Declan McCullagh really is a good journalist, but he’s tragically predictable. What begins as an informative article on the history of denial of service attacks ends as an attack on the federal government. In this case, I agree him, but the constant stream of libertarian agitprop in Declan’s articles is a drag.

Arthur Andersen is going to start offering consulting to promising startups in exchange for equity. Of course, if the amount of equity Andersen demands is anything like their rate for paying customers, I can’t imagine that too many startups will be able to afford them.

Here’s a conundrum. By linking to the linking policy at CNBC without filling out the application and submitting it via fax, am I violating said linking policy? Boy, some companies just don’t get the Web at all.

News.com has more information on the DOS attack on Yahoo yesterday, but they still don’t have the gritty details, which I eagerly await.

As a public service, I refer you to yesterday’s Jon Carroll column pleading with people not to forward email petitions (or any of the other viral email that makes the rounds periodically). As I always say, even if you don’t need to read this, somebody you know does. Along these lines, 13 Facts Everyone With Email Should Know is also good (unfortunately, it’s broken right now in Netscape).

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.

Boy, Matt Haughey hits on a perfect example of companies abusing Internet users today in his rant about employment sites harvesting r

There’s no doubt in my mind that ad banner networks are the most evil things on the Internet. Not only are companies like DoubleClick and Imgis trying to track our surfing habits and sell them to the highest bidder, but the actual ads are a pox on the Web sites on which they appear. The ad banner companies don’t understand the level of scalability that they need. I can’t count the number of times that a page has failed to load not because the browser couldn’t download the content I wanted to see, but because the ad banner company’s server was bogged down and couldn’t spit out an ad I don’t care about. Pathetic.

Thresh’s Firing Squad has an interview with John Carmack, the primary culprit behind the first person shooter revolution. In my opinion, he’s the most interesting person in the game industry.

Hey, version 2.0 of Seti@Home is available. Mighty team [email protected] (consisting of me) continues to chug along.