Word: cnn
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...Current has also sent the press release to the presidential campaign of Alan L. Keyes '72, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, CNN, the Christian Coalition and the George W. Bush Campaign...
...participate in a live public Internet chat. Of course, he was helped in reaching that goal by the fact that prior to 1992, the Internet didn't exist as a mass medium. But that's no reason to deny Clinton the glory of being the "first." Organized by CNN and moderated by correspondent Wolf Blitzer, the chat was intended to be an opportunity for citizens to interact with the President more directly than was possible before the Internet. Unfortunately, not even Clinton was immune to the biggest problem of Internet chats--that people are not always what they seem...
...chat started quite uneventfully; as is to be expected, the questions were moderated and were mostly softballs. The problem, however, came when the heavy load of users trying to ask questions crashed the Internet relay chat server and forced CNN to restart...
After thirty seconds, during which Petro says he "found himself in respiratory distress due to excessive laughter," someone at CNN decided that this was probably not the President talking and banned President_Clinton from the chat. However, Petro reconnected faster than the real President Clinton could and told the chat room, "okay, that was just too much. my apologies" before he was banned permanently. One wonders how long Petro could have lasted if he had decided to discuss a more realistic topic, such as China policy or the 2000 elections. Perhaps he would have finished the rest of the chat...
...CNN scrambled to announce that its computer systems had not been "hacked" and that no one had taken control of them; the problem was simply that CNN failed to set up the chat correctly. The episode seems to be a reminder that computer systems are just as vulnerable to silly human error as to malicious "hackers." Just paying adequate attention could have saved the network a good deal of embarrassment...