No wonder things are not going well at Yahoo! I just experienced a Yahoo! outage across multiple business unit sites, both consumer and business-focused — at least 10 minutes. I also checked via my Blackberry so it wasn’t just my ISP or computer…

Ouch. DDos?

This story about a rogue mobile phone constantly calling 911 is actually a little scary - sometimes a feature created to provide additional safety or security may end up compromising it. If a lot of cellphones unburdened by the cost and trackability of a carrier contract start dialing 911 in a particular area, they could quite easily create a denial of service for legitimate emergencies… however, in this case, surely they can triangulate the location based on other 911  services that have been set up that require the location of the call to be pinpointed?

The news just doesn’t get any better for Vonage, does it? A security firm put out a press release claiming that Vonage users using a particular Motorola phone adapter are “vulnerable to a form of VoIP identity theft, allowing hackers to take over a user’s phone service with a “registration replay attack,” then make and receive calls while impersonating the victim”. Valuable to remember that software isn’t the only thing vulnerable to attack, hardware is too… something to keep in mind when funding large-scale ISP-level hardware-related consumer-data-driven advertising ventures, perhaps?