infinite improbability

The RIAA should be cut into tiny pieces and buried alive.

Hi, Katie!

Actually, I don't think that they were under a DoS attack, as such. I rather think they were "Slashdotted" instead. Slashdot is a tech news website (motto: "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Really.) which is so popular that whenever they post an article, half of the computer geeks in the world decend upon its links. This results, as often as not, in an overload to the servers which is very like the slashdot effect.

Anyway, when you posted your article on the ninth, Slashdot also had an article posted on their site, which surely resulted in unusual network traffic.

Robert Lamar

Robert, I don't know who you are, but no need to come on to my site and condesend like that. I happen to know full well what slashdot is and what slashdotting is (if you had looked farther down the page, you would see that I even link to slashdot), and I have very good karma on slashdot, thankyou very much. What makes you think that I wouldn't know what slashdot is?

I do not, however, think that it was the slashdot effect that brought down the RIAA site, for several reasons. First, slashdot didn't link to the RIAA site, and since most slashdot readers are too lazy to even click a link and read an article, my guess is that they're too lazy to type in a url too. Second, whenever the RIAA does something particularly evil, they get slammed by somebody or another, and it's highly likely that somebody was attacking them then.

Kathryn,

I am most sincerely sorry. I mistook you for someone else; In my excitement in discovering that she had a blog, I replied to one of the posts without actually verifiying that it was her blog (or reading further down to see that you were thoroughly aware of slashdot and other technical issues). I feel like a complete imbecile, and rightly so. (From your post, I expect you would agree.)

I realize that my post sounds very condecending to anyone who knows much about slashdot, but I honestly didn't believe I was addressing anyone in that demographic. Considering the nature of the slashdot crowd, you are probably right about the DoS attack, as well. The average reader knows too much of the RIAA already to bother visiting the site after yet another story about intellectual property apears.

In sum, I have made a fool of myself. Please forgive me (or continue chewing me out, if that's what I deserve) either by posting another comment in this space or e-mailing me at rob.L@att.net.

Regretfully,
Robert Lamar

Robert, no offense taken. If you want, I can remove your comments.

Kathryn

Hey Robert!

I'm afraid my sister still hasn't gotten around to finding herself a blog, but you're welcome to come to my page and comment any time. No need to worry about condescending, either: I don't know anything about computers, and any thoughts you offer I will happily take as gospel. Hope all is well for you at college. Stetson, right?

Aaron Mesh

P. S. Geez, Kathryn. Sharing information, especially when it's said really nicely, doesn't equate to condescention. It's your blog, and you can protect it however you like, but on behalf of a dear old friend, that was mean.

SMILEY!

Want-a-blog?

And Kathryn, no need to get pissy at Robert, you know as well as I do that you don't know what Slashdot is.

Now, if he had referenced marthastewart.com or hotblackrappers.com that would have been a different story altogether, and you would have been justified in defending your expertise in your chosen fields of knowledge.

Kathryn,

It's your blog; I don't mind my comments remaining, if you want to maintain your blog's history. At this point, I'm just chalking all this up as a consummate embarassment and all-around Lesson Learned The Hard Way. I've learned to be more careful next time.

More than anything else by far, what I regret about this whole fiasco was that I so painstakingly explained Slashdot without checking to see that my audience didn't already know about it. Once, the Klez worm was spoofing my e-mail address (I know that my e-mail was not infected), and one of its recipients wrote me to warn me that if I didn't get a decent anti-virus, he was going to block all e-mail coming from my address. He forwarded Symantec's take on the worm, and I wondered why he hadn't read what they had to say about spoofing, and why he didn't have an Antivirus program he trusted.

So, I know how it feels to be condecended upon, to have someone challenge your level of technical knowledge. And I'm sorry I caused it to happen to you.

Yours,
Robert Lamar

Aaron and Josiah,

Thanks for trying to come to my rescue. It was valiant of you. And Aaron; I'll be sure to scope out your blog and post a comment or two.

Robert

mesh, I wasn't trying to be mean--if I had known Robert was a friend of your's I would have put two-and-two together and realized that he was mistaking me for your sister. As it was, I had no context, and it appeared, not knowing the context, to be condesending. Now that I know the context, I'm not the least bit annoyed--I know that mistakes happen online.

Josiah--me like Martha Stewart? Ugh. Gag.