"Bruce Sterling - The Hacker Crackdown" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

Foundation, a new and very odd interest group, fiercely dedicated to the
establishment and preservation of electronic civil liberties. The crack-
down, remarkable in itself, has created a melee of debate over electronic
crime, punishment, freedom of the press, and issues of search and
seizure. Politics has entered cyberspace. Where people go, politics
follow.

This is the story of the people of cyberspace.




13
B R U CE S T ER L I NG — TH E HAC KE R CR AC KD OW N NOT FOR COMMERCIAL USE
 PART ONE

Crashing the System
On January 15, 1990, AT&T's long-distance telephone switching sys-
tem crashed.


This was a strange, dire, huge event. Sixty thousand people lost their
telephone service completely. During the nine long hours of frantic
effort that it took to restore service, some seventy million telephone
calls went uncompleted.

Losses of service, known as "outages" in the telco trade, are a known and
accepted hazard of the telephone business. Hurricanes hit, and phone
cables get snapped by the thousands. Earthquakes wrench through
buried fiber-optic lines. Switching stations catch fire and burn to the
ground. These things do happen. There are contingency plans for them,
and decades of experience in dealing with them. But the Crash of
January 15 was unprecedented. It was unbelievably huge, and it
occurred for no apparent physical reason.


The crash started on a Monday afternoon in a single switching-station
in Manhattan. But, unlike any merely physical damage, it spread and
spread. Station after station across America collapsed in a chain reac-
tion, until fully half of AT&T's network had gone haywire and the
remaining half was hard-put to handle the overflow.


Within nine hours, AT&T software engineers more or less understood
what had caused the crash. Replicating the problem exactly, poring over
software line by line, took them a couple of weeks. But because it was
hard to understand technically, the full truth of the matter and its
implications were not widely and thoroughly aired and explained. The
root cause of the crash remained obscure, surrounded by rumor and
fear.