Protesters forced the Korean Ministry of Information and Communication's Web site to shut down for 10 hours on Saturday. But was it a mass click-in or a DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attack which brought the service to its knees?

Co-ordinating the protest was the Progressive Network Centre (PNC), a group which opposes Korean government plans to introduce film rating-type regulation to the Web (Story: Koreans to crack down on obscene Webcasting).

It says the site was brought down by thousands of people connecting to the site at the same time. However, the English-language version of the Korea Herald today baldly states that the ministry's home page succumbed to a DDoS attack and it cites a PNC statement proclaiming that DDoS is "one of legitimate methods to express political will". ®