The Net likes to know what time it is. (So to TV networks and cable systems and any other distributed resource.) When the Internet was small-ish, it was no big deal to have a few thousand routers checking in with a couple of places to make sure everyone was in sync.

Generally, these conversations go like this:

“Hey! What time is it, anyway?”
“200308281252042143”

And that’s the end of it. But as more and more people went online, and more and more of those routers got installed in places like home networks, it was only a matter of time before something broke.

Back in June, the University of Wisconsin was hit with what looked like a massive Denial of Service attack, with hundreds of thousands of requests for the current time. UW happens to run one of the Net’s time servers — a computer that much of the Net syncs up with. Instead of the normal conversation, here’s what happened:

“Hey, what time is it, anyway?”
<silence>
“Hey, what time is it, anyway?”
<silence>

… and so on. 250,000 requests per second. It more or less took the University off line.

It turns out that the problem was with a couple of models of Netgear routers. Netgear specializes in low-end stuff, the kind that’s installed in home networks. And with the advent of cheap computers and Wi-Fi and all that good stuff, there are suddenly a ton of cheap Netgear routers installed — many of them with a little programming flaw that caused them to check in with the University of Wisconsin all at the same time.

And like any good infants, when they didn’t get an answer, they kept asking. Louder and louder. A quarter-million times a second.

The kicker is that the owners of the routers didn’t know there was anything wrong. Their routers worked fine. They probably never heard of the University of Wisconsin.

Netgear has agreed to issue a patch for the five affected routers, and apparently to help the university build a more robust network. A university official pointed out to CNet, though, that the problem probably won’t go away soon. Netgear sells into a market that’s less than technically astute, and its customers are less likely than most to a) upgrade or b) tweak something that doesn’t actually affect the way they use their own network.

There’s a new health study today — and isn’t there always — that contains unaccustomed good news. Well, good for me, anyway.

Seems that the Journal of the American Medical Association and the journal Nature published studies this week indicating that eating chocolate will lower your cholesterol. Not just any chocolate. Dark chocolate. The good stuff. The darker the better, apparently. Clutter it up with too much milk and you lose the benefits, because the flavinoids and antioxidants are in the cocoa.

From the AP, via CNN:

Blood pressure remained pretty much unchanged in the group that ate white chocolate, which does not contain polyphenols. But after two weeks, systolic blood pressure — the top number — had dropped an average of five points in the dark-chocolate group. The lower, or diastolic, reading fell an average of almost two points.

This is a whole lot more encouraging than the other studies I heard about this week. One says that farmed salmon is loaded with PCBs; the other says that skin carcinomas that start on your feet have a higher mortality rate than ones that start on your arms. I eat a fair amount of salmon, and my feet are tanned.

So am I eating less salmon and using sunscreen on my feet? Nope. But I hereby resolve to eat more dark chocolate. And drink more tea and red wine. Gotta load up on those flavinoids…

The AP (via CNN) reports that the FDA has approved a new wheelchair, called the iBOT, that can climb stairs. The story talks about how the device relies on gyroscopes, and how it’s being sold by a division of Johnson & Johnson.

Not until the 15th graf does the story mention that the wheelchair was invented by the highly regarded medical inventor Dean Kamen, who put most of the iBOT technology into the Segway scooter — which is something that maybe a lot of readers might have heard about.

Me, I’d have found some way to work the Segway into the lede. But then, I don’t work for the AP.

I was all set to gloat a lot about the fact that Gallagher, Larry Flynt, Gary Coleman, and Ahhhnold are running for governor of California. Then I remembered that I live in the state where recent senatorial candidates included Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis and parking garage magnate/certified nutball Abe Hirschfeld, and where Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley, Al Sharpton and Gore Vidal all ran for mayor.

Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like all the loose screws have rolled west after all…

Sometimes, you can go months without synchronicity. Then it bites you on the ass.

Bryant Park is a picturesque park in Midtown, behind the New York Public Library’s main branch and the site of one of the better-known free Wi-Fi zone. There’s a lovely carousel there, and they show free movies on Monday nights during the summer.

For a little while, there’s been an experiment whereby they put hawks in Bryant Park to help control the pigeon population. But the other day, one of the hawks made the perfectly understandable error of mistaking a chihuahua for a rat, and tried to make off with it.

The hawk lost his job. (Were it up to me, I’d have given him a bonus, but once again, the true problem about this city is that they did not ask me.)

Now here’s a story from CNN about a judge sparing the life of 170 feral Chihuahuas.

Nearly 170 wild Chihuahua dogs facing death at a Los Angeles-area animal shelter were spared Friday by a judge who released them into the custody of actor Gregory Peck’s former daughter-in-law, who runs a Chihuahua rescue operation.

Seems to me that there’s this hawk who’s out of a job in New York…..

Faithful readers will recall that on March 31, the kids and I were evacuated because an explosive device was found in a car about 20 feet from our front window. The local paper reports that police have made an arrest: the former cellmate of the guy who blew up a building down the block a couple of years ago.

I encapsulated it in my earlier post:

A couple of years ago, a bomb went off in the building two doors down. It was built and set off by a former building superintendent who had a romantic thing for one of the residents, who had that day graduated from the Police Academy (and whose husband was and is now the super).

It seems that the there’d been a deposition on a civil suit against the former super slated for April 1, and he’d wanted to demonstrate that maybe police had gotten the wrong man two years ago. (Not likely since the bomb had gone off in his hands, but there you go.) So he reached out to his former cellmate, who planted the new device in the current super’s car.

It might possibly have worked — Strangers on a Train and all that — except that police tape phone calls into and out of Rikers Island. Ooops. Criminal genius strikes again.

Actually, they’re talking about potholes. From the NYDailyNews:

“Basically, you got three types of holes: You got your A-holes, and then you have your B-holes, and your C-holes,” McFarland said in describing the pockmarked streets.

After digging and thinking for four years, journalism students at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana think they’ve figured out the identity of Watergate figure Deep Throat.

If you had that weasel Pat Buchanan in the office pool, like Dateline NBC did, you’re wrong. If you had John Dean, you’re warmer, but not quite on the mark.

This has been a Washington parlor game for going on 30 years. Woodward and Bernstein themselves say they won’t tell until Deep Throat dies. But these students have assembled what looks like a pretty good guess.

Peggy Noonan has a pretty fair column today about unashamed patriotism, but she gets tangled up.

In the late 1960s a lot of young people and liberals thought you were a dope to love your country, “to wave the flag.” But that is also the precise moment that American flag lapel pins first became popular. When a local businessman wore one of them, it was as if he were wearing a sign that said “I support my country, and if you don’t like it, that’s too bad.”

Twenty five years ago at CBS News a major network star said to a newsroom friend of mine, who still wore his pin, “I wish I could wear one of those.” But, he explained, it might be “misinterpreted.” My friend thought, but did not say: Yes, it would be interpreted in a way that suggested you love your country. How terrible.