Two things happened this past week. Or, to be more accurate, one thing happened, the other didn't. One of them made national headlines, the other, for reasons that aren't clear, didn't. I have a feeling, though, that the events are related. I'd love to hear what you think.
a) Twitter was out of service for much of this past Thursday as it worked to defend itself against a "denial-of-service" attack. Many of Twitter's 45 million legitimate visitors were unable to use the service for hours, while hackers overwhelmed the site by orchestrating the sending of a deluge of junk requests.
At about 10:30 a.m. EST, millions of people worldwide received spam e-mail messages containing links to Twitter. When recipients clicked on the links, the site was overwhelmed with the requests to access its servers.
Interestingly, Google and Facebook were also targeted by these hackers. But they managed to fend off the attacks while sustaining minimal damage. Analysts quoted in The New York Times maintain that this is due to Twitter's relative "immaturity." The more established and older sites were able to distinguish between junk requests and legitimate traffic.
b) That important editorial project that I was supposed to complete three weeks ago, and to which I promised to devote time this past week, got shelved again.
I wasn't wasting my time, honest. Every day, things just came up. I was deluged by perfectly legitimate tasks. I'm pretty sure they all constituted "legitimate traffic." This blog post, for example: Can I really hear such fascinating news about such a major web-related event and not sit down to write up my thoughts?
This week will be different, I think. This week, I will act like a mature website. I will even get started on that Talmud class I planned to start last week. Really.
