http://mirrordot.org/ [mirrordot.org]

All the links mirrored. :-)

In a nutshell, it's kinda showing you connectivity and relative size of an ISP. What it's showing with the red spheres is that there are a few Autonomous Systems (AS) that have lots (hundreds or thousands) of inbound and outbound links to other ASes. Think UUNet or Sprint, alot of people are connected to them, as well as some ISPs. Then you have those smaller (tier-2, the orange to blue skittles) ISPs that are connected to UUnet and also connected to tens of other ISPs. All the way at the edge, you have people who are single homed only to their ISP, but they are not a transit network, meaning they don't send traffic from one AS to another. Any traffic on their link is either from their network or to their network. And there are lots and lots of those, they are the little purple skittles on the outside.
The lines represent the connections between these ASs. All the real connections arent there, the entire background would most likely be completely black if they were.
So it's showing that there are some really huge ISPs that form the "backbone" of the internet, and lots of smaller ISPs and thousands of even smaller ISPs. When you see a line that does not connect to/from the center, that's a connection between a tier-2 ISP to another tier-2 ISP. Usually this is done as a backup mechanism, sometimes it can also be done to more effectively get traffic to another network. For example, if UUNet charges you per byte, and they can get to anyone, you would think that you could just send all your traffic to UUnet. But you might find that a large percentage of your traffic is going to networks that are directly attached (peered) to Level3's network, and Level3 charges less per byte. It might make sense then to peer with Level3 in addition to UUNet, or completely with Level3. I'm leaving some stuff out here but this is the general idea, and what the picture is showing you.

Incidentally, there is also a concept in the internet backbone called "hot potato routing". If I am in LA with Sprint and sending traffic to NY to a UUnet customer, Sprint will do everything it can to put the traffic on UUNet's network while in LA. In otherwords, if this traffic is for a UUnet customer, it won't be sent across Sprint's network from LA to NY. Sprint drops it on UUNet's network at the first opportunity. The routing protocol for the backbone, BGP, has more than 10 different metrics it looks at to decide which route to take, and several rules to follow to decide what is the "best" path. Best is not always shortest or fastest once all the metrics are taken into account. So if you thought the internet was a big harmonious cooperative effort, guess again!

I had the slightest clue what those images meant.

It's simple. Your ship is the white blip in the center. You have to shoot your way out as the concentric rings rotate around you. I think it's based on Yars Revenge or something.