Tuesday, February 15, 2000

Rob Rosenberger has a terrific commentary on the media circus surrounding the recent Denial-of-Service attacks against Yahoo!, eBay, and others. As he puts it, “Today’s woes don’t hold a candle to the damage caused by Good Times mass hysteria. Gullible email users launched devastating ‘distributed denial of service attacks’ on numerous occasions.”

I was also pleased to find a link which will tell you the Navy’s current INFOCOM status: www.infosec.navy.mil. “INFOCOM” is a digital equivalent of “DEFCON,” measuring the Navy’s current alert status on any computer attacks or dangers. It’s a bit silly, in a way: all it does is measure how worried Navy people are about virii and website hackers, neither of which will cause a war any time soon (I hope).

I did a bit of writing last night, after going out to dinner with my parents. I have an idea for a near-future story about a cracker that decides to pick on a young woman, but it was late enough that I was only able to put together a very broad outline.

I spent some time this morning updating Cool SF, which was meant to be an Ain’t It Cool News for everything science fiction, from films to books to TV to music to computer games. Perhaps I’ll actually be able to put in the time to update it now. Or maybe not. :-)

I didn’t give blood yesterday, mainly because they usually don’t let you if you’re not feeling in good health. I’m sorry I didn’t, because I’ve tried to give blood religiously since I started working. It’s one of those things that’s easy enough to do, and saves lives. Why not?

Oh, and I caught the rest of Bubblegum Crisis over the past week. The last half of the series was very good, and the last episode was as good as many movies I’ve seen. Highly recommended.

I didn’t go to the Be User’s Group meeting, since I was sick as a dog on the day they planned to meet. Well, maybe next time (their next meeting will be in eight days).