al-Jazeera offline Here's an interesting bit of news. al-Jazeera, the Qatar based Arabic-language news firm has been taken offline. Why? The amount of traffic the site was getting was too overwhelming. Few reasons why: 1) There were lots of people who figured getting the news from al-Jazeera was better than the antiseptic CNN, 2) the site simply didn't have the bandwidth CNN can afford, so we shouldn't expect the same service; 3) the pro-US hackers were just having a field day with the site. On the last point, this was what's been happening to al-Jazeera since they decided to air footage of the US soldiers captured by Iraqi forces. Apparently, there has been a back and forth between pro-war and anti-war hackers, taking over, defacing and rendering sites in both camps useless. Welcome to the new age of protest.