Me neither.

That hasn’t stopped the BBC from claiming ”Global Internet slows after biggest attack in history,” or the UK’s Independent from saying that “Internet services across the world have been disrupted” with “millions of web users” not able to access service like Netflix.

According to the Internet Traffic Report, everything’s fairly copacetic. Response time has been pretty steady for the past 30 days, with no discernible dip in the past week, and packet loss globally has remained steady at almost zero:

Source: Internet Traffic Report

Internet traffic doesn’t seem very disrupted in the past month or week …

A quick check of InternetPulse shows that the U.S. Internet is all healthy, with sub-90-second latency in response times across the board today:

It’s not until we check Akamai’s global real-time web monitor that we see what the problem is: congestion is up in two general areas. Those would be the UK — where the BBC lives — and Germany/Netherlands, where a local fight is on between a controversial hosting provider, Cyberbunker, and a spam-fighting filter service, Spamhaus.

Essentially, it appears that Spamhaus blacklisted Cyberbunker for allegedly distributing spam, and friends of Cyberbunker then attacked Spamhaus’ servers with up to 300 gigabytes/second of data. That’s an enormous amount of data, and it constitutes the biggest-ever DDOS attack. It’s clogging the interweb’s tubes in at least a few places but not, apparently, all over the world.

Little hint to the BBC and others: Western Europe is not the world.

The free wireless internet startup FreedomPop is targeting the likes of Comcast and Cablevision with its Hub Burst home router, which is now available for purchase.

First announced back in December, the $89 Hub Burst brings FreedomPop’s free wireless service beyond mobile devices. It comes with 1 gigabyte of free WiMax 4G, and you can also purchase additional bandwidth starting at $10 a month.

Like all of FreedomPop’s devices, there’s a big social component with the Hub Burst — you can earn additional bandwidth by referring family and friends. FreedomPop also offers a variety of special promotions that grant more bandwidth when completed.

While routers for cellular connections aren’t anything new, FreedomPop’s strategy certainly offers something new for home broadband users. For many people, it doesn’t really make sense for them to subscribe to home broadband connections, so a solution like the Burst Router could be ideal. (It sounds like the best way to get your non-techy grandma online.)

Unfortunately, since FreedomPop relies on WiMax 4G, you won’t see speeds anywhere near typical home broadband connections. The company’s next wave of devices will run on Sprint’s LTE connection, which has the potential to reach or surpass home broadband speeds.

At the latest TED conference in California, Cerf says he envisions a future Internet that could expand communication beyond humans to other species — and even other planets.

“All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected. We’re beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn’t just another person,” he said. (As if you need another reason to love Vint Cerf.)

As crazy as it sounds, work on that very kind of Internet already exists. Last year, Peter Gabriel (yes, that Peter Gabriel) helped found The Interspecies Internet, a project “created to explore, encourage, and facilitate communication between cognitive species.”

Here’s how Gabriel describes it:

Many of the phenomena of the net, universal communication, open access to information and education, group behaviour and social networks will have their parallels in the Interspecies Internet. Although it will clearly be used by beings of the same species for communication a special emphasis will be made on communications between species, including our own.

Admittedly, all of this sounds a bit off the wall — but what Gabriel and Cerf envision isn’t completely beyond the realm of possibility. Researchers are already getting closer to decoding the language of dolphins, and Orangutans at the Miami Zoo are today using iPads to communicate with their keepers. (See video below)

The Internet is breaking down the linguistic walls between humans, so why can’t it help make it easier for us to understand animals as well?

The Internet may be home to an endless sweep of distractions, memes, and cat pictures, but it’s also really small.

So claims a recent research paper by Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási, who says Internet users are only 19 clicks away from any of the estimated 14 billion web pages online.

Using a simulated model of the web, Barabási determined that though the Internet is massive, search engines, aggregators, and indexes keep it tiny. Just like Kevin Bacon links the stars of Hollywood, Google links the pages of the web.

That interconnectedness persists at scale, too, which means that no matter how big the web gets, it will essentially remain the same size.

But what Barabási’s research really shows is that companies like Google and Facebook are succeeding in their missions to connect the world. Google’s mission, as it explains it, is ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” which is exactly what it’s doing.

Facebook’s is a permutation of the same theme: “Facebook’s mission is to make the world more open and connected,” the company says. Same goes for Twitter, at least as of January 2011: “Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them.”

Universal, unencumbered connectedness is the mission behind just about all major Internet companies nowadays. Everyone wants to be Kevin Bacon.

A new study shows children are just as upset by depictions of violence, animal cruelty, and parental snarking online as they are by sexual imagery and bullying.

This research, conducted by the UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) and slated to be revealed on Tuesday, Feb. 5, shows that Internet filters and parental controls for sexual content are only a half measure when it comes to protecting children who use the Internet.

For the study, UKCCIS asked 24,000 school-aged children as old as 16 about their online habits, including the question, “Have you ever seen anything online that upset you?”

According to the to-be-released report, entitled “Have Your Say,” the children’s answers ranged broadly from YouTube videos depicting animal deaths to Facebook reminders of broken homes.

However, the kids said they mostly used the web for playing games, doing homework, and social networking — all in all, mostly positive or at least harmless activities.

And while parents have recently voiced concerns to government officials about kids being able to access pornography while online, children seemed more likely to be disturbed by mean comments from friends or even family and images of violence on the web.

As researcher and academic Andy Phippen told The Guardian, “There is no silver bullet to crack child safety online. Government’s obsession with filtering is okay, but too narrow.”

The UK government’s most recent set of proposals focused on parental controls provided by ISPs, telecoms, OEMs, web services, and even retailers “to develop universally available, family-friendly Internet access which is easy to use” and to “improve online protections for the more vulnerable children.”

The proposal also seeks to better define what content is inappropriate — including upsetting, mean, and violent content — and develop better ways to identify and eliminate it before children are exposed to it.

The new law, Bloomberg says, will require people to provide their full names when ordering landlines, mobile phones, and Internet connections, and it will also mandate online services such as Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, to require real names when posting or tweeting or blogging.

“The Internet is a free and open stage,” an editorial in the People’s Daily said on Dec. 24. “But absolute freedom of the network does not exist … the virtual society and social reality are inseparable.”

The editorial paints the prime issue as one of public safety and well-being, adding that with the rule of law, “the network can be more civilized, more healthy, more secure” and enhanced with more “positive energy.” Others, however, are wondering if it isn’t critique of the government’s sex scandals and shoddy handling of disasters that is more the issue.

Whatever the case, the law is certainly going to further impair online freedom in a country that already isn’t shy about censoring and restricting online communications, as Google’s Eric Schmidt said earlier this year. Although some, including Sinocism China Newsletter author Bill Bishop, say there is already no Internet freedom in the country.

reality is there is already no anonymity online in china, ESP if you use a mobile device on services like weibo. Govt can already find you

—
Bill Bishop (@niubi) December 28, 2012

True or not, the reality is that in a country with more than 538 million Internet users and a billion mobile phone owners, implementing the new law will not be easy or quick.

Image credits: Aelius Aaron/ShutterStock, M. Dykstra/ShutterStock

Click here if you’d like my weekly column sent directly to your inbox. It takes less than a minute to sign up, and you’ll get the stories before they’re published on VentureBeat.

Vint Cerf is one of the two or three people who can rightly claim to have invented the Internet. Now he’s worried about its survival.

Specifically, he’s concerned about the World Conference on International Telecommunications, happening now through December 14 in Dubai. At this meeting, for the first time since 1988, the countries of the world will gather to try and update international agreements on how to handle data, voice, and other communications technologies.

Now, the host of this event, the International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, knows that it needs to update the antiquated rules governing international telecommunications. In 1988, the last time they met, the Internet existed but was far from being a huge consumer and business phenomenon.

Here’s the danger: Certain countries want more control over the Internet. According to the Open Net Initiative, 42 out of 72 surveyed countries do some kind of filtering and censoring of Internet content, while 21 do “substantial” or “pervasive” filtering — and that’s not even counting North Korea or Cuba.

Lest you think this applies only to “repressive” countries, keep in mind that the U.S. is the #1 country asking Google for more information about its users. That’s not censorship, but it still could be a threat.

Imagine if you had something politically sensitive to post about corruption in Washington, D.C., so you posted an anonymous YouTube video. If the FBI asked for it, Google might give them details that could lead them to your identity.

That’s just one of the examples why openness and anonymity are still important.

Cerf spoke recently at the Egnyte Firestorm conference in San Francisco, where I was a speaker. See below for a video of Cerf’s speech, which covers the entire history of the Internet — no kidding! — in about half an hour, all the way up to Internet-connected wine cellars and the ITU threat. I was honored to meet the man, and of course I took the chance to ask him what he was working on.

(By the way, Cerf really did invent the Internet, or at least the most important part of it: Together with Robert Kahn, Cerf concocted the Internet Protocol [IP] and Transmission Control Protocol [TCP], which, together, underlie nearly all Internet communications. He’s now the chief Internet evangelist for Google.)

At the conference where I met him, he’d just returned from a meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Baku, Azerbaijan — the kind of dry, technocratic meeting that a man like Cerf must spend his life flying to — but the first thing he mentioned was the emergence there of a faction of countries that want to limit free speech and the unfettered ability of people to connect to the net. He expanded on that Dec. 2 in a guest article for CNN.com:

Several authoritarian regimes reportedly propose to ban anonymity from the web, making it easier to find and arrest dissidents. Others have proposed moving the responsibilities of the private sector system that manages domain names and Internet addresses to the United Nations. Yet other proposals would require any Internet content provider, small or large, to pay new tolls in order to reach people across borders.

The upshot? The next garage-based phenomena would face a steep and probably insurmountable financial hurdle in its effort to become the next YouTube, Facebook, or Skype.

Rules like this would put a huge crimp into the Internet’s “free and open” principles, which is why Cerf and others are calling for people around the world to sign a pledge of support for openness.

Maybe it’s no surprise, but I’m in favor of Cerf’s petition. Openness and transparency are critical to the Internet’s survival.

The pledge has attracted over 2 million electronic up votes to date. You should add yours.

But its real impact is probably minimal, at least in the short term: The ITU meeting will happen behind closed doors with what Cerf told me was a complete lack of transparency, and nobody at the ITU meeting is going to pay much attention to this website.

Worse, the ITU meeting only includes representatives from various national governments. It lacks representatives from companies or people who use the net, as other Internet governance organizations like the IETF or ICANN have.

Still, signing the pledge is a good way to raise awareness and, eventually, political pressure on the administrations sending delegates to the ITU. It’s also a good heads-up that these requests for control might come dressed in language that sounds much more innocuous.

For example, Cerf warned that governments would likely couch their demands for control in terms of protecting citizens — from, for instance, spam. But the upshot would be an end to the freedom we’ve enjoyed for decades.

In reality, many countries want to control access so they can prevent dissidents from using the Internet to organize, without having to shut down the entire country’s Internet access, as Syria recently seems to have done. And they want to control content for a variety of reasons: to prevent seditious material from getting in the hands of their citizens, to enforce content laws like Germany’s ban on Nazi propaganda, and to help enforce copyright law.

“History is rife with examples of governments taking actions to ‘protect’ their citizens from harm by controlling access to information and inhibiting freedom of expression,” Cerf concluded in his essay today. “We must make sure, collectively, that the internet avoids a similar fate.”

Photo: Mandy Kakavas/Google Ventures

Meeker is delivering her report to a group of Students at Stanford University, and Kleiner Perkins is live-tweeting the presentation on Twitter at @kpcb.

This is an update to a report Meeker delivered in May 2012, and it’s got a ton of new information.

We’re still digesting the slides, but the slide above (#24 in Meeker’s deck) is a real standout. Echoing a similar graph of computer system sales from Horace Dediu at Asymco, it shows the dramatic shift away from Windows-powered Intel machines (Wintel) in the past few years. Apple drove a wedge into the Wintel monopoly, but it’s Google’s Android OS that’s really eating Microsoft’s lunch. Since Q4 2010, combined shipments of tablets and smartphones have exceeded the number of PCs shipped, Meeker reports, and that trend shows no sign of reversing.

Other tidbits:

• Meeker’s data show 2.4 billion Internet users worldwide, a number that’s still growing eight percent yearly.
• There are 1.1 billion smartphone subscribers worldwide — but that’s still just 17 percent of the global cellphone market.
• 29 percent of adults in the U.S. now own either a tablet or an e-reader.
• Mobile devices now account for 13 percent of worldwide Internet traffic, up from 4 percent in 2010.
• Mobile app and advertising revenue has grown at an annual rate of 129 percent since 2008, and now tops $19 billion.
• Mobile traffic app Waze has been adding users faster than all GPS makers combined have sold personal navigation units, and it’s been that way since the beginning of 2012.

Meeker’s presentation goes on to spell out how these device and connectivity trends are leading to the complete re-imagination of everything from encyclopedias to money itself. It’s a great presentation — you should definitely read it.

See the full slide deck below.

Internet analytics and networking company Rensys noticed early today that all 84 of Syria’s internet protocol (IP) address groups are unreachable. That essentially removes the country from the internet, as traffic cannot be routed to, from, or through those blocks.

Syria is, of course, in the middle of a bloody civil war which is being fought online — and in the media — as much as in the streets and cities.

Renesys says that the primary provider for Syria is the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment, and that all of its customer networks are currently unreachable, using the word “killswitch.” This does not bode well for the Syrian rebels — if the government forces are shutting down the internet, it is presumably either so that they can operate with greater impunity and less publicity, or so that rebel forces cannot use the internet to communicate.

Or, both.

Oddly, however, there are five Syrian networks that are still up and running. Sort of Syrian, at least:

Now, there are a few Syrian networks that are still connected to the Internet, still reachable by traceroutes, and indeed still hosting Syrian content. These are five networks that use Syrian-registered IP space, but the originator of the routes is actually Tata Communications. These are potentially offshore, rather than domestic, and perhaps not subject to whatever killswitch was thrown today within Syria.

Those networks happen to be the same ones, Renesys notes, that were used in the delivery of malware targeting Syrian rebels earlier this year.

Which may mean, to those of nasty suspicious minds, that the government is retaining some level of internet access for itself, while denying the rebels — and the rest of the country — the same benefit.

Here’s Arbor Networks‘ graph of web traffic to Syria over the last day or so:

photo credit: FreedomHouse via photopin cc

While NASA is busy extending the Internet to outer space by increasing fault-tolerance and caching for packets traveling long distances over long periods of time, Chinese scientists are helping invent something that could make communication between Mars and Earth even more reliable. Or help create the next generation of quantum computers.

I’m talking about data teleportation. Data has been teleported before — as far as 89 miles —  but never between two large, physically visible objects.

So the scientists at Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences in Anhui, China entangled photonic quantum bits in a quantum memory node, sent one of the entangled particles  to another quantum memory node via an optical cable, made changes to the spinwave state of the nearby photon, and observed the same changes happening in the remote photo.

If you understand this, you’re a genius. Stop reading immediately and create a Star Trek-style matter teleporter, charge the world royalties, and retire as the richest human in the history of the world.

The stupid translation — meaning one I can understand — is that some super-smart geeks mysteriously connected two tiny particles so that they want to be twins but cruelly separated them. They then made changes to Mike (the nearest one) and observed equivalent changes automatically happening in Ike (the farthest one).

What’s this good for?

The upshot is that scientists can read data that has been received without, apparently, having been sent. Without, that is, having been sent by any physical means that we currently understand: no radio waves, no light messages, no audible communication, and yes, no smoke signals.

Which means that if the distance over which this occurs can be increased, and if you can reliably transport half of your entangled quantum bits and bites to Mars, Jupiter, or Alpha Centauri … you’ve got an awesome interplanetary Internet that’s reliable even if there’s a solar flare filling local space with charged particles and drowning out radio waves. Or, you’ve got the makings of a quantum computer that can have parts in Washington, Beijing, and Valles Marineris, the Martian Grand Canyon.

Unfortunately, however, you do not get instantaneous transmission. You still have to wait the 15 or so minutes it takes for light to travel between Earth and Mars, depending on where the two planets are lining up.

Because sadly, although teleportation is cool and spooky and amazingly high-tech and doesn’t travel by light, it does obey Einstein’s laws of physics and will not move faster than light.

Seems odd, doesn’t it, that such a crazy metaphysical technology feels bound by that cosmic speed limit?

photo credit: - Dave Morrow - via photopin cc; hat tip: ExtremeTech

Tom Paseka works for CloudFlare, the content delivery network that handles more traffic than Amazon, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, and Apple combined, delivering more than two billion pageviews per employee. The company knows a few things about the Internet.

What Paseka knew last night, apparently before any Google employees noticed, was that Google’s services appeared to be offline. Tracing the problem, he noticed an Indonesian Internet service provider in the path to Google — odd by any standard.

Particularly when CloudFlare is just a few miles from Google, not an ocean away.

It turns out, Paseka learned, that the Indonesian ISP Moratel was giving its users an incorrect route to Google. And because Moratel was trusted by other networks upstream, the incorrect route was propagating around the globe. As Paseka writes:

And, quickly, the bad routes spread. It is unlikely this was malicious, but rather a misconfiguration or an error evidencing some of the failings in the BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) Trust model.

The fix was simply notifying Moratel about the issue, which Paseka did. Three minutes later, the problem was fixed and Google’s services were back online. Of course … they had never gone down. But they had been inaccessible.

You may not have noticed unless you were in Hong Kong. Paseka estimated that the entire outage affected only about 3-5 percent of the Internet population.

No word on whether Google engineers sent their CloudFlare colleagues a box of donuts or a Google hoodie in thanks.

photo credit: GustavoG via photopin cc

But Google is in Baku, Azerbijan today at the seventh annual Internet Governance Forum to make the case that a free and open internet is best for all. And with them is internet pioneer Vint Cerf.

(In case you’re wondering where Azerbaijan is, it’s east of Turkey, south of Russia, and right near all the “stans.”)

Source: Open Net Initiative

Counties the filter the internet for political purposes

The IGF is a United Nations organization. Among other things, its mandate includes fostering the security and stability of the internet, helping countries with internet governance, and finding solutions for “the issues arising from the use and misuse of the Internet.”

Over 40 countries currently censor the internet to varying degrees, as Google notes, so the company “is going to Azerbaijan to stand up for freedom and openness of the Internet.” Many of those countries, according to Google, are hoping to make those restrictions international, and are already trying via the International Telecommunications Union.

One of the conference’s sessions is titled Security, Openness and Privacy, and will include discussion on several key questions, including

• What impact can security and governance issues have on the Internet and human rights
• Freedom of expression and free flow of information: how do legal framework, regulations, and principles impact this?

Panelists on that session include a member of the US Department of State and an advisor to the Egyptian minister of communication and IT.

Vint Cerf will be speaking about freedom and openness at an event during IGF, at which the company will show a selection of “The Caucasus Triangle” – a documentary on youth media and democracy in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan:

Google acknowledges that laws and customs differ, and it has committed to obey local laws in areas it operates. The company is there, however, to add its voice to those who are advocating for openness and freedom: ”Our bottom line remains a strong preference for keeping the Net as open and free as possible.”

Image credit: Google Maps

Early this year, Twitter created the capability to block tweets and users by country, while still allowing Twitter users — err, customers — in other countries to see them. Now the 140-character social network has done so for the very first time, as MarketingLand reported.

Twitter’s top lawyer confirmed it, by tweet, of course:

We announced the ability to withhold content back in Jan. We're using it now for the first time re: a group deemed illegal in Germany.

—
Alex Macgillivray (@amac) October 18, 2012

Twitter had received a request to close the account from German police, and recorded it, as is Twitter policy, on the Chilling Effects anti-censorship website:

The enclosed letter gives you the information that the Ministry of the Interior of the State of Lower-Saxony in Germany has banned the organisation “Besseres Hannover.” It is disbanded, its assets are seized and all its accounts in social networks have to be closed immediately. The Public Prosecutor (State Attorney’s Office) has launched an investigation on suspicion of forming a criminal association.

It is the task of the Polizeidirektion Hannover (Hannover Police) to enforce the ban.

The organisation “Besseres Hannover” uses the Twitter account
besseres-hannover@hannoverticker

https://twitter.com/hannoverticker

I ask you to close this account immediately and not to open any substitute accounts for the organisation “Besseres Hannover”.

The blocked group is allegedly a neo-Nazi organization in Hannover, Germany, where for obvious historical reasons neo-Nazi organizations are illegal. Due to Twitter’s country-specific method of dealing with censorship, however, the account has not been closed.

The tweets and account are still available and visible from other countries … so the organization is now complaining, in English, about German censorship:

Look at this regime: They gossip viciously about china and russia but noone about them! freedom for #germany! #censorship #injustice #brd

—
besseres-hannover (@hannoverticker) October 18, 2012

While people in Germany theoretically cannot see this account, country reality bubbles are easy to pop.

Anyone can, with a very limited amount of technical knowledge and software fiddling, appear to come from just about anywhere else. Firefox, for instance, offers Geolocater, which allows you to spoof sites’ geo-location routines with just a few clicks. Or you can use a proxy server, or pay for services like the wonderfully-named Hide My Ass private VPN.

Generally, people use these for connecting to country-specific video content. But they could also be used to circumvent Twitter and Google country blockages.

Which, when the content is allegedly neo-Nazi hatred, is not a great thing. But I guess the price of freedom is the risk that some will be assholes.

photo credit: S@Z via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The U.S. Congress Intelligence Committee and telecommunications vendor Cisco are agreed on one thing: Chinese networking equipment companies can’t be trusted.

Whether that’s just political posturing and jingoistic protectionism or the plain simple facts of global geopolitics depends a lot on who you believe.

According to Reuters, this morning Cisco killed a seven-year partnership with Chinese networking manufacturer ZTE after investigations reportedly showed that ZTE sold banned technology to Iran. Sending U.S.-developed technology that could allow Iran to monitor and control Internet usage violates U.S. sanctions against that country — and could put Cisco’s U.S. business in jeopardy.

According to Cisco’s financial statements, more than half of its revenue is from North and South America, and most of that will be from the U.S. Cisco had partnered with ZTE, licensing Cisco technology to the up-and-coming company in an attempt to fight larger and more dangerous competitor Huawei in emerging markets.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the U.S. House of Representatives’ Intelligence Committee released a draft report saying, in part, that both Huawei and ZTE “cannot be trusted to be free of foreign state influence,” and therefore, U.S.-based Internet service providers and telecommunications companies should “seek other vendors” for infrastructure projects.

This is not new.

Congress has been concerned about China electronically spying on the U.S. for some time now. The concern is that, since Chinese companies either have close ties to the Chinese government or can be compelled to allow significant amounts of government access to their technology, products used in the sensitive telecom industry could contain backdoors or intentional security holes to facilitate espionage.

Very similar, of course, to what the FBI wants Facebook, Twitter, and Skype to grant it. Or to what the NSA was rumored to have built into various version of Windows.

China has been accused of industrial espionage many times, as well as of spying on activists and political dissidents, and very recently was reported to be attempting to access military systems in the White House itself (not for the first time). So it’s hard for China to wear the white cape here.

But that doesn’t stop the country from trying, and a spokesman for China called upon Congress to “set aside prejudices and respect the facts,” according to Reuters, as well as offering a veiled threat, saying the U.S. should “do more that is beneficial to Sino-American economic and trade ties, rather than the contrary.”

The story won’t end here.

But if it continues in the current path, this war of words threatens to become something more substantial, potentially involving trade sanctions on both sides.

photo credit: ukaszSie via photopin cc

“Craiglist was an innovator at one time,” says 3taps chief executive Greg Kidd. “But time has moved on, and the concept of what the open web is today has evolved.”

Craiglist, the massive online classifieds site where the internet is still 1997, has had a wildly tumultuous 2012.

In June Craigslist blocked a third-party service, PadMapper, from scraping its apartment rental listings and presenting them in a more 2012 way. Then in July, when PadMapper found a “legally kosher” way to access Craigslist postings via 3taps (which essentially sucked the data right out of Google), Craiglist sued PadMapper and 3taps … and then bizarrely amended its terms of service, telling users they were not permitted to cross-post their sales items anywhere else on the internet.

Effectively, Craigslist was claiming complete and total copyright of its users’ content.

That died its inevitable death in early August, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation — on whose advisory board Craigslist founder Craig Newmark sits – got involved. Since that strategy failed, Craiglist went thermonuclear on all content scrapers, blocking all search engines from accessing the site.

At which point, you might think, it would just be easier to play nicely with others. But the core question remains: Who owns the data in Craigslist listings?

“Public facts are public property,” says Kidd, who is also an advisor at Square and was a first-round investor in Twitter. “Our view is that facts are protected by the First Amendment.”

Facts, of course, are not copyrightable, at least according the U.S. Supreme Court. That means no one can copyright the fact that Hitler lost World War II, or that you’ve got a slightly-used sofa for sale for just $299, no tax, no refunds.

And if that’s the case, says Kidd, how can Craigslist “own” its users’ listings? Kidd cites James Boyle from the Center for Public Domain at Duke University, who says that a Craigslist-style view on facts and copyright would “break the internet.” And not just 3taps, either. Giants like Google would also be affected.

“People seem to feel that scraping is a bad word,” says Kidd, referring to the often ethically controversial practice of electronically capturing data on other organizations’ websites. “But Google’s whole model is based on scraping.”

He doesn’t see any law, Kidd told me, that says Google can do it but no one else. And he has a real problem with Craigslist deciding who is a search engine and who isn’t.

So 3taps is suing Craigslist to force the courts to define what is public and what is private, and what can be copyrighted. In addition, 3taps will be suing Craigslist under the Sherman Antitrust Act, claiming that Craigslist is a monopoly acting in monopolistic ways to reduce competition in the marketplace.

“You can bully people that aren’t well-resourced,” says Kidd. “But that only works until it doesn’t work.”

He’s had no contact with Craigslist — and, despite repeated requests on this occasion and others, Craigslist has not responded to VentureBeat’s attempts to get its perspective — saying it refuses to talk to anyone.

“I don’t know what goes on in their heads,” Kidd told me. “I just wish they’d stop suing everyone else.”

photo credit: jox. via photopin cc

---

Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

---

In his new book The Fine Print, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston tell us, among other things, what’s wrong with the Internet in America. The answer is fairly depressing: It’s too slow, too expensive, and … too controlled by a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon.

Japan has fiberoptic Internet available to many homes with speeds of 100 or 200 megabits per second, and, believe it or not, an available 1 gigabit per second service. (At least one place in the U.S, Chattanooga, Tenn., can get an equivalent speed.) South Korea is still the king of Internet speeds, however, with an average 17.5 megabits per second to all homes.

Average speed in the U.S., meanwhile is a measly 5.8 megabits per second — actually a decrease from U.S speeds of 2011, according to Royal Pingdom. It’s the barely visible blue line in the chart below:

Source: Royal Pingdom

Average global internet connection speeds.

That slower speed comes, unfortunately, at a higher cost than many other countries.

Hong Kong gets 500 megabits per second for $37 a month. Other major international cities, such as Paris and Berlin, get 100 megabits per second for $40. But the same speed in Washington, DC, comes at $105, courtesy of Comcast, and Verizon’s 150 megabits per second service sets New Yorkers back $159.95.

Typically, service providers point to the vast distances of North America as the reason why speeds are slower here. VentureBeat contacted both Verizon and AT&T for comment, but neither have responded (yet).

The question remains for cities as densely packed as New York: Why such high cost for such comparably slow service?

Johnston’s answer is that Americans were better off with Ma Bell’s monopoly. Adjusting for inflation, he says, phone service is 230 percent more expensive than in 1984.

That’s a future even Orwell didn’t anticipate.

photo credit: Maryam (one bored chica) via photopin cc

This post was written by Jeremy Hitchcock, CEO of Dyn, an Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) provider.

Dyn has been a bootstrapped company and profitable from day one. We get a lot of questions on how we pulled this off, and while I would love to claim all the credit, there’s nothing really magical about our success. We started as an open-source, community-led project, found a need, and grew a company around it — fueled by a lot of hard work and many sleepless nights.

But when we incorporated in 2001, things weren’t pretty. We had never thought about funding, and since we were in college, we asked our customers to bankroll us. Actually, we said that the project would get shut down unless we were able to raise our $25,000 goal. When $40,000 came in, we knew we were on the hook.

We’ve grown and been profitable year over year. Now we’re eight years removed from my college graduation, have 150 people, and service some of the best Internet companies — plus 4 million customers — all over the world. We’ve learned a lot along the way, and there are a few tips that we can pass along.

1. Start with something you love.

Don’t be afraid to start small. We started with a little project that helped us access papers off our dorm room computers so we could escape walking through the cold to get to a lab printer. This is also how you understand the market/product fit and who is an ideal customer. By pursuing something personal, you understand the pain and the value that you can deliver in a product.

2. Spread the word and get others involved.

It’s easier than ever to get people to see projects and other ideas and to get public momentum behind them. Kickstarter, Twitter, Facebook, and Angel.co are great ways to do just that. You’ll want to get people using your service. We were free at the time (which was pretty unique) and enlisted a core group of volunteers who served as our initial customer support staff.

3. Get to minimum viable product (MVP) and dollar one fast.

When you start out, you are constantly thinking about dollar one — the first customer that actually pays you for your service. While we asked for donations to keep the project going, we also simultaneously launched a paid version of the service with additional features. When people are willing to part with their money because you deliver value, you’re onto something.

4. Revenue has to be greater than expenses.

John Lynch, the popular governor of New Hampshire and former head of Knoll Furniture, said this line many times: If there is a single rule in business, it’s that revenue has to be greater than expenses. This fiscally conservative approach worked well for New Hampshire, which, even during one of the worst financial crises in history, was able to maintain a balanced budget and create jobs. If it works for an entire state, it’ll work for your business.

Sometimes, this means sacrificing comfort. Since we were in college when we started Dyn, we didn’t have expensive tastes (except for the occasional trip to the Cheesecake Factory); we were perfectly happy cramming into a small office space. In fact, even as we grew, we maintained modest accommodations. All of those early sacrifices paid off, as we now have a spacious 30,000 square foot headquarters — but only because we can afford it.

5. Optimize efficiency first.

The biggest tradeoff that comes with living within your means is that you obsess over efficiency. You’re always thinking about next year’s challenges while solving this year’s problem. It takes a lot of will to break out of each plateau and make sure that you don’t get stuck.

Around 2007 we were cruising along as an e-commerce platform, selling our services to small businesses and home users. But we wanted more. After a lot of careful consideration and even more risk, we decided to move upstream and provide an enterprise service. This gamble didn’t pay off immediately. There were more sleepless nights, but today, it’s fueling our growth. We wouldn’t have been able to take this leap if we weren’t living with one foot in the future.

6. Get lots of good advice.

Because people love the bootstrapping story, it’s easy to find people willing to share their experience. Don’t just talk to people in tech. Talk to people who run restaurants, ad agencies, do metal fabrication, own car dealerships, etc. You’ll realize that once you get the market/product fit relatively right (always a work in progress), all of your problems are related to people.

Of course, listening to advice is only part of it — you also have to implement it. Sometimes that is easier said than done, especially when you’re 23 years old. If you’re an entrepreneur, there is always part of you that thinks you know everything. But to grow a company, you have to accept your shortcomings and look elsewhere for answers — while simultaneously remembering that if you’re truly innovating, there may eventually be some things people can’t help you with, simply because they’ve never been done before.

7. Have a lot of fun.

In the end, it’s important to have a good time and love the people you work with. There’s nothing secret about running a company that is profitable from day one. It involves a lot of hard work but is incredibly rewarding when it happens.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

Image via yyellowbird/Flickr

Satellite television service provider Dish Network is planning to expand its business with a brand new high-speed Internet service, according to a Bloomberg report that cites unnamed sources familiar with the matter.

The new Internet service will use satellites from Dish’s sister company EchoStar that can support download speeds of up to 15 Mbps. However, Bloomberg’s sources indicate that Dish will likely offer just 5 Mbps so it can maximize the number of customers it takes on without straining the network. But even with the lower speeds, people in rural areas of the country are likely to be interested, as there isn’t a hardwired broadband cable service alternative.

It’s estimated that the new service can handle 2 million customers immediately, but more satellites would need to go into orbit to increase that number significantly. The company could eventually package its TV service along with the rumored new Internet service — much in the same way that cable providers like Comcast and Time Warner Cable do. Dish already offers some satellite-based Internet service via a partnership with ViaStat, but it only covers certain portions of the country.

The report states that Dish will formally begin offering the new service to customers in late September or October.

Photo via Dave Lindblom/Flickr

But a decade ago, the big social networking story was Friendster with a whopping 3 million users. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had 95 percent market share. And less than 600 million people were online globally … fewer than Facebook users alone in 2012.

10 years, 3,652 days, 87,648 hours.

A lot has changed since Apple was touting a new 700 MHz iBook and iPhoto 1.1. Blockbuster went from $5.5 billion in revenue to a big bloody hole in the ground, and Yahoo went from Internet behemoth to will-Marissa-Mayer-be-able-save-it.

In a glorious animated GIF from BestedSites: The change a decade makes in Internet time.

photo credit: Mikey G Ottawa via photo pin cc

User numbers hit a new high, with 955 million worldwide visiting the site at least once a month. And earning are slightly above estimates, coming in at $1.18 billion in revenue and 32 percent year-over-year growth. Over half a billion are coming from mobile devices.

One of the most interesting slides in the company’s quarterly earnings release, however, is this one:

Just two years ago, the United States and Canada made up 30 percent of Facebook’s users. Fast-forward to today, and the percentage is a little bit different: under 20.

Not only has the percentage changed, but the growth rate is almost negligible: only about 35 percent user growth over 24 months for the world’s social utility. That compares to 170 percent growth in Facebook’s “rest-of-the-world” category, which includes Africa, and 165 percent growth in Asia.

Even stodgy old Europe has 63 percent growth.

On the one hand, this is expected and normal. North America has a limited population, about 350 million, of which Facebook has about a 53 percent penetration rate. That’s slightly up from about 50 percent at the end of 2011.

On the other hand … why are those missing 164 million people not on Facebook? It’s a question the company should ponder … particularly because US and European internet users are worth more to advertisers than any others. Internet users are valued at perhaps $1,200 to advertisers, with Facebook making about an annualized $5 as of the first quarter of this year, and Google collecting $20 per user per year.

But not all internet users.

Zambia’s average annual income is $1,600. In the Phillipines, a college professor might make $500 dollars a month. I don’t think Barney’s New York is banging down their doors to sell $5,000 Gucci bags. Not too many iPhones being sold in Cambodia.

The point?

As Facebook’s growth has transitioned largely to the developing world: Asia, Africa, Oceania … the average value to advertisers per user is going down. Just check another slide from the Facebook deck:

The biggest chunk of Facebook users — “rest of world,” at 268 million — accounts for the smallest slice of Facebook’s revenue, $113 million. In fact, if you do that math, you can find the average value to Facebook, per quarter, of each user:

• US/Canada: $3.20
• Europe: $1.43
• Asia: $0.55
• Rest of world: $0.44

The good news is, if this quarter is any indication, Facebook could be bringing in about $12 per US and Canadian user per year. But there’s also bad news … and that’s everywhere else.

Europe can probably be fixed with more time and attention than the US-centric Facebook has given it so far. Starting an office in London may help with that. But Asia? And the rest of the world? Those per-capita incomes aren’t coming up to U.S. standards any time real soon.

And that’s one of the reasons Facebook’s stock is getting hammered.

Image credit: Sergej Khakimullin/ShutterStock

But the new poster boy for internet freedom has a big-kids message:

“The war for the Internet has begun. Hollywood is in control of politics. The Government is killing innovation. Don’t let them get away with that.”

Whether you agree or disagree, Dotcom is eager to make his case on the new Kim.com, where he calls on American president Barack Obama to “end the war on internet freedom” … and shares 10 facts about the MegaUpload scandal and court cases in an attempt to both exonerate his company and demonstrate the illegal nature of the US government’s actions.

And he explicitly links his message to Dr. Martin Luther King, saying “I have a dream, like Dr. King.” He also links himself implicitly to Che Guevara, the famous Argentinian Marxist who contributed to the Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, by wearing the beret cap in the video.

Watch, listen, enjoy:

Somewhat interestingly … on the bottom of the Kim.com website is a small image: a copyright notice.

And there’s a terms of service, which states that the website is copyrighted and may not be used by organizations, companies, or businesses for any purposes. And one more thing:

Unauthorized framing of or linking to the Website is prohibited.

I don’t think Che had a terms of service page, Kim.

Note:  last week Dotcom published the following letter to the movie industry via The Hollywood Reporter.

Dear Hollywood,

The Internet frightens you. But history has taught us that the greatest innovations were built on rejections. The VCR frightened you, but it ended up making billions of dollars in video sales.

You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently. And the economic benefits of high-speed Internet and unlimited cloud storage are so great that we need to plan for the day when the transfer of terabytes of data will be measured in seconds.

Businesses and individuals will keep looking for faster connectivity, more robust online storage and more privacy. Transferring large pieces of content over the Internet will become common — not because global citizens are evil but because economic forces leading to “speed of light” data transfer and storage are so beneficial to societal growth.

Come on, guys, I am a computer nerd. I love Hollywood and movies. My whole life is like a movie.

I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.

Providing “freemium” cloud storage to society is not a crime. What will Hollywood do when smartphones and tablets can wirelessly transfer a movie file within milliseconds?

The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. Instead of changing their views to fit the facts, they try to change the facts to fit their views. The fact remains that the benefits of Megaupload to society outweigh the burdens. But instead of adapting, you imported one of your action-conspiracy movie scripts into the real world. In my view, MPAA CEO and former Sen. Chris Dodd lobbied his friends in the White House to turn me into a villain who has to be destroyed. Due process? Rule of law? Eliminate me and my innovation and worry about the consequences later. Never mind that millions of Megaupload users lost access to cloud data like their wedding photos. Well done, Hollywood, everyone with similar innovations got the message. But wait … You did not read the end of the script.

The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.

As you should have known, our Mega services operated within the boundaries of the law. We had users that spanned from the military to Hollywood to lawyers and doctors. If you are unhappy with that, it is up to you to convince Congress to amend legislation. You tried with SOPA and you failed. As an alternative, you chose to lobby the Justice Department to ignore the law and stage a global show of force and destruction. The only parties a New Zealand court has found to have violated the law in this case are the local police and the FBI.

Regardless of the issues you have with new technologies, you can’t just engage armed forces halfway around the world, rip a peaceful man from his family, throw him in jail, terminate his business without a trial, take everything he owns without a hearing, deprive him of a fair chance to defend himself and do all that while your propaganda machine is destroying him in the media. Is that who you want to be?

There can still be a happy ending. I am working on solutions. Just call me or my lawyers. You know where to find me. Unfortunately I can only do lunch in New Zealand.

This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.

Image credit: Kim.com

The Internet Defense League (IDL), an organization dedicated to keeping the internet open, officially kicked off its efforts today with a conference call that included several members of the tech industry and a handful of U.S. congressmen.

The group said it has set up its own version of Batman’s bat signal.

IDL members (you can sign up on the organization’s official website) will have access to tools for automatically alerting people to issues that may hinder the web’s freedom. Members can put a piece of code on their website that will contain updates on issues, send out automated messages on Twitter or Facebook, and receive e-mails. The group calls this effort the “Cat Signal,” appropriately named for the Internet’s nearly universal fascination with kitties.

“This is a call to arms for all the people who are creating something online,” said Reddit and Breadpig founder Alexis Ohanian during today’s call, adding that the Internet needs a watchful protector like DC super-hero Batman. “Whether they’ve got a Twitter account with 20 followers or a website with 30 million visitors, they all have a Gotham, so to speak, to protect.”

“The Internet, from the time it was commercialized, has proven to be a place where innovators come together, or innovate on their own,” said Congressman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) during the call. “Had the government intervened through regulation … the Internet today would look much more like a telephone system and much less like a communications system (that is) an economic engine that has driven so many new and innovative products.”

The IDL — whose members include companies like Reddit, WordPress, Cheezburger Network, Fark, and others — was formed in the wake of successful protests by a number of groups to thwart such now-dead pieces of legislation as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The group is attempting to bring together regular Internet users, companies that build their business around the Internet, and others into a permanent coalition able to alert the community to threats to net freedoms in the future. And as VentureBeat previously reported, many IDL members have already come together to sign a Declaration of Internet Freedom.

The IDL wants to be the caped crusader for the Internet. And in keeping with the Batman metaphor, not only is the group scheduling its launch to coincide with the release of the latest Batman movie, but it’s also creating a digital version of the bat signal with its Cat Signal.

Oh, and it’s also got real-life Cat Signals.

Seriously. The organization started a crowdfunding campaign to get real life Cat Signals beaming the IDL’s “cat-signal” icon onto clouds in the sky or neighboring buildings. The group has raised almost its entire $19,000 target to have these spotlights used in five different cities across the globe. Depending on how much you donate, you can even receive IDL trinkets and gear, such as a personal cat signal torch-light key chain, IDL t-shirt, stickers, and more.

Additionally, members have the option of donating money to the organization’s future efforts.

Logistics of flipping on the Cat Signal

During the call there was some discussion about how the IDL would identify each threat, as every member will likely not agree with everything the new organization deems hurtful to the web.

For instance, issues regarding net neutrality would end up being put on a case-by-case basis.

“Net neutrality is a tricky question, because a lot of people really love the idea in theory, but finding a legislative way to do it without attaching a lot of power to a group or (government) agency is incredibly difficult” said EFF’s Rainey Reitman on the call. “It would just depend on the legislation.”

The group will, however, monitor websites, including a IDL subreddit devoted to threats against a free Internet. Based on the limited discussion on the conference call, it didn’t sound like there was any standard procedure for identifying threats that would be fed through the Cat Signal, at least not for the moment.

Some IDL members, like Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), don’t foresee this as a huge problem. “Once there is an issue brought up by either the (IDL) community or through mainstream media, the public is going to drive it,” Wyden said, adding that any issue that needs to be addressed won’t be hard to identify for the organization.

For the immediate future, the IDL plans to keep its eyes on the senate version of cyber-security legislation CISPA.

As we reported earlier, the new legislation is a series of amendments to other bills that grant the Russian federal service for supervision of communications, IT, and mass media the power to remove websites from the Russian Internet 24 hours after notifying offending publishers.

While the bill’s language states that its focus on pornography, extremist websites, and sites promoting suicide, critics fear it will be used to stifle dissent. According to the Russian legal information society Rapsi, Alexander Morozov, the head of Moscow’s Center for Media Studies, is one of those who is worried.

“It is always argued that these laws are against extremism, child pornography, and so on, but this legislation will hit the opposition and freedom of political expression.”

Russian Wikipedia ran an SOPA-style blackout yesterday to no avail, and the Kremlin’s own human rights watchdog has complained.

Oddly, the bill has both broad political support, having been drafted by members of all four of Russia’s major political parties, and many opponents. It appears that the bill will be signed into law by President Valdimir Putin later this year, but opposition members of the Russian parliament said that the bill’s goal was to stifle dissent.

The broader danger to free speech is that by implementing the bill, the Russian government is giving itself a lever that it can now activate for an increasing range of reasons.

Image credit: Vladdito/ShutterStock

The bill, which is really a series of amendments to existing laws, was originally drafted in June, according to Ria Novosti, a Russian news agency, but will be presented to legislators this week, on July 6. If the amendments pass, Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal service for supervision of communications, IT, and mass media, will be in charge of the blacklist and will work through a non-profit organization to monitor compliance.

When a website is found to contain illegal content, the government agency will give the owner of the site 24 hours to remove it. Failing that removal, the site will be entered on the blacklist. In some cases, such as sites advocating violence, the courts may need to get involved.

Opposition has already arisen, comparing the Russian effort to China-style “great firewall” censorship.

As the Financial Times has reported, the country has already seen questionable cases of harassment and attempted censorship on .ru domains. Compromat.ru, which publishes stories on official corruption in Russia, was closed by a Moscow prosecutor, and moscow-post.ru, a news site, suffered a similar fate. Both websites subsequently relocated to .net or .com domains.

Even the Kremlin’s own human rights watchdog is complaining, saying that it is important to stop censorship on Russian language websites. And the Voice of Russia reported that Minister of Communications and Mass Media Nikolai Nikiforov does not “appreciate the bill in its current form.”

Regardless, the bill may be passed in first reading, says RAPSI, the Russian Legal Information Agency.

Image credit: ShutterStock

With six million tweets circulating per day, it’s no surprise that Twitter receives hundreds of requests from governments and copyright holders to remove content.

In the new report, we gain insight into three categories of requests from the first six months of 2012: government requests for user information, government requests to withhold content, and requests from copyright holders to remove infringing content.

Complaints concerning copyright infringement far outweighed requests for user information. Between Jan. 1 and June 30 of 2012, Twitter received 3,378 requests to remove copyrighted material and complied with roughly 600 of them.

And government officials are showing more interest in Twitter than ever before. The social media site received more requests in the first half of 2012 than it received throughout 2011. The rates of compliance are also shockingly high: In 2012, Twitter fulfilled more than 75 percent of these requests. Similarly to Google, the vast majority of user information requests are levied by agencies from within the United States.

Google offered props to Twitter this morning for its efforts to be more transparent. In an interview with VentureBeat, Christine Chen, a spokesperson from Google, said she hopes the move will inspire more Internet companies to follow suit. Notably, Facebook has yet to publish information about the nature of the requests it receives for user data.

“The more transparent that companies and governments are, the more meaningful the public debate can be about the free flow of information online,” said Chen.

Twitter bird image via Shutterstock; Transparency Report screenshots via Twitter 

Sex crimes may soon be a lot harder to keep secret for social network users in Louisiana.

A new law, which goes into effect August 1, will require that sex offenders clearly state their criminal status on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter, CNN reports.

In addition to their criminal status, the law also requires sex offenders and child predators to include the location and description of their crimes, as well as their physical characteristics and addresses.

Sex offender registration laws are nothing new, as many states already require sex offenders to publicly list their locations. These can then be accessed on online databases, many of which also feature detailed map information. The new law, however, takes these measures a step further.

There’s no equivalent clause in the Terms of Service for Twitter and Pinterest, though.

So what’s the point of the new law? Louisiana state representative Jeff Thompson says the measure offers a new tool for prosecutors. ”I don’t want to leave in the hands of social network or Facebook administrators, ‘Gee, I hope someone is telling the truth,’” he told CNN.

Sex offenders found violating the law could face imprisonment of up to 10 years, along with a fine of up to $1,000. A second offense could result in a maximum of 20 years in jail and a $3,000 fine.

The law is a follow-up to a failed Louisiana measure that sought to completely prevent convicted sex offenders from using the Internet. That law was shot down by a federal court for being too broad, not to mention a civil rights violation, according to American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana

Photo: Frustrated man/Shutterstock

But hey, it’s fun to try.

Internet Protocol version 6 is the newest version of the global internet map. The map is how a packet of computer data — like the words you are now reading — find their way from my screen to yours. Slightly more specifically, from some anonymous box in some anonymous server farm, through thousands or tens of thousands of miles of wired or wireless connections, and finally to your computer.

The old version was IPv4, and it has 4.3 billion possible addresses. That sounds like a lot, until you realize that it’s only about half the number of people on the planet, and lots of individual people on the planet are adding lots of toys that all want to talk: smartphones, TVs, tablets, cars, toasters, fridges, and sofas (I’m not so sure about the sofa part).

IPv6 has 340 trillion trillion trillion possible addresses.

That’s quite a few. In fact, it’s enough to give each star in the universe a 4.3-billion-address Internet of its own.

The switchover has already begun, this very month. To celebrate, the Internet Society put together this infographic:

Image credit: ShutterStock

Today is IPv6 Day, a geeky holiday that celebrates the web’s transition to Internet Protocol version 6. There’s been a great deal of lead up to today, and much of it has been preceded by a crisis: The Internet is running out of addresses.

The best way to grasp the situation is to imagine a rapidly growing neighborhood with a finite amount of real estate.

The Internet is a place that’s become a popular destination for just about every sort of device — PCs, smartphones, tablets, game consoles, and, increasingly, things like Internet-connected refrigerators. All of these devices need a place to live, which online means they need their own IP addresses.

This has been the role of IPv4, which allocates to Internet-connected devices 32-bit addresses. The problem is that, while the number of devices has grown, the number of available addresses hasn’t. Introducing all of these new devices without any IP addresses would mean adding a max influx of new residents to a neighborhood with nowhere to put them.

This is a problem.

Enter IPv6, which introduces 128-bit addresses, ballooning exponentially the number of possibilities. With the new standard, the Internet has now has trillions of  trillions new addresses — an infinite number, essentially.

Which, in turn means this: The Internet can keep growing without fear of hitting a brick wall.

That’s a big deal, but making the transition isn’t an easy task –which is why it’s taken this long for companies to getting around to doing it.

Fortunately, many of the net’s biggest players are joining in: Microsoft, Cisco, Yahoo, Comcast, Facebook, and Google have all made the switch to IPv6. On the service provider end, AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable have also begun offer IPv6 access to customers.

Naturally, there will be some hold ups, but any short-term annoyances will be mitigated by the long-term possibilities that the transition to IPv6 will allow.

Internet, welcome to the future.

Image: Tobias Mandt, Flickr

Twenty-something employees have flocked to social networks to connect with our coworkers and superiors. Seven in 10 Facebook users have friended a coworker or supervisor and 68 percent of Twitter users have followed a coworker or superior. I can attest to this as I’m friends with and follow many of my coworkers and my boss.

One in three college students and young professionals feels the Internet is as important as food, shelter, water, and even air according to a Cisco 2011 Connected World Technology report. We apparently breathe for the Internet and feel it’s a crucial part of our jobs.

While at work, we can’t stay away from our social networks. Checking Facebook ranks third in the top activities done at work, behind checking personal emails and checking company emails. However, 54 percent of businesses surveyed don’t allow employees to check any social networking site while at work at all.

Generation Ys are also drawn to hipper work environments like those in startups from Silicon Valley and beyond. We hope for perks such as free food, laid-back environments, team bonding experiences, and open workspaces in the jobs we go after.

Check out the infographic to enlarge and read more stats on how Generation Y is changing the workforce.

Young professionals on a computer image via Shutterstock

Countries in Asia and the Indian subcontinent are far outpacing the U.S. and Europe when it comes to tech adoption, according to stats published today by analyst demigod Mary Meeker.

The report shows massive growth, both in data-capable cell phones and Internet adoption, in countries like Japan, China, the Philippines, India, and Korea. While the U.S. is still leading in the total number of 3G mobile subscribers and the total number of Internet users for a single country, it’s clear that other regions are gearing up to swipe those titles, and fast.

Meeker’s research also shows a disturbing trend, however: Very slow mobile and Internet growth in the developing world. Throughout Africa and South America, in some of the areas that most need better access to life-changing information, Internet adoption has lagged.

For example, Nigeria is the only country from both of those continents to make the top-10 list for Internet adoption, access, and population penetration. Today, only about one third of Nigeria’s citizens have Internet access.

And only four countries from these two regions (Nigeria again, South Africa, Mexico, and Brazil) are in the top-30 list of countries for 3G mobile penetration, and percentage penetration ranges from six to 21 percent in these countries.

Here’s a visual breakdown of Meeker’s spredsheets, courtesy of your friendly spreadsheet jockeys at VentureBeat:

Graphics by Jolie O’Dell. Top image courtesy of Supri Suharjoto, Shutterstock