Ddos

Distributed Denial of Service (see DoS).

A distributed denial of service is many computers on the Internet coordinating a DoS against a single host, network or network infrastructure.

A DDoS can be done by people who have hijacked a great number of hosts (known as zombie hosts) or done by members of organizations who have moral, political or religious motives.

• Stories posted to Slashdot can be seen as the control for a DDoS, and all the slashdotters clicking on the link of a site contribute to the load on that remote web server. When a web server is unable to handle the loads of HTTP demand it is said to have been "slashdotted". This drives home the point that freedom of speech on the Internet can be a costly affair. You can have a good idea but if you can't put money behind it, popularity like being featured on slashdot will put you to ruins.

• Large organizations also have the power of "slashdotting" sites that they have a moral disagreement with. Sometimes they'll ask you to reload the site a few times to create the extra load on the remote servers.