Slashdot Mirror

Uhh...the Slashdot article on the sale of DALnet was a joke, but the DDoS attack on DALnet is very real. Actually, several IRC networks have been getting DDoSed in recent months.

The (new) article referenced in this article's initial post describes, not a DDoS attack on the IRC server, but a use of the IRC server as a control point for a DDoS attack on something else. (The "bots" - infected machines - connect to the IRC server and lurk on the channel for their master to give them orders.)

So perhaps the DDoSing of DALnet and/or other IRC servers is not an attempt to take out the servers themselves, but a side-effect of the progeny of a particularly fecund worm "phoning home" to ask for futher orders.

And perhps those trying to track down the authors of the worms will soon be bugging the worms' favorite IRC servers in the hopes of tracing the perpetrator when he finally logs in to give 'em marching orders.

(A marching army of worms. What an image. Something like an angry horde of bananna slugs on pogo sticks.

Worse yet would be an attempt to shut down IRC servers in general. Of course this wouldn't stop the worms, as the authors would quickly switch to another method of controlling them. So it would just eliminate another Internet tool without having any perceptable benefits.

The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.

Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:

o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about ... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.

o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.

o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.

o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).

(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)

o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.

o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.

o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.

o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.

All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!

Here's a few good ones (I'll leave out the obvious links to Sluggy and stuff, and those that I've seen people mention already.):

Nukees
Acid Reflux
Snail Dust
Avalon
Bruno
Waiting For Bob (currently on hiatus)
Clan of the Cats
It's Walky
Irritability

To believe that no one has ever held the "source" for humans and other living things is akin to believing that you could find an intricate piece of machinery (a watch, for example) lying on the ground that had somehow assembled itself and was designed by no one.

Whoa there, McCarthy. I'm not saying there's no God, or Allah, or Yehova, or anything else of that nature. I just prefer not to limit that guiding force to any single moment of creation, saying that It(the correct pronoun doesn't exist) needed to have all time and all thought forged at once.

What could be more interesting to a Creator than a universe he did not Create? Think about that. Think about how cool self-optimizing code is to us hackers. Look at the talk of genetic algorithms. Are you saying we can pull off stuff our own creator can't?

Actually, that'd be really interesting wouldn't it...

(I actually wouldn't have replied to this, but I've been having an inordinate amount of fun reading the online comic strip Acid Reflux, which really should be read from the beginning but has a pretty good summary right about here...call me a blasphemer if you like; I just love the concept behind this strip!)

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

To believe that no one has ever held the "source" for humans and other living things is akin to believing that you could find an intricate piece of machinery (a watch, for example) lying on the ground that had somehow assembled itself and was designed by no one.

Whoa there, McCarthy. I'm not saying there's no God, or Allah, or Yehova, or anything else of that nature. I just prefer not to limit that guiding force to any single moment of creation, saying that It(the correct pronoun doesn't exist) needed to have all time and all thought forged at once.

What could be more interesting to a Creator than a universe he did not Create? Think about that. Think about how cool self-optimizing code is to us hackers. Look at the talk of genetic algorithms. Are you saying we can pull off stuff our own creator can't?

Actually, that'd be really interesting wouldn't it...

(I actually wouldn't have replied to this, but I've been having an inordinate amount of fun reading the online comic strip Acid Reflux, which really should be read from the beginning but has a pretty good summary right about here...call me a blasphemer if you like; I just love the concept behind this strip!)

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com

To believe that no one has ever held the "source" for humans and other living things is akin to believing that you could find an intricate piece of machinery (a watch, for example) lying on the ground that had somehow assembled itself and was designed by no one.

Whoa there, McCarthy. I'm not saying there's no God, or Allah, or Yehova, or anything else of that nature. I just prefer not to limit that guiding force to any single moment of creation, saying that It(the correct pronoun doesn't exist) needed to have all time and all thought forged at once.

What could be more interesting to a Creator than a universe he did not Create? Think about that. Think about how cool self-optimizing code is to us hackers. Look at the talk of genetic algorithms. Are you saying we can pull off stuff our own creator can't?

Actually, that'd be really interesting wouldn't it...

(I actually wouldn't have replied to this, but I've been having an inordinate amount of fun reading the online comic strip Acid Reflux, which really should be read from the beginning but has a pretty good summary right about here...call me a blasphemer if you like; I just love the concept behind this strip!)

Yours Truly,

Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com