Bewildering Stories

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Blackout

by Jerry Wright

Here am I in Washington State, totally untouched except in totally peripheral ways to the worst blackout in US history. This is the blackout that couldn't happen, it says here. Curiously, I was listening to NPR where it was mentioned that the SCADA monitoring software failed to notify the downstream utilities so that the problem sections could be isolated. Another net group I belonged to mentioned that SCADA runs on Windows, and so we can all lay this debacle to the feet of Mr. B. Gates, and the clown who wrote this Blaster Worm, which attacks the RPC part of Windows, a critical part of SCADA. The law of unintended consequences, perhaps.

I did find it interesting that the authorities were quick to say, "It isn't a terrorist attack. We don't know what it IS, but it ain't that." If they don't know the root cause, then how do they know it isn't/wasn't terrorist related? Ah well.

On to more fun things. Yes, that is Tom Easton, the reviewer for Analog, in our pages. As he said in one of his emails, "Do you know how hard it is to find a place for a Probability Zero story?"

And John "Lerk" Hancock wrote a side-spitting little outburst in Asimov's forum, and Gardner Dozois, his very self, told Lerk he should sell it to Bewildering Stories, and he did, and we did, (appearing in Issue 59) and now we owe him a couple of jars of Cactus Jelly as payment.

Nobody ever said it was going to make sense. And they were right.

We're still not finished with the site re-design, but we won't inflict anything on you until we're happy with it. And as to visitors... We now have over 400 visits a day according to Webalizer, although many are by the same visitors, leaving and coming back. Looking forward to visit 100,000. Have to throw a party then!

Jerry, The Bottle Washer