Aye, Telstra in it's days as a monopoly really sucked. How's this for a horror story. We used to run a BBS and decided to setup a rotary for all our lines so all our users could use the one phone number. Instead of routing all the calls to the rotary Telstra routed them to one of our secondary lines, so we ended up with one line for our users to call in on and all the other lines hanging idle. It made us look like complete fools and took ages for them to fix it. Loads of similar stories from friends who got into the ISP business, but I digress... bring on the competition.
How about something closer to CryptNet (?) in The Diamond Age (also by Neal Stephenson). Imagine hundreds or thousands of factoid users, wandering about all day through the city exchanging little packets of data. Sure, it'd take a tad longer for your data to get around, but it'd certainly scramble the path back to you.
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Aye, Telstra in it's days as a monopoly really sucked. How's this for a horror story. We used to run a BBS and decided to setup a rotary for all our lines so all our users could use the one phone number. Instead of routing all the calls to the rotary Telstra routed them to one of our secondary lines, so we ended up with one line for our users to call in on and all the other lines hanging idle. It made us look like complete fools and took ages for them to fix it. Loads of similar stories from friends who got into the ISP business, but I digress... bring on the competition.
How about something closer to CryptNet (?) in The Diamond Age (also by Neal Stephenson). Imagine hundreds or thousands of factoid users, wandering about all day through the city exchanging little packets of data. Sure, it'd take a tad longer for your data to get around, but it'd certainly scramble the path back to you.