The History of the Internet in a Nutshell [more inside]
posted by Miko on Nov 16, 2009 - 59 comments

"the scale-free network modeing paradigm is largely inconsistent with the engineered nature of the Internet..." For a decade it's been conventional wisdom that the Internet has a scale-free topology, in which the number of links emanating from a site obeys a power law. In other words, the Internet has a long tail; compared with a completely random network, its structure is dominated by a few very highly connected nodes, while the rest of the web consists of a gigantic list of sites attached to hardly anything. Among its other effects, this makes the web highly vulnerable to epidemics. The power law on the internet has inspired a vast array of research by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers. According to an article in this month's Notices of the American Math Society, it's all wrong. How could so many scientists make this kind of mistake? Statistician Cosma Shalizi explains how people see power laws when they aren't there: "Abusing linear regression makes the baby Gauss cry."
posted by escabeche on Apr 23, 2009 - 30 comments

You may have seen this excellent map of the internet from xkcd. Still lost? You are here.
posted by loquacious on Dec 16, 2006 - 26 comments

The Croquet Project is a staggeringly ambitious attempt to create 'an operating system for the post-browser Internet' - a multi-platform, open-source, extensible, decentralised, peer-to-peer, 3D virtual reality metaverse [2,3], designed for 'highly scalable deep collaboration', led by Alan Kay.
posted by MetaMonkey on Oct 1, 2006 - 37 comments

Robot planes may make phone towers obsolete "...it's a "Stratellite", and its makers believe it will revolutionise the broadband and wireless industry; if it ever gets off the ground.

Wisconsin communications company Sanswire on Tuesday unveiled its almost-finished prototype of a hard-framed, unmanned airship designed to fly in the stratosphere 21km above the earth and send broadband and cellphone signals to an area the size of Texas."

This in my opinion is an example of truly innovative technology.
posted by jaydedx on Apr 13, 2005 - 25 comments

A nice article on some of the engineering and economics aspects of WiFi, and the history of frequency regulation in the USA.
posted by freebird on Aug 16, 2004 - 9 comments

Akamai is having some issues. It turns out a lot of really large companies use Akamai as their DNS host and apparently most of their DNS servers are no longer responding. And it's not like this is the first time. Geeks are in a tizzy. Whither the decentralized network?
posted by bshort on Jun 15, 2004 - 19 comments

Employing a rather breath-taking counter, Netsizer claims to track the growth of the internet (users and hosts) in real time based on a methodology briefly and unsatisfyingly explained here. According to Netsizer the number of internet users already tops 800 million, but the Cyber Atlas is projecting 700-950 million users in 2004. Does anybody really know what's going on?
posted by taz on Sep 1, 2002 - 7 comments

Been to a USGS site today? What about your favorite national park site? Probably not, since all are part of the U.S. Department of the Interior, whose external network connections have been severed due to electronic security concerns raised by the court in the case Cobell v. Norton (formerly Cobell v. Babbitt).

With no external email or access to the Internet could you do your job? How dependent is your workplace on electronic information access? (Since all their websites are down, I have no direct link to post. A copy of the memo was sent to the members by the admin of a USGS email distribution list.)
posted by carobe on Dec 7, 2001 - 16 comments

The Martian Internet
This is a cover-eyes-and-post post: NASA has made it a goal to improve telecommunications in deep space. This is good since I would hate to get up to my lunar base, and not be able to check e-mail. For a while, it will probably be Arpanet-level bandwidth. Just when we master this whole optical fatpipe stuff, they redraw the amount of territory an ideal network should cover.
posted by rschram on Apr 17, 2001 - 1 comment

This article at zdnet is all about how wireless web devices aren't that handy, and how our lives would suck if wireless web access was everywhere. I heartily disagree. I have a wireless 2Mb LAN connection at work and it's liberating (it's possible to code, listen to shoutcast mp3 streams, and check email outside or down at the coffee house next door). My PCS phone is useful too, I can surf a few important websites when I don't have a laptop around, getting news, weather, and email. Wireless access is certainly a Good Thing, and should make our lives easier, but the article's author is blaming the possible deluge of information on wireless, instead of the user. How would a wireless broadband connection make your life better or worse?
posted by mathowie on Feb 1, 2000 - 8 comments