In fact, I've read dozens of articles over last few months explaining in great detail concepts of cyber-warfare and cyber-terrorism. One of central assumptions of many of these documents is value of internet is obvious to any enemy of United States and rest of free world. It has even been argued that Code Red may very well be a form of cyber-warfare, perhaps even created by a quasi-government agency of some kind.

Now light has dawned and I understand a basic fact which I did not fully gasp until I saw a plane fly through World Trade Center building.

The job of a terrorist is to create terror.

Attacks through a communication system such as internet do not create terror. Yes, you can do one heck of a lot of damage to American infrastructure by sending attacks through phone lines. You can cause electric power blackouts, banking failures and many other malicious acts.

A computer programmer shutting off power to a city is no where near as horrifying as watching a 110 story building crumbling to dust.

What could a cyber-terrorist do?

- Shut down stock market? The September 11th terrorists closed it down for two or more days.

- Get their attacks shown on evening news? A cyber attack would get no where near coverage as terrorists got on this day.

- Crash a jet? The terrorists did far more than that.

- Ground a few planes? The terrorists grounded every plane in United States.

- Shut down power grid for a city? Again, nothing compared to a real terrorist attack.

That's what we in IT miss ... we are terrified beyond belief by failure of technology. Most people, however, do not have anywhere near intimate knowledge and understanding of shear power that we possess.

You've got to understand, terrorists are not intelligent beings. They are stupid as stones. Do you really think Usama Bin Laden is intelligent? It does not take brains to ruthlessly kill thousands of innocent human beings. A volcano or mudslide can do that just fine without a single brain cell.

File not found - requested URL not found on this server

It's annoying, especially when you've searched for something and found what looks like perfect site. At least description exactly matches your needs. You click and boom, a 404 error appears. Whoops. What happened to that perfect site?

There are several reasons why this error occurs. I guess thing that you need to remember is internet is very fluid. In fact, it changes constantly. Sometimes a site is changing while you are looking at it. I can remember several times I was examining a site and returned to a page that I had seen only moments before and found it to be different! That can be very unnerving, to say least.

So what sometimes happens is a webmaster changes his site around and obsoletes links. If he's a rank amateur, he'll break links within his own site. This does happen sometimes, but any webmaster worth his salt is constantly checking and rechecking his site to be sure it works and works well. After all, only way to test something is to use it. And only way to see if a site really works is to surf it.

More often, someone has linked to a site and that site changes. Since it can be difficult if not impossible to determine who has linked to a site, links break.

Now, really good webmasters never ever delete a page on their site. What they do is create redirect pages. Thus, if I have a page called "barbi.htm" and I want to delete it, I will modify page to tell visitor it no longer exists and redirect him to another page in my site. This way I will not loose traffic simply because I've deleted or renamed a page.