCom was always in trouble. the F R A U D only hid the trouble WorldCom was in. The fraud that was committed allowed the top execs to make out like bandits at the expense of shareholders - not the company. The value of a companies stock is only an indicator of how the company is doing - not vice versa. The actual stock price does not affect the assets and liabilities a company has but instead is a reflection of those.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[donutello]

I'm not trolling but I don't get it. I remember one of the statements being touted a lot during the dot-com bust was the telecom sector. How the telecom sector had overbuilt capacity based on the anticipated demand and now that that didn't hold true there was all this excess capacity which would cause a financial collapse.

So what happened? How do we go from having too much capacity to too little in a lean economy? Or am I confusing types of capacity or something?

Re:The new new new new new economy

[donutello]

Here's a reference to an article talking about this overbuilt capacity. I know I wasn't imagining it.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[greenrd]

The fraud that was committed allowed the top execs to make out like bandits at the expense of shareholders - not the company.

That's not correct. If you commit major fraud or are even suspected of it, you become a perceived credit risk, thus it's harder / more expensive to raise the credit you need to keep going.

Re:The new new new new new economy

[donutello]

Good point. You're right, of course.

Would that it were so

[NetWurkGuy]

Actually all the major telcom companies have been engaged in massive purchase financing, effectively buying customers. The customers go bankrupt leaving the supplier/lender in the lurch.

Re:Supply+demand: Not only a good idea, it's the l

[thegrommit]

No doubt some day people will request and pay for all that dark fibre, but until then they will be broke.

*sniffs* 1999 *sniffs*

Seriously, do your really think the demand is there for the available capacity? In five years? Ten?

What applications will drive this demand? What providers are ensuring sufficient access to make all of this capacity worthwhile?

So much for "value-added" services

[dcavanaugh]

Last year, our pitiful ISP discontinued frame relay service in our area, along with our T1 (probably a violation of our contract). So we signed up with UUnet, thinking they were "too big to fail". Oops.

When we signed up for a T1, Worldcom/UUnet was also pitching all kinds of value-added services (managed VPN, website hosting, etc.) I'm generally paranoid about outsourcing, especially outsourced telecomm. services. As a result, we bought only raw bandwidth from them, just in case we had to switch carriers again. At the time, I was concerned about UUnet's attitude toward spam and the possibility of a massive blacklisting operation against them -- as you see against the Chinese ISPs today.

Well, here we are. I feel stupid about choosing Worldcom, but I feel like a genius when I kept the corporate website and corporate VPN "in house".

At this point, why would anyone buy "value-added" services from their ISP? For a long time, Worldcom/UUnet was really hyping this stuff, as if VPNs and website hosting was some kind of rocket science that only a big ISP can do properly. They have single-handedly destroyed the entire "ISP value added" service industry. Who would be crazy enough to depend on ISP-managed services now?

Re:So much for "value-added" services

[dloyer]

The thing is that all of the ISP pitched value added services like managed VPN and hosting because it was easy to do and had great profit. They where counting on revenue from these services to make up for lost revenue for pure co-location and bandwidth as capacity was overbuilt. They never had many takers. Why pay a few thousand a month for somthing that you can set up in a few hours and have better control over? The only way to justify it would be to get savings by downsizing. Most managers do everything they can to avoid downsizing.

Answer = have a proper business model

[MrFenty]

"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

The way my company avoids bankruptcy is simple - we have a proper business model, one based one making a profit on everything we do, rather than burying ourselves under a mountain of debt in the hope that one day we might escape by having a IPO or writing off debt as equity, or fiddling the books, or anything else. Just price your goods/services to make a profit and the rest should work.

Repeat after me - *have* *a* *business* *model*

No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[tytso]

... and panic.

FCC regulations (authorized by the Communications Act of 1934) require that company provide 60 days notice before terminating telecommunications services. This has been interpreted more recently to mean notice before cutting off voice or data services, and means that even in the case of a chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy trustee isn't allowed to just sell all of the assets and leave customers hanging high and dry.

Furthermore, in WorldCon^Hm's case, they will almost certainly be filing for a chapter 11, which means they are trying to reorganize debts, and not shutdown the business. In a chapter 11, the advantage is that Worldcom will paradoxically be more able to get financing after they file for bankruptcy, since lenders know that they won't be screwed by past debts.

(Bankruptcy essentially creates a two legal companies from the perspective of debt --- before the bankruptcy and after the bankruptcy. It means that equity shareholders will be completely screwed, and that debt holders will be partially screwed, but hopefully the company will emerge from bankruptcy able to pay its bills. That means that creditors that lend a company money after the bankruptcy have more of a chance to get paid --- which means that suppliers will more likely be willing to give WorldCom credit, and banks will be more likely to give WorldCom short-term loans, etc.)

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[ajs]

There's a problem with your theory. They may have to lay off many of the technitians that are required to keep their networks running. They may continue to nominally provide pipe, but will routing loops take longer to resolve? Will QoS get hosed? Will fiber cuts cause more downtime than they should?

I'm confident in WCOME's long-term outlook (so much so I bought 8500 shares of their stock at the fire sale), but the short-term may not be pretty.

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[Anonymous Coward]

We certainly didn't get 60 days notice before Northpoint DSL went dark!

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[The Cat]

They may have to lay off many of the technitians that are required to keep their networks running.

Oh, they *will* lay off as many people as they can. First option and *priority* for any "corporate" company is to destroy careers first, ask questions later.

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[ajs]

That's a rather silly outlook. Critisizing how they got where they are is one thing, but at this point keeping people on to the detriment of the company would not help those people (they might have a few weeks or months more employment at most). Laying people off and/or selling non-profitable business units is the best thing that can be done for the company and the employees that are left at the end.

Destroying careers is bad business, but then so is mis-managing revenue. Worldcom made a major, MAJOR Internet bid at just the wrong time. They're paying for that and how they handled the down-turn. They'll recover.

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[The Cat]

Critisizing how they got where they are is one thing, but at this point keeping people on to the detriment of the company would not help those people (they might have a few weeks or months more employment at most).

Mass chronic layoffs are rarely, if ever, used to
keep a company afloat. More likely they are used, like most other "strategies," to benefit the quarterly earnings reports. Fortune 500 companies are not going to go out of business by keeping the people *they hired.* They're always re-hiring in two years anyway.

AOL makes $48M a month in subscription revenue. They laid off 2000 people at one point last year. Why? Their combined monthly salaries are pocket change to a company with 23 million subscribers?

Well, we all know why.

Laying people off and/or selling non-profitable business units is the best thing that can be done for the company and the employees that are left at the end.

Employees who will be shown the door next, no doubt.

Destroying careers is bad business

Dow's off 3000 points. NASDAQ's off 4000. Highest unemployment in the last FOUR recessions.

Plaintiff rests.

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[The Cat]

Critisizing how they got where they are is one thing, but at this point keeping people on to the detriment of the company would not help those people (they might have a few weeks or months more employment at most).

Mass chronic layoffs are rarely, if ever, used to
keep a company afloat. More likely they are used, like most other "strategies," to benefit the quarterly earnings reports. Fortune 500 companies are not going to go out of business by keeping the people *they hired.* They're always re-hiring in two years anyway.

AOL makes $48M a month in subscription revenue. They laid off 2000 people at one point last year. Why? Their combined monthly salaries are pocket change to a company with 23 million subscribers?

Well, we all know why.

Laying people off and/or selling non-profitable business units is the best thing that can be done for the company and the employees that are left at the end.

Employees who will be shown the door next, no doubt.

Destroying careers is bad business

Dow's off 3000 points. NASDAQ's off 4000. Highest unemployment in the last FOUR recessions.

Plaintiff rests.

(Wow. If posting the comment doesn't go exactly the site's way, it becomes a REAL CHORE to re-submit... this is attempt NINE)

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[Anonymous Coward]

And, hence, the difference between a citizen and a corporation. In the US a corporation is afforded more rights than a citizen. Which is why incorporation needs to die a horrible, nasty death.

The time to run around like chickens with their heads cut off is after the US government abandons UUNet. Until then their traffic will require UUNet to keep the network running, by whatever means the government deems necessary.

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[ajs]

Mass chronic layoffs are rarely, if ever, used to
keep a company afloat.

You weren't discussing just any company. This is a company that has more debt than it can handle and *will go out of business* unless they do something. What they will do (roughly) is this:

1. Secure financing for restructuring costs
2. Go chapter 11 to protect company assets from ceditors
3. Pay off and/or work out long-term plans on as much debt as possible to avoid liquidation of essential assets
4. Sell some non-core assets and/or business units
5. Restructure

Restructuring is the hard part. The goal there is to re-shape your business so that you can afford what debt you come out of chapter 11 with (mostly your new debt that consolidated some of your old). Debt payments are expensive, and you have to do something to assure the courts that your credit will be good, or you won't get out of chapter 11.

So, you cut costs where you can, sell off anything that you don't actually need (Worldcom made some acquisitions that didn't make a whole lot of sense anyway) and close the ones you can't sell. This is where the bulk of the layoffs will usually come from. You don't lay off people who are required for your core business unless you have to, since that's where your revenue will have to come from post-chapter-11.

It's not about trying to screw over your employees or make your earnings look good (the accounting mess that got them where they are was about earnings). It's about getting the money together to pay off debt.

AOL makes $48M a month in subscription revenue. They laid off 2000 people at one point last year. Why? Their combined monthly salaries are pocket change to a company with 23 million subscribers?

Ok let's do the math. Let's assume those 2000 people only cost AOL an average of $50,000/yr each (that's basically a smidge over minimum wage plus benefits plus social security plus unemployment insurance plus accounting and hr and other overhead). If these were more senior people that number is usually between $100,000 to $200,000 per employee.

Take that $50,000 and divide by 12. You get a little over $4,000 per month per person, so for 2,000 people that's $8million per month. However, you actually have to shrink that number a bit because some of the layoffs will come from overhead areas like accounting and HR (less people, less overhead).

Let's call it (and this is really just ballpark) $5,000,000 per month. So you say that they have $48,000,000 per month in revenue. So, you're talking about reducing your costs by about 10% of your total revenue by laying off those 2,000 people.

This is all arm-waving without being able to see AOL's books, but you can see how laying off staff can quickly put a company's earnings back in line to the point that they not only make investors happy, but they're able to pay their debts. Event a profitable company is constantly incurring debt, and if it ever gets out of control, you end up in Enron/Worldcom land. Very bad. Do not do.

Lay offs are not the only and often not the best solution, but any comprehensive restructuring cannot afford to ignore layoffs (even in those few private companies that view layoffs as harmful to their long-term health such as Fidelity Investments).

I'm not an accountant, but I've had enough exposure to the theory and the practice of corporate accounting that I don't have the innocent "if only people weren't evil it would all work" view. Running a business is insanely hard, and there comes a time where you have to make the choice to keep the business running or lay people off. It's always painful because you know these people rely on you, but you have to think of the health of the whole company and help those you can. Even Japan had to learn this lesson (which was totally foreign to their way of doing business until the 90s).

Re:No need to run around with our heads cut off...

[Reziac]

60 days notice may be required by law, but that doesn't prevent companies from breaking said law. Don't know if said law applies in this case, but one SoCal DSL provider (I can't think of the name offhand, since I don't use 'em) went belly-up last month and gave their customers (including ISPs) less than a week's notice. Caused a friend to have to run frantically around doing paperwork to get his commercial clients switched to a new provider.

nothing to fear...

[constantnormal]

Personally, I think they're hollering Fire! FIRE!! when there's only a whiff of smoke in the air. After all, the internet was DESIGNED to withstand having large chunks of it taken out (it was originally a DARPA project to build a resilient computer network that would survive a nuclear war), and while there's not nearly so much unused capacity as a year ago, there's still excess capacity. If UUNET were to go dark, it would be similar to yet another bad Microsoft virus (CodeRed, SirCam, Klez) clogging the net -- a slowdown, and some systems offline, but in a few days most things would be fully functional again. Either someone else would buy UUNET and fill the need, or some other company (Level 3?) would eagerly pick up the load.

Supply and Demand vs. Topheavy Mismanagement

[gorehog]

Sprint/Wordlcom going bankrupt cant really be blamed on the decreasing price of bandwidth. All they had to do to manage prices correctly was to limit their creative bookkeeping.

See, you cant run a business if you're pretending everything is a-okay. If you're losing money and covering it up then you cant properly set prices.

IT'S A FEEDBACK PROBLEM.

Part of the solution is to stop spending millions on excutive salary. But even more of the solution lies in mking sure that you sell the bandwidth for an appropriate price so you can pay the bills.

Keep a locally cached copy of this article

[giminy]

So you know who to blame when you can't get to slashdot anymore...

Re:Supply+demand: Not only a good idea, it's the l

[Angry White Guy]

What applications will drive this demand? What providers are ensuring sufficient access to make all of this capacity worthwhile?

.NET anyone?
But seriously, The demand would be there if three criteria were met: Pricing, Vision and Diversity. If companies were to expand to multiple locations with minimal obstacles, this would fill the need for a large telecommunications market.

Common taxation and corporate laws throughout the states would allow ALL businesses to expand (Read: Allow, not ensure) and the IT sector would be sitting there ready to wire it all up!

worldcom didn't go bankrupt...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure this is obvious if you think about it -- Worldcom fell apart because of a crisis of investor confidence, not bankruptcy.

Re:worldcom didn't go bankrupt...

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely you're joking. They're going bankrupt because they built a house of cards using debt they never should have been given.

EBAY... Running the internet?!?

[Rooked_One]

I just signed up on ebay to sell a couple of things. I had no idea the difficulty they gave me just to sign up! They charge fees wherever little bit they can, and you can DAMN WELL expect that they will start charging our ISP's more, so we will get hit. Then again, worldcomm never would hire me... sure did fire a lot of my real life friends with that 800 person layoff. Boy, has that made my job search easier. =(

Other things on UUNET

[Gonarat]

Our business uses the UUNET lines for settling offline retailers to our host (Tandem System). If MCI Worldcom would pull the plug on UUNET, not only would Internet Access be cut off, but businesses like ours would have to scramble to find ways for our customers to connect. We are working on this just in case, but it is complicated by the fact that we deal with many retailer chains in different states.

We will survive the collapse if it occurs -- but it will be a royal pain in the ass.

Enjoy this life while you can

[presearch]

If the execs didn't didn't snarf every dollar as soon as it came in, and instead took $.99 of each buck and paid
guys like us to actually do the work, then they would have a viable business, we'd be swimming in Negroponte-style
bandwidth and eventually, management would still be making a considerable pile of cash.

But no. They had to immediatly run off with all of the working capital and even that wasn't enough.
Once they got a taste of $10Mil a year, they wanted to see what $100Mil felt like. Life begins at half a billion.
Filtered down from the top, the exec VP's want a proportional cut, the junior VP's, and so on.

Now there's no money to run and grow the network. Engineers, wire pullers, suppliers, all the way down the line,
are out of a job so there's nobody with enough cash to buy services. Thus the perception of over-capacity.

Oh well, instead of making a living wage, we C programmers and network engineers can be grounds keepers
and security for the elite for eight bucks an hour. The elite, including our government, think that things worked out quite well.

Thanks dubya, good job. There is hope however. Many of us will be able to enlist in the national guard so we can
police the homeless tent cities that will be springing up next year when the banks start failing. Good work if you can
get past the brutality you'll be showing to your fellow "citizens".

Re:Enjoy this life while you can

[pieterh]

Time to move into tent production.

Re:Enjoy this life while you can

[oPless]

Quick someone patent tents now!

Re:Enjoy this life while you can

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm one of the growing number that saw my years of good, hard and dedicated work result in unemployment. After the Sob's that were at the top let us all go and stiffed us for our severance, they drove off to their mansions in their Mercedes and BMW's .

Do I seem pissed? I'm furious. We live in an age of avarice where the scrupulous are the ones that pay for the greed of the unscrupulous. The government is owned by business and won't do jack about that. It makes me want to get together a lynch mob. Some good old-fashioned public CEO hangings ought to fix things. I'm less than half kidding about that and with each passing day of unemployment that percentage diminishes...

Re:Enjoy this life while you can

[Hale Adams]

Presearch, Several points... First, stop railing at the executives, when it's really the shareholders who LET the executives pay themselves those kinds of salaries and benefits. Second, from the sound of your wailings, you don't own stock in any corporation. (If you did, you'd understand point #1 above.) Until you stop acting like a wage slave and start becoming your own master by investing in corporations, you WILL be treated like a wage slave. Thirdly, how are the latest corporate scandals President Bush's fault, when the worst of these abuses were started under (and even abetted by!) the CLINTON Administration? Hale Adams Life Member, Libertarian Party, so don't call me a Bush partisan. I didn't vote for him either!

Re:Supply+demand: Not only a good idea, it's the l

[Wudbaer]

Seriously, do your really think the demand is there for the available capacity? In five years? Ten?

Someday there hopefully will be... more people on the Internet, some new applications (but see below)... apparently the demand for bandwidth is still growing, but by far not as fast as anticipated.

What applications will drive this demand?

That is the question of questions. I think there has been no really compelling reason to get broadband Internet access apart from stuff a lot of people do not want to be there (at least not officially), like P2P, downloading warez and pron etc. or getting your daily Linux distro, which is also something most people don't give a damn about. I know a lot of people who could get affordable broadband Internet access (ADSL has become quite attractive in Germany in the last 1-2 years) but just stay with their old ISDN or even analogue lines because they don't know what to do with the bandwidth. The same problem with the new mobile standards like UMTS: Noone really has a useful idea what to offer via the additional bandwidth people really will want to use and pay good money for.

So everyone is waiting for the saviour: A new, compelling and veeery bandwidth-hungry killer app.

Great ...

[Fished]

In the article, they mention another 28% layoff coming. I've managed to survive 4 of these now - how much longer can I last? Has anyone seen more concrete information on this layoff?

Re:Great ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The probability of NOT being among those was (1-0.28)^4. Thus you have a 73 % chance of being hit... if my math is correct.

Solve the Crisis Now -- Buy More, Citizens!!

[madmagic]

Let's see if I've got this straight... since one of the telecom/ net giants is in major trouble and soon may not be able to provide reliable services to their customers -- the wisest decision those poor customers can make to protect themselves, is to make sure they purchase alternative bandwidth.

What an amazing way to promote sales. My hat's off to the spin doctor who came up with this one. :)

Patrick

p.s. Gotta love that 'Act of God' mention in the article too. "It wasn't due to any human error -- it was all a supernatural manifestation!!"

and the band played on...

[aerojad]

So the company goes under because of what it does, and we get punished because we *gasp* use a service.

Love how this all works...

What?

[connsmythe96]

Worldcom isn't going bankrupt because it was trying to keep up with the demand from users. It's going bankrupt because it was poorly managed, just like ENRON. They used edceptive accounting to hide the fact that they were losing a lot of money.

Re:What?

[/dev/trash]

They used edceptive accounting to hide the fact that they were losing a lot of money.

And why were they losing money? Because they had lost customer demand.

Our ISP went Chapter 11

[dloyer]

Our co-location provider, AboveNet was bought by MetroMedia and then when Chapter 11. The sales office stoped responding to calls, we never received any communication from MetroMedia of what would happen to our service. To protect ourselves, we had to build a mirror of all of our critical services with another ISP. We plan to leave AboveNet as soon as our contract runs out. Their service sucked even before they went under. Bad service and attitudes top to bottom. I cant count how many times their network went offline. Between our two mirror sites, we are now able to survive shutdown of either datacenter with no impact on users.

Every node should carry some load, eh?

[rdmiller3]

It may be time to develop more of the qualities that the Internet Protocol was supposed to make possible:

• Routing around network faults
• Network traffic load sharing
• Distributed network management

It's time, I think, that radially managed services (like DNS) should be replaced with more P2P-like services where everyone talks to their network neighbors and where there is no "root" server nor critical list of top-tier servers.

Every node should be capable of participating in the same ways; searching, routing, serving...

Okay, so it may not be as "set in stone" as the URLs we've grown used to... but does anyone reading this remember when URLs didn't appear in SuperBowl ads? It wasn't so bad, y'know.

-Rick

The myth is high demand

[glrotate]

The New Economy was all hot air. Their is no demand.

Geesh! The things the RIAA will do ....

[Anonymous Coward]

just to stop a little file trading. Don't pop the cork just yet though Hilary, Dey'll be bok!

creative accounting doesn't lose money

[Trepidity]

Creative accounting merely hides losses by basically listing a bunch of income that isn't really there. The actual money loss comes from somewhere else, such as selling bandwidth for too cheap.

Re:creative accounting doesn't lose money

[psocccer]

You're half right. They did use creative accounting to hide losses, but they weren't booking it as income as I understand it. Instead they claimed expeneses as assets, which has the effect of making the spending look like they are retaining something. The reason it's bad is because expenses are considered just that, expenses and you pay out money. Assets are a little different in that you may have paid 2000 for that new P4 workstation, but if you were hurting for cash in theory you could sell it and get some of that money back, unlike paying for example your power bill, where after you've spent the money you have nothing to sell and retain nothing of value. By accounting for expenses as an asset, you would depreciate it so that it doens't hit your bottom line until the end of the products usefullness, at which point you can't sell it anymore and it's not really worth anything. But for big purchases, it can make a business show it's having a profit instead of a huge loss at the time when it bought the equipment.

Re:creative accounting doesn't lose money

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual money loss comes from somewhere else, such as selling bandwidth for too cheap.

The only way to sell any commodity (e.g. - bandwidth), "for too cheap" is by paying 'way too much for it in the first place'. Until the bandwidth creators (i.e. ATT et`el) are forced (either via regulation or eventually market forces) to sell it at a reasonable wholesale rate, there is no hope for a viable everlasting internet. The mass consumer market is already being severely overcharged - especially for broadband, and its only going to get worse in the not so distant future.

The problem is that provider management is 'far too stupid' to realize that they are overpaying for bandwidth by nearly an order of magnitude. ATT and her horde are laughing all of the way too the bank.

Re:creative accounting doesn't lose money

[photon317]

The losses did *not* come from providing bandwidth at all. Worldcom's data business was the most profitable (in percentage of gross sales anyways) arm of the company. They lost in Long Distance Telephone, and other dying markets they were too heavily vested in.

IMHO, if Bernie had stopped his acquistion madness just after grabbing UUNet/MFS, and avoided going on and buying MCI, the company could have flourished. It was the acquisition on MCI that killed them. Sure, it brough InternetMCI, but it also brought way more than it's fair share of baggage.

You can even see Worldcom backpdeal on the MCI deal once they figured it out, as they took the crappy areas of the company and tried to spin them out as a tracking stock called MCIT (as it was largely former MCI business units). But the market didn't buy it and just kept hammering the main WCOM stock anyways.

fraud to *hide financial problems*

[Trepidity]

The fraud was to hide financial problems -- they hid losses and overstated profits to make it look like they were making money when they were actually losing it. So this can't be the cause of their problems; it merely hid them so everyone else didn't think they had problems (thus inflating their stock price). If they had been more carefully accounted, they'd still be losing money, we just would've known about it as it was happening, instead of finding out years later.

As for whether they've been losing money because of over-regulation or because of some other reason, I don't know.

Re:fraud to *hide financial problems*

[crawling_chaos]

We wouldn't be looking at a sudden, severe problem without the fraud. If they had honestly reported their earnings along the way, they would never have acquired so many companies and would not have as large a segment of the Internet backbone as they do today.

WCOME was a shell game, a gigantic Ponzi scheme that left a few executives and investors rich and screwed everybody else. More regulation by the SEC would have nipped the problem in the bud.

Act of god!?

[mikewas]

Act of God!? It's Act of Management.

I certainly hope that some of the affected companies go directly to the WorldCom managers and their accountants to recoup their loss. Hold them personally accountable and maybe other execs will start running companies for long-term results.

The only thing better would be if those of us who lost jobs, retirement, 401k and/or stock options would get to redistribute the money the execs stole from the company amongst themselves!

Re:Act of god!?

[GlassUser]

Act of God!? It's Act of Management.

In the eyes of management, there's no difference.

+1 Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

GOATS

Goats are very friendly animals, and seem to crave attention and companionship from people. They love to play, and sometimes will spend as much time as you want playing. If you want to do this, get a goat with no horns! The larger breeds are about the same size as a large dog, so they are not too convenient to mount. They can be trained to lay down, so you can put them in bed, but will not take to this as fast as a dog.

A goat can be a great screw if you are not too well hung. Their pussies look quite small, but a lot of tonguing will open them up, and they don't have the bone like a dog. The entire genital area of the goat has very velvety skin, and a lot of time can be spent licking her pussy, asshole and the underside of her tail. I have found that you can get your cock in OK, but the goat does not seem to have a very deep pussy. I tend to bottom out.

Goats shit a lot, but the turds are small and hard and you can just brush them out of the way.

The sphincter muscles of the goat are fairly weak, so you can easily butt fuck them too. (That is, of course, if they let you. Consent is everything in animal love.) Personally, I prefer the black Nubian breed. What a sexy looking animal!

Be sure to do proper housing for your goat. They can jump a great distance. I've seen one clear a six foot fence from a standing start.

SHEEP

When someone who is not into the scene hears about sex with animals, almost invariably they think of sheep. So many shepherds have told so many stories over the years. My experience tells me that this reputation is probably well deserved. Their main disadvantage is their size... they are not convenient to mount. They are fairly easy to get into bed.

Once a sheep thinks she is trapped, most of them will give up and stop any struggling. Every time, I am concerned about that and it is a little distracting, because I do not wish to "trap" any animal for my own pleasure. Pleasure must be mutual for me to enjoy it. Anyway, sheep body shapes allow you to get them on their backs and fuck them belly to belly -- and kiss them while your at it!

Sheep tend to have burrs, stickers and other undesirable things in their coats. I recommend keeping them shorn. Even then, their wool produces a lot of lanolin, so you can expect to come away feeling a little oily.

The thing that really recommends the sheep is the pussy. It's as though it was specifically designed for bestiality minded guys. It is tight, wet, and seemingly bottomless. It's also a good pussy for eating. Don't worry if you are hung like a mule, the sheep will accommodate you just fine. Sheep don't have a very strong sphincter muscle, so you can easily fuck them up the ass also.

Worldcomm was just stupid

[chompz]

Like all the other telecomm companies - they were laying fiber which they expected to light in a few years, but still a large percentage of it is dark, and will not be lit anytime soon. Why? Because they all thought that demand for bandwidth would be increasing so fast that noone could keep up, but the rapid increase in demand never came. Sure, the p2p explosion created a small bump, but most of the serious p2p traffic was already there, just using different applications, like IRC. I wouldn't expect great financial things from anyone in the telecomm industry, unless they held thier breath while everyone else was gambling on laying fiber.

Yeah, the logic is there

[Anonymous Coward]

But the one of the original poster just does not compute. Price your bandwidth suitably. What problem is there? If there's a problem, then those people shouldn't have been allowed to run a company in the first place?

MY PERSONAL SOURCES TELL ME

[NoData]

My girlfriend is a senior analyst at WCOM...(I'll wait for the peals of derisive laughter to die down, and then continue...)

She sez: Overproduction of data infrastructure (fibre, etc.) may be. It's arguable whether forecasts during the dotcom explosion warranted the type of capital spending WCOM engaged in or not. NEVERTHELESS, this overcapacity has NOTHING to do with WCOM's current situation. The current situation is purely a credit crisis.

WCOM may go bankrupt NOT because of inability to make money...but because its creditors are calling in their debt ($2.65B of it) all at once. That is all there is to it. And they're doing in response to an accounting fraud.

The fraud was simply the misbooking of expenses as capital. Period. WCOM did not have a cash flow problem before, they don't have one now. The fraud was NOT perpetuated to make the company more money...this has never been an issue. It was simply an effort to keep stock price artificially ballooned---AND, what's most infuriating to WCOMers, is that IT FAILED to achieve its intended devious purpose. Stock price tanked anyway, along with the whole tech sector. It was a crime that never paid at any point.

Re:MY PERSONAL SOURCES TELL ME

[MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM]

"My girlfriend is a senior analyst at WCOM."

Will she be posing nude for Playboy like Enron's sluts did? I would like to see your girlfriend gagging on a hard throbbing cock like the bitch she is.

Re:MY PERSONAL SOURCES TELL ME

[SnMcLmn]

"Will she be posing nude for Playboy like Enron's sluts did? I would like to see your girlfriend gagging on a hard throbbing cock like the bitch she is" well I can say one thing not true for most /.ers, at least he has a girlfriend.

Why? And Who?

[MrIcee]

Why is all the fibre dark? Because the last mile problem still hasn't been solved (getting the fiber into the home).

Why did worldcom go down? Because of bad management and siphoning off money and cooking the book. They need to go to jail for a very long time.

WHO will bail worldcom (and the others out)?

• The government might write a huge trillion dollar check to worldcom to keep their networks afloat, if worldcom agrees to pay back some of it into the republican national party... the rest the crooked execs can pocket, wait 6 months, then go bankrupt again.
• Microsoft... they have enough cash, and look what they would end up with. The largest 1st tier network in the world, AOL dependency, MCI and other phone networks. Geeze, and I'll bet that billy goats would even be willing to throw a few billion at the republican national party if they look the other way during the purchase.

As the SMUDGEreport.com says.... Harmless nut John Walker Lindh in jail for 20 years, Enron (and worldcom) execs who collapsed US economy walking around free.

Re:Why? And Who?

[Catbeller]

Ah, if only I hadn't posted, I'd mod you up.

He ain't no troll, he's telling the truth.

BTW, if associating with the Taliban is a crime, why aren't the Texans who were negotiating with them last summer for the pipeline deal in jail? Those same good ol' boys threatened military action if the Tallys didn't cough up permission -- a case could be made that the Taliban thought they were going to be invaded anyway, so then told us to go &*#$ ourselves when some nitwit psycho was holed up there.

Oh. the leader of the delegation said only one of them threatened military action, so it didn't count. Sigh. That bastard is, in my view, responsible for the deaths of thousands.

BTW, those Texas boys are getting their pipeline across Afghanistan. And oil companies are waiting to get the oil fields of Iraq for free really really soon now.

John Walker laid in a steel case with a bullet wound for three days for the crime of being there. The Enron/Worldcom/Haliburton bastards will sip Mai Tais on a beach for the rest of their lives.

Oh, the reason John pleaded guilty to not reading the news (NOT being an enemy soldier) is because the case had been so prejudiced by Ashcroft and the Prez, and so locked up by being tried on the east coast, that taking the chance of winning meant death if he lost. The guvmint's case was in danger of collapsing from lack of evidence, but they knew that a jury would not care - so the poor bastard is going down as a traitor for dealing with the Tallys, whilst the pipeline boys smoke cigars and wait for their billionsto start rolling in, paid for courtesy of the U.S. Guvmint and George Bush Jr.

Who said life ain't hysterically funny?

Ever stop to think the connections?

[Anonymous Coward]

Worldcom and KPNQwest. That's a big load of fiber. Who's going to own it? Gimme E, gimme C, gimme H, gimme E, ...

Is demand really increasing that fast?

[AnotherBlackHat]

If "demand" is the amount of money people are willing to pay per bit, then demand is increasing at an amazing pace.

But if "demand" is the total amount of money that people are willing to spend on internet access,
then demand is only increasing moderately.

Consider dialup vs. ADSL.
Dialup is about $20 a month. ADSL is about $45.
Last year, some people switched from Dialup to ADSL. But most did not.
And if you look at the ones that did switch, you find that most of them had a second phone line,
(about $15 a month) which they terminated when they got ADSL.
IOW, the demand in terms of money spent increased less than 20%.

My prediction for the future is that demand will continue to be inflexible,
(i.e. people aren't going to pay more than $20-$30 a month for connectivity)
and the cost of supply will continue to decrease at about the same rate it does now.

End result: every year, the total dollars spent will be approximately the same, but the amount of bandwidth we get for those dollars will increase. A larger percentage of the internet will be carried by a smaller number of providers. Worldcom is just the first in a long series of companies that will go under as the market shifts to more and more efficient providers.

-- this is not a .sig

Creative Reality Accounting Practices (CRAP)

[Stephen Samuel]

CRAP has a few problems associated with it:

• It is used to justify bad business decisions.. Decisions that wouldn't be made if the company is losing money, but (in some cases) are required to keep up the facade of plentiful income
• By many accounts, CRAP's purpose is to justify giving massive stock options and other bonuses to company execs (see above).
  e.g. the $400M loan to WorldCom's outgoing leader would have never been doable if the true state of the books had been known.
• It changes the nature of the stock market sellout.
  • Everybody bails out at the shock -- trying to sell out before the stock completely craters. This includes traditional risk-takers.
  • Because everybody knows that the sh*t has hit the fan, nobody is willing to buy back in until the fan has stopped spinning.. By that time, the stock is worth $0.007 and vultures are picking off the juicy bits.
  • This is in contrast to a truth-based selloff in which the nature of the share holders slowly changes from cautious stock holders to more risk-willing types. Stock prices would still go down -- but in a slow, controled manner. A large company in dire straights can sometimes survive for decades under such conditions (in the expectation/hopes of an eventual turnaround).
    IBM is an example of a company that managed such a turnaround.
• With the stock cratered (and stock being the common backing for many loans, nobody is willing to provide interim financing. With no interim financing, the company will never have the cash to survive to better times.

The lies and deception did more than just cover up a problem, they justified even more bad decisions and then cratered the public's faith in the company and it's leadership such that the company is now doomed to oblivion.

(-: The acronym CRAP is copyright (c)2002 Stephen Samuel. The method for creating it is Patent Pending. :-)

Update: WorldCom to go bankrupt tomorrow

[Animats]

Reuters reports that the debt-for-equity swap deal for bondholders has fallen through, and a bankruptcy filing is expected tomorrow.

Reuters: "WorldCom is expected to file for bankruptcy on Sunday after a $3.85 billion accounting debacle forced it into the nation's largest insolvency, the sources said. It would eclipse the Chapter 11 filing by collapsed energy trader Enron Corp. as the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history."

Re:Update: WorldCom to go bankrupt tomorrow

[esarjeant]

Read the next sentence: "[it] would not include a pre-negotiated debt-for-equity swap as some bondholders had hoped".

Not good. This could spell the end of WorldCom; start shopping for your next service provider or you're a WorldCom customer!

Thieves, not the free market, caused them to fail

[defile]

Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

That depends.. can profitable telecommunications companies (MCI) resist being acquired by bullshit corporations (Worldcom) who just want to leech money and discard them like last night's whore?

Freenet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Will Freenet be affected by Worldcom going under, or will Freenet's intelligent routing/caching be able to compensate for such a large failure?

Consider the source...

[Anonymous Coward]

KPNQuest is old news.

There's a strong motivation to spread a blanket of FUD so we all heave a great sigh of relief when Microsoft plays "white knight" and buys UUNET.

Basic Economics?

[peterdaly]

I may be off on some wacko train of thought, but here is my economics lession for today for slashdot.

1. Capacity doubles every 100 days
2. Demand doubles every 356 days (estimate based on msnbc quote a couple nights ago)
3. "Customer" cost stays the same, helping to keep demand growing at a pace well below capacity growth. (Have you priced T1's recently? In my area, they are $1500/month)

Supply = way up
Demand = about the same

You do the math. An "supplier implosion point" is bound to be reached following that supply/demand/price curve.

-Pete

So what's the alternative?

[Astin]

If the underlying network is controlled by a handful of large corporations, and they can't keep up with the bandwidth demands without losing money, what's the alternative? They can charge more as the requirements increase, but that will effect the consumer side of it in the end. Corporations and companies that use large amounts of bandwidth will have to pay more, and those costs will have to be passed on down the line, until Joe User is paying through the nose. Not to mention the effects on home users who could see their subscription prices skyrocket as the costs are passed on to them to connect.

There's only so much the consumer will bear before either switching methods (back to dial-up, less usage) or switching off. Problem is the power users out there (and I think most of /. falls under that category) will complain and demand their cheap, uncapped access.

So, if large corporations are vulnerable to bankruptcy and the network suffers because of this, there are only two options that I can see to provide a more stable situation. The first is government control of the networks. I know there's a collective cringe when that's suggested, but as the Internet grows, so does the need for support. Roads, public transit, electricity, hydro, sewage, etc, are all subsidised or controlled by government agencies and paid for through taxes. So does an Internet tax get added to all connections? There's a gas tax and a car tax that goes towards road maintenance after all. I know this is practically taboo to talk about, but in the end, the upkeep of the Internet's infrastructure is an enormous cost that has to be covered to maintain a quality of service.

The other option is of course the polar opposite to government control - community networks. Be it shared broadband, wireless networks, or some other situation, this too would be viable except for a small problem or two. I know how to set up a wireless access point, you know how to, and if we don't, we know where to find the HOW-TO and how to read it. We're the minority though. My 83 year-old neighbour who loves his computer and is always breaking it for the "upgrades" he tries to install would have no idea how get a wireless NIC installed let alone set up access to the neighbourhood. Are there enough geeks out there to make this viable in large urban centres? Outside of small pockets, I doubt it. On top of this there's no control over the points beyond the individual who has been gracious enough to permit access. If I decide to move and take my antenna with me, anyone who relies on that access is now without, and I don't care because I'm not about to leave a few hundred dollars worth of equipment lying around and then reinvest to set up again somewhere else. Add to this the fact that not everyone is gracious with access and there are a large number of leeches and script-kiddies out there who would abuse this sort of system, throwing the user-provider balance way out of whack. It's a nice thought, but still years, if not decades, away from being feasible.

It comes down to money in the end. Why should a corporation set up a redundant network in case another company goes kaput? Why should a company increase its capacity beyond what is absolutely necessary? This all costs far more than they're willing to spend, and they sure as hell aren't going to do it for the good of the public. In the end, SOMEBODY has to control and maintain the backbones and connections that we all take for granted.

Re:we get punished

[Anonymous Coward]

So the company goes under because of what it does, and we get punished

In some countries, government would act in the interest of the people and the crooks would get punished. Watch what happens here. Yep the people will get punished - it's payback for electing Bush.

Re:Supply and Demand vs. Topheavy Mismanagement

[plugger]

I wouldn't exactly say that high executive pay levels are the problem. Tying bonus payments to short-term share performance is a factor which makes dishonesty profitable for crooked management.

WorldCom lied about Internet traffic growth

[Animats]

The Economist reports that WorldCom inflated the traffic figures for UUNET, and that the whole "traffic doubles every 100 days" myth was a WorldCom fabrication. Other telecoms believed WorldCom's numbers and expanded to keep up with this phony growth. "WorldCom executives are thus more responsible for inflating the Internet bubble than anyone".

We need some honest network statistics. Slashdot readers are likely to have access to good data. Where can we get real Internet traffic stats?

Re:WorldCom lied about Internet traffic growth

[A.Gideon]

There's been a lot of traffic here (and elsewhere) on "how could this happen" and "what greedy SOBs they are." But I've a concern/issue/idea about which I see nobody talking.

Have I merely missed it?

Worldcom's been fudging numbers for how long? Worldcom has been buying Internet players for how long? Worldcom has been increasing peering requirements for how long?

From what I can see, Worldcom's creative accounting may have helped shape today's connectivity market. And where I write "shape", I mean "shrink". I don't refer to a reduction of bandwidth, but instead of competition.

And as Worldcom increased in market control, they made peering increasingly difficult/expensive. So routes, as others have mentioned here, have become interesting.

All of which may have come from Worldcom's cooking of the numbers.

So is there any possibility of a restored market? That is, might Worldcom be forced to disaggregate into the separate backbones, phone companies, network providers, etc. out of which it was formed? Or, at least, might the more recent purchases be returned to an independent life?

Re:WorldCom lied about Internet traffic growth

[Anonymous Coward]

We need some honest network statistics. Slashdot readers are likely to have access to good data. Where can we get real Internet traffic stats?

No such thing. But see TeleGeography and Andrew Odlyzko for stabs at it.

Are they going bankrupt from providing bandwidth?

[Catbeller]

Is Worldcom going bankrupt from providing bandwidth?

Nope. They make lots o' money from that.

They are going bankrupt because they got greedy. As did Enron, Haliburton, and all the others to come.

Remember, the mantra for the last ten years is to maximize shareholder value. To do so, firing your workers en masse is acceptable. Buying up synergystic businesses at silly prices is okay, too, because no matter what the true value of the company is (read: earnings per share), the perception of the stock market has become the ONLY ruler to measure performance.

So, to keep stock values high, they cooked the books, constantly, and eventually were caught.

The people who ran Worldcom made themselves millionaires. They will never see a real jail. They know this, they knew this.

Alan Greenspan himself, an #1 acolyte of Ayn Rand, has finally grown up and wrote the epitaph for unbridled corporate greed:

"An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community" as stock prices ballooned in the late 1990s, Greenspan said. "It's not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously."


If Greenspan can see it, then the end of this madness may be at hand. Sadly, my portfolio agrees as well.

Have these companies created mighty servers and bandwidth for all this trouble? Let's just say I'v spent 10 minutes trying to search for Greenspan's speech online, and I've given up because even on a cable modem, it's too slow, especially on a beautiful sunny day with lots to do outside.

AOL made billions, and should have been a rock-solid stock based on just being rich. But they blew it on acquisitions. Why? To make themselves even richer. To boost stock prices.

Greed, stupid dumbass greed, is causing the collapse of the world economy at the moment. Greed combined with an infectious contempt for the common welfare of all people as well, for greed was GOOD for the businessmen who profited. WE are going to pay for all this mess. We are going to see higher taxes to cover the shortfalls, to pay for the interest on all that lovely new debt incurred by tax cuts for rich people. Our standard of living is going to plumment for the benefit of a couple million rich connected people, one of whom was crowned President by his dad's judges.

Time to get a commune and set up to ride this era out. Peace out, baby :)

Congratulations

[Anonymous Coward]

Yesterday it was reported that the stock market has now fallen below the post Sept. 11 low.

Congratulations to the CPO's (Chief Plundering Officers) of America. The terrorists now kneel and worship pictures of you that they proudly display on the walls of their caves.

Re:Are they going bankrupt from providing bandwidt

[ainsoph]

A very interesting read to augment your argument is a book by Thomas Frank called "One Market Under God". It works hard to undermine and expose the myth of the free markets, and how we have been used as consumers and fed lies as to how the markets are the great liberator. As such, what does it matter how all of our jobs have been shipped overseas when we have the gift of the markets.

I watched Thatcher state that on a PBS documentry about Thatcher/Reagan and the great market liberation of the modern world.

I picked up this book right afterwards.

Remeber VA Linux anyone?

What happened to basic economics?

[BeBoxer]

Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?

Basic economics will tell you that this is not true. If the public had a need for growing bandwidth, the public would find a way to pay for it. I think part of the problem is that there isn't a need for growing bandwidth, which means that those companies that are financially structured such that they need growth are basically screwed.

Think about it, how does a little company like Worldcom buy a giant like MCI? By borrowing a shitload of money, that's how. How does get a loan that big? By borrowing against future revenues. Revenue which needs to be much larger than current revenue. Personally, I was amazed that Worldcom was able to buy MCI. I was amazed the regulators, bankers, etc. allowed it to happen.

I think Worldcom was doomed from the minute they bought MCI. It was a stupid deal which never should have been allowed to happen. The accounting frauds were only delaying the inevitable. The debt load on the combined Worldcom-MCI was so high that only in a perfect world where nothing went wrong and every financial projection was met would the company have survived. Meanwhile, in the real world where economic downturns happen, debt-laden companies like Worldcom are going to go down the tubes. Qwest will probably go down too for the same reasons, and I wouldn't be suprised to see AOL-TimeWarner go also. A lot of the big mergers and buyouts we saw in the last five years resulted in fragile, debt-laden corporations which aren't likely to last.

Address space portability/redundancy in general

[congiman]

the problem is address space.

If you have a web site that has less than a /21 of usable address space. (Yes folks thats 2048 addresses), you are forced to get your address space from an upstream provider.

The rules on arin: http://www.arin.net/policy/ipv4.html#multihomed

say that you need to show that you have used the equivalent of a /21 (2048 addresses) to get a /20 (4096 addressess).

With these 4096 addresses you can then have "portable addresses".

This means that you do not need to get your address space from an upstream provider.

So lets imagine these scenarios:

1: Single homed (1 connection) company.
Potential problems:
If upstream goes out of business, then you have nowhere to route to.
To migrate you have to get a BRAND new set of IPs for your company.
You better hope that your DNS TTL is low, and that all the places out there that cache it honor it and dont set it to something astronomically high. (this does occur).

2: Multi homed (N connection (n>1) company. (running BGP).
Potential Problems:
If upstream goes out of business, then you are still routing the address space of your out of business provider out your alternate provider. (good).
You are now at arin's mercy depending on what they do with the upstreams IP space. You can bet that they will not give you a small chunk to stay as who you are.
Other large providers may get crazy ideas and start filtering. Ie: Worldcom has not paid me so I filter their netblock as protest. (see PSI).
The best help in this scenario is your own problem, the small IP range you have. Since you have a small range, you then have a "more specific" route to your network. That will override most things as null routes etc. (it will not override ACLs though).

Pretty much this scenario will keep you on the net for longer, but, should the ISP you have your space from go down and stay down, you will need to migrate address space, dns ttl etc.

3: Multi homed (N connection (n>1) company at multiple datacenters.
Potential problems:
Hopefully you have different providers at each datacenter, or at least the address space is given to you by different providers.
In this case, the worst you lose is 1 datacenter. hopefully your site can maintain full traffic out of the remainder of your datacenters.
The biggest problem here is again DNS, but if you are doing multiple datacenters, you can probably remove 1 out of the picture realyl quick.

--- This does not end the list of possible scenarios, there are many others you can do. (for example: you could have address space from 2 carriers at the same datacenter, and multihome/map addresses from each carrier onto them. ) etc.

Now as to the likelyhood, when Exodus went bankrupt for a few months last year, they did not lose all their advertisments, and for the most part they did stay up. I'd guess this would be the same thing as uunet.

Also UUnet has much more traffic than exodus. that hopefully means that most ISPs will not kill their peering with uunet.

That being said, if the rats leave the ship called uunet, uunets peering will fall to low levels, and then ISPs will be able to contractually cancel with uunet. Possible, but not likely.

Now, if you wanted to have multiple carriers, and be truly independent of any of them going away, you have to show effective usage of a /21.

The good part of this is that you can split this into multiple sections:
ie: I have 2 datacenters, and each need a /22
ie: I have 4 datacenters, and each need a /23
you can seperate address space out to that, and show use of a /21, and hopefully get a /20. It helps if you show that you are growing.

ie: I have 2 datacenters, and each need a /22 but i'm opening another withing 6 months
ie: I have 4 datacenters, and each need a /23 but i'm opening another withing 6 months

What you have to look out for is that you probably should not advertise anything more than a /23 or you may get filtered by other ISPs.

for example take this recent nanog posting: http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg01717. html

Too many specific routes (/24 and above) add more work to peoples bgp routers, as such limiting accepted routes helps performance of the router, and keeps things more stable.

In summary,
if you have 1 carrier, get 2.
if you do not have enough address space, be prepared to have to change it.
If you have multiple datacenters you should be good to go, but with some exposure as you have to re-ip.
if you have enough address space to be portable, you are good to go.

Re:we get punished

[aerojad]

In some countries, government would act in the interest of the people While in other countries, as long as the people remain rich, the people can turn a blind eye to the government, and the government a blind eye to the people. Once the institutions that cause the wealth to be created begin to crumble, the public can do nothing but stare and the government still keep the blind eye turned, since in the end, they have all the money.

Yes.

[supabeast!]

"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

They could if the stockholders and the board would get it through their heads that telling executives to raise the stock price as fast as possible is a bad idea. Companies need to make money to survive, and this is why companies like Verizon and AT&T are doing just fine.

not to give anyone ideas, but... .

[devilmaycare]

What's potentially scary about this, as of yesterday, you could purchase a controlling share of Worldcom for about $10 million. Of course, the low price is due to the impending bankrupcy. However, as daunting as the billions of dollars of debt might seem, Worldcom is still a viable company for someone who might be able to refinance the debt. Know of any large software companies that have that much working cash available?? Who might want to own a significant percentage of the backbone? Think its too far fetched??

$10,000,000 US is not much for many entities or individuals - not just Gates. frankly, i'm more concerned about controlling interest of the company falling into the hands of those that intentionally want to inflict harm on the public... . farfetched?

huh, bandwidth caused them to go bankrupt?

[Glog]

For your info WorldCom did not go bankrupt because their customers demanded more bandwidth. This is the stupidest economic statement I have heard in a while. They went bankrupt because of sloppy management, corrupted accounting practices, and greed. Can't wait to see which one is next?!

Excuse me, you blame WHOM?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the underlying network is controlled by a handful of large corporations, and they can't keep up with the bandwidth demands without losing money...those costs will have to be passed on down the line, until Joe User is paying through the nose. Not to mention the effects on home users who could see their subscription prices skyrocket as the costs are passed on to them to connect.Problem is the power users out there (and I think most of /. falls under that category) will complain and demand their cheap, uncapped access

What is this - Worldcom exec astroturfing? So it's the consumers' fault, you suggest. Supply side economics need not apply here. By extension then, Microsoft (General Motors, etc.) must be about to go nipples-up, because everyone I know complains about their products and demands cheap uncapped access to them.

It comes down to money in the end

Now there your are correct. But it is the sociopath CPO (Chief Plundering Officers) of Americas' singled-minded persuit of personal wealth at the expense of everyone else, horrendous management practices, outright lies and unchecked greed that are to blame here. It is not the consumer's fault!

Re: the next boom

[King_TJ]

I think you make an excellent point about the "next boom" being related to bandwidth.

I've been predicting for years that lots of high-speed connectivity between people will be the "key" to any future innovation related to computers and communications devices.

I think the "pioneers" of high speed Internet suffered because they were trying to lay down the infrastructure before the "killer apps" were out there that made the general public interested in buying.

I'm not saying this killed Worldcom. Obviously, they died due to fraudulent accounting practices and poor planning.

In general though, the demand for high speed Internet for the consumer is primarily fueled by things they can't really promote. (Porn video streams, software piracy, and music/video piracy.) People using the net mainly to read/write email and do some research or shopping on the web don't feel compelled to spend $50 a month for DSL or a cable modem, as a rule. These activities were created around the 56K (and slower) modem connection - and "high bandwidth versions" of these services generally mean "pointless additional graphics and sounds that make it harder to get to what you need".

The next generation of people picking up the pieces from the dead/dying pioneer companies have a real shot at getting the bandwidth out there to the masses. If/when they start doing this at prices equivalent or cheaper to using analog phone lines w/modems - people will switch "just because you get more for the same money". Only then will creative uses for all the bandwidth really start popping up.

Gateway's apparent lack of redundancy

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at this in usatoday.com:
PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) -- Computer giant Gateway has been hit with a $3.6 million jury verdict for a wrong number that flooded another company's toll-free telephone line with calls from thousands of angry Gateway customers. The number belongs to Mo' Money, a Pensacola business that manufactures and distributes promotional items with company logos, including T-shirts, caps, gym bags and jackets. A federal jury awarded the damages to Mo' Money on Wednesday.
The url to the complete story is:

• http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2002-07-19-gatew ay-number_x.htm

The part about the "thousands of angry customers" got my attention. What, given a perfectly good Gateway machine with Windows XP, and they can't get it to do what they want?
It's always the same in the pc vs public world.
(as usual, you'll have to fix the url to remove the space between the "w" and "a" in "gateway". IMHO this is a bug in the /. posting setup.)

Yes...

[CrazyDuke]

"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"

Yes, the solutions are called honesty and integrity. Too bad this seems to be an alien idea these days in corporate America...

Open Source Development HOW-TO by poopbot

[adexonq]

Credits: onby

1. Introduction

As everyone knows, Open Source software is the wave of the future. With the market share of GNU/Linux and *BSD increasing every day, interest in Open Source Software is at an all time high.

Developing software within the Open Source model benefits everyone. People can take your code, improve it and then release it back to the community. This cycle continues and leads to the creation of far more stable software than the 'Closed Source' shops can ever hope to create.

So you're itching to create that Doom 3 killer but don't know where to start? Read on!

2. First Steps
The most important thing that any Open Source project needs is a Sourceforge page. There are tens of thousands of successful Open Source projects on Sourceforge; the support you receive here will be invaluable.

OK, so you've registered your Sourceforge project and set the status to '0: Pre-Thinking About It', what's next?

3. Don't Waste Time!

Now you need to set up your SourceForge homepage. Keep it plain and simple - don't use too many HTML tags, just knock something up in VI. Website editors like FrontPage and DreamWeaver just create bloated eye-candy - you need to get your message to the masses!

4. Ask For Help

Since you probably can't program at all you'll need to try and find some people who think they can. If your project is a game you'll probably need an artist too. Ask for help on your new Sourceforge pages. Here is an example to get you started:

"Hi there! Welcom to my SorceForge page! I am planing to create a Fisrt Person Shooter game for Linux that is going to kick Doom 3's ass! I have loads of awesome ideas, like giant robotic spiders! I need some help thouh as I cant program or draw. If you can program or draw the tekstures please get in touch! K thx bye!"

Thousands of talented programmers and artists hang out at Sourceforge ready to devote their time to projects so you should get a team together in no time!

5. The A-Team

So now you have your team together you are ready to change your projects status to '1: Pre-Bickering'. You will need to discuss your ideas with your team mates and see what value they can add to the project. You could use an Instant Messaging program like MSN for this, but since you run Linux you'll have to stick to e-mail.

Don't forget that YOU are in charge! If your team doesn't like the idea of giant robotic spiders just delete them from the project and move on. Someone else can fill their place and this is the beauty of Open Source development. The code might end up a bit messy and the graphics inconsistant - but it's still 'Free as in Speech'!

6. Getting Down To It

Now that you've found a team of right thinking people you're ready to start development. Be prepared for some delays though. Programming is a craft and can take years to learn. Your programmer may be a bit rusty but will probably be writing "hello world" programs after school in no time.

Closed Source games like Doom 3 use the graphics card to do all the hard stuff anyhow, so your programmer will just have to get the NVidia 'API' and it will be plain sailing! Giant robot spiders, here we come!

7. The Outcome

So it's been a few years, you still have no files released or in CVS. Your programmer can't get enough time on the PC because his mother won't let him use it after 8pm. Your artist has run off with a Thai She-Male. Your project is still at '1: Pre-Bickering'...

Congratulations! You now have a successful Open Source project on Sourceforge! Pat yourself on the back, think up another idea and do it all again! See how simple it is?

- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot

OJJcCkcgrm Post #319

Folks, get out yer modems

[PD]

Get out your modems, and install uucp on your boxes! I have a feeling that the collapse of the Internet backbones is going to be a wonderful thing.

less bandwidth means:

-less spam
-web designers won't use flash anymore
-companies will realize that the Internet is NOT a good place to do marketing

Worldcom owns Digex..

[Frank of Earth]

.. which is a big hosting farm. We have all our servers [30+] hosted there. If Worldcom goes under, Digex might also, which would really suck.

I think it would be easier trying to buy our own servers on eBay than transitioning to another hosting vendor.

Re:Supply and Demand vs. Topheavy Mismanagement

[Anonymous Coward]

Easy buckaroo Sprint is not part of Worldcom. There not going chapter 11.

Slashdot address space?

[silentbozo]

Why not gang a whole bunch of people together and just get a block from ARIN? Sure, we have to pay a fee every year, but at least we'll be in control of the block.

On a different note, does anyone know why we have to kowtow to ARIN? It hardly seems any more benevolent than the ICANN folks...

the possible truth behind the phony shortage

[Anonymous Coward]

you might want to take a look at Keven Maney's recent column
http://www.usatoday.com/money/columns/mane y/2002-0 7-10-maney.htm
He details the relationships among Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Level3's Crowe, and WorldCom's Sidgemore and Ebbers. He's a little off the track, but I think that he's got the right players. My take is that they've taken a page from the Enron playbook. They will bankrupt WorldCom and let Level3 buy the UUNET backbone. This will allow Level3 to function as a front for the RBOC's without the burden of FCC regulations, giving the Baby Bells access to the backbone at favorable rates and at the same time eliminating WorldCom from competition in the LD telephony market. This will also allow Level3 to function for the RBOC's the way that gas pipeline company functioned for Enron in Califorinia, allowing it to squeeze out competition while the RBOC's sit back and adjust their halos. Independants will be put out of business; but what is worse, the flow of information will also be controlled.
Ok. now all of you can accuse me of being a conspiracy nut. But remember, you heard it here first

Re:Are they going bankrupt from providing bandwidt

[Minkey Brines]

Nice article!

Re:Are they going bankrupt from providing bandwidt

[derubergeek]

Man, has someone ever indoctrinated you. A little too much time spent in college perhaps?

Why is Worldcom in this mess? Because they have been encouraged to please their shareholders at the cost of their core business vision.

Who's watch did this happen under? Can you say "Are you better off now than you were 8 years ago"?

Who's going to clean it up? Probably not anyone in power right now. The Democrats are too busy looking for campaign mud to sling to actually do their job. The Republicans are too busy fending off the Democrats, attempting to fight a war, and watching out for their business buddies to do anything about it.

Ain't gonna get better soon....if Shakespeare had been born later he might have said "First thing we do, let's kill all the politicians".

dU

Accounting rules too complicated to monitor?

[Tablizer]

(* Alan Greenspan himself, an #1 acolyte of Ayn Rand, has finally grown up and wrote the epitaph for unbridled corporate greed [msnbc.com]: "An infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community" as stock prices ballooned in the late 1990s, Greenspan said. "It's not that humans have become any more greedy than in generations past. It is that the avenues to express greed had grown so enormously." *)

Perhaps it may be time to think about dumping the accounting steps. You judge a company simply by their dividends and product popularity. That way they don't have to provide statements about what is going on *internally* and have a bunch of complicated reporting rules which most investors can't make heads or tails of anyhow.

US vs. Euro vs. Global Telecoms Problems

[billstewart]

Worldcom, L3, Global Crossing, and anybody else who built out big fiber networks got caught because the technology for multiplexing lots of very fast connections on a fiber finally caught up with the market. Back in 1990 or 1991 I heard a talk from somebody at MCI predicting we'd have problems like that, though back in those days we were worried about the failure mode of "Cheap bandwidth, smart PBXs -> customers build their own phone networks and undercut the telcos" as a likely method of killing the cash cow, rather than the internet-speed version of the problem.

European telcos were hit by this, partly because they'd gotten away with charging huge amounts of money for small connections for years, and all of a sudden they could be out-competed, but they had another serious problem: They'd believed all the market hype about wireless and spent billions of euros on auctions for government licenses to allow them to run the next-generation wireless technology, when in fact the revenue just wasn't there, so they bankrupted themselves. Unfortunately, after the first auction collected a few billions for the lucky government running it, everybody else got into the act, and the wireless companies all believed that they *had* to pay up, because otherwise they wouldn't get their piece of the pie, and besides, everybody else had mortgaged their futures so *they* presumably knew what they were doing and knew that the marketing analysts were correct. Unlike the Internet market, where dogfood-on-line.com could fail and only bother the employees, stockholders, and venture capitalists plus a few suppliers and their loyal customer base, this was a much larger amount of money (I think I read that the totals were about $35B, more than all the Silicon Valley VC money during the boom) this upfront tax on vaporware trashed a lot of companies providing critical infrastructure for the continent, and dragged down most of the European economy's productivity by taking otherwise useful money that might have funded real business activities and pouring it down the drain.

Re:US vs. Euro vs. Global Telecoms Problems

[mtest]

"Worldcom, L3, Global Crossing, and anybody else who built out big fiber networks got caught because the technology for multiplexing lots of very fast connections on a fiber finally caught up with the market."

I think that carrier's problem is that they ovelooked the local loop; although there's a lot of unused bandwith on the copper to the homes I don't hear anybody complaining about the bandwidth glut on copper; I also don't hear any baby bell going bankrupt (ok, some people talk about Qwest; but Qwest in my opinion is one of the smartest baby bells in handling the local loop; it hasn't anything to do with you thinking that their service sucks). Why isn't anybody complaining? Because you have a paying customer on that line. However, carrier's customer is beyond that local loop.
The fact is that you need a customer in order to have revenue; local loop is in my opinion a natural monopoly so if the customer is yours the only thing stopping you from building a network and providing the service is business stupidity (ex: @Home providing internet access on cable companies' networks). This kind of stupidity is not going to last forever; solutions to this? Level3 went into software; AOL bought TW (well, they got more than they bargained for).
People say that the telecom doom is due to dot com doom; and why is that? In my opinion the problem is that those dot coms were like piramydal schemes: at some point the number of new customers didn't grew at the same pace due to local loop providers seeing their own stupidity: why should they put money in someone else's pocket? Why shouldn't they have their own network? Unfortunately, network building takes time and money and at this moment nobody wants to tell investors that they are putting fiber into the ground. However, in the telecom doom there will be plenty of cheap networks...
At this moment, in my opinion the best positioned in the industry are Cable&Wireless and Qwest; unless something goes terribly wrong (accounting issues etc.) all the others players should get in similar situation or go down. Bundling rules! (not that I like it)
Of course, there's also wireless; but this technology has a few things to sort out before it will be ready for massive deployment (first of all there's still quite some research still going on).

Greenspan

[Luyseyal]

Greenspan sits atop one of the highest apexes of unelected power in the world, a tool and author of vast economic policy. He's a hard core monetarist. Whatever lip service he pays to the free market, his main job is micromanaging the money supply at the official behest of the US government.

Is this sort of meddling in the market really what a n "acolyte of Rand" would do? I don't think so.

-l

p.s., none of this has to do with whether I agree with the meddling, just taking issue with your accusation.

Re:Greenspan

[Catbeller]

Greenspan is not just an acolyte of Ayn Rand metaphorically, he actually hung out with her. It's not an accusation, it's the simple truth.

The Fed, Alan Greenspan, and Ayn Rand

Alan Greenspan, Cultist?

The Motley Fool: Who is Alan Greenspan?

quote:
In the 1950s, Greenspan, who had been steeped in the free-market skepticism of John Maynard Keynes along with most economists of his generation, became an acolyte of Ayn Rand. Rand's philosophy of what she termed "enlightened selfishness" bears considerable similarity to today's libertarianism. Greenspan met Rand through his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell. Although Greenspan's friends and colleagues suggest that his relationship with Rand's Objectivism was more of a flirtation than a real commitment, Greenspan remained part of the philosopher's circle until at least the late 1960s. In addition to writing for The Objectivist, a rather surprising essay he wrote in defense of the gold standard -- surprising in light of his later work, that is -- appeared in the Rand-edited 1967 collection of essays Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Still, something about Greenspan's obvious pragmatism and political instincts fits poorly with the uncompromising sense of purity that characterizes Rand's heroes. If Greenspan ever was an Objectivist, his years in Washington have probably made him reconsider.

Businessweek: The Chairman as Political Animal

quote:
RAND FAN. By his mid-20s, Greenspan turned from music to economics--and the virulently antigovernment views of philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand. Greenspan became a regular in her salon in the 1950s and remained in touch until her death in 1982.

Randies may think of Greenspan as an apostate today, but the Chairman still thinks of himself as a Randite, if his reading preferences are any indication. And it's not hard to get become an apostate of Objectivism -- dissent ain't tolerated much in that salon.

Mayhap Greenspan deviated from Rand because he's actually working in the real world.

The Fed may be anti-democratic in nature, but thank god for that, or we would have collapsed into something resembling the Weimar Republic in the 80's.

Re:Greenspan

[Luyseyal]

The Fed may be anti-democratic in nature, but thank god for that, or we would have collapsed into something resembling the Weimar Republic in the 80's

well, let's not put the cart before the horse. Who's to say the policy of the Feds didn't in fact lead to the SnL scandals? convince Reagan that grotesque military spending was good?

I'm just skeptical of it.

Besides, there's a reason why USG hasn't sold off Fort Knox. The partial reserve system is borrowing against Fate, cosigned by Providence. It's only a matter of time... Scare people enough and they will run the banks and that will be the end of the Fed, lock, stock, and barrel.

-l

Re:Are they going bankrupt from providing bandwidt

[Catbeller]

Man, has someone ever indoctrinated you. A little too much time spent in college perhaps?
Why is Worldcom in this mess? Because they have been encouraged to please their shareholders at the cost of their core business vision.

Who's watch did this happen under? Can you say "Are you better off now than you were 8 years ago"?

It happened under Bush. Bush, Bush, Bush, Bush. And before that, it happened under Reagan and Bush's daddy. And during Clinton, it happened under the Contract on America lead by the sex-crazed Gingrich and all the other far-right warriors, as Clinton fought them every inch of the way. He did it so well they had to try a putsch to get rid of him. They failed.

This mess has been in evolution since the late seventies, and kicked into high gear in the early ninties. Demos certainly are hardly distinguiushable in their support for big business. To survive in the right-wing era, they have forgone their classic pro-little guy stance in order to obtain financing, otherwise we really would be in a one-party system. They would have been removed from office one-by-one by infinite money.

But to compare Clinton to Reagan/Bush/Bush is silly to anyone who actually reads. Clinton could be regarded as the best Republican president since Lincoln; he balanced. The RBB axis does not balance, does not even pretend to balance. They wanted the neocon agenda, which meant removing regs on relationships between auditors and the audited, removing the rights of stockholders to sue larcenous directors (rein in those evil lawyers!), removing ownership restrictions of mass media, annihilation by underfunding of environment oversight, and worst of all, installing the foxes to guard the henhouses. The nitwit in charge of the SEC, Pitt, was the chief lobbist for the accounting industry! He actually wrote a paper instructing businesses to destroy documents on a regular basis to hamper investigations! Powell of the FCC is simply going limp. The EPA is dead.

Clinton balanced the budget by making hard choices. We now have the same liars we had in the '80's in charge again, and we have been robbed us of trillions, TRILLIONS.

I don't hear the Bush asking for Social Security to be privatized again. Can you imagine the trillions that would have been funneled off into the financial sector??

Who's going to clean it up? Probably not anyone in power right now. The Democrats are too busy looking for campaign mud to sling to actually do their job. The Republicans are too busy fending off the Democrats, attempting to fight a war, and watching out for their business buddies to do anything about it.

We are not at war. We are blowing up rocks to make ourselves feel better, and not incidentally to get a pipeline across Afghanistan.

Only Congress can declare war.

If we wanted war against the countries that spawned Bin Laden, we would be bombing Saudi Arabia right now. The terrorists were from there. But for some reason, we're blowing up another country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

War my tired fingers. This is an Orwellian power grab. We are at war, don't question anything, we're too busy... while somehow finding time to drape naughty statues, investigate whorehouses in New Orleans, fly around the country raising a billion dollar campaign fund...

Ain't gonna get better soon....if Shakespeare had been born later he might have said "First thing we do, let's kill all the politicians".

Politics is nothing but the process by which three or more people resolve their differences without killing each other. If you kill all the politicians, somehow, you mean you kill everyone with the human intelligence to iron out a working government. What do you propose, one man one rule? We nearly have that now. It's always very popular.

Did you ever think that the creation of anti-"political" sentiment is a political tactic of high sophistication? That you are being duped yourself by adopting nihilism? Not that it isn't the most popular U.S. position -- the citizens of the U.S. have always hated their own representatives. Which explains a lot of our history, including how the unelected Boy King was given his throne without outrage from the governed.

By adopting a hatred of politics, you have have been removed from the board, and those who encourage such nihilism gleefully continue playing.

Don't hate them -- become them!