In fact, if it is your only main medium of communication, it can be crippling.
Just watched TV3's Nightline, with the usual BN propaganda hogging the news. Not only that, there is now a 'I Choose Malaysia' advertisement (no prize for knowing who is the sponsor), which plays on viewers' mind to vote BN: a tick for Malaysia in Barisan blue!
I have also read a headline in Harakah in which MCA claimed 10 minutes on RTM is 'more than enough' for each political party, as offered by our Information Minister! Of course, with the unlimited airtime already enjoyed by BN, there is no more propaganda to add is there? In fact the overloaded onslaught of BN spin is having a negative impact now.
Pakatan Rakyat, being in the opposition at federal level, has to rely much on the internet to disseminate information. This is most evident in Facebook and in Twitter. But the danger in having to rely too much on one medium is rather risky in view of the forthcoming General Election. Any concerted cyber attacks on popular online news portals like Malaysiakini, or social networking sites like Facebook, will have a drastic effect on Pakatan.
Not sure if it was sheer coincidence, but I was about to complain about my basic Maxis Home Wifi service which was slowed down considerably (after my monthly quota for peak hours was used up) when I was using the available quota during off-peak hours. Just imagine: 30 minutes to download a 11 MB of video clip! Were we affected by the following international cyber war?:
Huge attack slows internet worldwide
The largest known distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in the history of the internet is currently slowing down the Net worldwide.
The slowdown is because of a fight between a company attempting to stop the spread of spam emails, and a Dutch company that hosts the spammer's servers.
It was causing widespread congestion Wednesday evening to critical infrastructure around the world.
The squabble between Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group based in London and Geneva, and hosting service CyberBunker is causing a global slowdown of internet speeds and leading to frustration for those unable to access websites as quickly as normal or stream TV shows online, analysts said.
Up to five separate international police forces are investigating the incident.
It is the sheer scale of the attack which will be most worrying for those charged with protecting the underlying structure of the internet.
The attack is larger than anything ever seen before with the attackers flooding Spamhaus servers with up to 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data.
Darren Anstee from Arbor Networks Solutions said attacks of 100Gbps are the largest recorded before now, and if it this attack is 300Gbps, it is "substantially larger" than anything ever seen before.
Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.
"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week. The attack not only knocked Spamhaus' website and mail systems offline, such was the volume of traffic that it affected a much wider pool of internet users."
He added that if a similar attack was aimed at critical government infrastructure, then it would be instantly knocked offline.
"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly."
Source:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/computer/342651/huge-attack-slows-internet-worldwide
Link
Just watched TV3's Nightline, with the usual BN propaganda hogging the news. Not only that, there is now a 'I Choose Malaysia' advertisement (no prize for knowing who is the sponsor), which plays on viewers' mind to vote BN: a tick for Malaysia in Barisan blue!
I have also read a headline in Harakah in which MCA claimed 10 minutes on RTM is 'more than enough' for each political party, as offered by our Information Minister! Of course, with the unlimited airtime already enjoyed by BN, there is no more propaganda to add is there? In fact the overloaded onslaught of BN spin is having a negative impact now.
Pakatan Rakyat, being in the opposition at federal level, has to rely much on the internet to disseminate information. This is most evident in Facebook and in Twitter. But the danger in having to rely too much on one medium is rather risky in view of the forthcoming General Election. Any concerted cyber attacks on popular online news portals like Malaysiakini, or social networking sites like Facebook, will have a drastic effect on Pakatan.
Not sure if it was sheer coincidence, but I was about to complain about my basic Maxis Home Wifi service which was slowed down considerably (after my monthly quota for peak hours was used up) when I was using the available quota during off-peak hours. Just imagine: 30 minutes to download a 11 MB of video clip! Were we affected by the following international cyber war?:
Huge attack slows internet worldwide
The largest known distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in the history of the internet is currently slowing down the Net worldwide.
The slowdown is because of a fight between a company attempting to stop the spread of spam emails, and a Dutch company that hosts the spammer's servers.
It was causing widespread congestion Wednesday evening to critical infrastructure around the world.
The squabble between Spamhaus, a spam-fighting group based in London and Geneva, and hosting service CyberBunker is causing a global slowdown of internet speeds and leading to frustration for those unable to access websites as quickly as normal or stream TV shows online, analysts said.
Up to five separate international police forces are investigating the incident.
It is the sheer scale of the attack which will be most worrying for those charged with protecting the underlying structure of the internet.
The attack is larger than anything ever seen before with the attackers flooding Spamhaus servers with up to 300 billion bits per second (300Gbps) of data.
Darren Anstee from Arbor Networks Solutions said attacks of 100Gbps are the largest recorded before now, and if it this attack is 300Gbps, it is "substantially larger" than anything ever seen before.
Steve Linford, chief executive for Spamhaus, told the BBC the scale of the attack was unprecedented.
"We've been under this cyber-attack for well over a week. The attack not only knocked Spamhaus' website and mail systems offline, such was the volume of traffic that it affected a much wider pool of internet users."
He added that if a similar attack was aimed at critical government infrastructure, then it would be instantly knocked offline.
"If you aimed this at Downing Street they would be down instantly."
Source:
http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/computer/342651/huge-attack-slows-internet-worldwide
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