If only I could strip off the black map

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The best time of the year winter is when there is white snow, blue sky, and sun shining so that the brightness hurts the eyes. So far this winter there hasn't been much time for experiencing such moments, except on December 25th.

Here in Finland one of the big topics in the news has been Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on two Finnish financial services groups. This has generated somewhat heated discussion in various forums on the net sites of Finnish newspapers.

For an ordinary citizen it is rather difficult to understand how these things work, that there is malware that takes over computers which can then be used to launch DDoS attacks against targets. The attackers don't actually break in to the target system (in this case, the web sites of Finnish banks), they just make the systems unable to respond because of excessive traffic.

In a situation like this it is easy to get scared if you don't know how computers and internet work. Some people have been afraid that their money can be stolen in a DDoS attack; some others are convinced that Russians are behind the attacks.

I did some searching on the net and found interesting places where various hacker groups and group (ex-)members diss each other. In fact, it seems that there is a similar subculture going on with hackers as with rappers, that is, people start feuding because they want to be noticed, and this has nothing to do with talent, skills, or understanding; it is just a way of trying to attract attention. But sometimes the measures taken are rather excessive.

(Posting title is from the poem The Hurt Sonnet by Casey Thayer.)