Banner day for me today...

Here is another article for perusal, but this one is actually more interesting than one would think at the outset...

Akamai Declines to Assist Al-Jazerra Site


Apr 4, 2:31 PM (ET)

The Web site of Arab satellite news channel Al-Jazeera was refused assistance this week when it sought help from Akamai Technologies Inc. (AKAM) of Cambridge, Mass., in dealing with hacking attacks and massive interest from Web users.

"We think it's political pressure," said Nabil Hegazi, deputy managing editor of Al-Jazeera's English-language Web site.

Akamai rents out a network of 12,600 servers that help customer Web sites deal with unexpected traffic, hacker attacks and Internet bottlenecks.

In a prepared statement, Akamai said it "worked briefly this week with Al Jazeera to understand the issues they are having distributing their websites," but decided not to continue the relationship.

Akamai would not comment Friday on why it broke off the collaboration.

Al-Jazeera drew intense interest and criticism after it carried Iraqi TV footage of dead and captive U.S. soldiers. U.S. television networks had decided not to air footage of the corpses. Al-Jazeera later honored a U.S. request to stop until families could be notified.

Its English-language Web site was brought down by Internet attacks soon after it debuted last week, and the Arabic page was unavailable for long periods as well. Hackers calling themselves the "Freedom Cyber Force Militia" later diverted visitors seeking the English site to a page with a U.S. flag.

Al-Jazeera said this week that steps were being taken to protect its servers against hackers. The English-language page went back online by Thursday evening U.S. time, but by Friday afternoon, the full text of the stories was again unavailable. Al-Jazeera's night staff did not know what the problem was.

Web portal Lycos reported that Al-Jazeera's site was the most sought-after on the Internet last week.

Al-Jazeera is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. It has received funding by Qatar's government but is an unusually independent voice in the Arab world.

Its reporters were banned from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last week, but the exchange has indicated that it might be willing to reconsider its decision.

Okay, here is what is interesting about this article. The co-founder of Akamai was killed on one of the airliners on September 11. Now, what in the world was Al-Jazeera thinking when they approached this company? Would it not be obvious that Akamai might harbor just a little bit of resentment towards the one Arab news source that trumpeted the story that the Jews were behind 9/11 and praised wholeheartedly the attackers of the World Trade Center? All I can say is good for Akamai.