* * * * *

				   
			    Chain Letters
				  or
	      How to Trash the Internet in Under 2 Days
							-- by Saint Patrick


Some of you may wonder what is the big deal about propagating chain
letters via e-mail.  The following thought experiment should help
underscore the danger they pose.

Let's say that each person propagates the letter to two other people
on the net and let's suppose that the time between propagations is an
hour on average.  Furthermore, assume that the letter is about one
page or 250 words in length which is about 1,000 bytes or 1 Kb.

If you are the originator of the letter, then you send 2 Kb worth of
data over the net in the first hour.

The next two people each send to two others for a total of 4 Kb over
the next hour.

These four people each send to two others for a total of 8 Kb over the
third hour.

After 24 hours, there are 2-to-the-power-24 or about 16,000,000 Kb of
data being transmitted per hour.  This is the equivalent of 16 giga
bytes of data per hour or 4 mega bytes per second.  

To put this in perspective, my gateway to the Internet has a capacity 
of only 0.007 mega bytes per second.  Most MAJOR internet sites have at
most a 1 Mb per second channel to the Internet.

After the second day, there are 2-to-the-power-48 or about
300,000,000,000,000 Kb of data being transmitted per hour.  This is
the equivalent of 300 quadrillion bytes of data per hour or 80
trillion bytes per second.  Assuming there about 100,000 sites
on the Internet with 1 Mb/s capacity channels connecting
them, the chain letter will have completely saturated the entire
Internet 800,000 times over by the end of the second day.

Please pass this on to the 10/20/100 people you sent that chain letter
to.  ;-)