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Have you had any strange email or text message delays?

Curious | 07.11.2001 23:16

There are some strange things happening in everyday communications in Britain today: has anyone any interesting stories to report?

I have had a number of strange experiences in the last few weeks with email and with text messaging on my mobile phone: emails sent on Friday afternoon, somehow dont reach their recipient in London till the middle of Monday (with the keywords Afghan and war in the email); text messages sent either arrive late or not at all ...

Has anyone in the indymedia community observed similar irregularities in their own communications?

Is this some kind of GCHQ/ Echelon interference with civilian communications? We know they can do it whenever they want, but have other people found evidence that it is going on?

Curious

Comments

Hide the following 8 comments

there's lots of wierd delays

07.11.2001 23:49

It's like indymedia - some stuff goes straight up and some entices you to push the button again. We don't know if it's im staff surveying the stuff for correctness or if it's gone somewhere else. Like I'm still waiting for a contribution that mentions a notable american right winger who's been offed in a shoot-out to be mentioned. who knows what happens? One thing we can be sure of- our opinions and thoughts are being monitored for future reference. Hi spooks - hope you're having a nice day!

dwight heet


french attack on the firewall

07.11.2001 23:55

And while we're about it, does anyone here with a firewall in place note constant trojan horse probes by a french workgroup? What is the meaning of this?

dwight heet


Delays with browsing

08.11.2001 10:20

Haven't noticed too many delays with email (not to say that there haven't been any), but I've been noticing considerable delays when browsing any sites or picking up emails. Whereas before you could hit a link and you'd notice some activity almost immediately, there now seems to be a delay of between 10 seconds to a minute before a click will even be registered. I know that it's not a server specific thing as it happens wherever I browse and repeated clicks serve no purpose (which they did before - activity would have started immediately on clicking on a less busy server). It is almost like everything that we do is being monitored and registered - perhaps those routers that were mentioned by the CIA (?) are now in place...

mucus64


internet fuckups

08.11.2001 10:56

who are your ISP's, there are dozens of reasons for delays on the internet. Did you know that email works on a "store and forward" principle? You send the email to your "default gateway" (the nearest computer/router to you which is connected to the internet) where it is stored on the hard disk. These routers have extensive "routing tables" which are essentially a list of every computer or router it is connected to or has heard about (routers swap these tables with each other at regular intervals) which it consults to find a path to the domain where it expects to find an email server with your account on. The computer then sends a copy of your email to the next one down the line like a bucket brigade puting out a fire, except each computer down the line has a copy of your email and stores it for an arbitrary amount of time or even archives it. It's the equivelant of writing a message on a post-it note and handing it to the first person who looks like they are going in the right direction and hoping it gets there. if the computer with your message is unable to resolve the domain name of the recipient or is bogged down with throughput (code red, nimda, mellissa generated spam for instance) your message will just sit there until the server finds somewhere to send it on to or sends it back. If the recipients mail server was offline over the weekend then the message would just have floated round in cyberspace until it was switched on again (bear in mind that the weekend is when most companys make changes to their computer networks).

Recently there have been changes made, to increase throughput, at LINX (the London INternet eXchange) where practically every ISP in Britain connects their computer networks together and to the "backbone" of the telephone network. Most ISP's have been experiencing - due to changes made to counter code red and nimda mainly - problems with a piece of hardware called a webcache which allows them to store large amounts of data which is requested frequently, the problem is with the time it takes to decide to send you an object from it's cache or to request it from the doamin web server.

As for text messaging, i sent a text message using "UBOOT" last week and it didn't arrive until the following day. Lost in (cyber)Space...

"Attacks" on your firewall could be anything. There are loads of people all over the world running scripts which prope ip addresses for vulnerabilities, there are also thousands of search engines and ISP's probing IP addresses looking for web servers, it's just the way the internet works.

Trust me, if GCHQ wanted into your computer they would just come into your house while you were out and not go the trouble of finding out your ip address (which is randomly assigned to you every time you dial up, unless you have a very special relationship with your ISP)

Echelon monitors mainly satellite transmissions, see attached EU report.

Peace

mjarsk


probably not sinister

08.11.2001 11:01

who are your ISP's, there are dozens of reasons for delays on the internet. Did you know that email works on a "store and forward" principle? You send the email to your "default gateway" (the nearest computer/router to you which is connected to the internet) where it is stored on the hard disk. These routers have extensive "routing tables" which are essentially a list of every computer or router it is connected to or has heard about (routers swap these tables with each other at regular intervals) which it consults to find a path to the domain where it expects to find an email server with your account on. The computer then sends a copy of your email to the next one down the line like a bucket brigade puting out a fire, except each computer down the line has a copy of your email and stores it for an arbitrary amount of time or even archives it. It's the equivelant of writing a message on a post-it note and handing it to the first person who looks like they are going in the right direction and hoping it gets there. if the computer with your message is unable to resolve the domain name of the recipient or is bogged down with throughput (code red, nimda, mellissa generated spam for instance) your message will just sit there until the server finds somewhere to send it on to or sends it back. If the recipients mail server was offline over the weekend then the message would just have floated round in cyberspace until it was switched on again (bear in mind that the weekend is when most companys make changes to their computer networks).

Recently there have been changes made, to increase throughput, at LINX (the London INternet eXchange) where practically every ISP in Britain connects their computer networks together and to the "backbone" of the telephone network. Most ISP's have been experiencing - due to changes made to counter code red and nimda mainly - problems with a piece of hardware called a webcache which allows them to store large amounts of data which is requested frequently, the problem is with the time it takes to decide to send you an object from it's cache or to request it from the doamin web server.

As for text messaging, i sent a text message using "UBOOT" last week and it didn't arrive until the following day. Lost in (cyber)Space...

"Attacks" on your firewall could be anything. There are loads of people all over the world running scripts which prope ip addresses for vulnerabilities, there are also thousands of search engines and ISP's probing IP addresses looking for web servers, it's just the way the internet works.

Trust me, if GCHQ wanted into your computer they would just come into your house while you were out and not go the trouble of finding out your ip address (which is randomly assigned to you every time you dial up, unless you have a very special relationship with your ISP)

Echelon monitors mainly satellite transmissions, see attached EU report.

Peace

majrsk
mail e-mail: a@a.com


paranoia

08.11.2001 13:33

The sheer amount of emails going out everyday, the sheer amount
of emails going out every day with the words afghan, war, terrorist,
and such keywords would make it totally impossible to monitor them
all - while flagging an email that might look suspicious can be done
automatically, you still need someone to read it, interpret it, write a report
about it..... No one will monitor your emails/text messages if they don't
have a good reason to do so. And that needs to be (I think) a bloody
good reason - they won't monitor simply for beeing an activist...
The one thing they might do, though, if you organise some act
of civil disobediance, is check your mail afterwards (wich is handily
cached on a number of servers) to proove you planned the event
(conspiracy).

Please, let's not get paranoid.

Anselm.

PS. Anyone has a gas-mask for sale ?

anselm


probably not sinister

08.11.2001 14:31

who are your ISP's, there are dozens of reasons for delays on the internet. Did you know that email works on a "store and forward" principle? You send the email to your "default gateway" (the nearest computer/router to you which is connected to the internet) where it is stored on the hard disk. These routers have extensive "routing tables" which are essentially a list of every computer or router it is connected to or has heard about (routers swap these tables with each other at regular intervals) which it consults to find a path to the domain where it expects to find an email server with your account on. The computer then sends a copy of your email to the next one down the line like a bucket brigade puting out a fire, except each computer down the line has a copy of your email and stores it for an arbitrary amount of time or even archives it. It's the equivelant of writing a message on a post-it note and handing it to the first person who looks like they are going in the right direction and hoping it gets there. if the computer with your message is unable to resolve the domain name of the recipient or is bogged down with throughput (code red, nimda, mellissa generated spam for instance) your message will just sit there until the server finds somewhere to send it on to or sends it back. If the recipients mail server was offline over the weekend then the message would just have floated round in cyberspace until it was switched on again (bear in mind that the weekend is when most companys make changes to their computer networks).

Recently there have been changes made, to increase throughput, at LINX (the London INternet eXchange) where practically every ISP in Britain connects their computer networks together and to the "backbone" of the telephone network. Most ISP's have been experiencing - due to changes made to counter code red and nimda mainly - problems with a piece of hardware called a webcache which allows them to store large amounts of data which is requested frequently, the problem is with the time it takes to decide to send you an object from it's cache or to request it from the doamin web server.

As for text messaging, i sent a text message using "UBOOT" last week and it didn't arrive until the following day. Lost in (cyber)Space...

"Attacks" on your firewall could be anything. There are loads of people all over the world running scripts which prope ip addresses for vulnerabilities, there are also thousands of search engines and ISP's probing IP addresses looking for web servers, it's just the way the internet works.

Trust me, if GCHQ wanted into your computer they would just come into your house while you were out and not go the trouble of finding out your ip address (which is randomly assigned to you every time you dial up, unless you have a very special relationship with your ISP)

Echelon monitors mainly satellite transmissions, see attached EU report.

Peace

majrsk
mail e-mail: a@a.com


Yes, it is totally sinister

09.11.2001 00:16

Plenty of email delays starting with September 11th. Internet much more sluggish than normal. Delays, loss and more torn open snailmail letters too.

It is a well known fact the cops are slow readers.

Arthur Mix
mail e-mail: arfamix@yahoo.com