Editorials

The online movement known as Anonymous had a fairly busy weekend and even managed to push their “fun” into Monday. According to several of the Anonymous twitter accounts they are now rather upset at PasteBin. It seems that the owner of PasteBin is unhappy about the uses that Anonymous has put his “code sharing” site to. He laments that it was never intended for the sharing of sensitive information and has even stated he is going to hire additional workers to help remove these types of posts. This had an interesting effect on the collective where tweets saying things like “Srsly Pastebin, f*** you - @Pastebin to hire staff to tackle hackers' 'sensitive' posts” .

When the smart phone first hit the market it was designed with the business person in mind. It was something like a combination between a PDA and a Phone; in fact the first smartphone that I owned was a PDA complete with the PalmOS. It was a horrible brick of a phone and was quickly replaced with a HTC PPC 2600. Phone manufacturers quickly caught on to the fact that people other than business people wanted to do more with their phones. The idea of the connected phone was born and we started to see even the cheapest handsets with mobile web browsers games and message sharing.

For those of you that are old enough to remember the birth of the AMD Athlon CPU then you might also remember that AMD picked up quite a bit of the technology from a company called DEC. DEC had a CPU that at the time was simply amazing. To make matters worse it was a 667MHz CPU that was able to run rings around both Intel’s and AMD’s 1GHZ CPUs. There were multiple reasons for this but the most under rated one was the efficient caching structure. The DEC Alpha processor was light years ahead of most CPUs on the market at the time, but due to it being a RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) CPU it was not as flexible as even the slower X86 CPUs.

A while ago we wrote a piece that talked (in simple terms) about how Anonymous could kill the internet through attacking the root DNS servers. The article was written with the intent to give a background on the system in place and how it works. We did not then, nor do we now believe that Anonymous would take down the internet. As with all of the threats to take down twitter, Facebook and other forms of communication it would be exceptionally counterproductive. If Anonymous were to take down the internet and prevent connecting to servers via DNS it would lose many of their followers and supporters for at least the length of the hack.