She received this in her email yesterday and was understandably (?)
concerned:
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> As many of you know, each leap year the internet must be shut down for
> 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which
> eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows for
> a better -working and faster internet.
> This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on
> Feb. 29 until 12:01 am GMT on March 1. During that 24-hour period, five
> powerful internet-crawling robots situated around the world will search
> the internet and delete any data that the find."
--------------
It went on to say, disconnect all hard drives and computers from the
Internet before this time so you won't get your valuable data deleted,
etc, and was signed by "Someone" at the "Interconnected Network
Maintenence Staff, Main Branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology".
I assured her that the Internet itself was not 'closing down' for any
reason and that no precautions were necessary.
Good to know that MIT is running the net, tho... ;)