Consumerist

Neal Stephenson is hands down one of the best hard sci-fi authors I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

Just had to throw that out there.

I'm sure Neal Stephenson is a great writer and all, but what does rubber plants in Sri Lanka and Penang have to do with undersea cables in Asia and how they recently interfered with AT&T's network?

Cliff notes would be nice ....

Silly Hump - "Neal Stephenson" is Aquaman's civilian name. Jeezus.

Wait, so does this mean that China gets a discount on the selling of our data that AT&T peddles too?

@humphrmi: Dude: You should read the article. I read it when it came out in 96, and I still remember it to this day. It is a GREAT piece, and well worth your time, trust me...

So the Internet really IS a series of tubes.

@China:
STOP CLOGGING OUR TUBEZ! KTHNX BIE!

Carey, the previous Consumerist post you linked to is not correct, as noted by me and others in the comments. Statements from AT&T thus far regarding the cable breaks have referred only to Mideast outages. So while the linked article from Wired is interesting, it's not a huge mystery why a cut cable in the Mediterranean would affect the network in Egypt.

the information superhighway is actually a habitrail.

Definitely one of the best wired articles ever. And if I remember, the magazine was about twice as big as normal solely because of the length of the article.