Vortices of Extelligence

Is SCO's website down?

There's a brief discussion over at Neurotech of a CNN article about the MyDoom virus DoS on SCO's website.

What really bothers me about the CNN article is the implied connection between SCO's judicial pursuits, the open-source community, and the MyDoom.A virus. Of course, it would be hard to deny that SCO has indeed drawn the public attention in more than one way with the (insert expletive of choice) lawsuit, but the way this (and some other) article is written more than suggests possible candidates for the virus writers.

As to whether taking www.sco.com out of DNS could be considered bringing the website down, IMHO it might indeed. Why? Well...

• people are much more used to typing www.sco.com first, before (if at all) trying sco.com or www2.sco.com;
• people might have bookmarks pointing to content on www.sco.com;
• other webpages may practice the dark arts of deep-linking into content on www.sco.com.

Other than that, I agree that SCO made one of the best choice in handling the attack, so that it might well still emerge from it with nothing more than a huge boost in PR and only a possible psychological perception of the site being down.

Update: As seen by the comments below, I have apparently managed to misunderstand Luke's point. Of course the site was not brought down by the virus itself - as, indeed, the CNN article falsely claims.

Posted by roam at February 2, 2004 02:25 PM