In a flash, some of the giants of e-commerce were shut down by a torrent of bits sent by hostile invaders. The attacks were a wake-up call to the fragility of the Net and kicked off a worldwide dragnet in search of the cyberperps.
Hell week for e-commerce last Monday morning. At around 10:20 a.m., the brisk pace of the Yahoo portal - a site of digital services including e-mail, news, sports and a renowned Web directory - slowed precipitously. Net surfers accustomed to an average page-loading time of 1.7 seconds were confronted by an annoying six-second World Wide Wait. Then it got really bad. By 10:30 almost half of those attempting to jack into the Web's second most-popular site were finding nothing but error messages.
Yahoo was under attack, the first of several last week that would dramatically expose cyberspace’s dirty secret: though the Internet is an amazing creation that has boosted our economy, it is still a work in progress that can be knocked silly with surprising ease. Instead a stiff huff from a wolf’s lungs, all it takes is a well-directed "denial of service", at least on a temporary basis. And when you try to track down the culprit, it turns out that all you can find is sheep’s clothing – the dummy computers through which the cybervandal laundered his poisonous computer code.
At first the nerd squad (Yahoo’s operation team, four engineers led by David Filo with an $8 billion stake in the company) figured that a router had failed. But analyzing the flow of bits, they discovered what Global's exec Laurie Priddy called "a huge tidal wave of data." Millions of meaningless digital packets - short, anonymous "pings" that ranged from simple diagnostic messages to requests for page views.
By Maggie McComas
At last, a calm evening on your own. Nothing to do but settle in with a bow1 of munchies and a favorite video. Yet despite the quiet, you are not alone.
Little critters, probably so small as to remain unseen, are with you. They may not actually be alive, or even complete. We’re talking insect body parts, and in some cases, related matter, you know, body wastes.
Most of us are well aware of the possible lethal contamination that may lurk in raw oysters or undercooked chicken, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There are plenty of other contaminants, or, as the bureaucrats would prefer to call them, "defects", in most processed foods. These little bits of grasshopper or excreta or rodent hair are so common, in fact, that the Food and Drug Administration ( FDA ) regulates exactly how much of each is allowable. It sets ceilings, or "action levels" for these defects that apperar to be amazingly arbitrary. Reading them you might think scientists had determined that some foods are rendered inedible by just a few grasshopper parts while others are perfectly healthful in spite of a few maggots. For example:
Popcorn: Two rodent hairs ( or 20 gnawed grains ) per
pound.
Frozen broccoli: 60 aphids per three and a half ounces.
Brussels
sprouts: 30 aphids per three and a half ounces.
This means, folks, that if there are 29 aphids per three and a half ounces of Brussels sprouts, the FDA is willing to certify that they’re okay for you to eat.
But 30 aphids are another matter. You say you never eat brussels sprouts anyway. Well, what about fig bars? The FDA’s action level for fig paste stands at 13 insect heads per three and a half ounces. Does this mean that a mere dozen little skulls may have rolled into each package of Fig Newtons
you consume? Or take infested peanut butter, which will sound the FDA alarm bells with 30 or more insect fragments per three and a half ounces.
Since that amount makes a nice thick peanut butter and jelly sandwich, any serious peanut butter addict might wind up consuming thousands of fragments a year. What exactly is a fragment anyway? Is the head of a grasshopper a fragment? Perhaps the entire grasshopper body is a fragment.
Why not switch to chocolate-covered ants as the snack of choice? At least you’d know which fragment of what critter you are eating.
Self, June 1995.
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