Yeah, it's yet another bogus excuse from the police trying to justify what their leadership is trying to do. The probable cause is too often "the guy's ethnic and acted suspicious", and they're adding "possession of a computer" as a further excuse, which these days is pretty much universal. They're not even saying they plan to hold people for 90 days only if they also get a warrant to seize and search their computers.
The discussion of encryption radically increases the bogosity of their arguments - if something's encrypted with a decent algorithm, and they use decent passwords, the police will *never* be able to decrypt it, not in 90 days, not in the lifetime of the prisoner, and not in the lifetime of the planet unless quantum computers actually work magic some day in the misty future. Translation is something that could take time, but basically that means that if they want to arrest people who speak languages other than English, they need to hire some people who can speak Arabic and maybe Farsi, Urdu, and Dari or Pushtu; it's not like Southwest Asian languages are any worse than Gaelic (to the extent that IRA terrorists were actually native Gaelic speakers.) If they do a quick search of the computer and find that it looks suspicious enough to require holding somebody, they can get a warrant then, rather than saying they should be able to hold everybody for 90 days with no warrant just in case their computers are hard to wade through.
Ireland lost about half its population during the Potato Famine; a large fraction of the emigrants came to North America, and there are probably more Irish-Americans today than Irish in Ireland. While much of the culture was assimilated into American culture after a while, and Gaelic pretty much disappeared over here, there was still a lot of group coherence, especially since the Irish were mostly Catholic and the dominant US culture was mostly Protestant, so every week you got reminded that you weren't like Them. And there was a lot of anti-immigrant prejudice against the Irish, just as there was against many other ethnic groups, so there's a continuous reminder about ethnic identity, as well as continuous pressure both toward assimilation and towards pride in your own group which applies to many ethnic groups over here.
A recent article I saw compared the terms "-American" with "French-", such as French-Algerians. Over here, if you're a hyphenated ethnic group, the noun part is that you're an American and the ethnic group is a description. In France, you're still an Algerian, you're just in France. To some extent that's unfair; the large Algerian and Moroccan populations in France are mostly more recent immigrants from the ex-colonies, while the hyphenated-American terminology started largely applying to groups that had been here a long time (though it's also used for more recent immigrants.)
And the term "African-American" is largely asserting "hey, were're just as much part of mainstream America as you Irish and Italians, so stop calling us." A couple of my friends do enjoy bending minds by identifying themselves as African-American. One's a blonde guy who was born in Zimbabwe; another's an older Afrikaaner.
The issue here isn't just English cops beating up Irish due to prejudice. It's Irish as in the IRA and other Irish terrorist groups, and how the current British Government is saying they need all sorts of extraordinary powers to violate civil liberties because Muslim Terrorists are an extraordinary menace unlike anything they've ever had to fight before, powers far beyond what they needed to deal with IRA terrorists. After all, Muslim Terrorists believe in a Different Scary Religion, and are immigrants from countries which the British Government fscked over and they're Really Mad About It, and you can't tell South Asian Terrorist Immigrants or Terrorist Illegal Border Crossers from regular law-abiding South Asian Immigrants because they all look the same and some of those regular immigrants might be friendly toward the terrorists, and none of those things were true about the IRA. So the then-extraordinary powers they got for their war against the IRA are now just standard police procedure, and now they need brand-new extraordinary powers.
To cut them a little slack, some of the reasons that they want new extraordinary powers written into the laws is that in the fight against the Irish, they often just ignored and violated laws about police procedures and generally got away with it, whereas today there's more visibility, more television publicity, and more European political concerns about human rights, so they want to make sure that when they're doing extraordinary violations of people's civil rights that they've got laws to permit them to do so.
Don't get me wrong, it's a nice concept. They may be doing some innovative things with the screen, though as of September's non-slashdotted article, that was still just proposed. The crank on the side is a potentially useful touch. And they've taken some creative approaches to picking useful software, applications, and modularity.
But the fundamentally cool thing about this box is that it costs $100; at $200 it wouldn't be as cool, and at $500 it'd be really lame. So until they've got real manufacturing costs and really *can* make it for $100 in volume, it's still vaporware.
Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten's English-language pages keep crashing my Mozilla 1.7.7 browser. I assume it isn't *actually* a plot to get Mozilla users to convert to Opera - more likely it's got something IE-centric in it - but it's annoying, especially because my normal way to read news sites is to start with the front page, open lots of stories in separate tabs, and then read the stories, so if one of the stories has some bad html in it, it crashes a whole browser session, plus whatever other Mozilla windows I have open. I usually only read a few news articles from Aftenposten at a time, but Fark typically has URLs and titles for a large number of stories every day, often with some Aftenposten m00se-bites-car story that crashes my browser after I've opened 50 tabs.
And yes, that's Mozilla, not Firefox, and I probably should either upgrade to 1.7.12 or else use real Firefox, but it's convenient to have a browser install that has all the parts and most of the plugins working with it. I haven't hunted down the offending pages, or tried them in Opera yet to see if they crash it; if I'm going to bother doing that, I should upgrade the browser first.
BBC Article on Spyware in WoW
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Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 2, Informative
Coincidentally, a mailing list I'm on had a posting pointing to the following BBC Article URL
Warcraft game maker in spying row By Mark Ward Technology Correspondent, BBC News website
Screenshot of dwarves on ram mounts from World of Warcraft, Blizzard Warden watches as gamers explore Warcraft's world. Game maker Blizzard has been accused of spying on the four million players of World of Warcraft.
Net activists branded software used to spot cheats "spyware" because it gathers information about the other programs running on players' PCs.
In its defence Blizzard said nothing was done with the information gathered by the anti-cheat software. And many players seem happy to have the software running if it cuts the amount of cheating in the game world.
Home invasion
The watchdog program, called The Warden by Blizzard, has been known about among players for some time.
It makes sure that players are not using cheat software which can, for example, automatically play the game and build up a character's qualities.
However, knowledge of it crossed to the mainstream thanks to software engineer Greg Hoglund who disassembled the code of The Warden and watched it in action to get a better idea of what it did.
Screenshot of stone giant from World of Warcraft, Blizzard Warcraft players back Blizzard's anti-cheat system
He found that it performed a quick analysis on other programs running on a PC to see if their characteristics match known cheating programs.
But Mr Hoglund found that The Warden also scans the text in the title bars of any Window for any other program.
Writing in his blog about what he found Mr Hoglund said: "I watched The Warden sniff down the e-mail addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs."
Mr Hoglund noted that the text strings in title bars could easily contain credit card details or social security numbers.
Digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) branded The Warden "spyware" and said its use constituted "a massive invasion of privacy".
The EFF said that it was not acceptable simply to take Blizzard's word that it did nothing with the information it gathered. It added that the Blizzard could get away with using The Warden because information about it was buried in licence agreements that few people read.
Fair play
Blizzard took to the forums on the central community site for World of Warcraft to defend itself and correct what it saw as "misinformation" about its actions.
It said that The Warden did not gather any personally identifiable information about players only data about the account being used. It also re-iterated that the only thing done with data gathered was to look for evidence of hack or cheat programs.
For their part many gamers seem happy to tolerate The Warden even though they acknowledged that it eroded their privacy to an extent.
Jason Justice, speaking on behalf of members of the Low Red Moon guild, said many in its ranks supported the programs used by Blizzard if it kept the cheats out of the game.
Pack shot from Diablo II, Blizzard Cheats spoiled the online version of Diablo II "The concern most have is that the program has the capability to read text from open programs, potentially compromising the privacy of some sensitive programs."
"If someone is afraid of the program reading sensitive information from their programs, one possible solution is simply to not run any additional programs while playing World of Warcraft," he said, "which is certainly advisable from a performance standpoint to begin with."
He told the BBC News website: "It is entirely Blizzard's responsibility to protect their intellectual property and the fairness of the game experience, and if they have code sophisticate
Sure, any of us who have broadband could set up a honeypot, and any anti-spam cabal could provide as much effort as "a couple dozen interns", or any university professor with some grad students and a budget for caffeine could do it.
But why Borg vs. Zombies is important is that they have the resources to get a bunch of lawyers to build a sufficiently large lawsuit to hunt down the spammers across jurisdictions, and sue them where it's legally possible.
And because they're MSN, the big ISP, they can make a strong case that zombies are costing them lots of money, and can get the spammers' ISPs to listen to them in ways that smaller non-ISP players usually can't.
Seattle's the only place besides the San Francisco Bay Area where I can predictably get good sourdough bread, and the corporate stuff in both places is only halfway between Wonder Bread and real bread.
But obviously Microsoft is giving these guys the razzberry, and also the blackberry and the olallieberry while they're at it. (The other Washington has the MarionBerry....)
Or really speaker.house.gov.us, but the DNS system does have too much leftover US-centricness and that's unlikely to change.
There are *way* too many government people who don't understand DNS and abuse it because they don't bother paying attention. For a while there were standards for naming within.gov and.us, but they're widely ignored. If you're going to have DNS structures for geographical and governmental organizations, you should use them.
And too many (mostly US) government organizations are giving themselves.com DNS names because they think it looks cool. For instance
Marines.com - obviously the Marines are now admitting they're mercenaries...
Louisiana's Attorney General used to have a website www.la-ag.com - what kind of commercial business was he in? Taking bribes?
US Postal Service can't decide if it's a.gov or a.com, though it is somewhat of a hybrid organization. Some of its subdomains or web servers bounce you from one side to the other - mainly redirecting *.usps.gov requests to *.usps.com, but sometimes the other way around.
Hey, mods, it was the *second* post, two minutes after the original article, and the First Post was a different joke (about naming it "G-Bay"). So it wasn't redundant - the later All Your Base posts were.
While the US Religious Right and US Feminist Left are certainly two of the main interest groups pushing for Internet Governance and DNS Censorship, one of the other big Pro-Censorship groups are the Chinese government, who use Stopping Pr0n as their main excuse for regulating and controlling all the parts of the Internet they can get their hands on. They aren't religious (quite the opposite), but they're really hung up on it nonetheless, because it's socially inappropriate behaviour and Not Nice. Of course they're also interested in stopping Falun Gong and student movements and anything else outside their control (though the Great Firewall of China doesn't appear to block any outbound spam or inbound requests to spammer websites.)
There were two different groups of people advocating creation of a.xxx TLD or something like it
Puritans who wanted pr0n exiled to a separate domain hoping they could ban it from the rest of the net. I think there were some Congresscritters in this camp, but it may just have been other politicians.
Greedy domain name sellers who wanted to make a buck selling names there. Some of these included various alternate-root vendors selling dodgy service to suckers.
ICANN worked on the project at its usual snail-like speed, slowed down further because they really only get one or two chances to sell a domain this potentially lucrative (they could sell.sex as well as.xxx.) So by the time they were done, the Puritans who disapproved of it had forgotten that their side were advocating the.xxx TLD, and assumed it was just the greedy capitalists pr0n-sellers, so they opposed it.
Sure, it's possible for governments to run their own roots and try to force their subjects to use them, but they've already got Country-Code TLDs that they can do anything they want under. The problem is that China not only wants to ban Falungong.org.cn, but they also want to ban Falungong.org.uk and Falungong.org, so they want to get "Governance" over the whole Internet, not just their own space.
It's not that tough - DNS is the Internet's phone book, which lets you look up human-readable names and find the numbers your PC dials with. It's got different sections for companies, organizations, educational institutions, other countries. You can have multiple listings for your company, so some people buy anything that sounds good. Most individuals don't have their own listings - they have their email and web page where they work or on their ISP.
The.xxx flap is because some people said they want all the pr0n sites shoved into a separate section and then other people said they don't like having a separate section for that.
There are governments that want to control DNS instead of the US controlling it - but they have country code Top-Level Domains they can control, and leave the rest of us alone. A few of them do, typically with requirements that domain names in their space may only be sold to residents and businesses located in their countries, while many countries like.TV will sell namespace to anybody who wants to pay for it. The non-CCTLDs are explicitly for non-government-aligned namespace* (except for a few US-centric leftovers like.MIL and.GOV, and a few US federal/state/local organizations that bought.COM names for marketing reasons, like USPS.COM and MARINES.COM.) And there's a.INT for international treaty organizations like the UN, if the UN wants to control something - or they could easily enough get ICANN to create a.UN for them.
The rest of the argument is primarily governments that want to censor what happens in the rest of the world's space, with some secondary issues like allocation of the remaining IPv4 space and attempts to get other people to pay for Internet connections to underdeveloped countries that typically have telecom monopolies too inefficient to implement it themselves and too stubborn to let the private sector compete with them. ICANN doesn't really work for the US government anyway - it works for the WIPO Trademark Mafia, which is a partially overlapping set of interests, but the primary effect that has is rabid anti-privacy policies for whois registration and data access, which the governments that rant loudest about wanting "Internet Governance" generally like. China, for instance, would be really happy to know the ICBM address and cellphone number for the owners of websites like www.falungong.com.
There are a few technical issues that ICANN's been really sloppy on, which annoy "foreigners" more than Americans - primarily support for non-ASCII character sets. It's sadly overdue, and the initial proposals I've seen from Verisign are horrible botches that only work for the web and partially for email and fail badly for other protocols like telnet and ftp.
* There are some people who contend that.COM/.NET/.ORG aren't non-government space, they're leftovers of a US-centric namespace; that's historically true, but that's all the more reason that non-US governments can't complain if a US entity controls them. On the other hand, newer TLDs like.MUSEUM and.AERO are explicitly international.
Sun URLs show several different slideshows of what this interface looks like in use. It's pretty cool, if gratuitous and annoying, and I wouldn't waste screenspace on it unless I had a much larger screen than my laptop has. Basically you've got a 3D space, and instead of windows being parallel to your screen, they can be turned arbitrarily, stacked in front of each other, etc. So you can have windows sitting half-sideways in perspective scattered around an image of Stanford campus or your apartment, like an improved version of the Microsoft Bob Family Room, just waiting for your cursor to be a friendly animated dog.
I was surprised not to see BSD listed at all, and *somebody* had to make the "BSD is Dying" joke. But I suspect there are several things happening that account for its invisibility:
Maybe it's lying about what OS it really is? Not an uncommon thing for browsers to do, as well as lying about what browser type they are.
Lots of BSD use, especially OpenBSD, is for appliances like firewalls that aren't running browsers very often.
5-20% of US bandwidth at Midnight == No Problem
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Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 1
The US has about 20-30 Tier 1 ISP carriers, depending on who you count, and most of them have significantly more bandwidth than their average busy-hour traffic levels, so on the average, each one's under 5%, not even counting the bandwidth of well-connected Tier-2 carriers, international carriers, etc. Level 3's one of the bigger ones, but if that meant they were 10% or even 20% of the total bandwidth, losing that much in the middle of the night wouldn't bother the Internet as a whole.
Their direct customers would obviously be affected, so if you've only got one ISP connection and they're down, you're out of service - if losing connectivity in the middle of the night is a problem, you need to arrange for diversity, but during the daytime you're more likely to have a backhoe take out the wires on your street than have your ISP down for more than an hour or two.
L3's a big wholesale provider, so if they're down, it can affect people who didn't know they were using their services; maybe they're using a small ISP that buys half its bandwidth as transit from L3, or maybe their ISP is using L3 to reach specific areas where they don't have geographical coverage or provide specific types of service. So the outage may feel a bit more widespread than it really was, but it's still the middle of the night. The recent L3-Cogent fracas was a bit more visible because they handle different kinds of customers - L3 provides bandwidth to lots of small ISPs with consumer end-users, while Cogent provides big cheap pipes to lots of hosting business, so the interference was fairly synergistic, and it lasted a lot longer because it was a Layer 8 / Layer 9 business disagreement, not a Layer 3 technical problem that can be fixed by engineers.
Software Problems Worse than Physical Damage
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Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 1
Yeah, the Internet can find any available routes around physical damage and repair itself. But software problems are often much harder to work around, and can be much more insidious. Most ISPs run most of their services on big routers from companies starting with C or J (or sometimes L or N or A), and if an ISP installs a software version or a set of router configurations on most of their machines without testing it carefully enough, they can take down their whole network. (I'm not just blaming either the ISP or the router vendor there - many of the Tier 1 ISPs are carrying traffic loads that are too big and weird to duplicate in a lab that's smaller than the real network, and sometimes there's a bug that only shows up if somebody configures two or three different things in subtly-inadequate ways on different models of hardware and then overloads the hardware.) And you'll notice they did their install at US midnight, when it's about as quiet as it's going to get and they've got time to restore things before morning.
Most of the time, ISPs can protect themselves against their neighbors failing, and most of the time they do. A few years back, some random company advertised that their T1 was the best way for half the world to reach MAE-EAST (or some target of that size), and suddenly half the world's internet traffic was trying to get down that wire before it melted, making it difficult for any equipment nearby it to even scream for help. Lots of ISPs started doing a lot more BGP filtering after that, and developing methods to monitor the advertisements the outside world was seeing about them, and things got safer, but it's still possible to screw up.
Publish Longer-Match Prefixes to Avoid That
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Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 1
If you've got a given prefix, and people are exporting bogus reachability information about it, start advertising two prefixes of half the size. I know one large ISP with a/8 who had to start publishing two/9s because some bozo outfit was doing incorrect route summarization and claiming that their little circuit in South America had a really great route to that/8. It's a cheap trick, and you shouldn't leave it up too long if you can avoid it, but works really well when you need it.
Connectivity has evolved a lot, MAEs irrelevant
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Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 1
The US-located parts of the Internet have evolved a lot since your ideas of design were formed. It's really a big change from the days when a pickup truck driving the wrong direction in the parking garage where MAE-East lived could have taken down half the Internet, and don't even *ask* which Tier 1 ISP was once renting POP space in the floor below a restaurant and had their servers taken out by a spilled pot of broccoli soup...
The MAEs don't really matter much any more, at least for Tier 1 peering, which has almost all moved off of public peering and into private peering. A lot of that private peering takes place in carrier hotels or telco POPs - Equinix has 7-8 big locations, Seattle's Westin building, a bunch of different buildings within a block or two of the main Los Angeles telco POP, and a few others. Some private peering also happens on fibers run between carrier offices.
Most of the Tier 1 providers have lots of excess bandwidth - if the DC area peering were to fail, most of them would have enough spare peering capacity in New York or Atlanta or Chicago to recover without major capacity losses, and BGP would reroute most of the rest reasonably well. The West Coast is in a bit worse shape, just because the distances are longer - SF-LA is only ~350 miles (~3.5ms one-way), but SF-Seattle is a lot farther, and isn't quite as overbuilt, and with many carriers, if you lose the direct route, you take a 2-3000 mile loop through Salt Lake City to recover (unless you've got two central California routes, on I-5 and 101 or railroads.)
European peering architectures have much differently - the geography's different, and the carrier relationships were different, so huge fractions of that traffic go through LINX and a few other points like AMSIX, and losing LINX would be seriously bad.
Slashdot Mirror
The discussion of encryption radically increases the bogosity of their arguments - if something's encrypted with a decent algorithm, and they use decent passwords, the police will *never* be able to decrypt it, not in 90 days, not in the lifetime of the prisoner, and not in the lifetime of the planet unless quantum computers actually work magic some day in the misty future. Translation is something that could take time, but basically that means that if they want to arrest people who speak languages other than English, they need to hire some people who can speak Arabic and maybe Farsi, Urdu, and Dari or Pushtu; it's not like Southwest Asian languages are any worse than Gaelic (to the extent that IRA terrorists were actually native Gaelic speakers.) If they do a quick search of the computer and find that it looks suspicious enough to require holding somebody, they can get a warrant then, rather than saying they should be able to hold everybody for 90 days with no warrant just in case their computers are hard to wade through.
A recent article I saw compared the terms "-American" with "French-", such as French-Algerians. Over here, if you're a hyphenated ethnic group, the noun part is that you're an American and the ethnic group is a description. In France, you're still an Algerian, you're just in France. To some extent that's unfair; the large Algerian and Moroccan populations in France are mostly more recent immigrants from the ex-colonies, while the hyphenated-American terminology started largely applying to groups that had been here a long time (though it's also used for more recent immigrants.)
And the term "African-American" is largely asserting "hey, were're just as much part of mainstream America as you Irish and Italians, so stop calling us ." A couple of my friends do enjoy bending minds by identifying themselves as African-American. One's a blonde guy who was born in Zimbabwe; another's an older Afrikaaner.
To cut them a little slack, some of the reasons that they want new extraordinary powers written into the laws is that in the fight against the Irish, they often just ignored and violated laws about police procedures and generally got away with it, whereas today there's more visibility, more television publicity, and more European political concerns about human rights, so they want to make sure that when they're doing extraordinary violations of people's civil rights that they've got laws to permit them to do so.
But the fundamentally cool thing about this box is that it costs $100; at $200 it wouldn't be as cool, and at $500 it'd be really lame. So until they've got real manufacturing costs and really *can* make it for $100 in volume, it's still vaporware.
And yes, that's Mozilla, not Firefox, and I probably should either upgrade to 1.7.12 or else use real Firefox, but it's convenient to have a browser install that has all the parts and most of the plugins working with it. I haven't hunted down the offending pages, or tried them in Opera yet to see if they crash it; if I'm going to bother doing that, I should upgrade the browser first.
BBC Article URL
Zombie Walks in Seattle - Boingboing seems to be a hotbed of articles on upcoming zombie mob activity and pointers to pictures of the events afterwards:
Vancouver Pictures San Francisco.
But why Borg vs. Zombies is important is that they have the resources to get a bunch of lawyers to build a sufficiently large lawsuit to hunt down the spammers across jurisdictions, and sue them where it's legally possible.
And because they're MSN, the big ISP, they can make a strong case that zombies are costing them lots of money, and can get the spammers' ISPs to listen to them in ways that smaller non-ISP players usually can't.
But obviously Microsoft is giving these guys the razzberry, and also the blackberry and the olallieberry while they're at it. (The other Washington has the MarionBerry....)
Me and my uncle - we grabbed the gold, and we high-tailed it down to Mexico."
There are *way* too many government people who don't understand DNS and abuse it because they don't bother paying attention. For a while there were standards for naming within .gov and .us, but they're widely ignored. If you're going to have DNS structures for geographical and governmental organizations, you should use them.
And too many (mostly US) government organizations are giving themselves .com DNS names because they think it looks cool. For instance
(Does that make the IBM article a dupe, or have I pushed the Slashdot lame-joke envelope too far to get away with that? :-)
Hey, mods, it was the *second* post, two minutes after the original article, and the First Post was a different joke (about naming it "G-Bay"). So it wasn't redundant - the later All Your Base posts were.
While the US Religious Right and US Feminist Left are certainly two of the main interest groups pushing for Internet Governance and DNS Censorship, one of the other big Pro-Censorship groups are the Chinese government, who use Stopping Pr0n as their main excuse for regulating and controlling all the parts of the Internet they can get their hands on. They aren't religious (quite the opposite), but they're really hung up on it nonetheless, because it's socially inappropriate behaviour and Not Nice. Of course they're also interested in stopping Falun Gong and student movements and anything else outside their control (though the Great Firewall of China doesn't appear to block any outbound spam or inbound requests to spammer websites.)
- Puritans who wanted pr0n exiled to a separate domain hoping they could ban it from the rest of the net. I think there were some Congresscritters in this camp, but it may just have been other politicians.
- Greedy domain name sellers who wanted to make a buck selling names there. Some of these included various alternate-root vendors selling dodgy service to suckers.
ICANN worked on the project at its usual snail-like speed, slowed down further because they really only get one or two chances to sell a domain this potentially lucrative (they could sellSure, it's possible for governments to run their own roots and try to force their subjects to use them, but they've already got Country-Code TLDs that they can do anything they want under. The problem is that China not only wants to ban Falungong.org.cn, but they also want to ban Falungong.org.uk and Falungong.org, so they want to get "Governance" over the whole Internet, not just their own space.
The .xxx flap is because some people said they want all the pr0n sites shoved into a separate section and then other people said they don't like having a separate section for that.
The rest of the argument is primarily governments that want to censor what happens in the rest of the world's space, with some secondary issues like allocation of the remaining IPv4 space and attempts to get other people to pay for Internet connections to underdeveloped countries that typically have telecom monopolies too inefficient to implement it themselves and too stubborn to let the private sector compete with them. ICANN doesn't really work for the US government anyway - it works for the WIPO Trademark Mafia, which is a partially overlapping set of interests, but the primary effect that has is rabid anti-privacy policies for whois registration and data access, which the governments that rant loudest about wanting "Internet Governance" generally like. China, for instance, would be really happy to know the ICBM address and cellphone number for the owners of websites like www.falungong.com.
There are a few technical issues that ICANN's been really sloppy on, which annoy "foreigners" more than Americans - primarily support for non-ASCII character sets. It's sadly overdue, and the initial proposals I've seen from Verisign are horrible botches that only work for the web and partially for email and fail badly for other protocols like telnet and ftp.
* There are some people who contend that .COM/.NET/.ORG aren't non-government space, they're leftovers of a US-centric namespace; that's historically true, but that's all the more reason that non-US governments can't complain if a US entity controls them. On the other hand, newer TLDs like .MUSEUM and .AERO are explicitly international.
Sun URLs show several different slideshows of what this interface looks like in use. It's pretty cool, if gratuitous and annoying, and I wouldn't waste screenspace on it unless I had a much larger screen than my laptop has. Basically you've got a 3D space, and instead of windows being parallel to your screen, they can be turned arbitrarily, stacked in front of each other, etc. So you can have windows sitting half-sideways in perspective scattered around an image of Stanford campus or your apartment, like an improved version of the Microsoft Bob Family Room, just waiting for your cursor to be a friendly animated dog.
Their direct customers would obviously be affected, so if you've only got one ISP connection and they're down, you're out of service - if losing connectivity in the middle of the night is a problem, you need to arrange for diversity, but during the daytime you're more likely to have a backhoe take out the wires on your street than have your ISP down for more than an hour or two.
L3's a big wholesale provider, so if they're down, it can affect people who didn't know they were using their services; maybe they're using a small ISP that buys half its bandwidth as transit from L3, or maybe their ISP is using L3 to reach specific areas where they don't have geographical coverage or provide specific types of service. So the outage may feel a bit more widespread than it really was, but it's still the middle of the night. The recent L3-Cogent fracas was a bit more visible because they handle different kinds of customers - L3 provides bandwidth to lots of small ISPs with consumer end-users, while Cogent provides big cheap pipes to lots of hosting business, so the interference was fairly synergistic, and it lasted a lot longer because it was a Layer 8 / Layer 9 business disagreement, not a Layer 3 technical problem that can be fixed by engineers.
Most of the time, ISPs can protect themselves against their neighbors failing, and most of the time they do. A few years back, some random company advertised that their T1 was the best way for half the world to reach MAE-EAST (or some target of that size), and suddenly half the world's internet traffic was trying to get down that wire before it melted, making it difficult for any equipment nearby it to even scream for help. Lots of ISPs started doing a lot more BGP filtering after that, and developing methods to monitor the advertisements the outside world was seeing about them, and things got safer, but it's still possible to screw up.
If you've got a given prefix, and people are exporting bogus reachability information about it, start advertising two prefixes of half the size. I know one large ISP with a /8 who had to start publishing two /9s because some bozo outfit was doing incorrect route summarization and claiming that their little circuit in South America had a really great route to that /8. It's a cheap trick, and you shouldn't leave it up too long if you can avoid it, but works really well when you need it.
The MAEs don't really matter much any more, at least for Tier 1 peering, which has almost all moved off of public peering and into private peering. A lot of that private peering takes place in carrier hotels or telco POPs - Equinix has 7-8 big locations, Seattle's Westin building, a bunch of different buildings within a block or two of the main Los Angeles telco POP, and a few others. Some private peering also happens on fibers run between carrier offices.
Most of the Tier 1 providers have lots of excess bandwidth - if the DC area peering were to fail, most of them would have enough spare peering capacity in New York or Atlanta or Chicago to recover without major capacity losses, and BGP would reroute most of the rest reasonably well. The West Coast is in a bit worse shape, just because the distances are longer - SF-LA is only ~350 miles (~3.5ms one-way), but SF-Seattle is a lot farther, and isn't quite as overbuilt, and with many carriers, if you lose the direct route, you take a 2-3000 mile loop through Salt Lake City to recover (unless you've got two central California routes, on I-5 and 101 or railroads.)
European peering architectures have much differently - the geography's different, and the carrier relationships were different, so huge fractions of that traffic go through LINX and a few other points like AMSIX, and losing LINX would be seriously bad.
Used to be that people would predict "The End of Usenet As We Know It, GIFs at 11", but technology has progressed a lot since then...