internet

Internet Trends 2019 (Bond Report)

Internet Trends 2019 report is the most comprehensive, detailed, and research document that I have ever seen on what’s going on with the Internet, web, mobile, social media, marketing, and security.

This year’s report spans 333 pages and is full charts, graphs, statistics, insights, and references. And if you are feeling nostalgic, there is an archive of the annual reports going all the way back to 1995.

It’s difficult to pick a single fact from such a huge document, but if I had to, I’d go with this:

51% of the global population, or 3.8 billion people, were Internet users last year.

Wow. That’s quite a crowd.

Via Slashdot.

Things that shouldn’t be online

Slashdot is running a story about a researcher who scanned all Australian IP addresses and found a whole bunch of things that shouldn’t be online.

As interesting as it is, this comment to the thread offers a lot more:

Pffft Only one country?
At a defcon talk in 2014 (talk [youtube.com] slides [defcon.org]) they scanned the whole IPv4 space live, looking for VNC instances. At least, anything that responded to a SYN packet.
Then they took a couple months to connect to each VNC instance, if no password was required, grab a screen shot.
Leading to a series of talks of things that shouldn’t be on the internet [youtube.com].

I am still watching the video, but even in the first few minutes, you’ll see some crazy stuff. And let me get you started with a quick quiz question: if you had 7 servers, each connected to the Internet via a 1 Gb/s link, how long would it take you to scan the whole of Internet (all IP addresses), assuming 10 ports per IP?

Well, five years it took 12 minutes only, and it was done on stage at the conference! To me, this is somewhat mind-blowing. We keep hearing how huge and enormous the Internet is. So the idea of being able to scan all of it in just a few minutes sounds insane. Today, you’ll probably need even less time, with more better broadband and hardware.

And if you are curious about the tool that the guys used, it was massscan. It’s a lot faster than nmap for this kind of jobs, even though they are somewhat compatible.

W3C Standartizes DRM, EFF Resigns

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has recently voted in favor the DRM standard. Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has been fighting against it, now lost, and resigned from the W3C. Read more:

It is a tragedy that we will be doing that without our friends at the W3C, and with the world believing that the pioneers and creators of the web no longer care about these matters.

Effective today, EFF is resigning from the W3C.

Thank you,

Cory Doctorow
Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C for the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Wow! This is big. And bad. Like breaking bad.

DRM will die one day. But it looks like it will take a few more years, court cases, and such to help it go into the ground. We could haven spent all this effort on something much more useful and productive.

Internet Protocol version 10 (IPv10)

Heard enough about IPv4 and IPv6 yet? Good. Here’s something new for you – IPv10.

IP version 10 (IPv10) is a new version of the Internet Protocol,
designed to allow IP version 6 [RFC-2460] to communicate to
IP version 4 (IPv4) [RFC-791] and vice versa.

The Internet in real time

The Internet in real time provides a visual insight into how much activity is happening on the web every second. Counts for things like Facebook likes, tweets, and YouTube video views are updated every second, all on one page.

It fascinates me every time to see stuff like this, because, apart from the human activity in itself, I have a glimpse of an understanding of how much technology work is happening behind the scenes.