NetworkWorld: Homeless man disrupts Internet2 service

A stray cigarette butt landed on a mattress under the Longfellow Bridge between Boston and Cambridge which cut the OC-192 connection between Boston and New York for Internet2. The damage to the academic network was repaired within four hours.

[Chris] Robb, [co-author of the Internet2 Network Upgrade Blog] writes: "Question: When can a cigarette take down your network? Answer: When you throw it at a bridge and light it on fire."

Authorities say the fire, which also disrupted service on the Red Line subway, started around 8:20 p.m. when a homeless man tossed a lit cigarette. The cigarette landed on a mattress, which ignited and led to a two-alarm fire.

I called up the Boston Fire Department, and was told there were no serious injuries reported, so we can start lampooning the incident immediately.

Chris Robb already has a head start. Slashdot posters suggest the "obligatory firewall joke."

And of course, "Level 3 Communications used by the network went up in flames… taken out by a Level 1 homeless person… he obviously rolled a 20 on his attack roll."

Apparently, the fire also knocked out MIT's Internet 1 connection for a short while, according to this comment.

New York Times: In Web Uproar, Antipiracy Code Spreads Wildly

No, we will not publish the HDDVD key. Don't ask. Not just because it's illegal, but also because it's quickly turning into an "All Your Base" that can set you up for legal liability. We wouldn't mention it, except that the uproar about it caused Digg's front page to be swamped with stories about it - causing what can only be termed as a "denial of content" effect.

The campaign to remove the number from circulation went largely unnoticed until news of the letters hit Digg. The 25-employee company in San Francisco, acting on the advice of its lawyers, removed posting submissions about the secret number from its database earlier this week, then explained the move to its readers on Tuesday afternoon.

The removals were seen by many Digg users as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. Some also said that the trade group that promotes the HD-DVD format, which uses A.A.C.S. protection, had advertised on a weekly Digg-related video podcast.

On Tuesday afternoon and into the evening, stories about or including the code swamped Digg's main page, which the company says gets 16 million readers each month. At 9 p.m. West Coast time, the company surrendered to mob sentiment.

This is an unorthodox way for network performance to go awry, but it's still a network performance issue. The machine worked the way it was programmed to, bits still got from one end to the other. But Digg's site wasn't able to fulfill its primary purpose: To inform people of multiple different interesting news stories. Instead, the revolution crowded out other information - and since the network exists in order to run the applications to support business, that's a network and application performance issue, even if it's one that most network engineers might not think about.

Anyway, we won't publish that code, and ask you not to publish it in our comments - we've got moderation up, so any "09's" won't make it on the site anyway.

It is also imperative that you do not publish the number 30-22-09. That's my gym locker code in my junior year of high school, and it could have been used in 1996 to allow access to my homework assignments so that they can be illegally copied in a Xerox machine or scanned into a Linux system.

Once again, that number that you must not distribute is 30-22-09.