From this Slashdot article today:

katre writes “Checking all my favorite sites this morning, I saw that about half a dozen seem to be offline. Trying to figure out why, I found an interesting article on the front page at http://isc.incidents.org/. Seems that the problems at Akamai are screwing over Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Fedex, Xerox, Apple, and others. Whatever happened to my decentralized net with no single point of failure?”

Yes, it is pretty scary to see how major sites of the net (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) can be pulled down for a while by a mysterious “DNS problem” possibly attributed to DDOS (direct denial of service) attacks on the Akamai DNS servers. It brings up the scary possibility that much of the internet might actually be taken out some day. It was discussed on the Gamingforce forums a while ago, but it seemed so impractical to happen that many people just thought it would never happen anyway. However, the event that happened today at Akamai just made me wonder if such a thing could actually be possible and how it would make such a great impact on our lives and on the world if many more DNS servers were hit by it and remained down for long periods of time– much longer than a few hours. Can you imagine how much impact that would leave? Markets would close, companies would cease to function for some time with a slower means of communication, information would generally crawl down to the height it was before massive networks and the internet allowed so many people to communicate so easily. There is always the telephone + snail mail, but how fast is that compared to a simple press of an enter key on a keyboard? Wow.

Now Playing: Delerium - After All (Svenson And Gielen / genre: Trance