From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 1998 09:04:21 +0800
To: "Brown, R Ken" <cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: Evil Bandwidth Plot Exposed
In-Reply-To: <896C7C3540C3D111AB9F00805FA78CE2013F85CB@MSX11002>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981128000814.008f6cb0@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 04:40 AM 11/27/98 -0600, Brown, R Ken wrote:
>We're still getting clueless people forwarding us email virus hoaxes.
>Pen-Pal, Buddy Frogs, Good Times, whatever.
>
>And I just realised who has to be responsible!  Who has a motive for this
>"crime"?  These things do no-one any real harm, they just take up
>bandwidth.  Networks get saturated and maybe we have to buy more kit. It
>must be the router manufacturers. Maybe there is a secret team at Cisco or
>IBM generating new  hoaxes  to keep the email market growing.

A long time ago, in a network far far away, when there were wolves in Wales
and Netnews still mostly ran over UUCP instead of that newfangled Arpanet, 
and the Center of the Earth was either allegra or ihnp4, there were
some people who accused Bell Labs and probably in particular Mark Horton
of spreading Netnews as part of a plot by The Phone Company to increase
telephone usage, since more netnews volume meant more long-distance minutes.

(Everybody tried to avoid knowing what the phone bills for
allegra and ihnp4 _were_, because even internal funny-money creates
some responsibility if you know you're spending more than $1M/year of it :-)
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639