  Reliable spanners can withstand huge failures, even when a linear number of
vertices are deleted from the network. In case of failures, a reliable spanner
may have some additional vertices for which the spanner property no longer
holds, but this collateral damage is bounded by a fraction of the size of the
attack. It is known that $\Omega(n\log n)$ edges are needed to achieve this
strong property, where $n$ is the number of vertices in the network, even in
one dimension. Constructions of reliable geometric $(1+\varepsilon)$-spanners,
for $n$ points in $\Re^d$, are known, where the resulting graph has $O( n \log
n \log \log^{6}n )$ edges.
  Here, we show randomized constructions of smaller size spanners that have the
desired reliability property in expectation or with good probability. The new
construction is simple, and potentially practical -- replacing a hierarchical
usage of expanders (which renders the previous constructions impractical) by a
simple skip-list like construction. This results in a $1$-spanner, on the line,
that has linear number of edges. Using this, we present a construction of a
reliable spanner in $\Re^d$ with $O( n \log \log^{2} n \log \log \log n )$
edges.
