For the past week getting access to newscene has been frustrating - to the extent that I am using the Westnet news servers to post this message since newscene isn't even fetching new message headers at the moment.
Is there somewhere to find out if others are having the same trouble as I am? None of the '.usenet' newsgroups carry anything other than one or two miserable little spams.
I did an extended ping for about 2 minutes a while ago and got a 48% packet loss (okay it dropped back to 11% later).
Is there something going on over in the US that's affecting our connections and how *do* you track the health of the internet? Is there an internet news site that lists outages and blockages etc with current reports so you can say "Oh I see, such-and-such.com is experiencing technical difficulties?" (that would be useful).
The trouble with the internet is that if there's a bottleneck it's difficult to trace and impossible to do anything about, worse still you can't tell if it's transient or stable. (I'd say the bottleneck I've got is pretty stable, after a week, and I may have to ditch my usenet provider, even though it's probably not even their fault.)