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No one wants to corner the market on impotence -- except for Pfizer, makers of Viagra. Pfizer is suing four competing drug companies to keep Viagra-like products off the market. Unspun would crack some tasteless jokes right about now, but it's all been said by cheeky British headline writers. "Pfizer's Viagra Faces Stiff Competition," read the BBC News hed, while the Guardian titled its article "Pfizer Fears Rivals' Potency."

It's been quite a week for pharmaceutical news. On Monday, President Bush scolded the drug industry for using patents to discourage competition from generics. The next day, Pfizer got a patent (nice timing) covering not just Viagra but the general way the drug works, by blocking an enzyme that relaxes muscle cells and allowing increased blood flow to you-know-where. Then Pfizer sued Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline (currently developing a drug called Levitra) and Eli Lilly and Icos (working on one called Cialis) for infringing the brand-new patent. The suit is "unusual" because usually Big Pharma sues small companies pumping out generic drugs from developing countries, said the BBC, not other big firms.

"Similar legal action in Europe has already failed," said the Guardian, and an Icos spokesperson repeated that fact to anyone who'd listen. Regardless, Glaxo has "put aside £145m to settle patent disputes," reported the Independent. Remember, the suit was filed in lawyer-happy America, the same country that lets the obese sue fast food chains. You never know.

Pfizer's competitors say their impotence drugs are different from Viagra, anyway. Levitra is supposedly better for diabetics, and Cialis will last longer (stop snickering). A choice of drugs that do the same thing but vary in some ways is good, said Forbes.com's Matthew Herper, because patients who don't respond to one can try another. Herper gave another good reason why Pfizer is out of line: What if Bayer, whose cholesterol drug Baycol was declared unsafe and had to be withdrawn, were first to market and got a patent on that entire class of cholesterol drugs? Pfizer couldn't have introduced its competing product, Lipitor, and "people with high cholesterol would be out of luck," said Herper. Wait, is the pharmaceutical industry about helping people with health problems? Pardon us if we occasionally forget. - Jen Muehlbauer

Pfizer's Viagra Faces Stiff Competition
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/2352085.stm

Pfizer Fears Rivals' Potency
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,817876,00.html

Pfizer Wins Viagra Patent, Moves to Block Competition
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1035325918718052671,00.html
(Paid subscription required.)

GSK Puts £145m Into Patent Fund As Pfizer Launches Viagra Lawsuit
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=345381

Pfizer sues to protect Viagra (Bloomberg)
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/92414_icos23.shtml

Pfizer Sues to Protect Viagra Patent (Reuters)
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Business/reuters20021023_458.html

Pfizer Must Lose This Battle
http://www.forbes.com/home/2002/10/23/cx_mh_1023pfizer.html

The Internet was attacked at about 5 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. Network operators noticed immediately and took steps to mitigate any damage. The press noticed about 24 hours later. The Washington Post's David McGuire and Brian Krebs seem to have been the first mainstream reporters to write about the incident, a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS) attack aimed at the 13 machines at the heart of the Net's naming system.

No other outlet that we reviewed tried to give the Post much competition for the thoroughness of its probing; many simply called the same sources the Post had cited. The Post stayed ahead of the story, this morning reporting that the first attack had been followed five or six hours later by a second sortie aimed at a different part of the Net's infrastructure.

CNET's reporter interviewed Paul Mockapetris, one of the Internet's pioneers and the inventor of the Domain Name System, whose root servers were the target of Monday's first attack. According to CNET, Mockapetris said that "compared to the 300 or so records that each root server contains, a future target that administrators should worry about is the three million or so records held by the .com DNS servers." These were in fact among the targets of the second attack, as reported by the Post. (InternetNews also spoke with Mockapetris but misspelled his name.)

Several outlets led with the angle of FBI and/or White House involvement in investigating the attacks. Good luck with that. As the BBC pointed out, DDoS attacks are relatively simple to mount after a bad guy rounds up a stable of "slave" machines to do the dirty work; "numerous free packages" are available for the roundup, the BBC reported. (Whew, good thing their authors don't charge for them.) The Post's followup story today explained how difficult it it so trace the actual locations of the slave machines once a DDoS attack is launched.

The BBC put some perspective on the occurrence of DDoS attacks, quoting a Web monitoring source who guesstimated that 4,000 such attacks are launched every week, though most are not so precisely targeted at the Net's crucial infrastructure.

Among the most amusing accounts of the attack was one carried in the Inquirer (no, not THAT Inquirer), a British Web site aimed at the IT profession. The story's first three words should tip savvy readers to the outlet's slant on tech news: "The wonderous Interweb withstood an almost catastrophic DDoS attack ..." (There is no such animal as the Interweb). We mention this source only to bring to your attention this spinoff from The Register that seems determined to outdo its progenitor in outrageousness and raw sarcastic attitude. In other words, the Inquirer has it has its tongue in its cheek, but some might say it has its head in some other orifice. - Keith Dawson

Attack On Internet Called Largest Ever (10/22)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A828-2002Oct22.html

More Than One 'Net Attack Occurred Monday (10/24)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6894-2002Oct23.html

Net attack flops, but threat persists
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-963095.html

Dealing With Massive Attack: DNS Protection
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/1487331

FBI probes attack on net
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2352667.stm

Internet almost brought to its knees!
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=5884

FBI investigating assault on Internet
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/4356781.htm

Net backbone withstands major attack
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/10/23/021023hnattack.xml

Internet's foundations shaken by attack
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992963

AOL-TW Restates Two Years of Results (Reuters)
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Business/reuters20021023_589.html

Fed finds Sluggish Economy With Weak Retailing, Manufacturing (AP)
http://www.startribune.com/stories/535/3384910.html

How I destroyed the new economy http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/10/23/wetherell/

Is Sears The Next Lucent?
http://money.cnn.com/2002/10/23/markets/sears/index.htm

Chevy Has Faith In Tour, But Christianity-Themed Concerts Spark Controversy
http://www.freep.com/money/business/chevy23_20021023.htm

For Richer
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/20/magazine/20INEQUALITY.html

A Palmtop for the Prosecution
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/24/technology/circuits/24palm.html

AOL to Revise Financial Results
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7867-2002Oct23.html

AOL recast hits Time Warner's income
http://media.guardian.co.uk/city/story/0,7497,818009,00.html

Copyedited by Jim Duffy (jimduffy86@yahoo.com).

Advertising: Erik Vanderkolk (erikvanderkolk@yahoo.com).

Editor and publisher: Jimmy Guterman (guterman@vineyard.com).

Media Unspun is produced by The Vineyard Group Inc.
Copyright 2002 Media Unspun, Inc., and The Vineyard Group, Inc.
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