the article was illuminating. a) for a while, there has been a literature on chokepoints for oil shipments, places like Suez, Panama, the Straits of Malacca.
this fellow is extending that, and the fact that corporate leaders tolerate energy chokepoint information in the public domain, but not fibreoptic chokepoints, indicates a shift from industrial to informational economy as much as anything i've seen.
b) it's this paradox that the Internet was designed to re-route around blockages/disruptions in the system, so that even if part of the system was disrupted, brought down, obliterated by nuclear bomb, that things would continue. a good metaphor for the Internet is electricity generating stations to the plug in the wall in your house. it goes from massive hydro towers, to smaller pylons, to electric stations in cities, to those fake-houses-but-they-are-transformers, to backyard power lines, to you. this fellow is tracking where people enter the Internet and the possible choke points at various steps up to the Internet "backbone", and only 13 servers route that backbone Internet traffic. those 13 have already suffered an october 2002 attack that temporarily crippled 7 of them.
[ 10 July 2003: Message edited by: Willowdale Wizard ]