The recent DNS attacks are probably known to everyone paying attention. As a reminder, be advised that this could be (easily) repeated, taking down vast segments of the Internet, including your’s truly. I was offline for days and barely had even dialup access.

I was still “here”, but you’d not have known it. I received a few phone calls for free catalogs, but I don’t waste the ink and paper anymore and have a downloadable .pdf catalog that I keep current. Get it while you can.

That’s right - this is a commercial advertisement to get you to download my catalog. The Net could be taken down at any time. My only source of advertising is on the Internet, which means I could be put out of “business” instantly. Or not, if you have my catalog in hand on your computer.

The Net attacks cost me an untold number of sales, if everyone else was experiencing the same problems I was. I finally gave up and waited for the local provider to reconfigure and regain access. It was almost five days before things were back to normal for me.

Undoubtedly, this hurt other Net companies too, but I don’t know how many. A future attack could and probably would disable many companies and eventually, it could even lead to a serious shortage of goods. The Internet has become the lifeline for a lot of companies, shipping, receiving and selling products all over the country.

Eventually, as Cryptogon points out, the Net could be taken down completely. That’s bad news for everyone, especially those of us that are struggling to make a living. Get whatever important and necessary data now and store it on your computer someplace. That will certainly be better then nothing if this happens again, which it probably will.