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.
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).
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.
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.