Usually, an unresponsive Web site does not faze me. Web sites get funky from time to time, and I typically just look for porn somewhere else when that happens.

But on Tuesday night, I could not get on CNN.com to get my evening news fix. This is the news organization that during the Persian Gulf War actually attached reporters to scud missiles and introduced the world to the rifle-cam. CNN is not the type of outfit you would expect to be cranky. Unless the annual mud wrestling match between Larry “Suspender Hold” King and James Earl “Squeaky” Jones got out of hand and they bumped over the server.

Wednesday morning, I picked up the paper and realized what went wrong. CNN.com, along with eBay and Amazon.com, was nearly crippled for several hours on Tuesday by cyberterrorists.

Adding to the list, Yahoo! was hit on Monday, and Wednesday morning brought problems for ZDNet and E*Trade.

All of these e-businesses were struck by the same type of assault — a nasty little number called a “denial of service attack.” According to CNN.com (now that’s a Texas-size serving of irony), a denial of service attack involves not breaking in to a site but simply overloading it, sending millions and millions of small chunks of data with no return address.

It would be akin to sending the U.S. Postal Service a billion postcards addressed to Santa Claus all within one hour. Not only would the postal workers be so overworked that they barely had time to clean their semi-automatics, the legitimate mail would get lost in the shuffle.

None of the parade of techie experts that have been marched out in the wake of the crisis seem to able to establish even a tentative motive for the attacks. The swath of terrorism seems to be a random one, narrowing in on both Web sites that are extensions of old media (CNN.com) and new media poster boys such as Amazon.com and E*Trade.

To be honest, I enjoyed a guilty rush of pleasure when I learned what had caused my frustration Tuesday.

I’m no Ted Kaczynski, but I have a hard time buying into the idea that the Internet is the future of everything. Listening to professors in class or analysts on TV, one would have no choice but to believe that in 10 years the Internet will be a major player in business, communications, religion, politics, medicine, sex, dating, home appliances, couches, the logging industry and even Luddites.

The Internet is pretty damn cool. There are things it can accomplish very well. In the world of business, e-commerce can probably elbow itself out a little pocket of the retail market, just like back in the beginning of the 1900s when them there dag darnity new-fangled catalogs did the same.

But I don’t see the advantage of ordering over a computer what you could just as easily order over the phone with much less risk. The Internet is not going to revamp society. The inadequacies of the medium were clearly displayed this week.

The Internet is an entity that does not exist in any one place. It cannot be defended from corruption. It is too intangible to protect. We’re not talking about a bank you can slap an alarm on.

No matter how sophisticated the safeguards, no matter how unbreakable the data encryption, there are going to be pricks getting their kicks or their bankroll breaking in to these systems.

I have never given my credit card number to a computer, and I don’t plan to because shenanigans like those that brought a handful of the great Internet giants to their knees this week are just going to become more and more frequent as this new technology is pulled further into mainstream society.

The hackers, crackers, computer geeks and net nerds who once ruled this world of glazed eyes and carpal tunnel syndrome will strike out at these monolith companies and make them pay for stomping onto the technological playground and extending no more courtesy to its founding fathers than a six-foot square cubicle.

Yes, the only thing that happened was that I couldn’t get my news from my preferred source for a couple hours and some 43-year old comic book dealer from Ohio was denied access to his Furby account on eBay.

But mark my words, it’s a sign of things to come. The Internet is here to stay, but it’s not here to conquer. It is not only prudent but also plain common sense to assume that the dot-com craze is nothing but that, a craze. Don’t buy in to this oft-trumpeted fantasy world where we have everything at our fingertips. Remember that in that world, everything’s fingertips will be all over us.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communication from Aurora. He is a news editor at the Daily.