(Edit: About the topic... I didn't know which forum to post this in so I felt I had to stress how this affects us Amiga owners, too
oh and yes, I missspellet it... Akamai, akamai...
You might have noticed that big sites (and search engines) like Google, Yahoo, Altavista and even Microsoft has been down during parts of the day. The reason for this is that Akamai - who owns and operates a large number of DNS servers around the world - was down (probably due to a DDOS attack). Akamai claims that this is because of a large-scale attack on the Internet infrastructure (
http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/2004/06/15/akamai/), which suggests that other big ISPs were affected too. However, no sites except the ones with their DNS records at Akamai seems to have been bothered by this.
So, why this post?
Well, today I learned a few things:
- Surfing without Google (or any other search engine) is almost impossible :-)
- Being a Windows/.NET-developer is nearly impossible with access to MSDN. Using Office help IS impossible because it's all online.
But most importantly: When big finances walk in and take over huge parts of the Internet infrastructure, the net automatically gets more vulnerable because there's a single point of failure.
Admittedly, the IP address for
www.google.com still lead to web search heaven, but noone keeps stuff like that in mind. Internet is supposed to survive a nuclear attack and then it turns out it can't even survive a DDOS attack against a single company.
Fortunately, most of the companies have their own name servers, which were utilized shortly after the problem was discovered. But what if Akamai had a three-day TTL?
To me, this is the downside of the commrecialized net.
