internet (Page 23)

While most of us were innocently surfing away on our computers Monday evening, the entire internet was almost taken down. The FBI has launched an investigation into the attempt to destroy the net by trying to cripple key servers by deluging them with many times more data than they usually receive. But since servers are spread around the world, have fast connections and ordinarily cope with many data requests, the net did not go down. “As best we can tell, no user noticed and the attack was dealt with and life goes on,” says Louis Touton, of Assigned Names and Numbers.

“What we learned yesterday is?it is hard to kill this system,” says Paul Vixie of the Internet Software Consortium. “The Internet is sort of the cockroach of the modern age. It survives.”
read more

Over 2,000 U.S. websites are blocked by the SaudiGovernment, and not just pornography, either. Many of themare cultural information or woman’s sites. “We foundblockage of quite a bit of content beyond political contentand pornography,” says Ben Edelman of Harvard University.”We found the blocking of content about women’s history orsites about bathing suits. So if you want to buy somethingto swim in, they seem to treat that as it were pornographicin Saudi Arabia.” Some of the blocked sites are: The ArabAmerican Roman Catholic Community, The Islamic CulturalLibrary, iVillage.com, Beach Queen swimwear, Warner BrothersRecords and Rolling Stone.com.
read more

Bankrupt WorldCom may take the internet down with it. Theauction site eBay is already busy makingcontingency plans. “If the service ain’t there, it ain’tthere. That’s the bottom line,” says eBay spokesman KevinPursglove. “It doesn’t matter why or how it happened. Wejust need contingency plans to take care of customers.”

In case of a WorldCom crash, eBay has spread out its e-mailson different servers, and found backup providers for critical jobs. And it?s notthe only one: Around the world, companies are interviewingbackup vendors and adding emergency clauses to business contracts. WorldCom owns MCI, the second largestlong distance provider and UUNet, which carries most of thetraffic on the internet.
read more