From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 1996 17:02:05 +0800
To: Dave Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Re: US Power Outages
Message-ID: <199608120525.WAA25154@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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At 06:15 PM 8/11/96 -0400, Dave Farber wrote:
>attempt to explain that blackout and how to prevent such. We have not
>progressed very far. The avalanche behavior of power systems is still not
>well understood and techniques to prevent such failures are not obvious.

It surprises me how little these systems appear to be monitored.
It took some hours for them to decide that the brush fire on the
California border didn't cause the system to shut down;
you'd think they'd know quickly that the subsystem shut itself down
or disconnected from the grid or whatever because of reason #17...

One of my concerns about the situation is that it's only a week
or two after Clinton's speech about how The Government needs to protect the
National Information Infrastructure for us.  I'm not paranoid enough
to think that they did it, but I'm sure that within a week we'll
see Al Gore or somebody making an NII Protection Agency speech
and Louis Freeh explaining that we need enhanced wiretap underwriting
to make sure that encryption-wielding hackers don't do it again.

>As someone who was married in NYC during the 65 blackout *happened at 1716
A former boss of mine was on his honeymoon cruise in the Caribbean
and pulled into scenic Havana harbor the day of the Revolution....

#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
# <A HREF="http://idiom.com/~wcs"> 	Defuse Authority!