Mirror doesn't seem to be working either :(

Closer makes no difference, effective transfer speed does (which BT already prioritizes peers based upon). I can get much better download rates from the guy in Finland with a 100mbit connection then I can from the guy across town on my same cable ISP with an already saturated 384kbps upload.

Aren't IDNs already available via Puncode encoding? (For example the ones at http://www.w3.org/2003/Talks/0425-duerst-idniri/slide12-0.html) Or am I missing something?

Carnegie Mellon University, not Central Mich.

I was hit by this issue earlier today, more info with some malware URLs available on metafilter here.

The original use of URL shortening services was to prevent link breakage in e-mail and nntp clients that linebreak after 80 characters. They still work great for this. http://tr.im/wGhA works a lot better in e-mail than http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=1600+pennsylvania+ave,+dc&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=49.624204,58.359375&ie=UTF8&ll=38.898732,-77.038515&spn=0.012007,0.014248&z=16 . I've also heard shortened links used to good effect on internet radio, where it's easier to direct listeners to a tinyurl than a long forum URL, when there's discussion about a certain thread.

I'm betting that a good amount of the information used in this case came from posters on the WGA forum, where people can post if they're having issues with WGA. One of the tools available in that forum is a WGA diagnostic tool which will generate a sanitized text dump of a user's windows validation information. Most cases on that forum are people whose brother, cousin, or sketchy PC shop installed a common warez release of Windows on their systems, but several there are people who bought apparently legitimate software from resellers which failed validation and later turned out to be counterfeit. Microsoft got in touch with these users, identified the resellers, and I'm betting that this news story is the result.