Worm

For those of you who don’t have super tech-nerd friends like me, you may not know about the connectivity problems of the past 20 hours or so. A SQL Worm was working its magic across the whole of the web, apparently. For more information: technical | general. This morning, I was experiencing some serious lag time trying to access things, and couldn’t figure out what it was. The moment Justin found out about it through his Mac News application, Flak had already posted a thread about it on twelvestone. What I love about my forums (both WH and twelvestone) is that it’s often as speedy as any other news source – sometimes faster. When 9/11 occurred, almost all of the major news sites (cnn, msnbc) were crippled by the amount of traffic. But at WH, folks from all over were posting what they heard on the radio, on the news, what they saw looking outside their apartments. Of course, not all the information people offered was accurate or verifiable (not much was during that time), but we could verify some of it – which was better than nothing. It helped too, that everyone more or less knew each other. Online forums are a bit like having a bunch of friends, scattered in different places. Imagine being on the phone, talking to all of your friends, but each friend is in a different room, and the house is a big as the world.