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Looking at data from the third quarter of 2009, content delivery network Akamai just announced that the average broadband speed in the U.S. declined by 2.4% in the third quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter in 2008.
In the U.S., Delaware currently leads with 7.2 Mbps, though it remains far behind South Korea, where the average speed is almost 15 Mpbs. Currently, the U.S. is in 18th place, far behind Japan, Hong Kong, Romania and Sweden. The average U.S. broadband speed is currently 3.9 Mbps.

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If you are looking for a fast Internet connection in the U.S., Sandy, UT and Iowa City currently offer the fastest connections. Delaware (7.2 Mbps), New Hampshire (5.9 Mbps) and Massachusetts (5.9 Mbps) are the top 3 states on Akamai’s list. The states with the fastest average broadband speeds can all be found on the East Coast.

It is interesting to speculate why average speed in the U.S. declined over the last year. Chances are that a lot of people downsized their connections during the economic downturn. If you have a theory, let us know in the comments.

IP Addresses: U.S. Leads but China is Catching Up

Akamai’s quarterly report also notes that the number of unique IP addresses increased by about 4.5% globally since the second quarter of 2009. The U.S. is still home to the largest number of unique IP addresses, but China is catching up quickly. In total, the U.S. was home to just over 119 million unique IP addresses in Q3 2009. With 49 million IP addresses, China is currently a distant second, but the number of Chinese IP addresses increased by 30% compared to Q2 2009, while U.S. addresses on increased by 9%.

Attack Traffic

Akamai also looked at where most of the traffic from botnets and other attack traffic originated from. Russia (13%) is currently the source of most of this traffic, followed by Brazil (8.6%) and the U.S. (6.9%). On a positive note, it’s important to note that attack traffic from the U.S. declined from 15% compared to Q2 2009. Attack traffic from China declined even more. In Q2 2009, 31% of all of this traffic originated in China. Now, China is only responsible for about 6.5% of all attack traffic.

Most of these attacks (78%) target port 445. On Windows systems, port 445 handles local printer and file sharing traffic.

Discuss

I am always looking for something for my kids to do for Valentines Day. Maybe it is because we homeschool and the kids don’t get the benefit of school parties and such, I’m not sure. Anyway, I try to do a party with the kids and grandkids every year with special Valentine’s Day food and decor and a craft or two. It is always a lot of fun for everyone and a great way to make memories.

Here are a few of my favorites from around the Internet.

• Remember the lacing cards? They are great for fine motor skills and they are just fun. You can make hearts, laminate them and allow small children to lace red, pink, or white ribbon or yarn through them. This is great for a Sunday school class or preschool activity. Kids as young as two can do this easily.  Heart Lacing Activity Pattern
• Most kids will be able to make these cute Valentines Day Hats with a little adult supervision.
• Homemade Valentine’s Cards are always fun. This one has pin pricks in it to let the light through.
• Valentine’s Day Mice from chocolate kisses are not only fun…they are chocolate. Enough said.
• Lollipop Valentines are fun to make for friends. They are a nice option to the boxed Valentine’s Day cards

Even just making cards from construction paper, some lace scraps and some glitter is a great way to spend a winter afternoon. Gather some glue and other materials and give your child free creative rein!

image: SXC

Post from: Blisstree

Best Valentine’s Day Crafts for Kids

In today’s Remainders: AT&T users log in to Facebook only to find unfamiliar faces; iPhone 4G rumors abound while AMOLED Apple Tablet rumors get shot down; and Northwestern’s StatsMonkey robot takes hard stats and churns out baseball narratives.

Unfamiliar Faces
Over the weekend, some AT&T customers logged into Facebook only to find that they faces they were looking at were not their own. A network hiccup redirected some of the carrier’s customers to other people’s pages upon logging in on mobile phones. AT&T has acknowledged the issue but maintained that it only affected a “limited number” of users. Still, you’d think they wouldn’t just brush this off. As more and more people are putting more and more of their lives on Facebook, shouldn’t the security of these accounts be paramount? With all of the bad publicity in recent months—starting with the privacy settings fiasco and continuing through the revelation of a Facebook master password—this latest snafu doesn’t do anything to restoring our confidence in the social network. [Geek.com]

4G Orgy Writhes On
Apple Tablet rumor-mongering must be getting boring, because these last few weeks have seen a conspicuous uptick in speculation on the next generation of Apple’s smartphone. With the January 27 event just made official, a Tablet reveal is almost a certainty. But could we be getting some news on the new iPhone as well? Nowhereelese.fr put together this handy visual guide to all the rumors swirling around the iPhone 4G, but we’re not sure how much stock we put in them: the render they’re using is one we’ve all seen before, and some of their probabilities are downright batty. [Nowhereelse.fr]

AMOLED, Am I Right?
No, you’re not. Today, Ars Technica argued the case against the 10″ AMOLED Apple Tablet. This quote from Barry Young, Managing Director of the OLED Association, gets to the heart of the matter: “there’s no real production of 10.1-inch panels.” Right. Thing is, we already knew that. It’s good to hear more official confirmation, though, and now we’re thoroughly convinced that Apple isn’t going AMOLED on January 27th. [Ars Technica]

Robowriting
StatsMonkey, a creation of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Laboratory, is a robot that takes raw statistics of baseball games and fleshes them out into full narratives of the contest. It does so pretty well. Here’s an example of a StatsMonkey screed:

UNIVERSITY PARK – An outstanding effort by Willie Argo carried the Illini to an 11-5 victory over the Nittany Lions on Saturday at Medlar Field.

Argo blasted two home runs for Illinois. He went 3-4 in the game with five RBIs and two runs scored.

Illini starter Will Strack struggled, allowing five runs in six innings, but the bullpen allowed only no runs and the offense banged out 17 hits to pick up the slack and secure the victory for the Illini.

Not bad, eh? Robowriting isn’t necessarily a new idea, but this is the first time that I’ve seen an example that made me actually get a little nervous. At least there’s no gadget-blogging robots. Yet. [NPR]

Filed under: CES, Technology

Continue reading Visteon shows us its next-gen tech, a dash that can tell if you’re sleeping, and an in-car Tegra 2 [w/video]

Visteon shows us its next-gen tech, a dash that can tell if you’re sleeping, and an in-car Tegra 2 [w/video] originally appeared on Autoblog on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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»  Forget 2011. Now you can expect Windows Mobile 7 at the end of this year, and a preview of it at next month’s MWC. [Gizmodo.]

»   Steve Wozniak clarifies his opinion about the Nexus One – it’s not his favorite, but a new gadget he considers to be “good.” [Geek.com]

»  Weird AT&T (NYSE: T) glitch gave m.facebook.com users access to other users’ accounts. [AP]

»   Motorola (NYSE: MOT) has several likely Android-based phones coming out this year. [Engadget]

»   Verizon rolls out FiOS bundles with connections of 35Mbsp. [Release]

Cramer’s prediction about a huge stock market rally if Scott Brown wins got us thinking: what do we predict will actually happen to healthcare stocks if the insurgent GOP candidate wins and torpedoes healthcare reform.

Casual observers would guess that healthcare stocks will rally, but that ignores the fact that healthcare stocks rallied even as it looked like reform was a sure thing.

One reason for this — and it’s the same reason that many industry lobbyists went to bat for Coakley — is that reform would likely be good for the industry (more people on insurance, more people buying drugs, no government competition.

Of course, the fact that healthcare stocks rallied at the end of last year doesn’t mean much, since the whole market drifted upward, so who knows what was due to reform and what wasn’t.

Anyway, here’s what will happen if Brown wins: Healthcare stocks will initially rally in the first half of Wednesday, before settling down, if not ending in the red outright, as the smart money dumps their shares.

If Coakley wins, we’ll get the opposite.

Anyone disagree?

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Scott Brown Peaked Two Days Too Early
• Martha Coakley Falls To 40% On InTrade
• Healthcare Stocks EXPLODE Higher After Big Vote On Reform

ReCellular, the world’s leading recycler of cellphones, has launched Phones For Haiti—a relief effort that donates 100% of the value of your recycled phone to quake victims via the American Red Cross. [Phones for Haiti via Inhabitat]

International law firm Vinson & Elkins sees untapped billable hours in renewable energy and is therefore opening a new office in Palo Alto, Calif., to capture  a slice of this growing market.

The office is opening with three partners and will be managed by Boyd Carano who has moved to Northern California from the firm’s Houston office. Kyle Fox and Margaret Sampson of Austin have also joined Carano in Palo Alto. Fox has extensive experience advising early-stage companies and Sampson is a partner with Vinson & Elkins’s intellectual property practice.

Carano tells us that the firm could add a partner and three or four associates by the end  of the year.

Law firms have been staffing up with environmental/greentech lawyers, (see here and here), although a lot of the hiring has been in Washington, which these days is the epicenter of cleantech funding, with the Department of Energy overseeing nearly $40 billion in dedicated funds.

click on the image for a larger version

The most recent satellite reported to be joining China’s constellation of Beidou navigation satellites is shown in yellow. An example of a geostationary Beidou satellite is shown in white and China’s one and only navigation satellite in a medium Earth orbit (MEO) is shown in green.

The launch of what is reported to be a seventh Chinese navigation satellite (on 16 January 2010) provides an opportunity to review what we know about this system of satellites. First, it is clear that the satellite, which has yet not been officially designated a Beidou satellite on the NASA space-track website (at least as of 12 noon, 18 January 2010), is intended to be a geostationary satellite. It, and the third stage of the CZ-3 launch vehicle, are in a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), as the image above shows. Within a few days of launch, the satellite’s apogee motor will fire, positioning the satellite in to its final orbital.

If the case of Beidou 1D is any indication, we will not know which satellite it is replacing until China moves it into position. China, as a responsible spacefaring nation, moved Beidou 1D into a supersync orbit just days after the launch of its replacement satellite, Beidou G-2. Beidou 1D as only about two years old when China replaced it with what is reported to be a second generation Beidou satellite. That is somewhat surprising since Beidou 1 was over six years old at the time and one might have expected it to be replaced before the much younger 1D. If China decided to replace 1D because it was failing, they must have had plenty of warning since they were still in control of that satellite.

click on the image for a larger version

Current Beidou Constellation is shown (at the top) with the ground tracks for three orbits for each satellite projected onto the Earth’s surface; (lower left) an equatorial view of the satellites; (lower right) a polar view of the constellation. Note the Beidou 1D’s ground track shows both a large longitudinal displacement over three days and a large inclination—the up and down motion of the ground track. Dates indicated are the launch date of each satellite.

China’s first generation of navigational satellites did not have an onboard atomic clock. That, of course, complicated their operation and limited the number of users. Instead of broadcasting their own timing, as GPS satellites do, the satellite operated as a “bend in a pipe” with the time standard generated on Earth and, in fact, the “user” position determined by a central location after a round trip of radio signals from the center to the satellite to the user and back. It would be very interesting to know if the second generation satellites had their own space qualified atomic clocks.

With this latest satellite, we are also starting to see a pattern in Beidou launches. About every three years (2000, 2003, 2007, 2009*, 2010) a new wave of satellites is plugged into the constellation. (The asterisk for 2009 indicates that this launch might well have been accelerated to replace a dying satellite.) That might indicate the length of time it takes to design and/or build a new satellite. If it includes design time, I would expect evolutionary changes; something we might expect from China in any case given their known history of systematic development.

The holidays and possibly some intense weight work may have Quinton Jackson, Georges St. Pierre and Diego Sanchez considering a jump to a new weight class. Jackson was seen last night in Las Vegas at the Hard Rock’s new club Vanity. St. Pierre is pictured with heavyweight Brendan Schaub and middleweight Nate Marquardt. GSP looks like the thickest guy of the bunch.

GSP and Sanchez (not pictured) have actually given hints about a move up. St. Pierre told the media throng before UFC 108 that he was considering the jump to 185 pounds. Sanchez posted on his Facebook page that he may go back to welterweight where he was 8-2 in the UFC. Sanchez has little shot at the title at 170, he’s simply too small to compete with guy’s who walk around between 185-195 pounds. But he can get back in the mix at 155 with possible fights against Gray Maynard, Tyson Griffin, Takanori Gomi and Kenny Florian. MMA for Real says Sanchez is in no man’s land. We say he’s fine at lightweight, B.J. Penn won’t be around forever.

UPDATE – Sanchez confirms move via Twitter:

Meanwhile, Rampage to heavyweight is purely speculation. But by the looks of his new Mr. T persona, there won’t be a "jump" necessary. What is that 230 pounds? The Hard Rock did confirm that the photo is indeed Jackson not Brett Rogers. 

Jackson photo by Cody Boor/Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Rogers line via Twitter @EAJames. 

In this Google-sponsored video by Patrick Boivin, stop-motion ninjas show us only the second unboxing that I can describe as “action-packed.” They easily defeated the Nexus One packaging, but their arch-rival Blister Pack won’t go down so easy. [Engadget]

As Mobile World Congress—and presumably Window Mobile 7—careens closer and closer, we’re going to hear a lot more of this. Today’s batch? Business and consumer versions of the OS, a sexxxy new name, and possible first hardware.

WMExperts’ post is essentially a digest of everything they think they know from a variety of sources, including this very site. Even as a summary, though, it’s pretty huge, and the rumors sprawl from totally ridiculous to fairly credible, so here are the meaty bits:

&bull Windows Mobile 7 won’t be marketed as Windows Mobile 7. We sort of knew this already, since Microsoft has been marketing Windows Mobile and “Windows Phone” since the announcement of 6.5. But it’s not even going to be that, apparently. The new name? “Seven.”

&bull There will be two versions of the OS: one for OEMs and businesses, a stripped-down that’s being referred to in development as Business Edition; and one media-oriented version for consumers, tentatiely called Media Edition. Business edition will be focused on enterprise tools, like collaborative document editing, while the media edition will be focused on, well, media.

&bull If we see Seven at MWC, it won’t be a full product—we’ll see HD video playback, a Zune-like media interface, and some of the rest of the UI, but not all of it. This sounds odd! But the rumor consensus is that the OS won’t hit phones until late 2010, so it’s plausible that they’re just not done yet,

There’s nothing earth-shattering here, and most of these rumors just prompt more questions. Perhaps the juiciest part of this whole mess, though, is the rumored hardware from LG and HTC. What’s so great about the LG Apollo and HTC Obsession, assuming they actually exist? Well, seeing as they’re supposed to be Seven launch devices, they represent the new baseline for Windows Mobile phones. And this baseline is high: WMExperts reports both have 1GHz+ Snapdragon processors, 3.7-inch AMOLED screens, and 512MB to 1GB of RAM. In other words, Windows Mobile 7’s dumpiest handsets will be gutsier than anything you can buy today—something that will get less and less impressive the longer Microsoft waits to release this thing.

Anyway, if you’re still feeling a little lost as to what on earth WinMo 7 may or may not be, WMExperts’ breakdown is worth a read. [WMExperts]