email Crypto- third party

[Donald Ramsbottom]

SNIP

"All,

The InvisiMail download and payment servers suffered an extended period of

downtime from 10:00pm GMT 30/7/99 to 11:00am GMT 31/7/99. The fault was

caused by a misconfiguration by telecom at the main switch used by our

service provider. Although automatic monitoring is employed to detect server

problems it was unable to detect the misconfiguration as all system were

reported as running correctly. Only inbound connections were affect

therefore our outbound connections were working leading us to believe

everything was okay.

Apologies if this has caused any in-convience to you or our customers. I

have been assured by our service providers (two were affected) that changes

are being made to the monitoring software to detect this problem in future."




I tried to get on to invisimail, I could not and emailed Jack and received
the above response. Very prompt and helpful, however the downtime would
simply not be acceptable. If you have certain deadlines to meet imposed by
outside authority, then this is the last thing you need. Now I know you are
going to say well you should have done it earlier, but clients tend to leave
things to the last minute and think you have nothing else to do. You must
still try and deal with the situation which may not be of your making.
Reliability really is crucial.

It may suprise this list to know that many (if not all ) the large London
firms of solicitors habitually send correspondence by fax only. It is
cheaper, and they know it has arrived as they get a print out that says so.
The fact that it is totally insecure eludes them, probably through
ignorance, but even if they knew, they would probably say there is no viable
alternative which ensures that they *KNOW* that its got through. For the
avoidance of doubt these letters usually contain highly sensitive client
information, much of which is very commercially valuable, contract terms and
the contracts themselves with pricing etc set out.

I am glad to see changes will be made in the future but products need to
have inbuilt safe guards from the begining to inspire the all important
CONFIDENCE.

Just a thought for the crypto suppliers out there.





Donald Ramsbottom LL.B, BA (Hons).

RAMSBOTTOM & Co. Solicitors

Internet Law & Global Cryptology Law Specialists