SpeedPlexer Blog

The morning of the 14th, for about an hour or two, Google went down. Or in some cases, just moved excruciatingly slowly—but that was for only about 14% of its users. Reports in online news outlets and on Twitter spread the word that people could not get to Google News, Gmail, Google Apps and even Google.com. Apparently the problem occurred after an error routed much of Google’s traffic through Asia, where the servers couldn’t handle the load.

The official Google blog puts it this way in it’s post entitled “This is your pilot speaking. Now, about that holding pattern…”

“Imagine if you were trying to fly from New York to San Francisco, but your plane was routed through an airport in Asia. And a bunch of other planes were sent that way too, so your flight was backed up and your journey took much longer than expected. That’s basically what happened to some of our users today for about an hour, starting at 7:48 am Pacific time.”

The post was written by Urs Hoelzle, SVP of Operations, who went on to apologize, saying “We’ve been working hard to make our services ultrafast and ‘always on,’ so it’s especially embarrassing when a glitch like this one happens.” He ended by assuring users that all planes were now back on schedule.

Wired.com points out “Actually, the fact that Google’s slip-up causes such a stir in the media, on mailing lists and on Twitter, says much more about Google’s centrality to the internet.”

On Twitter, the term “#googlefail” was the top “trending topic,” indicating that many users were posting about Google’s troubles. Meanwhile, CNet reported that the problems appeared to affect users worldwide.

A new study entitled ‘The Carbon Footprint of Spam’  published by ICF International and commissioned by the computer security company McAfee, claims that spam uses around 33 billion kilowatt hours of energy annually, which is approximately enough to power 2.4 million US homes for an entire year.

They calculated that the average CO2 emission for a spam email is around 0.3 grams. “That’s like driving three feet (one meter) in equivalent emissions, but when multiplied by the annual volume of spam, it’s like driving around the Earth 1.6 million times,” the report states. 

Interestingly, the majority of energy usage–around 80%–comes from users viewing and deleting spam, and searching for legitimate emails within spam filters (also known as false positives).

Spam creates the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion gallons of gasoline each year.

The good news is that McAfee notes that current levels of spam filtering save 135 billion killowatt-hours of electricity that would otherwise be wasted. “That’s like taking 13 million cars off the road,” the report says.  But, we could remove the equivalent of another 2.3 million cars if every inbox were protected by a state-of-the-art spam filter.

 “Filtering spam is beneficial, but fighting spam at the source is even better. When McColo, a major source of online spam, was taken offline in late 2008, the energy saved in the ensuing lull — before spammers rebuilt their sending capacity — equated to taking 2.2 million cars off the road,”  the report tells us.  But another way to fight the energy-sucking power of spam is not to pass it on. Be mindful of slowing down the traffic on the information superhighway, and you’ll be helping keep up the internet speed!.

In an attempt to give the info-seeking public more information with internet speed, Google has come up with some new enhancements to its Web search engine. The New York Times tech blog explains that one an experimental feature called Google Squared extracts information from the Web and displays it in a table, so that each column offers a different way of interpreting your request. For example, if you type “science fiction television shows,” it may return a table with their release dates, lead actors, directors and the networks that broadcast them. And it can be saved and shared as a spreadsheet!

Google Squared will be released in the next month in the “Labs” area of the Google site, which is reserved for experimental products. As an experimental product, Google Squared is not likely to be used by many people, at least initially, but you can be among the few and the proud who decide if it’s useful or not.

On Tuesday, Google also unveiled features that are less experimental and more mainstream, including one called Search Options that allows users to repeatedly refine search results, by clicking a new “show options” link, then sorting the search results by category of content (videos, discussion forums, reviews), by time (recent results, past 24 hours, past week, past year) or a combination of these and other characteristics. As the user clicks on each refinement, the search results update automatically.

Also on Tuesday, Google began showing enhanced versions of snippets — the short segments of text that appear just below search links to include more details. Yahoo already offers a similar feature. In a world that seeks more info at faster speeds all the time, Google aims to stay ahead of the rest.

The internet encompasses business, academics, and leisure, and technology is the driving force behind it. Besides fuelling e-commerce and e-services, the internet harbors a plethora of new models of communication, such as RSS, VOIP, video, multimedia, webcasts, and podcasts.

Internet service providers and application service providers have continuously upgraded their products and services to accommodate constantly changing web technologies. In the quest to provide faster internet speed, the hardware is becoming more powerful, but from the perspective of physical dimensions and costs, it is getting smaller. For instance, if you want to have your own server for a simple website that you have designed, you can set up the server at a very low cost. All you need is a normal PC with an Intel Celeron Processor, a Linux, or Windows NT operating system with Apache Web Server loaded on it. You will also have to connect your machine to the net through a T3 line. That’s all.

For larger websites, however, the technological infrastructure that is needed to provide consistently fast bandwidth speed is much larger. To handle millions of visitors each day, the websites either require a massive machine with very powerful processors and a large amount of RAM, redundancy, and disk space, or they may distribute the load to several machines that are extremely powerful. The Domain Name Server (DNS) and the load balancing switches are used predominantly for this purpose.

The demand for faster internet speed is always on the increase; so is the size of web pages. Many of the web pages today are dynamic too, making it imperative for ISPs and web hosting services to incorporate the latest internet technologies to deliver a fast bandwidth speed.

Stolen laptops can be a security nightmare for any one person, but when a laptop with corporate information is stolen, it can affect many people and be much more costly. But now Fujitsu and wireless provider Willcom have created a “kill switch” that can be activated by remote and will instantly make sure your data is unreadable and unrecoverable—even if the laptop has been turned off or the battery has been depleted.

The kill switch offers protection of your data in two ways. First, although the data itself will not be deleted, Fujitsu plans to allow remote deletion of the encryption key that allows access to the hard drive; rendering the data unreadable and recoverable. (I’m guessing this may be useful if you get your laptop back.) The second line of protection is a function that prevents them from being booted up. They won’t even be able to use the Speedplexer you downloaded to your desktop to check the internet speed. Fujitsu plans to begin offering this technology in Japan first, beginning in the third quarter of 2009.

Read Write Web explains that lost and stolen machines are one of the most common ways that corporate data is compromised. They cite a recent report by the Ponemon Institute that claims it costs companies an average of $49,246 when a laptop is lost or stolen. If the discovery is made on the same day, the average cost is $8,950; if it takes more than a week to discover the loss, the average cost rises to approximately $115,849.

Hopefully, this will make thieves decide it isn’t worth their time to bother stealing laptops!

Modernity and antiquity are coming together on eBay…or are they?  Whereas archeologists assumed that eBay would make the illicit trade of antiquities that much easier to perpetrate, it turns out that it has had quite a different affect—and the objects are not really all that antiquated.

In an article from the journal of the Archaeological Institute of America , a professor of anthropology at UCLA, Charles Stanish, writes, “How is it possible? The short answer is that many of the primary ‘producers’ of the objects have shifted from looting sites to faking antiquities.”

It’s all based on economics, you see.  Before the internet, the people who actually dug up the finds made very little money. It was the people who restored them, found the buyers, forged the papers and got the items past customs officials who made the big bucks.  But now the people who might have done the digging in the past can much more easily turn a profit by returning to the crafts of their ancestors and just creating reproductions. “Using local materials and drawing on their cultural knowledge, small manufacturers can produce pieces that are, in some cases, remarkably accurate reproductions of actual artifacts,” Stanish explains. “The really smart ones create an ever-so-slightly modified version that have the look and feel of an authentic ancient object.”

Transportation is also much easier now, since fake artifacts aren’t breaking any laws they can use mainstream shipping channels. “One vendor on eBay advertises a Greek marble head dated to around 300 B.C. For this ‘rare artifact,’ the shipping costs from Cyprus are a whopping $35 to anywhere in the United States.”

Though you may or may not be getting ancient artifacts with modern internet speed, Stanish says, “the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way.”

Is your laptop giving you a slower cable internet speed lately? There are probably some nagging issues that cause your laptop to be sluggish. You can use some of the steps mentioned below to get back the internet speed that you used to have.

The first thing you should do is flush out the temporary internet files and the cookies. These things use up a lot of hard drive space, and they can cause the laptop to slow down. The next thing to do is disable some of the start-up programs that you do not need. To check your start-up programs, click ‘Start’, and then click ‘Run’. Type in ‘msconfig’ and hit ‘Enter’. Then, you need to deselect the unnecessary start-up programs from the list. The third step is to defragment your hard drive, and the final step requires you to use a registry cleaner to clean up your registry. A few other possible reasons are insufficient memory, slow processor speed, and a virus. If it is a virus or spyware, the only way to remove it is to use a virus scanner.

Also, the problem for a slow laptop cable internet speed may be the internet connection itself. A sure-shot way to find out if that is the case is to take an online bandwidth test. A bandwidth test will not only help you determine your current internet speed; it will also help you to enumerate whether your ISP is truly giving you the kind of internet speed that they promised.
�
There are quite a few reliable internet speed test sites. Furthermore, some of them run as a desktop application, making the online bandwidth test more hassle-free and accurate.

Strange, but true—it seems the birth of the now ubiquitous “@” symbol was 473 years ago—May 4, 1536.  We know it as the “at” symbol, used to locate people to send them messages with internet speed across cyberspace.  But according the The New York Times tech blog, Italians call a “snail,” and south Slavs know it as a “monkey”.

The symbol appeared in a letter written 473 years ago by a Florentine merchant named Francesco Lapi, which was rediscovered in 2000 by Giorgio Stabile, who was then a professor of the history of science at La Sapienza University in Rome.

Francesco Lapi’s letter was sent from Spain to Italy and described the cargo on three ships that had just returned from Latin America. Although Lapi used it to mean “amphora,” an ancient measure of weight or volume, the Spanish word for amphora was “arroba,” (thankfully still using the letter “a”).  In modern Spanish, the @ symbol on keyboards is still called an arroba.

The symbol ended up on typewriter keyboards after it evolved over the centuries into English commercial accounting shorthand for the phrase “at the price of”, and was transferred over to computer keyboards, so that it was ready in 1971 when an engineer named Ray Tomlinson decided to use it in the first e-mail address to send the first e-mail. As Mr. Tomlinson himself has explained in a description of that first e-mail:

“I am frequently asked why I chose the at sign, but the at sign just makes sense. I used the at sign to indicate that the user was “at” some other host rather than being local.”

Whatever you call it, @ gets your message to you with internet speed!

The issue of internet speed is on everyone’s mind these days. It is quite natural, because the amount of multimedia and graphics that is contained in each webpage makes it necessary for internet users to speed up their internet connection speed.

Internet speed accelerators are one of the most convenient ways to crank up your internet connection speed. Generally, internet speed accelerators use a number of services and tools that utilize certain technologies, and they will eventually bring about a boost in your internet connection speed.

Several of the internet speed accelerators use online tools like speedy VPN proxies. VPN proxies are usually connected to high-speed devices such as T1. Some of the accelerators combine VPN proxies with certain hardware setting tweaks, such as boosting the memory of your computer or modifying your desktop settings. However, the most effective tweak that internet accelerators render has something to do with the TCP/IP settings and technology. Since TCP/IP plays a vital role in the transmission of data over the internet, an optimization of that setting will ensure a faster bandwidth speed.

Although there are some free internet speed accelerators available, the ones that have a host of useful features usually come with a price tag. While some of them require a one-time payment, others will incur a monthly fee. Another great aspect of internet speed accelerators is that they are reasonably priced.

It is not feasible for everybody to have a T1 or satellite internet connection. However, with internet speed accelerators around, it is still possible to surf the World Wide Web with fast bandwidth speed.

With fiber optic networks now bringing us internet connections and TV at top internet speeds, it wasn’t going to be long until the borders became blurred and they all became one big real-time communication tool.

“During the presidential elections, major disasters, sporting events and every episode of ‘Heroes,’ Twitter users went crazy Tweeting about their own experience. TV and social networking can no longer be separated.” That’s a quote from Tech Blogger the Gadgetress, writing about the Verizon FiOS platform that integrates TV, Tweets and Facebooking into one.

At present, Verizon has widgets for weather, traffic, headlines, horoscopes, and community information. There’s also an ESPN Fantasy Football widget which provides stats on your players and scores. Then earlier this week, Verizon FiOS offered details about the integration of Twitter and Facebook widgets for its TV viewers. A beta test with “several hundred” users began last week and is expected to last 120 days.

The new FiOS integration will allow you to quickly tell everyone what TV show you’re watching—and with no typing necessary! (FiOS doesn’t provide a keyboard anyway.) It’ll be something like, “Joe is watching Prison Break on FiOS TV.”

Read Write Web tells us that “DVRs will soon be able to access internet content from YouTube and several other video-sharing portals. And all of this web content is seamlessly woven within Verizon’s on-screen guide alongside traditional programming information.”

But when the widget platform goes live, the potential for an entire ecosystem of widgets are sure to explode and proliferate, with internet speed.