Just to let you know, I have found out that such companies as Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, CNN, BUY.COM and ZDnet had indeed fell subject to the onslaught of hackers both Monday and Tuesday. Yahoo, hardest hit, was receiving over 1 gigs of garbled messages a second to crash their servers. All companies have reported that none of the attacks focused on trying to get into their systems, only crash them. The FBI is involved in all instances and services should be fully restored now, or soon will be. Jack

Y'know when I was working at a used computer store a few months back, one of the techies there said that he used to do that, not as large of a scale or on any big sites mind you, but he did do it to a few "enemies" web servers. And he even said how he did it, it was surprisingly easy. He also did it as a way of testing a client's servers so they could find out what the maximum limit the systems could withstand. But these hackers should be found and nailed. I mean kicking off a little site that no one really cares about it one thing, but taking down some of the biggest sites and two of my personal favorites (EBay and Buy.com) really ticks me off. I just hope no one trys to pull that stuff here. This is my favorite site! You do have safeguards in place, right Jack? Roy?

Well, as I sit here working in the office today instead of my studio, I was listening to NPR and the 2nd topic on Talk of the Nation this afternoon was about hacking and in particular this situation. I learned that it is basically easy to do what they did (more or less 'jam' sites) but someone called in with a much smaller situation--something akin to what nicknoel mentioned. It was a professor that uses the net/email as an adjunct to his classes and talked about how their server had been brought down for several weeks (repeated hacking) and how the class had suffered because of it. So--its not even all large sites. Unfortunately, there will always be someone with a gripe that wants to make a 'statement' and I suspect the net/web will be a dramatic way for them to do it for a good while. Diane B

On that same Tuesday someone broke into my country's Justice Ministry servers and trough them posted an "official" manifest against the jews in the Communications Ministry HP. Racism is very unusual here, so it looks like some group is trying to do some serious damage to the world. Something similar was done last month in Japanese Gov. sites, this time a racist manifest against japanese people, the authors claiming to be brazilian hackers. Coincidences?

Looks like someone out there has seen "NetForce" a few times too often. Kate