<nettime> Facts About thing.net Shutdown

[Wolfgang Staehle <wolfgangsta@thing.net>]

[: hacktivism :]

On December 17, 1999, thing.netīs access
to the internet was cut off from 2 am until 3 pm
by Verio, thing.netīs upstream bandwidth provider.

Apparently Verio Security in Dallas received a
complaint by eToys around midnight claiming that
a "malicious attack" on etoys.com was originating
on one of the thing.net servers.

Verio claims it tried to contact thing.net staff
by phone.  Nobody was in The Thing's office
after 0:30 am Friday morning.  No messages were
found on the answering machine, nor did we receive
an email warning.

The address of the offending site that was given to
us on Friday afternoon by a Verio customer representative
was: www.thing.net/~rdom/ecd/eKillerToy/index2.html

This personal web site was maintained by Ricardo Dominguez
and contained information about a "virtual sit in"
and "Floodnet," a java applet. The applet is designed
to send out requests to a specific URL and then to load
that page repeatedly approximately 15- 20 times a minute.

EDT was criticized in the past by professional coders that
the applet was inefficient and has little or no impact on
a professional server.

After discussing the issue with Ricardo, we decided to
comply with the request in order to get the network back up.

Service was restored around 3:20 pm.

PS: Ricardo Dominguez donated the website with the complete 
archives of the EDT for a charity auction at
http://auction.thing.net.  Proceeds will be split
between The Thing, Inc. and the Chiapas Media Project.

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