How Tenuous Our Infrastructure Is

Asia's got Internet problems, and it's not just the Chinese government's unwillingness to let go of their ancient censorship practices. No, apparently what happens when an undersea Mediterranean cable is cut is that "large swathes of Asia, the Middle East and north Africa had their high-technology services crippled". (CNN story here.) Curious, I decided to check out Internet Traffic Report.

Here's what I found:

If it's not obvious to you, check out 12:40pm. Ouch.

While widespread blackouts are getting rarer, this reminds me of the Northeast US blackout during the late summer of 2003. And I was just reading Wired magazine this month online with a series of "America's Best Kept Secrets" that includes a picture of where the trans-Atlantic cable connects to the USA-side in my home state of New Jersey. The photographer comments how innocent and fragile it looks. Yeah, well, I guess it is?

In a world depending so much on stable, digital communication, shouldn't we have ... oh ... redundancy in our undersea cables? Multiple companies providing these services? And since they are in International waters, do we have any oversight whatsoever as to what actually happened? Things we sort of take for granted, hmm?

Oh, speaking of Wired, 2 things. First, I'll have my response to Julian Dibbel's article very soon.
Second, I noticed that "machinima" made it into Geekipedia, and "metaverse" has not. I took a look at the voting page, and found:

Machinima
by Paul Marino

A fusion of cinema, animation and video games, Machinima (muh-sheen-eh-mah) is the application of live-action filmmaking practices within a real-time 3D virtual environment - most often done using 3D video games.

Notable examples include Red vs. Blue (made using the Halo, Halo 2 and Halo 3), Person 2184 (Unreal Tournament 2004) and My Second Life (obviously, Second Life).

109 up / 23 down

Metaverse
by Ron Blechner

The Internet evolved into a set of immersed, 3-D environments where users interact with content and other users via avatars.

99 up / 26 down

So see the up / down numbers? That's up and down votes. Machinima has just about the same number of up-votes as Metaverse, and the same number of down-votes. Why hasn't Metaverse been accepted? I don't know! I'll grant that Paul Marino is one of the most well known experts on machinima. But could it be that ... Wired has something against virtual worlds? Eh? I'll make the case in my next blog post.

So, I encourage you to go vote on "Metaverse" for the Geekipedia, up or down!