"Where can I find a live or nearly live discussion of network outage problems? The unofficial #nanog [North American Network Operators Group] IRC channel has been overrun with kiddies for years so that's not valuable anymore.

"At 8:30pm PDT I noticed that transit across the Internet was exceptionally slow. A look at reported problems between Cogent, Internap, XO and others with packet loss between 3.5% and 6%. By 9 p.m. the problem had gotten worse with Savvis and Qwest reporting similar loss percentages. At 2 a.m. Friday (I happened to wake up and thought I'd check) Internap and Qwest are reporting 6.5% packet loss.

"I smell a DDOS problem on the greater Interwebs but can find no discussion of the issue anywhere. Nothing on Twitter other than ridiculous Tweets of "my Internet is down" or "Comcast sucks" -- information-less blather. Google search of the Web and blogs also shows no conversations. Pointers to the real-time Web of useful conversations about Internet status would be appreciated."

I'm guessing that this is a problem many people have wrestled with, so, anyone got any good suggestions for Dan?

My other topic for this week comes from some development work I've been doing using (I discussed the of this product a few weeks ago).