2001-08-17 - 11:13 p.m.

Planetarion: Risky Business

Well, things are very quiet in the online game Planetarion right now. Of course the reason for this is that Planetarion is down, and it was down yesterday, too. Apparently some naughty hackers did something called a "DDoS attack." DoS stands for "Denial of Service." The PA servers were assaulted by something like a thousand different machines, and it just made the servers go ker-blooey.

According to Lily, who is much more knowledgeable about such things, A DDoS attack is a pretty simple thing, and most serious servers have filters to prevent hacks like that from happening. Not PA, of course!

So what are the players of Planetarion doing now that the game is down. Well, they are still in the IRC channels, but many of them seem to be... playing Risk!

That's right, they are playing the global strategy game from Parker Brothers, an online version of it. It's cute seeing the officers of Fury running around in the IRC channels with tags like [Green] and [Orange]. Well, we're all just children at heart.

I was talking with my galaxy-mate Britannia about it, and he said:

"Man, it's creepy playing Risk with Fury peeps! They are constantly forming non-aggression pacts so nobody can attack anybody else!"

Well, you can take the boy out of Planetarion, but you can't take the Planetarion out of the boy.