Root Servers under attack

According to this report, nine of the 13 Root Servers came under sustained DoS attack last Monday. Details are sketchy, for obvious reasons. Here is the Washington Post account, which claims that all 13 servers were attacked and that there was more than one attack. The Register has the most detailed report. “In a distributed denial of service attack that began 5pm US Eastern time Monday and lasted one hour, seven of the 13 servers at the top of the internet’s domain name system hierarchy were rendered virtually inaccessible, sources told ComputerWire.”

“It was the largest and most complex DDoS attack on all 13 roots,” a source familiar with the attacks said. “Only four of the primary 13 root servers were up during the attack. Seven were completely down and two were suffering severe degradation.”

The source said each of the servers was hit by two to three times the load normally born by the entire 13-server constellation. Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Software Consortium, which manages one of the servers, said he saw 80Mbps of traffic to the box, which usually only handles 8Mbps.

Bruce Schneier on the so-called ‘National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace’

As usual, Bruce is right on the button. “For some reason, Richard Clarke continues to believe that he can increase cybersecurity in this country by asking nicely. This government has tried this sort of thing again and again, and it never works. This National Strategy document isn’t law, and it doesn’t contain any mandates to government agencies. It has lots of recommendations. It has all sorts of processes. It has yet another list of suggested best practices. It’s simply another document in my increasingly tall pile of recommendations to make everything better. (The Clinton Administration had theirs, the “National Plan for Information Systems Protection.” And both the GAO and the OMB have published cyber-strategy documents.) But plans, no matter how detailed and how accurate they are, don’t secure anything; action does.” Amen.

Google News…

… is the most interesting Web development since, well Google Web APIs. I’ve just written an Observer column about the new News service.

My verdict on Birt

For many years I was a TV critic with a ringside seat watching what was happening to the BBC under its controversial Director-General, John Birt. Now he’s published his memoirs and the Observer asked me for a verdict. Here it is.

$40 billion, but nothing for the shareholders
Dan Gillmor posts about Microsoft’s latest financials, pointing out that the company is now sitting on a $40 billion cash hoard. What most companies do when they are making as much money as Microsoft does these days is distribute some of those profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. But like most technology companies, Microsoft has never much believed in dividends. (Technology companies typically see themselves as “growth” companies that need to reinvest all their profits in the business.)

Gillmor says this is because Gates and other key Microsoft owners don’t want to deal with the tax implications of dividends given the size of their holdings. Maybe — I can’t say I’m an expert on tax management for billionaires, never having had such worries.

But I also think the Microsoft hoarding instinct is a weird function of the company’s ingrained, perpetual paranoia. As numerous insider accounts and much testimony at the antritrust trial have shown, Microsoft’s culture imbues employees with the sense that disaster is always around the corner — if they make one misstep, the competition will eat their lunch. This paranoia is a sort of management tool, to be sure, but it’s also an attitude that emanates directly from the company’s leadership. Microsoft is hanging on to its $40 billion because, hey, who knows how much money it might need when the next big seismic shift in the technological landscape threatens to unseat its monopoly? Think of that $40 billion as one big Windows replacement fund. (comments) [Scott Rosenberg’s Links & Comment]

Rule-making on allowable reasons for DMCA circumvention falls due again
Wired report.

“Starting Nov. 19, the United States Copyright Office will begin taking public comments on the section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the DMCA, which prohibits people from breaking encryption technologies.

When the DMCA was enacted Oct. 28, 1998, a provision was built in that requires the registrar of copyrights and the assistant secretary for communications and information to revisit certain aspects of the law every three years.”

The rule making is supposed to determine what circumvention activities are legal. But the problem is that it will have little immediate impact on what people can do to circumvent digital copyright protection. The arbiters might find that certain users (e.g. librarians) might have legitimate reasons for circumventing the copy protection in, say, e-books. But the DMCA still makes illegal all tools for achieving that end. The only way out of this is to amend the DMCA.

The grim reaper strikes — twice. Keith Uncapher and Matthew Lyon both dead

Keith Uncapher was Paul Baran’s boss at RAND and founded the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, where Jon Postel worked and where the domain name system evolved under Uncapher’s general oversight. The “NYT” ran a nice obituary.

It was only when browsing the piece that I discovered that Matthew Lyon — who with his wife Katie Hafner wrote the first history of the ARPANET — died last February at the age of 45. Makes you think, doesn’t it.

Broadband users more likely to go in for file-sharing, says survey. Well, whaddya know?

According to this BBC report, 39% of broadband users swap music files, as compared with 18% of dial-up users. ” Perhaps even more worrying for the music industry is that 44% of net users admit that they do not want to pay for online music in future.

‘The digital music industry in Europe is in danger of being stillborn,’ said Jupiter Media analyst Mark Mulligan. ” Quite.

New York Times discovers Slashdot

There’s a slightly bemused, patronising tone to the piece, like something written by a maiden aunt who had discovered that her nephews were making hooch in the garden shed and selling it at a profit.

The Zoe explanation
Dave Winer writes…Probably because I’ve written about “personal information managers,” I’ve occasionally received e-mails about Zoe — an innovative e-mail indexer. But I could never make much headway from Zoe’s site toward figuring out exactly what it did. Now, thanks to this Jon Udell column from O’Reilly, I get it: Zoe Googles your e-mail stash, turning it into a permanently accessible, organized, useful, Web-formatted archive.