The day the Net didn't die

By Richard Morochove

First published September 17, 1998

Predictions of the strangulation of the Internet due to massive communications snarls upon the release of U.S. Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr's report on President Clinton proved unfounded. While the 445-page report was virtually unavailable from some U.S. government web sites, the overall communications capabilities of the Internet held up quite well last Friday.

Conceived in the dark days of the Cold War as a U.S. Defense Department project, the Internet was built to withstand just this sort of load and came through virtually unscathed.

Granted, it was difficult to retrieve the report from the U.S. government sources that originally published it online, such as the Library of Congress or House of Representatives site. About 88 out of every 100 attempts to access the House of Representatives site were unsuccessful, according to Keynote Systems, of San Mateo, Calif., which provides Internet performance data.

However, the Starr report was quickly copied or mirrored at many other sites, from portals such as Netscape's Netcenter, Yahoo, Lycos and Excite, to countless news organizations. According to Lycos it delivered almost 2,000 page views of the report every minute. Excite said it experienced between 2,000 and 3,000 clicks a minute on its copy of the report.

In addition, some Internet Service Providers cached the report on their servers, which meant that a copy did not need to be downloaded from the originating server each time a user requested it.

The mirroring and caching helped reduce the overall load on the original sites by decentralizing the information, which is exactly what the Internet is designed to do.

Even though a few U.S. government sites were almost inaccessible due to heavy demand, the overall load on the Internet backbone was just 20 per cent higher than usual, according to communications carrier Sprint. The rest of the Internet took the surge in traffic in stride despite the fact that a train derailment in Georgia cut some fibre optic cables owned by WorldCom, another major Internet carrier, on Friday morning. For the forty top business sites tracked by Keynote, the average access time on Friday afternoon was about normal.

What's more notable than the survival of the Net is that the report's release marked the day the Internet became a mass medium. Anyone with a Net connection now has access to all of the information formerly available only to politicians, lawyers and the media. This means you can read the report and develop your own conclusions without relying on a filtered version provided by others.

Newspapers long ago adapted to the fact that many readers will first learn of breaking news from other sources, such as radio or television. Analysis of the news, rather than a rote recital of the facts, is where newsprint operates most effectively.

Television, often first with the news, will now need to cope with the reality that viewers can go directly to the source material on the Net. Viewers will often have more complete knowledge of the information contained in it than the time-pressed news anchors.

The combination of the details available on the Web, combined with instant reactions broadcast on television is just the sort of news event that's tailor-made for Microsoft's Web TV, available in a standalone box sold by Sony and built-into Windows 98. I'll review Web TV and its capabilities in a future column.

Yet there are still problems with the distribution of this sort of information on the Internet. Parents worried about the salacious content of the report learned that site-blocking software will pass through unhindered the contents of major news sites. One software vendor suggested that parents add "Lewinsky" to the list of forbidden words.

The lurid contents of the Starr report wasn't the only thing parents had to worry about. A group of hackers calling itself HFG or H4CK1NG F0R G1RL13Z took the New York Times web site hostage for several hours on Sunday. The Times main web page was replaced with a sexually explicit one that attacked the newspaper, its technology reporter John Markoff and others.

Hackers say Markoff exaggerated the crimes of Kevin Mitnick, who was convicted for repeated hacking offences and was imprisoned. Hackers say Markoff's extensive coverage ensured that Mitnick did not receive a fair hearing and resulted in an extended prison term. They accuse Markoff of a conflict of interest since he's written a screenplay about the Mitnick story and a book, "The Fugitive Chase."

While few confused the hackers page for a genuine one created by The Times, the ploy underscores the vulnerability of web sites to concerted attack. You need to retain a skeptical attitude about everything you read on the Net, even if it appears to come from a respected source. And that may not be so bad, after all.