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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 04:59pm Mar 25, 2001 EST (#1490 of 1491)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

From my old 1995 edition of THE LAWYER'S GUIDE TO THE INTERNET by G.Burgess Allison op. cit.

" SPAM: Junk mail of the e-frontier kind. Spam is an unsolicited posting -- usually off topic -- sent to many discussion groups and private e-mail adresses at once. . . . .. . Advertisements, get rich quick scams, and political pleas -- anything that gets posted to more than a thousand discussion groups qualifies as off-topic and intrusive. Retaliatory e-weapons used by net.vigilantes include the mail bomb and the cancelbot. Whereas spam is one message sent to thousands or millions of addresses, a mail bomb sends thousands or millions of messages to one address (usually, that's enough to shut down the site that sent the spam). A cancelbot is programmed to check for and cancel any posting sent from a known spamming site.

The "military technology" of spamming has evolved some since 1995. But spamming still works. Especially if the box to send it is used once, and the responses are directed to a web site.

For a valid purpose, if it were done in an entirely honest and traceable way, few might object to the use of this technique to break through the over-elaborate barriers that sometime stand in the way of communication.

No doubt she'd refuse to do so, but the Queen of England would know how to do this, in a suffiently good cause, in a way that would get the desired attention, and do so without any reduction in her status. So could the leader of a nation state, if she or he knew how do do so gracefully, and with total directness.

Here's an example, among some others, of a fact -- in the new internet world, old barriers to communication are more permeable than before.

rshowalter - 05:06pm Mar 25, 2001 EST (#1491 of 1491)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Several hundred million people, world wide, might be reached, sorted into a number of groups.

If this was done in an effort to establish the truth of facts -- that might get past a good many "barriers to communication."

This is, of course, only one example, among a number. But, just as the nuclear weapons designed in the 1950's have new vulnerabilities, the barriers to communication, crafted many years ago, also have new vulnerabilities.

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