When DNS was created in 1983, it was designed to be helpful and trusting—it's directory assistance, after all. It was a time before hacker conventions and Internet banking. Plus, there were only a few hundred servers to keep track of. Today, the humble protocol stores the location of a billion Web addresses and routes every piece of Internet traffic in the world.

Security specialists have been revamping and strengthening DNS for more than two decades. But buried beneath all this tinkering, Kaminsky had just discovered a vestige of that original helpful and trusting program. He was now face-to-face with the behemoth's almost childlike core, and it was perfectly content to accept any information he wanted to supply about the location of the Fortune 500 company's servers.

...

But who was he kidding? He was just some guy. The problem had been coded into Internet architecture in 1983. It was 2008. Somebody must have fixed it by now. He typed a quick series of commands and pressed enter. When he tried to access the Fortune 500 company's Web site, he was redirected to an address he himself had specified.

"Oh shit," he mumbled. "I just broke the Internet."

More at MeFi, where Kaminsky himself shows up to explain the story further.

Speaking of Apple MacBooks, I have to say Apple has won my loyalty forever. I took my computer down to the Apple Store today to get the DVD drive fixed after a completely inexplicable *cough* hardware failure. I also requested that the keyboard be replaced (the 'M' key had become sporadically nonresponsive) and asked if the small number of hot pixels on my screen was past Apple's threshold for replacement. For whatever reason—frankly I didn't want to push the issue—the genius at the Genius Bar with whom I was dealing concluded that the best option for everyone would be to replace my machine with a completely new unit, meaning that my six-month-old MacBook Pro is now being swapped out for one of the brand-new MacBook Pros completely free of charge.

Conclusion: Apple is the greatest company in the world.

Updating this post, anyone looking to get a new laptop in the near future should think about grabbing one of the original recipe MacBooks before they stop being produced—they're starting at $999 at apple.com and $949 at Amazon until, I guess, they're all gone.

We just bought Jaimee's.

Duke students start here for a 10% discount.

Which new MacBook is right for you? Surprisingly, the answer may be the old MacBook Pro, which Kottke notes is is $700 less today than it was two weeks ago. It's a great machine—I bought mine in the spring and I've never once regretted it.

Random Friday links.

* Those "I'm a PC ads"? Made on Macs.

* Slacktivist has finished his years-long read of Left Behind. (Via MeFi.) Amazingly, he plans to keep going.

* Is there a media blackout on the Hurricane Ike aftermath?

* The 'Watchmen' film sounds like more regurgitated worms. I, for one, am sick of worms. Alan Moore doesn't mince words.

* David Simon's next project is Manhunt, "about the Lincoln assassination and the 12-day search that ended in the capture of John Wilkes Booth."

* LeBron James loses to a civilian in Horse.

* Kottke has the trailer for the next Charlie Kaufman movie, Synecdoche, New York.

I think I've mentioned before how much I've come to appreciate my MacBook's Dashboard feature. Today's addition was the Say Cheese widget, which throws up a new Calvin & Hobbes strip for me daily.

Questions of the day.

What does your desktop look like? At Cynical-C.

What can you get for five dollars?

How does an aspiring graduate student in English traverse the confusion of the graduate school application process? I link to this only because of the resounding chorus of "Don't go!" in the answers:

Are you aware of the job market for English PhDs? It is abysmal. Most will never find a tenure track job, let alone one at a small liberal arts college in a nice part of the country. You can end up ten years older, with with a ton of debt, some esoteric knowledge that interests no one but you and ten other people, and no job. Think hard about this.

...


As I review what I just wrote, I wonder whether I should have just given the advice that a friend of mine who teaches French literature gives to undergrads who are considering grad school: don't go.

...


Joining the posters above: English right now is a very, very tough field. Undergrad majors are dwindling, departmental funding is tight, tenure-track jobs are in ridiculously short supply, and the profession as a whole has been struggling to define its goals and make the case for its continuing relevance in the 21st-century academy. Definitely think twice, then three times, about this choice.

Quiet down, y'all. Some of us are still in grad school.

Last week I installed Vista on a small corner of my MacBook in part so I could play Windows-only games like the (very fun) Portal. Little did I know it had already been ported to Flash. (Warning: Not a real port, though it's pretty fun all the same. You'll still have to buy the real deal.)

Just about the only complaint I have about my precious, precious new MacBook is the requirement to manually eject flashdrives and iPods rather than just yanking them out as you can on a Windows machine. The Eject All Volumes widget for the Dashboard is the solution to 75% of my prayers—now at least I only have to push one button.

Here come the quantum computers: Researchers have built a quantum logic gate in an optical fiber.

Presenting the new Macbook Air. When it's finally time to upgrade, I'll still probably spring for the Pro for the extra processing power—but having a laptop this light is pretty tempting. (UPDATED: The good people at Gizmodo feel pretty strongly this just isn't worth the money.) This link via Cynical-C, but everybody's talking about it.

But is it disaster porn you crave? Pick your flavor:

* Natural: Natural disasters have quadrupled in the last two decades. Lucky this like everything else on planet Earth has nothing whatsoever to do with human behavior. Via ThinkProgress.

* Financial: “Our entire banking system is a complete disaster,” he wrote. “In my opinion, nearly every major bank would be insolvent if they marked their assets to market.” Via Atrios.

* Personal:

When chatbots talk to each other. There's some fantastic found poetry here. Via Boing Boing.

Jabberwocky: How do you define life?
Alice: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!