h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

More snow today, interspersed with freezing rain. Our little burst of springtime appears to be on hold.

I spent the time indoors at the computer, wrestling with recalcitrant software. The only bright spot in a day of cursing at computers is that I was being paid to do it, which somehow makes it all a lot more worthwhile. I think I'm getting deep-down tired of misbehaved software, though, as I ended up with a splitting headache and had to go out in the snow and dig ditches for a while to calm down.

hey just wanted to ask, what's your stance on all this hacker attacking of yahoo etc?

ta
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Well, I can answer that a couple of ways. From a technological point of view, I wasn't surprised. The tools that were probably uses (TFN, Trinoo, Stacheldracht) were discussed on the security mailing lists six months or more ago, and had been discovered installed at numerous sites, so it was only a matter of time before someone used them. Indeed, the security community has been meeting to discuss this sort of distributed denial of service (DDOS) threat for some time now. So the media hype of this being something astoundingly new and unexpected can be easily dismissed.

On the purely elegant point of view, it's a neat demonstration of some fundamental weaknesses in the way the Internet is designed, and I'll be interested to see if the folks running things can react fast enough to keep the whole thing from crashing down in flames. This could conceivably escalate to the point where it becomes impossible to do real work on the net.

From the ethical standpoint, of course, I have no respect for the people who do such things. The communitarian side of me wants to find them, cuddle them, and gently show them the error of their ways, finding socially relevant ways to use their talents. The individualist side of me wants to find them and shoot them.