Category: Internet

Today marks a hugely important day in the history of the Internet: On April 30th, 1993, Al Gore published the world’s first ever public website. Ok, so perhaps Mr. Gore wasn’t involved, but today is indeed the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web becoming available to the public. Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN headed the WWW project and published the world’s first public web page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. To celebrate the 20-year milestone, CERN decided to bring the page back online in its original form. The resurrection of the world’s first web page is part of a larger effort at CERN to revive the web’s early history, and the page is now live for everyone to enjoy.

Many subscribers will be in for a surprise when the latest issue of Forbes Magazine arrives on doorsteps and newsstands. Microsoft has embedded a Wi-Fi router in select copies of the May 6th print edition of the magazine, which gives users 15 days of free Wi-Fi through T-Mobile. The free Wi-Fi is part of Microsoft’s latest campaign to promote its subscription-based Office 365 service. The router lasts for three hours before it must be recharged using the included microUSB cable. Once activated, up to five devices at a time can be connected to the hotspot until the free service expires.

Nielsen, the long-time leader in TV audience measurements, is taking their methodology online.

Today, the company announced a pilot program for the Nielsen Digital Program Ratings which will track TV content viewed online. The pilot starts with a handful of big-name partners – A+E, ABC, AOL, CBS, The CW, Discovery Communications, FOX, NBC and Univision. The pilot is set to begin in May and run through July, but Nielsen is already announcing that the Digital Program Ratings will see a commercial launch. The pilot program is simply serving to “fine-tune” Nielsen’s methods before they hit primetime, or, later streamed on the internet time – whatever.

“The pilot for Nielsen Digital Program Ratings is a major milestone for the industry,” said Eric Solomon, SVP for Global Digital Audience Measurement at Nielsen. “As a companion product to Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings, Nielsen Digital Program Ratings will enable clients to better understand the online audience for their programming by harnessing the same methodology Nielsen already uses to measure the audience for related advertising.”

Nielsen says that they will start by measuring TV content viewed online, on computers. For instance, CBS will be able to see Nielsen’s numbers for how many streams their online content got on their official site.

Of course, Nielsen plans to expand the program to “additional content types and devices” in the future. So we’re talking streams from sites like Hulu or YouTube, made on and iPad or Xbox.

“The potential to measure video viewing of specific programs on linear TV as well as the Internet is significant,” said Alan Wurtzel, President of Research and Media Development, NBCUniversal. “It’s an important step toward reaching the ‘holy grail’ of true cross-platform measurement.”

It’s an interesting move from Nielsen, but the online viewership tracking won’t really come into its true form until Nielsen is measuring all types of content across all types of devices. Although Nielsen is just announcing this pilot program, it’s clear that full inclusion is what they envision.

In 1989, CERN and Tim Berners-Lee changed the world forever with the creation of the modern Internet. They changed the world again four years later when the net was freed from being owned by any one person or organization.

CERN announced that today is the 20th anniversary of the free and open Web. On April 30, 1993, CERN put the software behind the World Wide Web into the public domain. The Internet only grew as fast as it did thanks to the software behind it being made available to all.

“There is no sector of society that has not been transformed by the invention, in a physics laboratory, of the web”, says Rolf Heuer, CERN Director-General. “From research to business and education, the web has been reshaping the way we communicate, work, innovate and live. The web is a powerful example of the way that basic research benefits humankind.”

As part of the celebration, CERN has put the world’s very first publicly accessible Web site back online. It must have been mind blowing to see a computer fetch a wall of text from another computer hundreds, if not thousands, of miles away.

Like most other relics of the Internet’s past, the first Web site really helps to put things into perspective. It’s easy to take the Internet of today for granted, but this Web site should really hit home just how revolutionary this stuff was only 20 years ago.

Of course, the Internet is still just as revolutionary today as it was two decades ago. In fact, there’s an argument to be had that the Internet of today is doing far more good than any other invention in human history as its bringing millions of people from every walk of life together to exchange ideas while promoting empathy among the human race. No other tool in human history has ever had that kind of power. So maybe, just maybe, it’s something that’s worth protecting.

Spanish officials have arrested a Dutch citizen in northeast Spain for his involvement in what has been called the biggest cyberattack in Internet history. The suspect is said to have operated a hacking bunker in a van that was equipped with “various antennas to scan frequencies” that he used to evade authorities. The unnamed individual, who was only identified by his initials S.K., is accused of launching several large denial-of-service attacks on Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States, and also of attacking Spamhaus, a Swiss-British watchdog group that blocks spam advertisement for counterfeit Viagra and fake weight-loss pills from reaching Internet inboxes. The Associated Press reports that the 35-year-old male was arrested in the city of Granollers on Thursday by Spanish authorities acting on an arrest warrant issued by Dutch authorities. The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to the Netherlands where he will stand trial.

National telecoms like AT&T have said they are going to compete with Google Fiber, but there’s not been much proof of that so far. Instead, startups and small phone companies are leading the charge in bringing fiber Internet to more Americans.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Vermont Telephone Co, a local telecom that only recently upgraded its century old network, has recently installed fiber across its service area thanks to stimulus money it received as part of the FCC’s National Broadband Plan. The company plans to offer gigabit speeds for only $35 a month, half of what Google Fiber charges for it service.

Funny enough, the company has Google to thank for its new fiber Internet. Michel Guite, Vermont Telephone Co.’s CEO, said that he was denied federal stimulus money when he first applied. After the Google Fiber announcement, the government agreed to fund the upgrade.

Vermont Telephone Co. is not alone either in receiving funding either. The Wall Street Journal says that more than 700 rural telephone companies have upgraded their infrastructure to fiber to keep up with the big ISPs. What’s funny is that these rural telephone companies are now starting to offer better service at cheaper prices than the major players.

Putting the proliferation of gigabit Internet aside for a moment, it’s encouraging that more rural communities are getting access to faster and cheaper Internet. The large companies often ignore these smaller communities saying the cost of building out Internet to remote areas isn’t worth the investment. Of course, the FCC is trying to change that with its City Gigabit Challenge, and one lawmaker has even proposed legislation that would make broadband Internet much more affordable for the poor families that often populate rural areas.

Of course, Vermont Telephone Co. doesn’t know if it will be able to keep up the $35 price in the long run, but it’s an experiment. That’s exactly what we need though. Experiments can soon lead to national examples.

Imagine a world where the Nasdaq, the Nikkei and the FTSE all failed within the span of a week and you have an idea how crazy the world of virtual currency trading has become. Wired reports that a new study from computer scientists Tyler Moore of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University has found that 45% of Bitcoin exchanges end up shutting their virtual doors while leaving their users’ money in limbo. However, this doesn’t mean that the Bitcoin exchanges that have survived so far are safe havens, since the study also shows that they’re under constant assault from cybercriminals who are working around the clock to hack users’ transactions.

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Google’s ultra-high-speed Google Fiber Internet service won’t be accessible to the bulk of Americans for quite some time, but the revolutionary service’s impact is already being felt even by those who don’t subscribe to the service. As noted by MIT’s Technology Review blog, Akamai’s annual state of the Internet report was released recently and it does a great job of highlighting Google Fiber’s ripple effect.

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A study published this week by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future found that young adults don’t care as much about online privacy as older Internet users. Individuals between the ages of 18 and 34, known as Millennials, were found to be more willing to hand over their personal data or web behavior to online businesses. Although 70% of young adults agreed that companies should never be allowed to access their personal data, compared to 77% by those older than 35, Millennials were more willing to give up some privacy if they benefited from it, such as receiving coupons or other business deals.

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Last night in the TED office, we held a salon all about spring cleaning — for your life. Themed ”A Better You,” the event featured four speakers with ideas on how to make a better, happier, more productive self.

First to speak was The Power of Habit author Charles Duhigg, a reporter for The New York Times who won a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series The iEconomy. Duhigg began his talk describing a habit he just couldn’t kick: Every day at around 3 pm, he would leave his desk and go to the cafeteria for a chocolate chip cookie. As a result he gained 8 pounds, and his wife was starting to make pointed comments. As he looked more closely at this habit, he realized why it was so hard to break — because habits become part of tightly wound behavior loops. Habits are extremely powerful: Bad ones can be harmful, he said, while good ones can improve all aspects of your life. He capped his talk with an unexpected example — Starbucks, which endows its employees with good conflict resolution habits in order to provide the customer service they are known for.

Tech reporter Jill Duffy spoke next, giving nine useful tips on how to conquer email before it conquers you. Among them: Keep your unread emails to about a page, save canned responses or email templates so you don’t always end up typing the same thing, and don’t be afraid to delete emails — and let go of the obligations that they represent.

You see a banana for eating; Jay Silver sees a yellow edible space bar for his keyboard. Silver, an MIT Media Lab Maker, brought in a bag of tricks to demonstrate how to hack everyday objects. He connected his laptop to two slices of pizza to use as a clicker to advance his slides, and painted a streak of ketchup — then played it like a piano. See more uses from his invention kit, MaKey MaKey »

Finally, author Amy Webb closed the night with a lesson in love, explaining how she reverse engineered online dating sites to find her perfect mate. Webb, drew from her new book, Data: A Love Story, to explain what she did when she found herself frustrated with her online dating prospects. Since she’s a digital strategist, she naturally turned to data analysis. She devised a point system by which to rate all her prospects, only to realize that she had left out one important element from the equation: the competition. In this incredibly honest talk, she explained why she created 10 fake male accounts to scrape data about successful female candidates and how they presented information about themselves. (Note: optimistic language and photos with just enough skin.) Webb’s story has a happy ending. She is now married to Brian Woolf, who she met as a result of her data gathering. Sitting next to me in the audience, last night was the first time he heard her tell the story.

“A Better You” was part of TED@250, a new series of salons held at our New York headquarters at 250 Hudson Street. Since our main conferences are only twice a year, TED@250 is an opportunity for talks that rethink headlines and  respond to conversation happening in real time. It’s also a place for speakers with the kind of personal stories that simply work better on the small scale. Stay tuned. Some of these talks may be coming to TED.com.

Last week, a cry rang out from privacy advocates everywhere as the House overwhelmingly passed CISPA. Those same advocates soon gathered up their forces for a fight in the Senate, but it looks like the Senate got to killing CISPA before they could.

US News reports that the Senate has decided not to take up CISPA. In short, CISPA is dead. The bill that would have given companies full legal immunity when sharing your personal information with the government will have its remains scattered on the winds of history yet again.

It seems that CISPA’s death can be largely attributed to two factors. For one, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, came out against CISPA saying it lacked privacy protections. Rockefeller holds considerable sway in the Senate, and his committee would have had a lot of say over CISPA. Secondly, President Obama’s veto threat most likely played a major role in the Senate’s rejection of CISPA.

We can relax now that CISPA is dead, right? Unfortunately, the answer is a little unclear at this point. An unnamed representative on Rockefeller’s committee says that “issues and key provisions” of CISPA will be divvied up and made into separate bills. In other words, CISPA will be broken up into smaller, separate bills in the Senate. The problem with this approach is that some of the less vile, but still damaging, provisions of CISPA can make it through as they won’t be attached to the really bad stuff.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Senate will craft a handful of bills that narrowly target the areas not covered by President Obama’s cybersecurity executive order without sacrificing civil liberties. It would certainly be nice, but the Senate’s past attempts at writing cybersecurity legislation certainly don’t inspire confidence.

Either way, we won’t be seeing any cybersecurity legislation out of the Senate for a while. The unnamed representative says the Senate currently has its hands full with a number of other bills that take priority over cybersecurity, including the controversial Marketplace Fairness Act.

The Pirate Bay has been on the move quite a bit these past few months. The infamous Web site anticipated that its .se domain wasn’t going to last much longer and set out for free waters. It first moved to Spain and Norway, but soon found itself kicked out. It then moved to Greenland to much the same reception.

After being tossed out of every port it came across, TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay has finally found a home in Iceland. Its new .is domain reflects the move, and any attempt to visit old domains will redirect you to the new one.

So, why Iceland? It seems that the company that operates the .is domain – ISNIC – won’t take any action against The Pirate Bay, or at least not yet. The company told TorrentFreak that it’s not responsible for what Web sites do on its domain. The only possible way for The Pirate Bay to be booted from its new .is domain is if the Icelandic courts issued a court order.

For now, it looks like The Pirate Bay is safe in its new home. ISNIC has a good track record of hosting controversial sites without any issues. The country’s anti-piracy group will also probably stay away for a while as it’s still reeling from a piracy-related PR disaster from earlier this year.

Data caps for home broadband services have been one of the less popular innovations ISPs have rolled out over the past couple of years and now one activist group is demanding that the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission conduct a formal investigation into ISPs’ practice of capping how much data their customers can consume per month. The group, which is sponsored by Public Knowledge and includes representatives from the National Film Society and several online content creators, has launched a new website called “Don’t Cap That” that urges lawmakers to “insist that the next FCC Chair commit to making a detailed examination of data caps a priority during his or her tenure.” The group says that it opposes broadband data caps because they are “an easy way for existing pay television providers to make their online video competitors less attractive to viewers” and that it wants the next FCC chairman to “recognize the threat that data caps pose to the future growth of the internet, and to the growth of online video specifically.”

The Marketplace Fairness Act, a bill that would force online retailers to collect sales tax regardless of its physical location, has gained quite a bit of support in recent days. The Senate and White House are united in passing a bill that they claim will level the playing field between online businesses and retail stores. A new procedural vote from today cemented the Senate’s support for the bill.

The Hill reports that the Senate voted in favor of the Marketplace Fairness Act yet again in a procedural vote that saw 75 senators come out in favor of the legislation compared to the 22 opposed. It should be noted that today’s vote was only procedural and does not represent the final vote. Still, the vote represents the bill’s overwhelmingly popularity in the Senate.

Sen. Dick Durbin, one of the bill’s many sponsors, continued to preach the advantages of a national online sales tax bill:

“Internet retailers have an advantage over brick and mortar retailers. This has caused many stores on Main Streets to face competition that is unfair … so we’re trying to level the playing field.”

Despite the overwhelming support from many senators, lawmakers from states without a sales tax are voicing opposition to the bill. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire says that the bill will increase the tax burden on small businesses around the nation, regardless of the state’s sales tax laws. Shaheen’s opinion was echoed by many of the comments in yesterday’s article regarding the bill.

Despite the opposition, it seems likely that the Marketplace Fairness Act will get through the Senate before the end of the week. Then the bill will move on to the House of Representatives where it’s expected to meet much tougher opposition at the hands of a Republican majority that’s incredibly hostile to the idea of any new taxes.

Apple’s iTunes has long dominated the market for online music purchases and it seems that it holds a similar stranglehold on the market for online movie and TV show purchases as well. New data from the NPD Group shows that iTunes accounts for 65% of all online movie downloads and 67% of all online TV show downloads, putting it significantly ahead of both Amazon Instant Video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 8% of TV show downloads, and Xbox video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 14% of TV show downloads. NPD analyst Russ Crupnick says that iTunes has stayed on top of the online video market because “Apple has successfully leveraged its first-mover advantage and of iTunes, iOS and the popularity of iPhone and iPad” to secure an enduring market advantage.

Akamai published its quarterly State of the Internet report on Tuesday covering global Internet speeds and Internet security from the last quarter of 2012. South Korea remained the leader in terms of Internet speeds, averaging a connection of 14 Mbps, TechCrunch reported. Speeds have fallen in the Asian country, however, by 4.8% since the third quarter of 2012 and by a whopping 13% since 2011. The United States ranked eighth in the world with an average connection speed of 7.4 Mbps, an increase of 28% year-over-year and of 2.3% since the third quarter of 2012.

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Every quarter, Akamai releases a report called “The State of the Internet.” In the previous report, Akamai found that broadband speeds had fallen on a global level. Thankfully, the latest report indicates that speeds are rising yet again.

Akamai reports that average global connection speeds rose 5 percent to 2.9 Mbps in Q4 2012. That may not seem like much, but many countries in Africa and Southeast Asia are still seeing average speeds of 500-800 Kbps. Those countries are only seeing less than one percent increase in speeds each quarter, but recent initiatives may help bring them up to speed sooner rather than later.

On a country-by-country basis, South Korea is still king with an average speed of 14 Mbps. Japan is second with 10.8 Mbps and Hong Kong is in third with 10.8 Mbps. The United States was ranked in eighth place with an average speed of 7.4 Mbps.

Every country in the top 10, except for South Korea, saw average broadband speeds increase. Japan saw a year-over-year increase of 19 percent, Hong Kong saw a year-over-year increase of 5.4 percent, and the U.S. saw a year-over-year increase of 28 percent.

The top 10 positions are largely the same when it comes to countries with high broadband (speeds over 10Mbps) connections. South Korea is in first place with 49 percent of the country with high broadband internet followed by Japan and Hong Kong with 39 percent and 28 percent respectively. The United States is in eighth place again with only 19 percent of the country having high broadband.

When looking specifically at the United States, the Northeast largely remains the place to be if you want consistently high Internet speeds. Vermont takes the number one spot with average speeds of 10.8 Mbps followed by Delaware and the District of Columbia with 10.6 Mbps and 10.2 Mbps respectively.

It’s largely the same when looking at the states with the highest amount of the population with access to high broadband. In this case, New Hampshire comes in at the top spot with 34 percent of its residents having access to speeds higher than 10 Mbps followed by the District of Columbia and New Jersey with both at 33 percent.

As for Internet penetration, Akamai says that nearly 700 million unique IPv4 addresses connected to its platform in the last quarter. That’s a 4.2 percent jump from Q3 2012 and a 13 percent jump from Q4 2011. With a single IP address potentially representing numerous users, Akamai estimates that there are over one billion unique Web users on the Internet today.

It should be noted that not every Internet user connects to Akamai, but a great deal of them do. Akamai’s numbers are about the closest we’ll get to the actual number of people who are now connected to the Internet.

On a final note, Akamai says that global attack traffic (i.e. DDoS attacks) increased by 200 percent in 2012. Unsurprisingly, 41 percent of that attack traffic originated from China in Q4 with the United States coming in second with 10 percent of all attack traffic.

Despite the worrying increases in attack traffic over the last year, Akamai’s report is incredibly encouraging. We like to complain about our ISPs, and for good reason, but these reports always help to put things into perspective. Our Internet speeds are slowly rising, and they’re rising faster than in other parts of the world. With the spread of Google Fiber and Gigabit Squared, we might start to see the U.S. rise up the ranks in forthcoming quarterly reports.

You can get a copy of Akamai’s State of the Internet Report here. If you don’t want to read 45 pages of analysis and charts, you can read the two-page executive summary here.

The Internet isn’t the outlet of freedom and prosperity it used to be. The truth of the matter is that big name companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft control and censor what we see online. As noted by Tristan Louis at Forbes, an individual can’t reach a majority of Internet users without the approval of a large company. If Google or Apple deem an application isn’t suitable, they can keep it out of their mobile app stores — and the same can happen with a webpage if it’s unlisted on Google or even Bing.

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Netflix reported a blowout quarter on Monday as its subscribers in the United States surged to more than 29 million, thus giving it even more paid monthly subscribers than HBO. The stock jumped more than 25% on the news. But financials and subscriber numbers are only part of what makes Netflix such a success story: According to NPR, some analysts are now estimating that “Netflix alone takes up a third of U.S. bandwidth between 9:00 PM and midnight.” Given these sorts of enormous bandwidth requirements, it’s easy to see why Netflix keeps such close track of how fast ISPs’ connections deliver video streams to the home, since slower connections inhibit the company’s ability to grow its online business.

Remember how Time Warner Cable executives tried to claim that American consumers don’t actually want 1Gbps broadband connections? Well, InfoWorld’s Paul Venezia isn’t having any of it and says that ISPs who deny the challenge that Google Fiber represents are whistling past their own graveyards. In particular, Venezia says that he’s surprised that ISPs have kept insisting that “customers don’t want gigabit Internet,” which he likens to “a lead paint salesman pooh-poohing latex paint because ‘customers don’t want their health.’”

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