Dear Friends, Patriots, and all --

There is no doubt that the Internet has been experiencing a fair amount of "congestion" lately, but this is not necessarily the result of a calculation or political dirty trick: the rapid growth of Internet-enabled secondary technologies is part of what is causing this sluggishness. First, more people than ever are using the Internet to download music and audio files via Real Player or Microsoft Media, and all of these files are just enormous when compared to text files. Second, the world wide web has been enjoying phenomenal growth, with e-mail traffic increasing rapidly both in this country and in Australia and South America (where access to the "web" is still a novelty), and many people are now learning how to send pictures, audio messages, and illustrated electronic cards this way. These innovations are aggressively marketed by the ISP companies but they do tend to clog the Internet with larger and larger files.

Third, the national socialist dictatorship in China has been busy employing its new assets in Hong Kong and Macao to determine just what benefits -- both in the way of industrial espionage, and for aggressive cyber-military purposes -- it can reap from the Internet, while also trying to calculate how to keep an iron fist inside the velvet glove of their control of Chinese media. Hacker groups thought to be located in Hong Kong have engaged in several suspicious attacks in the last fourteen months or so.

Finally, servers and pages fall down for a variety of reasons, not the least of which are hard drive failures and corrupted server file protocols. These can all be fixed but it takes time to accomplish those fixes. If an organization or group wants to "take down" Rumor Mill News, their best bet to accomplish this is to stage a Denial Of Service attack, which despite certain innovations in "web security," is still a temporarily lethal flurry of punches -- i.e. page demands -- which locks up a server or a group of servers and shuts down the web site. Denial Of Service attacks do not require "hacking" into the site or manipulating its pages, it is just a traffic bombardment.

The open architecture of the Internet is what makes it work. An Internet pioneer once told me that they created the system, at teh behest of DARPA and the Defense Department, to read all attempts at censorship as network failures and thus to implement work-arounds and re-routing. The ARPA Net concept was designed to keep universities and colleges communicating by computer with their key counterparts in Defense and Intelligence, in the event of a low-yield nuclear attack, or a scattered strikes attack, where the punishment inflicted was for demonstration purposes.

Parts of the network drop out or become unavailable, and every other part of ARPA Net, i.e., the INTERNET, assumes the extra load to keep the packets of information routing and moving. That is why the "packet" method used by the Internet is so darned reliable and such a fantastic innovation. It is nearly impossible to change it now. There is too much money invested in the whole of it. Forget the slaughter of the dot-com lambs, that is a superficial and temporary swindle (and scandal). The Internet can only be eradicated, it cannot be changed materially without upsetting ten thousand high-tech applecarts and the big money contributors who are pushing them down the information highway.

That is the way I see it. Rock on, Rumor Mill News Agents!!