THE INTERNET IS GOING TO DIE

Sensationalists everywhere: THE INTERNET IS GOING TO SHUT DOWN UNLESS THE FBI DOES SOMETHING!!!!!

Just thought you should know.

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If you made it this far down the page, you are one of the smart ones.

I just got done reading a thread over on the Gentoo Users Mailing List about how the Internet is going to be shut down by the FBI in March and how the whole world is going to explode:

http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/msg_f326fc2e5f8b55aa9fa398236ebbbbda.xml

Now, I would expect someone who lurks around on Gentoo-Users list to have a little bit of common sense as far as these things go, but apparently I'm wrong.  This gentleman thinks that shutting down the Internet for 24 hours is going to stop a raging, rampant, world ending virus in its tracks.  Anybody with working knowledge of the Internet would tell you that this world-ending virus doesn't exist, and even if it did, shutting down the Internet (which can't be done really), would just make the virus wait until it came back on.

So what does this virus actually do?  It redirects a user to sites that make the virus creators some money with advertising revenue.  What did the FBI do about it?  They replaced the illegal servers with legitimate ones, however, those can't stay there forever: the computers actually need to be cleaned out so they route to the Internet PROPERLY.

Shut the whole thing down and let people clean up their own messes.  If you aren't smart enough to be running around the Internet without antivirus software, you should be intelligent enough to know to have some and keep it updated.  I met a couple of 80 year olds coming from dialup service the other day who asked me how they could install Norton.  80 YEAR OLDS.

Let the 14 million computers explode and have people sort it out with their time and money, not taxpayer money by getting the FBI involved. I don't care how many fortune 500 companies lose revenue that day.