Thanks also to Matt for this link to a CBS Marketwatch story that mistakenly attributes today’s Yahoo! outage to hackers. I’m not one to get into semantic blow ups over whether hacker or cracker is the correct term for people who break into computers, but the fact is that neither term is appropriate here. Yahoo! was the victim of a denial of service attack, probably launched by some junior high kids with too much time on their hands. Naturally, the incompetent reporter didn’t bother to explain the nature of the attack. Declan McCullagh at Wired News is reporting that the outage occurred due to misconfigured equipment, and not a so-called “hacker attack” at all.