When I saw this on my IDG news ticker, I had to click through. Gunplay Blamed for Internet Slowdown I was hoping they meant that too many people were playing World of Warcraft. While that might be the case, the news item was about the more sinister option - somebody amed a gun at a chunk of fiber optic internet backbone near Cleveland and pulled the trigger, causing a service slowdown for many in the Norther half of the USA.

Some will call it terrorism, some will call it vandalism and some will blame America's permissive gun laws. I call it an unplanned outage for which service providers must pay. Like too many airlines, too many service providers are delivering lousy service and not taking any responsibility for it. Skype can hide behind being free or blame Microsoft, but when somebody shoots a hole in the internet, the owner of that segment of fiber should own up to it, make good to customers, and come up with a reasonable physical security plan to prevent such from happening again.

Come to think of it, this is exactly the sort of thing the internet was originally designed for - it was a military network that was supposed to be able to function even in parts of it were destroyed. I suppose those designers were more visionary than we give them credit for. There was a slowdown, but not a failure.

Does your network have a flak jacket?

Posted by David Karp | Permalink Comments (1)
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I have to admit it took me most of the day to realize that there was a world-wide Skype outage going on. My client was behaving strangely but I assumed the network guys were monkeying around and had blocked a port or something. This is big. People are migrating to VoIP of one kind or another in droves, and folks love a free or mostly free service, and Skype has been super-reliable for years. First the eBay acquisition, now this.

Have Skype been hit with a virus or an attack, or have they just joined the ranks of enterprise software providers kneecapped by the weight and complexity of their own software? The vagueness of Skype's public statments makes you wonder. I'm guessing they've fallen victim to their own popularity, having gotten too many subscribers who are talking too much for them to keep up with.

Looks like the free service might not be as servicable as we had hoped. Or as free -- even those of us who pay for premium Skype services are affected by this outage.

Posted by David Karp | Permalink Comments (579)
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SC Magazine picked up some fresh propaganda from Kaspersky labs yesterday suggesting that "the anti-virus companies have the upper hand" according to Alexander Gostev, a senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Labs.

Gostev and Kaspersky posit a "crisis of ideas" in which cybercriminals have just run out of inspiration and are just turning up the volume on their back catalogs, like so many bad heavy metal bands. "Virus writers are concerned solely with earning dirty money and are incapable of coming up with new ideas, so instead they are trying to milk what they can out of old technologies"

Virus writers are concerned solely with money? I'm shocked and dismayed - I thought they were artists, suffering for their craft! While I applaud Kaspersky and the other security vendors for collectively making computers and networks safer, (See McAfee's sponsorship at right of good ol' McGruff) the idea that malware writers have run out of motivation other than money offers cold comfort at best.

Money is a terribly powerful motivator, (here's a newsflash: I write this blog becuase they pay me to do it) and I fully expect that as long as cybercrime pays, it will continue to develop. And as long as publishing antivirus software pays, Kaspersky and the others will continue to do it. Maybe we're in a dip in the curve of criminal innovation, maybe the security vendors have the bad guys on their heels at the moment, but please, don't anybody let your guard down one bit.

Posted by David Karp | Permalink Comments (45)
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Sometimes I wonder if anybody actually reads an original source anymore. Why go to an actual media site, like Network World or Wired or Boston Business Journal when you can use news aggregators to have information on your chosen topics culled from all kinds of sources and delivered to your inbox or reader? It seems the chances of an interesting or serendipitous but off-topic item just won't get through anymore. Ever the luddite, I was actually reading the New York Times section by section when I spotted this item about Google experimenting with asking executives of companies in the news to comment on that news, and then including that comment as another piece of news. Seems like there's potential for an endless loop there. If McDonalds isn't putting forth newsworthy information about what they're doing and if journalists don't seek out their comments, why should Google get in on the act?

Posted by David Karp | Permalink Comments (2)
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