I was helping a friend pack her truck for a cross-country move the other day, when I was approached in her driveway by a very official looking gentleman in a blue jumpsuit and a baseball cap, holding a clipboard.

“Pardon me, sir!” he said. “How are you this fine day?”

“I’m doing well, thank you…” I said, dubiously.

“Sir, today I am in your neighborhood to find out if you’re happy with your cable company. I am from AT&T. Have you heard about UVerse?” (more…)

According to Bill Tancer’s new book “Click: What Millions of People are Doing Online and Why It Matters”, social media sites have overtaken porn searches on the interwebs.

Tancer is the general manager of global research at Hitwise, an Internet tracking firm. 

The only question I have is: Who “searches” for porn? I would be interested to find out exactly which “search” was used to draw these conclusions. I would venture to say that many porn sites act as portals to other porn sites, and people don’t generally hit up the big “G” to look for porn. 

Still, the rising star of social media sites (do I really need to list some for you?) cannot be denied.

Another trend (and a disturbing one at that) is celebrity searches completely overwhelming religion, politics, dieting, and well-being. After all, ’tis far easier to observe someone else’s life than to address the issues in your own. 

Source: Reuters

The controversy over internet privacy has swept into public consciousness in the past few years as lawsuits hinging on identity discovery have become more prevalent than ever. Lawsuits regarding piracy, malware, internet harassment and even libel have depended upon identifying anonymous defendants. One subcommittee of the United Nations — known as Q6/17 — is working on a so-called IP Traceback mechanism designed to rapidly uncover the source of digital communications.

Organized by the ITU, an agency of the UN, the Q6/17 group received its first submission from China. China’s record of internally-censoring the internet has historically relied upon their ability to suppress individuals subversive to the regime.  Documents obtained by CNET News reveals the nature of China’s proposal which hoped to guarantee that the originator of digital information could be found. “The IP traceback mechanism is required to be adapted to various network environments, such as different addressing (IPv4 and IPv6), different access methods (wire and wireless) and different access technologies (ADSL, cable, Ethernet),” it reads. The document adds: “To ensure traceability, essential information of the originator should be logged.”

(more…)

It is an age where internet connectivity is nearly that of an intrinsic human right. We are astonished when we meet another individual who does not go online or has no connectivity. It is arresting, then, to know that over three billion people in the world live without internet each day. With no hope in sight for the financial strength to deploy new infrastructure, the internet is taking to the stars. Dubbed the O3b — or, other 3 billion — initiative, Google and O3b hopes that their ultra-fast satellites will bring connectivity to the most remote regions.

Armed with an array of sixteen medium-earth orbit satellites, O3b and Google will be offering 1.25Gbps downloads with a 120ms latency to regional ISPs. It is expected that these ISPs will use the O3b satellites as backbones to distribute the connection via 3G or WiMax.

While this implementation is compelling and intelligent, the cost of equipment and subscription to poorer and rural areas may yet be cost-prohibitive.

Hexus says they’ve found the browser to beat Chrome, Firefox, and IE.

While Google’s quickly-famous browser has been meticulously analyzed and received scads of praise for its new Java engine, Mozilla says it is ready to do one better. Dubbed “TraceMonkey,” beta versions of their new Javascript engine is already faster than Google’s V8, and is being prepared for the imminent Firefox 3.1.

Testing conducted on Mozilla’s refinements with the SunSpider Java benchmark reveals an improvement just shy of 20%. While Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich was quick to praise Google, saying that their new V8 JavaScript engine was “very-well engineered,” he held the belief that Firefox would “only get faster.”

The ongoing saga of Comcast and its struggles to manage their network’s usage continues with the revelation that the ISP will be enacting country-wide 250GB bandwidth caps. Going into effect on October 1, Comcast defends the decision by noting that it is an “extremely large amount of data.”

Comcast asserts that the new bandwidth cap merely publicizes a long-standing internal policy and explicitly defines preexisting limitations. In a response sent to ArsTechnica, Comcast said that a customer using more than 250GB a month “may be contacted by Comcast to notify them of excessive use.”

While Comcast claims that this cap has been in place for some years, broadband consumers are expected to be incensed by the announcement. The mention of limitations to a broadband connection in the United States often cultivates public resentment and may further tarnish the ISP’s image.

Free Press, the non-profit organization lobbying for broader access to a more open media, has denounced the change as a symbol of the United States’ poor broadband market. In a public statement, research director S. Derek Turner noted that bandwidth caps and traffic management are stopgap solutions that belie the larger problem of a poorly-developed network.

“If the United States had genuine broadband competition, Internet providers would not be able to profit from artificial scarcity — they would invest in their networks to keep pace with consumer demand,” he said.

While Turner admitted that the “reasonably high” caps were a better alternative than illegal network management, he reasoned that congestion should be treated as a temporary problem and “one that is managed without discrimination.”

Yesterday Comcast revealed that it was preparing to engage in select trials of new traffic management techniques to alleviate the burden of high-bandwidth users. Verizon CTO Richard Lynch also expressed a need for network management today at the annual communications summit for The Progress & Freedom Foundation in Aspen, CO. There has “always been a requirement for network management,” he said.

While Verizon has enjoyed the luxury of fiber-to-the-home deployments via its popular FIOS service, the telecom firm still feels the pinch of a congested network. Though Verizon spends more than $17 billion each year in infrastructure, Lynch affirms that it would take considerably more to alleviate congestion network-wide. Saying that “customers would be upset,” Lynch referred to the tremendous monthly bill that customers would foot to achieve the level of service popularly demanded.

In order to manage the stratospheric rise in internet traffic in recent years, Verizon is testing network-wide Quality of Service (QoS) practices that have long been employed on business networks. A QoS-managed network prioritizes latency-sensitive packets from sources such as VoIP. Protocols and applications of lesser importance could be delivered with an artificial delay of up to 22ms. Lynch asserts that few users would notice such a miniscule delay.

While the details of Verizon’s upcoming policies remain scarce, Mr. Lynch assures that it’s not for conspiratorial reasons. “We don’t have all the answers yet,” he said, but promises that full disclosure is “best way to go about it.”

Yesterday Comcast said it planned to continue throttling users on their network with protocol-agnostic traffic management. Comcast plans to impede the speeds of a bandwidth-intensive user “roughly between, probably, 10 and 20 minutes” says Comcast’s senior VP and general manager of online services Mitch Bowling. Comcast’s new approach to operating their network is the first of many such trials in an industry that claims to be struggling to keep up with the demands of its users.

Dubbed “Fair Share,” Comcast alleges that the new technique is for the health of its network. “If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said. Users who continue to generate intense traffic, regardless of its intent or purpose, will be managed until the traffic subsides.

The Philadelphia-based ISP recently found itself at the middle of a controversy when it came to light that it was surreptitiously interrupting users of the BitTorrent protocol with artificial packet loss. The ensuing flash mob of angry internet users and internet-era civil rights groups resulted in a public censure for the ISP.

Comcast’s commitment to the same practice on a broader scale is striking some as a disingenuous disregard for the spirit of the censure. Commenters have been quick to point out that the new practice continues in the same vein, while merely targeting additional people.

In light of the recent announcement that the new technology would be undergoing trials in select markets, Comcast was quick to defend itself. In a managed state, a user would have a connection that provided “a really good DSL experience,” Bowling said as he poked fun at competitors.

Neowin is reporting that Mark Dowd (IBM ISS) and Alexander Sotirov (VMware) demonstrated a way to bypass all of Windows Vista’s memory protection safeguards using a web browser. The kicker? It isn’t a vulnerability, per se, but rather exploiting how the entire system is set up. Neowin continues:

According to Dino Dai Zovi, a popular security researcher, “the genius of this is that it’s completely reusable. They have attacks that let them load chosen content to a chosen location with chosen permissions. That’s completely game over.”

After news that the DNS flaw is much worse than initially thought, it appears the annual Black Hat conference is having a very productive session.

Grandfather of the internet-gone-Googler Vint Cerf came out swinging yesterday at the obtuse approach ISPs are taking with bandwidth management. While most are looking to throttle and meter customers in any way they can, Cerf suggests that a bandwidth guarantee would mean everyone wins.

Cerf suggests that users should be guaranteed a minimum bandwidth without traffic limitations. I would like you to raise your hand if you believe that’s what you’re already paying for. If you raised your hand, it is unfortunate that this is probably not the case. Today’s ISPs do not guarantee a maximum or minimum bandwidth for your line, and instead choose to qualify bandwidth statements with “Up to.” This charming phrase guarantees that your line will be able to access content on the internet, and implies nothing further. You are not entitled to, nor may you ever come close to, what was advertised on the box.

Cerf’s musings seem absurd on the surface, but a closer look at the state of bandwidth in the U.S. reveals a bleak picture. Provider nodes are typically over-saturated; they service entire neighborhoods with an insufficient capacity to deliver as advertised. This irritating little problem leads to the rapid jump in speed that many users experience between the hours of five and seven in the morning when most sane users are rather asleep.

Vint Cerf smartly points out that we have a chance to fix the real problem, rather than masking it with caps and penalties. Guaranteeing each user a set amount of bandwidth means the ISP knows precisely what equipment and provisioning is required for each user and neighborhood. One hundred users paying for 8Mbps/2Mbps service would require a node capable of handling 800Mbps/200Mbps. Miraculously, the congestion issues would disappear as no user is battling another for the slice of the pie.

Ars rightly points out that both DSL and cable are capped by the DSLAM or the cable modem. This leads to well-known bandwidth requirements, but ISPs have oversold the promise of speed, under-delivered on the back-end, and rode that overburdened hog to the bank.

This tectonic paradigm shift in broadband provisioning in the United States would require significant investment in the improvement of existing infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, telcos and cablecos are not in any hurry to fix the root of the problem. It’s easier to blame your customers for your inadequacy. There’s profit in that.

In 2007, Virgin American unofficially became a geek’s favorite airline. Their planes featured in-seat LCDs, passenger-to-passenger chat, movies, games, podcasts, and more.

Today Delta upped the ante and announced something even Virgin America doesn’t offer yet - in flight broadband Wi-Fi.

That’s right, in the near future you will be able to make crude jokes on IRC, troll 4chan, and read xkcd from 30,000+ feet in the air.

Delta is joining with Aircell®, a 17-year leader in airborne communications for business and commercial aviation, to install the company’s Mobile Broadband Network on the carrier’s domestic fleet. The system, Gogo™, will enable Delta customers traveling with Wi-Fi enabled devices, such as laptops, smartphones and PDAs, to access the Internet, corporate VPNs, corporate and personal e-mail accounts, as well as SMS texting and instant messaging services. Gogo will be available to customers for a flat fee of $9.95 on flights of three hours or less, and $12.95 on flights of more than three hours.

Plane upgrades are set to start ASAP and Delta expects to have their entire mainstream fleet upgraded by mid-2009.

Cuil’s CEO Tom Costello backtracks on that whole “better than Google” thing.

In October of 2007, the combined research of the Associated Press and other news outlets announced that the US ISP Comcast was engaging in unscrupulous traffic management of the web. The EFF, internet users, and other civil liberty groups were furious over the revelation. While the United States has no official net neutrality legislation, Comcast’s practice was generally regarded as a de facto horror. The proceedings that were spun from these findings have breathed new life into net neutrality with the bi-partisan signing of a new enforcement order.

The new order will legally oblige Comcast to cease and desist in further traffic manipulation and force them to disclose the methods they used to manipulate internet traffic. While this is not a law, it sets a relieving precedent regarding traffic management in the days to come.

FCC Chairman Kevin Martin likened the manipulation of web traffic to the manipulation of traditional mail.

“Would you be OK with the post office opening your mail, deciding they didn’t want to bother delivering it, and hiding that fact by sending it back to you stamped ‘address unknown – return to sender?’” he said.

“Or if they opened letters mailed to you, decided that because the mail truck is full sometimes, letters to you could wait, and then hid both that they read your letters and delayed them?” he continued.

This decision sends a clear warning to other U.S. ISPs considering illegitimate manipulation of American — and to a lesser extent, global — web traffic. Hands off.

Reading the announcements regarding Cuil, one would imagine that it is primed to unseat Google’s search dominance within the span of weeks. Significant to-do was generated regarding its not-so-humble beginnings as the child of $33 million in venture capitalist funding and the hands of several ex-Google employees. However, practical use has left me dissatisfied and wanting more from the engine to meet the the basic expectations set by its peers.

Cuil’s July 28 debut press release makes the bold implication that Google is not delivering the best experience on the internet. With phrases like “limitations, “true potential,” and “more comprehensive” delivered under the pretense of ex-Googlers, it’s hard not to see where Cuil is attempting to position themselves in the market.

Cuil’s technology was developed by a team with extensive history in search. The company is led by husband-and-wife team Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. Mr. Costello researched and developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM; Ms. Patterson is best known for her work at Google, where she was the architect of the company’s large search index and led a Web page ranking team. They refused to accept the limitations of current search technology and dedicated themselves to building a more comprehensive search engine. Together with Russell Power, Anna’s former colleague from Google, they founded Cuil to give users the opportunity to explore the Internet more fully and discover its true potential.

Yet as Cuil postures to combat Google’s dominance of the web, I find it vaguely irritating that it does not boast even the most basic amenities offered by today’s search engines. Today’s engines do not — must not — crawl text and text alone. The internet is no longer a sterile house of words, but it is now filled with an abundance of pictures, movies and audio that must also be cataloged.

Today’s top-five global search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Baidu, MSN and Naver) understand this fundamental shift in the wants of users. All of them offer specific searches for pictures and video, if not additional content. Cuil does not.

In a more subjective light, search engines are made or broken by the pertinence of their results. Google has made its meteoric rise to search engine superstardom by providing quality results with easy searches, and even better results with a suite of advanced search refinement techniques. Using Google and Cuil, I sought articles within Icrontic’s portfolio using keywords that are liberally sprinkled throughout the respective articles I was seeking. I then compared the accuracy of the results to what I was intending to find. Allow me to provide some examples:

Icrontic’s Memtest86 Guide:
Google: Results
Cuil: Results

In this case, getting more specific by citing “memtest86″ caused Cuil to suggest that there were no results at all.

Icrontic’s recap of Yahoo! v. Microsoft:
Google: Results
Cuil: Results

By refining my search on Cuil to include the word “Microsoft,” Cuil suggested that there were, again, no results. When using keywords that are known to be in a given site, one imagines that increased specificity would increase the probability of the desired result. Cuil disagrees.

Sadly, my experiences were not limited to this. On a regular basis, Cuil failed to provide me with what I was looking for when employing searches that could not get any more simple.

There is no denying that a hip and enhanced version of Google would make a compelling case for enthusiasts. It’s a venture that would be enhanced by word of mouth, and grass-roots love for better results. But I can’t help but be disappointed with its initial showing when the art of first impression is so very important given the pedigree touted by its creators.