Hot Line and e-mail

[Vernon Schryver]

In article <90Mar14.230345est.1442 at smoke.cs.toronto.edu>, moraes at cs.toronto.edu (Mark Moraes) writes:
> Would it run against the policies of the various Internet networks if
> one end of the email conversation was a research facility that
> considered it important that they get quick/convenient/well-informed
> answers to problems with their machines, so they could get on with the
> research that they're supposed to be doing?


I have occassionally asked Powers That Be essentially this question.  I
have been answered "... that might be ok, but don't quote me.  We are
working on the rules, and will let you and everyone else know."

Notice one minor hassle with the current structure of the Internet.
What about the zillion purely commercial customers of UUNET?  Imagine
what might happen if one of them purchased an IRIS (well, let's have
them all purchase lots of IRIS's), and decided to send the Hotline a
Valentine's Day greeting (while we're hypothesising, let's assume the
customer has no problems).  The message would probably go via private
UUCP to the east coast to uunet.uu.net, then onto JVCNet (?), onto
NSFNet, eventually to BARRNet to sgi.sgi.com, and finally to some
machine within SGI.  Notice how two evil money making organizations
have communicated about something unrelated to any interests of any
Official Sponsoring Agencies.

There are other possibilities.  What if Sun Microsystems purchased an IRIS,
and decided to email to the Hotline?  Such mail would likely use guvn'mnt
subsidized wires and routers.


Mind you, this is all hypothetical, since we all know that all Internet
email, netnews, FTP's, and so on are purely for Official U.S. Guvnmnt Purposes.


Vernon Schryver
Silicon Graphics
vjs at sgi.com