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wecoyote writes ABC News has an article on the completion of the Human Genome Project. Apparently, there is supposed to be a presidential announcement this morning regarding the accomplishment.

ARTICLES ABOUT LINUX GOING MAINSTREAM BEGINNING TO GO MAINSTREAM
News Organizations Feel More Comfortable About Reporting On Open-Source OS

ATLANTA, GA (AP) - News organizations such as CNN and ABC News are beginning to warm up to the Linux operating system. Linux, which is an "open source" operating system that provides an alternative to Microsoft Windows, has been seeing gradually more media coverage over the course of the past year or so. Although the popular operating system has been in use in the industry's mainstream for quite some time now, news stories about the OS's mainstream status were considered "fringe" by major media outlets, and were generally avoided.

"A year or so ago, you would never have seen an article about how Linux has entered the mainstream," explained Steve Kinsworth, a senior editor at Brill's Content. "Articles like that were considered 'niche articles' that had a very limited readership. The majority of people would have no use for such articles, and would be better served by articles about systems such as Microsoft Windows. These days, though, everybody is jumping on the Linux mainstream reporting bandwagon. Reporting about Linux's mainstream status has jumped from fringe to mainstream. We are very excited by all this."

Leonard Shaffer, Vice-President of Corporate Egotism at Wired, echoed Kinsworth's sentiments. "The media is in love with Linux and stories about how it has gone mainstream. Just a few months ago, if you had gone into your editor's office and suggested doing an article about Linux, the response would have been 'Huh?' or 'You wanna write about what?' These days, editors and managers all over are chomping at the bit to get more coverage of mainstream Linux onto the pages of their magazine."

Not everybody shares the enthusiasm, however. Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corp. and owner of the Fox News Channel, has publicly decried the coverage of the operating system. "I am deeply disturbed by the mainstreaming of coverage of Linux as mainstream," Murdoch said. "We at the Fox News Channel cater to the Christian Right and to ultra-paranoid conservatives," Murdoch explained. "We have absolutely no interest in blubbering all over some sort of leftist free-love collectivist liberal mishmash of computer code." Fox News contributor Bob Dornan agreed, calling Linux author Linus Torvalds "the anti-Christ."

Ted Turner contributed to this story.

ABC has video from the site.

This is an interesting concept...What about redundancy for integrity? Not to play the Devil's advocate here, but assume that you are running Linux on an S/390, and doing the work of 400 Sun server (figure courtesy of abcnews.com), and there is one HUGE power spike and the S/390 goes down. Goodbye enterprise because that was your ONLY system. Sure, you can run 41,000 copies of Linux on one, but it's still only one machine. In short, there are advantages (one system provides simplicity for maintenance) and disadvantages (as stated above) associated with the return of the mainframe computer. As for the idea of IBM phasing all of their OS's out in favor of Linux--good luck. With some of the bank tellers I've dealt with, I'll be pleasantly surprised if they would even be able to handle the idea of Linux in their place of business. That's all I have to say about that.

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Have you been able to get it to work as a plugin, or is that even possible? Many sites seem to want to have a pop-up, plugin window that won't work under Linux. At least ABCNews.com gives you the option, "Click here if your version of RealPlayer doesn't work with these clips", or somesuch...

Apparently they can't count. They report that buy.com, ebay.com, cnn.com, and amazon.com are all having problems that seem to stem from a large DoS attack.

There are actually two possibilities: misconfigured routers or a deliberate distributed DoS attack. If it's misconfiguration it's technically interesting. If it's an attack then you have to wonder about the motivation. There is no "ransom note" or other document that terrorists typically release. That we know of.

The obvious presumption with the list of sites before us is that we have an angry hacker(s) who is ticked at the commercialization of the web. Yahoo, after all, used to be mostly noncommercial. Now, however, searches on Yahoo turn up a bunch of Yahoo content and e-commerce crap. As for CNN, they were somewhat forward thinking compared to the rest of the media, and got on the web bandwagon relatively early. Points for CNN. CNN has has been bought out by AOL. Points taken away from CNN?

But that raises a big question. If this is deliberate, why haven't they targeted the biggest commercialization "offender" of them all: America Online. And they apparently haven't even touched Microsoft.

Maybe AOL and MS are better buttressed against this type of attack.

The subject line of this message is taken from the many humorous, now pretty prophetic messages on Usenet when the neverending rain of Spam began to devastate that formerly superb, and yes, noncommercial Inteneret communication system. This is obviously not the death of the Internet. That will come when President McCain signs the "Mandatory Internet Filtering Act." ;-)

ABC News is reporting that two more web sites were hit in the last 24 hours, in attacks remarkably similar to the one that hit Yahoo. One website was Buy.com, which was hit just as their stock was going IPO with 800 megabytes of traffic per second in a coordinated DoS (smurf?) attack. The other website was eBay. The Yahoo attack used one gigabyte of traffic per second, according to ABCNews. Full story is here.

Actually, those were facts. I don't see how your posting is even relevant to the original article which started this thread. The article was referring to banner adds and the use of cookies to collect statistics, not sites like the New York Times where you are required to divulge personal information in order to read their stories.

As an aside the New York Times has every right to ask this information, you have every right to refuse or falsify it. You've got every right to go elsewhere for news as well. I'd much prefer being educated on the impacts of the internet on personal privacy than having a privacy gestapo like you seem to prefer regulating what can and can not be done.

As for the New York Times being the only news site which collects information on its users you are pretty close to 100% inaccurate. ABC News, CNN, CBS news and NBC News all make use of banner adds. The issue the article was dealing with. I can't connect to the BBC News and it looks like it may be the one news site that doesn't use banner adds.

Whether or not the Dreamcast was actually connected to the internet or not was not the issue. It turns out that it isn't. The issue was that the owner of an allegedly popular Dreamcast news site felt it was his perogative to run nmap against his users which indicated just how much privacy you really have.