Thank you for posting this. > Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for c

Thank you for posting this. > Now you or your signal often have to travel hundreds of miles (as the crow flies) to find a central office that is required for call completion, even between two phones 10 feet apart. And people generally think this is okay. Until something big happens and everyone reacts to it by trying to call other people, the central office gets overwhelmed, and the entire system stops working right when it's needed the most. Then you get something like AWS or Azure outage. And you see engineers saying "it's fine, there are so many services down, no one expects out to work". Then you get something like that big Oculus Rift shutdown. No big deal, right? But do you know that that some industrial control systems use certificate signing? I've just finished reading The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. If you think about it, the kind of systemic failure he describes is not as ridiculous as it might sound. Over time, people start taking large technical systems for granted, like forces of nature.