Take a moment to read this article in the Sydney Morning Herald, courtesy of the AFP.

The article is titled “The Internet — a fragile system threatened by natural disaster”, and could have been quite a good article.

Actually, it starts out quite well - the first few paragraphs are quite good - and technically accurate, whilst remaining simple enough for most people to understand the background behind what is going on.

When you start getting into the more technical description, it reads like something a Year 7 high-school student would write.  Just for an example, look at these two paragraphs:

This vast linkage rests on an infrastructure spanning the world: routers, datacentres, servers and billions of small re-routers that can direct traffic into various networks via terrestrial and submarine cables or by satellite.

Among the weakest points of the Internet are the so-called backbones, the main arteries forming a “vertebral column” for the network interconnecting all the sub-networks and continents.

They’re not “so-called backbones” - they are backbones. Most people have a basic understanding of the human body, so you don’t need to draw different (and ultimately more confusing) analagies as to how The Internet works.

Try this on for size:

This vast network is made up of thousands of connections, large and small. High-capacity Intercontintental and long-distance connections make up the back-bone of the internet.

One paragraph, and makes more sense (to me, atleast). It also avoids making up new words. 

Further down, this hack continues the trend. First they start confusing two different types of technology (DNS, and Network Routing).  To add insult to injury, they quote some source (probably his mate in the mail room) that Wimax could mitigate the effect that natural disasters will have.

I’ll leave the whole Internet Pirates issue alone, given that this AFP writer obviously has no clue.

- end of rant -