is posted in links. While I can understand this person's stress, I'm sure Amazon can't simply accept his word immediately. I've seen cases where somebody claimed they were being "attacked" by another where it was simply a routine operation gone awry or just miscalculating how much CPU load they were really exerting on somebody else. Here, it was clearly an attack, but I'm sure there is some hyperbole in Amazon "staying silent". These things do take some time to discover, and contacting the customer before shutting down their instances would also be a prudent move on Amazon's behalf.

Consumers have long since stopped using serial cables in favour of USB. The only real place that they still exist is to get a serial console on servers in a datacenter. The OP suggests that it might be replaced by USB here too, but this is where I disagree. For that sort of task, network-based services are becoming more common. Ethernet is cheap and easy to deploy, and not that difficult to implement in hardware. Though there'd be nothing to stop a server manufacturer from just building a serial-to-usb converter into their hardware so you get the traditional serial interfaces but using USB. The serial cable isn't dead yet.