cyber-"terrorism"?

[Owen Lewis]

----- Original Message -----
From: Paul Leyland <pleyland@microsoft.com>
To: <ukcrypto@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Sent: 19 September 2002 17:55
Subject: RE: cyber-"terrorism"?


> From: Owen Lewis [mailto:oml@sysrx.uk.com]
...
> AFAIK, globally, there was no recorded incident of a
> catastophic system failure - or even a serious parametric failure
> - occasioned by Y2K. But perhaps your experience was different?

On the stroke of noon, day 99 of 1999, Microsoft UK's main building at
Reading lost all power.  No other buildings nearby suffered the same fate.

This may just be a coincidence.  Coincidences happen.  For instance, MSR
Cambridge lost all external network connectivity at 13:46 local time (08:46
EDT) on September 11 this year.  We were off the net for a couple of hours.
The failure was somewhere within the telco --- all of our systems at each
end of the link were working correctly.  Even though it was a coincidence,
the conspiracy theorists were having a good time.

As well as playing dice, God drinks beer and enjoys practical jokes, not all
of which are gentle. If we all understood this, the world would seem a more
explicable place.

Many years ago, I was duty officer, one sultry summer Sunday,  in a German
barracks. From 17:00 on, I received a string of calls from some woman in the
UK, demanding to speak with her son, urgently. Providing such social
conveniences was no part of my duty but, partly because of her great
agitation and partly because her son was the regimental Padre, eventually I
said that I would see what I could do. By  18:00 I had determined that he
and his family had gone on holiday to Italy and were not due back until the
next day. By 19:00 I had determined that the family had quit their Italian
hotel to drive back to Germany. By 22:00 I received a report from a local
German hospital that the family were at the hospital, the Padre having just
died there from an undiagnosed (til too late) small rupture to an internal
artery. This had resulted from a minor traffic accident at 17:00. When I
called his mother to break the news to her, it came to her as a release from
five hours of torment.

After several hours more of sundry calls and making out of a detailed
report, I finally stretched out on a bed at 03:45, as day broke.  At 04:00 I
was awakened by the Guard Commander to be informed that there was a lion
(Puma actually) loose in the camp. Sighing, I put my trousers back on. As I
picked up my swagger stick, which I intended to use to beat the beast into
submission, I remember I heard God laugh.


Owen