The internet was initially intended as a distributed network able to continue functioning even when partially destroyed. It's an interesting idea that engineers once built systems with the condition "Will this still work if half my country is nuked?", and luckily one that no longer applies - because if anyone ever targets the Googleplex in Mountain View the whole thing could come crashing down. Google demonstrated their importance last Saturday by blocking the entire internet, marking every single page with warnings that they was bad for the user. While that's probably true, overall, it didn't help users whose computers were constantly redirected to web security firm StopBadware.org. It didn't help StopBadware.org either, actually, since they were slightly unprepared for connections from the entire world and their servers went down due to the massive Google-directed denial of service attack.
The whole thing was over inside an hour, with the problem traced to a single slash typo in a malware site list. The blocked-site file included a "/", and if you look at that little browser bar above this article you'll see that every single site in the world has one of those.
Now, we're not suggesting that this is some kind of warning shot from an ultrapowerful cyber-corp that's been reading Neuromancer and thinking "Those online megacorporations who can bend the world to their will are an awesome idea!" We are, however, saying that literally with a single keystroke Google just broke both the internet AND an anti-breaking-the-internet site.
Checkout the official word: http://www.physorg.com/news152630976.html
