Here’s a good reason not to fly with Northwest Airlines.
Attacks on the Web
Let’s get one thing straight first. The attacks on popular Web sites (Mercury News story) are not about security, per se. No one is trying to break into the sites like the criminals who scarfed up credit-card numbers from a big music-selling site recently and then tried to extort big money from the site.
No, this is about what an e-mail correspondent calls terrorism. I disagree with that word — no one is being killed here — but agree with his overall point: The attacks are designed to shut down other people’s access to those sites. It’s more like a bunch of people in cars who deliberately cause a traffic jam at, say, a bridge.
Whoever is doing this should be prosecuted. That’s plain.
But the technology companies at the center of the Internet need to be working, hard, on new ways to prevent these events, which are known in the trade as “denial of service” attacks.
More on denial of service attacks from CERT, an organization that fights such things.
Cisco: Number Two and Climbing
It’s been an amazing thing to watch. Cisco Systems now has the second highest market capitalization of all U.S. companies.