More and more of the tech community seems to be talking about XMPP and how it fits into the future of the Internet.
One example: XMPP (a.k.a. Jabber) is the future for cloud services
The XMPP snowball is speeding up
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Tag Archives: Internet
CBC’s Spark and Search Engine
CBC has been doing a fantastic job of making most of its programming available as podcasts. More recently, CBC has also upped their Internet cool factor by adding two excellent new shows: Spark and Search Engine.
Both of these shows cover the interaction of technology and the Internet with society in general. Topics range from intelligent and interesting discussion of the forthcoming Canadian copyright changes to the funeral of a main frame computer, and more recently the applicability of the publication ban laws in the presence of blogs and social networks sites such as Facebook.
What is really unique about Search Engine and Spark though is how far they go to integrate the show into the web; or maybe it’s the other way around. Both shows make extensive use of their websites for listener feedback and to look for new story ideas. If this doesn’t seem particularly novel take note of how much these shows try to integrate ‘blog culture’. Search Engine starts each episode with keywords like a blog post. All of the music used on Spark is Creative Commons licensed and linked from the show’s website. Most importantly both shows sound very personal. Almost like an audio version of a blog post at times.
On a final note, these are not geek shows. If you read blogs or publish your own or use Facebook regularly you are likely to get something out of each episode.
Social network privacy settings
From How to Lose Your Job on Your Own Time:
Personal disclosure is the norm on social networking sites. But the Pew study included an unexpected finding: Teenagers have the most sophisticated understanding of privacy controls on these sites, and they are far less likely than adults to permit their profiles to be visible to anyone and everyone.
If you are a teenager, restricting public access to your profile has the nice effect of restricting your parents access to your social network data. I suspect lots of teenagers have pictures from parties and other activities that they don’t want their parents to see. This makes me wonder how much the use of privacy controls by teenagers has to do with a desire for more privacy in a general sense versus hiding from mom and dad.
Teenagers are also much more under the control of other authority figures than most adults are. Teachers are a good example of this situation. It is dangerous to speak negatively about your teacher when there is no way to know that they are not following your online activities.
Monitoring how these same teenagers change their privacy settings as they mature and become more independent would be a very interesting study.
Things that NAT breaks
Network address translation (NAT) has become so common on the Internet that many people consider it normal for their Internet access to use NAT. It may be common, but it is not how the Internet is supposed to work. A large amount of unnecessary complexity has to be added to applications to work around NAT.
For more information take a look at this list of things NAT breaks.
And just for the record, NAT is not a security device. This is the most common argument I hear when I try to tell people how much NAT complicates Internet software. For more information on NAT and security read this NANOG thread (the topic changes to security and NAT a few posts in).
Map of the IPv4 address space
http://maps.measurement-factory.com/gallery/Routeviews/
A very interesting map of the IPv4 address space. Each pixel is a /24 network. The color of the pixel indicates the size of the route that covers the /24.
This map can be ordered as a full size poster.
Internet maps
These maps of global Internet connectivity are amazing.
The original network neutrality problem
From History of the Public Switched Telephone Network:
- 1884
- AT&T is incorporated as a subsidiary of American Bell
- Bell Telephone creates the first long distance connection from Boston to New York City
- 1891
- Almon Strowger receives patent for his automated electromechanical call switching device
“No longer will my competitor steal all my business just because his wife is a BELL operator.”- 1899
- AT&T buys out American Bell assets.
- Cleyson Brown founds Bell System competitor Brown Telephone (eventually becomes Sprint)
Somehow that comment seems relevant given the current net neutrality debate.
A map of the Internet
From Mapping the Internet:
The researchers’ results depict the Internet as consisting of a dense core of 80 or so critical nodes surrounded by an outer shell of 5,000 sparsely connected, isolated nodes that are very much dependent upon this core. Separating the core from the outer shell are approximately 15,000 peer-connected and self-sufficient nodes.
Take away the core, and an interesting thing happens: about 30 percent of the nodes from the outer shell become completely cut off. But the remaining 70 percent can continue communicating because the middle region has enough peer-connected nodes to bypass the core.
Internet censorship
The latest episode of CBC’s Dispatches covered Internet censorship. Well worth the 30 minute listen. Dispatches is available as a podcast.
Of particular interest was the interview with Ronald Deibert of the OpenNet Initiative and CitizenLab.
Geographical distribution of Google searches for one day
From Interpreting the Data: Parallel Analysis with Sawzall
Animated image of the geographical distribution of Google searches for August 14, 2003.
