On Sat, 19 February 2000, Alex Rubenstein wrote:
But, more to the point; I was commenting more on the fact that NSI [has not|probably will not] comment(ed) on any of said outages, not even a post-mortem, in any fashion.
Unfortunately in today's environment, many companies don't want to admit to problems even to their own customers. If you look at the denial of service attacks, almost all the victims were identified first by Keynote press releases to Businesswire before the companies made any statements to their own customers or the public. I've been asked by several different publications if I would send outage reports directly to them. NANOG's off-topic volume is actually a fairly good defense mechanism, since reporters and assignment desks don't want to read through all the stuff either. The intent has always been to give other network operators a head's up about common problems, not generate press coverage. Waiting for each network provider to notice, debug, and contact the source of the problem is one method. In addition to notifying the source, telling your neighbors could save them a lot of time and effort. Next time it might be you they save. Even when a Yahoo! engineer sent a message to a supposedly private list, the Associated Press obtained a copy and reported it. There is a supposedly private list between banks which received a "warning" four days before the first attack. It was also reported extensively by the press. So if private lists don't work, and public lists don't work, what's the alternative? Although jhawk will probably think its off-topic, BBN has one of the best customer notification systems in the business. BBN (or is it still GTEI) is a well-run network, but they occasionally have problems. Sometimes even major problems. But you don't see the "what's going on" and unhappy customer messages as much any more, compared to the Stanford rat incident or other providers today. Its strange how most of the executives came out the White House meeting saying the solution was "Cooperation."