Last night I tried to update my Netflix queue, cause right now I got “Elizabethtown” and “The Good Shepherd”, and if my next delivery is another chick flick or ponderous John Le Carre-like yawnfest, I’m gonna puke. Though I should note that additional chick flicks may, however, help me make a ride on Sunday.

Site’s down, it was almost midnight, so no worries probably a maintenance window.

This morning, still down and a note saying its expected down for a few more hours! So I troll a bit online, and sure enough the net is humming w. rumors of the site being hacked. What is the most interesting is the immediate and profound reaction this is having on Netflix shares. I never thought of hacking being big-business like that!!! This article give a good early summary

A couple months ago in Wired magazine there was a detailed description of how a well-known hacker bought an entire ISP down with a coordinated dns ping attack first on the site, then on elements of their backbone. The gist of the article was that it was totally mercenary and done for extortion. The hack itself was made up of millions of computers infected with a very benign virus just overwhelming the capacity of the target site — pretty simple virus that would not raise a lot of alarms on its own.

Email scams and spam are well-known stepping-stone tools for big hacks, and have been for profit for some time. F’ing scary that a few guys can come up with something where the effects are so devastation, since I know firsthand how easy it is to write a little nasty virus if you have it as a core piece in a bigger more diabolical plan. Its the equivalent of one man getting hold of some plutonium. As our society has gotten bigger and more complex, the destructive power of the individual has grown exponentially beyond the club or the handgun. Be afraid.