[syhprum (OP)]

It seems to have disappeared!!

[Variola]

It's working ok here!

[Karen W.]

Mine works fine here too!
maybe you need to check your cookies?

[Don_1]

I've been checking out some cookies....YUMMY YUM YUM!

[Variola]

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i want some now!!!

[Karen W.]

I've been checking out some cookies....YUMMY YUM YUM!

OHHHHHHHHHHH Chocolate chip cookies are my all time favorite cookies!

[DoctorBeaver]

Facebook, Twitter, and a few other social sites have been victims of DDOS attacks.

[Karen W.]

Facebook, Twitter, and a few other social sites have been victims of DDOS attacks.

Doc...what are DDOS ATTACKS?

what doews that stand for?

[RD]

... distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users. Although the means to carry out, motives for, and targets of a DoS attack may vary, it generally consists of the concerted efforts of a person or people to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning efficiently or at all, temporarily or indefinitely. Perpetrators of DoS attacks typically target sites or services hosted on high-profile web servers such as banks, credit card payment gateways

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack

[DoctorBeaver]

In general what happens is that a person or persons send out a virus/trojan or whatever which then sits on people's hard drives until a signal activates it. That PC then continually tries to access a certain website. Sometimes there are tens of thousands of infected PCs all sending requests to the 1 site at the same time. That much traffic overloads the servers and they throw up their hands in submission.

The host site where I have my site was subjected to a different kind of DDOS attack, In that instance all the DNS addresses were set to null. To understand what that means you need to know a bit about how the internet works. Briefly, if you want to access the Naked Scientists site you type "http://www.thenakedscientists.com" into your address bar. But for the internals of the internet that needs to be translated into a IP number such as 127.10.34.81. and the mechanism for tying a name to an internet address is DNS (Domain Name System). This system allows a website's name to remain the same even if it is switched to a different host site. What happened with my host site was that all the addresses were set to 0.0.0.0. so no sites were accessible.