>>Michel, forgive the confusion. I am in no way talking about UT.
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>>I am talking about the interenet in general where you can't get to a site that you must have access to. The UT is not one of these, I can come back tomorrow or next week for that matter. I talking about "business critical sites" and there are ton's of them (bank's, insurance companies, brokers, etc.) that we must haved access to "right now".
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>>Sorry for the confusion, I was just making a comment of how we have advanced in someways (we can order a pizza perhaps easier than on the phone), but we have stepped back decades in privacy and other things of importance such as are required for an active business person.
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>>Some things good, somethings bad. Only time will tell how bad it will get if lots of requied sites can't be accessed in a timely fashion.
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>Redundancy is becoming more at large now but the Internet is what it is and one of its top layer is the DNS which locate routes for the transfer of data. Technology will advance and one day we might have something better than that. But, as already mentioned, it's like an EMP. If such a thing would happen, it would be very difficult to garantee an online status. In that case, the attack was very serious and well planned. Unfortunately, there will always be bad people in this world. Some of them, with that kind of knowledge, are hired by good businesses to test and improve their security systems, for example. But, some others, like to cause trouble and this is what happened this week when the entire DNS system got lost.

Ironically, ARPANet, the progenitor of the current Internet, was originally designed to be fault-tolerant. The legend has grown that it was designed to withstand a nuclear attack (i.e. EMP) when really it had to deal with something nearly as bad, the unreliable equipment and connections of the day. Today routers can work around outages (at least to some extent), but back in the ARPANet days no-one was contemplating DDoS attacks.

It's worth pointing out the "entire" DNS system didn't get lost. Network Solutions suffered a DDoS attack, which rendered its DNS servers unreachable. Only those sites whose authoritative DNS servers were NSI or subsidiary company nameservers were affected. Admittedly, that's quite a few sites but by no means the "entire" DNS system.