Attack pushes technology to its extremes

BY KUSHAL DAVE

NEWSMAKERS

If the Gulf War was America's first televised war, Tuesday's events might be considered America's first crisis in the Information Age. Particularly at Yale, with many students desperately worried about friends and family in New York, the tragic crisis ironically showcased the power of the new, connected world.

True, for simply obtaining information, the Web held up poorly. This was not the fault of the University: Yale's Internet traffic increased in the face of the crisis, but the system easily handled the demand. "The Yale infrastructure held up very well," Director of Data Network Operations Joseph Paolillo explained. Rather, the problem was with the news websites themselves. ABCNews.com, for example, experienced a quadrupling in traffic, thus limiting availability of the site. Consequently, students turned to television and radio to get their news about events as they unfolded. "The all-around Internet jam-up Tuesday made it clear that the Web is going to operate very differently in the future," Computer Science Professor David Gelernter explained.

However, when it came to getting in touch with loved ones, newer technologies proved far more useful. Throughout the day, although Connecticut's phone system performed well, circuits into New York were taxed to capacity. SNET reported that it handled 43 million calls, a 60 percent increase over normal volume. "We are geared up for extremely heavy calling volumes," SNET Spokesperson Beverly Levy explained.

The system, although it can accommodate the rise in use on Mother's Day, tends to become overloaded during occasions of more concentrated usage, such as New Year's or Super Bowl half-time. "It doesn't make sense to engineer a telephone network for those rare occasions...when, at worst, it's an inconvenience," she said. "We're actually very pleased with how the telephone system held up in Connecticut and around the country."

Specifically at Yale, "Inbound and outbound voice traffic was up significantly," Paolillo explained. "There was of course overload of regional and national cell and long distance infrastructure, which `backed up' into Yale, but there was no Yale-specific trunk shortage or switch overloading."

Some students, unable to get through via regular phones, got in touch through cellular phones—the same technology that allowed passengers in the hijacked planes and survivors of the collapsed Twin Towers to call out. Although none of the cellular providers had any information specific to the New Haven available, they all detailed a large jump in call volume. Verizon, for example, saw twice the usual traffic on both its cellular and landline networks.

Since phones of any kind still faced difficulty on Tuesday, others turned to electronic communications to get in touch. The Internet news site SFGate reported that AOL experienced a spike in instant messaging traffic, and that its dial-up lines for Internet service in Manhattan were taxed throughout the day.

Lynna Jackson, head of Yale's e-mail services, explained that the average number of e-mails arriving each day last week was 610,000. On Tuesday, 716,779 messages were delivered, and on Wednesday there were 844,174. Also on Wednesday, alums began using the Class of 2001 mailing list provided by AYA to exchange information about who was OK and who had not been heard from.

When the traffic on the list became heavy and hard to keep track of, a website was established for alumni to exchange information about classmates. More general survivor websites sprang up all over the Internet and provided central repositories for friends who were searching for news of each other.

The Web also proved useful to Yale for disseminating official information. On Tuesday, the front page and YaleInfo alone received more hits than the "September 11th" website on www.yale.edu, which received 6,500 hits. But overall, Yale's website received fewer visits than in previous days, perhaps reflecting the fact that most of the nation sat glued to televisions. E-mail also helped the Yale administration get word out about the official response.

But Gelernter was quick to point out that the Internet is only a "minor footnote" in Tuesday's story in an article appearing in the National Review. "I'd have to write an awful lot of words about this topic before I got to the Internet," he wrote. "The real topics are good and evil; bravery and heroism versus wickedness—too bad we've let those words get rusty and cob-webbed. When we need them, we barely know how to say them."

He added, "Insofar as the Internet appears, as a minor footnote, it's striking that the front page of a newspaper has vastly more power to communicate than any web site. On Tuesday people wanted to see the major newspapers' front pages. It's a question of graphics and history; in this respect the Web can't compete. Hasn't even tried."

Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, pointed out another inadequacy: "Technology helped to deal with this, but it also made it easier to precipitate it," he explained. "It helps in some ways—like cell phones—but not in others. It seems that no part of the attack was preventable by technological means."

In fact, broadcast news was reporting last night that a Microsoft flight simulator might have been partially to blame for the terrorist pilot's skill in crashing the planes. And the technology magazine Wired reported on Wednesday that federal agents, suspecting that electronic communications might have been involved, wanted to install software to facilitate spying on various Internet sites.

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