Smoking kills Internet2

Say what you want about net neutrality, at least the Internet hasn't been taken out by a hobo. Unlike the regular Internet we all use everyday, which was originally designed to distribute the AACS hex key withstand a nuclear attack, Internet2 is designed primarily for speed -- up to 9.08Gbps in most recent tests. All that juice comes at the price of redundant network links, though -- which means the whole thing got taken offline last night when a homeless man threw a cigarette onto a mattress under Boston's Longfellow Bridge, starting a blaze that eventually melted the fiber-optic link between Boston and New York. While initial estimates called for a service outage of 1-2 days, quick-thinking techs were able to get service going again in just 4 hours. Good thing, too -- if the panic that sets in around here when our DSL goes out is any indication, with the kind of bandwidth these guys were missing out on, there must've been wailing in the street.