Follow this link to the story at Yahoo News.

Their is a slight danger in posting this information on this blog.  However, I think that Yahoo! is a much more widely read source than this blog is.  So the damage is already done.

With  signature authenticating mechanisms already in wide use, I’d think the technology is available to solve this problem.  I’d think that each link in the chain could have a pretty good idea of the immediate next links in the chain so that it wouldn’t have to check those links’ authenticity on every message.

The problem of the authenticity check being a single point of failure could be easily solved by making it a distributed mechanism.

If I can think of these things, I am sure the experts trying to implement a solution have already thought of these ideas.

Now it is a matter of getting the humans involved in the process to come to some sort of agreement.