LuTze

No, not by itself - but then I never said it did. A good loadbalancer (I have the most experience with F5 BigIP's) has features like DDoS protection (syncookies) and an 'adaptive reaper' that can free up resources faster depending on the utilisation of the unit. This, combined with global load balancing and products from Arbor (Peakflow, which does some very clever things), and services from people like Akami make it very difficult indeed.

Sure, yes. I'm just trying to put a bit of meat on the bones, as it were. Whats interesting is when you get a different response depending on where you are in the world. Try out http://www.mytravel.com and you'll see what I mean. I could tell you *exactly* how that one works

Heh. All your 'tracer' program is doing is giving you an IP for a given name. This IP is only the start of the picture and really doesn't tell you anything about how it all fits together. I know for a fact that Amazon, for example, use Akami's global CDN network to distribute content around the world and make it quick no matter if you're in America, Europe or anywhere else. This is why most of the images (for the UK site, anyway) come from a different amazon subdomain (images-eu.amazon.com in this case) I also know that that IP address you're getting is a load balancer, and not in fact a server. I'm not trying to offend you either, just trying to point out it's really a lot more complicated than "this server gives me this site". Trust me, I know a lot about this sort of thing.

Haha! Amazon will be nowhere near that simple. Usually for this kind of large company, they have different solutions in different datacenters all over the world. Probably load-balanced globally with something like F5's 3-DNS (see http://www.f5.com/f5products/products/bigip/gtm/ ). Each solution will also be locally load balanced transparently to the user between lots of webservers, and on from there it'll get more complicated with probably caches, application servers and databases at the backend. Where you get load balanced will depend on where your request comes from, where you're going to and probably lots of performance metrics, too. So, it takes rather a lot of effort and coordination to take someone like Amazon down. The possible upside on the minds of the bad guys is that while nobody can get to a retailer that exclusively operates on the web they're losing a lot of money and might possibly pay the bad guy to stop attacking. This is usually a bad idea though, as has been mentioned. Fortunately, we have ways of mitigating organised DDoS style attacks these days. Arbor Peakflow being one - http://www.arbornetworks.com/

Installing DX9 probably broke Windows. This is easy to do, because it's a core part of the OS. If part of it didn't install quite properly you'll have all kind of trouble. Boot into safe mode and reinstal DX9, reboot and prey.

Goodo

Did I say you were?

A belief that gays should not have the same rights as 'proper' couples, a belief that abortion is wrong and should be illegal, a belief that stem-cell research is wrong, a belief that having religon anywhere near government/politics is a great idea. Take your pick.

I'd be more concerned if people started judging us by the content of the Daily Mail. For the non-Brits here, it's probably the most right-wing conservative rag in the country. They are of course quite positive about another 4 years of Bush: - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/uselections.html?in_article_id=324716&in_page_id=1832&in_a_source=&ct=5

http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-63601 http://www.privacyinternational.org/issues/idcard/campaigns.html

The mac: -

Next year we'll hold the presidency of the EU, and will host the G8 summit. Mr. Blair isn't likely to stand down before them. Although Tony isn't mr. popular at the moment he's still not as disliked as Michael Howard and the Tories. He's got a very good chance of winning the next election.

China have a treaty to protect North Korea. Should anyone attack them, China will join in. This is one of the reasons the US sat in South Korea haven't already attacked.

Ban donations over a certain size to political parties/members of congress, problem solved.

I've not seen much about this either because it's really new or people just aren't interested, but: - http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040928%2F0515512476.htm&sc=1104&flok=NW_5-L2&floc=NW_1-T http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/3696092.stm Seems pretty significant to me.