In Other News, World Almost Ends

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I know I’m coming late to this story, but is it intriguing to anyone else that someone or -ones tried to kill the Internet last week? Last Tuesday, at 5:30 in the morning, a massive denial of service attack was directed at the root servers that route traffic on the Internet. The Internet did not, of course, perish, but three of the servers were fairly overloaded, and some users may have seen a slowdown. No one has any idea who mounted the attack. (And this is after Google announced that IPTV could cripple the Internet all on its lonesome.)

This raises all kinds of questions to me. One, it’s great that there’s enough anonymity build into the Netweb that people can get away with this stuff — it bodes well for the future of privacy — but still, it also sucks that people can get away with this stuff. Two, who would possibly have a stake in this kind of an attack? Even terrorists benefit from an intact Internet infrastructure — look at the efficient way the Web multiplied the horror of September 11th.

And three, the Internet is run on 13 root servers? What, did Tolkien design this thing?