May 3rd, 2008 DJB
The broadband crunch
An ‘exabyte’ is a lot of data. It is 1.074 billion gigabytes of data, to be exact. It would take 14 million laptops like mine to store an exabyte. Two exabytes equals the total volume of information generated back in 1999. Today, the internet is handling one exabyte of data every single hour.
The sheer size of the internet, not to mention seemingly universal access to it, makes it easy to forget how young the net really is.
Many of us are now so familiar with – and reliant on – this technology that it’s hard to believe it is such a recent development, but it has been with us for a mere blink of an eye in historical terms: speedy commercial access to the world wide web barely made it to us by the end of the 20th century.
Something like YouTube would have seemed like a crazy dream just 10 years ago. Six million videos on a single website, each available to watch in an instant? Impossible.
Bandwidth-hungry online video
But now online video streaming is a reality - and enormously popular. However, downloading a 30 minute television programme consumes more bandwidth than receiving 200 e-mails every day for a year. Small wonder then that the internet is already working hard to keep up with our demands.
This growing demand for online video and streaming television (like the BBC’s iPlayer and Channel 4’s 4oD) is draining the internet’s capacity to deliver data. “Changes in internet usage have quickly turned the internet into an entertainment medium,” says Asam Ahmad of broadband provider Virgin Media. “And there does need to be an open discussion about how bandwidth is managed.”
Broadband providers
ISPs currently use moderate measures to ensure the most extreme bandwidth hogs do not ruin it for the rest of us. Virgin Media, for instance, uses a ‘non-discriminatory’ policy of peak time traffic management, based on a user’s total bandwidth consumption, which might temporarily lessen the speed of a video junkie’s connection if his or her usage has been particularly high.
These measures have been effective so far, and the burden of increasing demands might not have been felt yet - but it will soon. Experts are predicting a ‘broadband crunch’ come 2010, wherein increasing use of bandwidth-hungry services will bring the internet to a virtual standstill.
A report by Nemertes Research, a group that analyses the business value of emerging technology, says that current investment in internet infrastructure is insufficient to meet growing bandwidth demands.
“The network is coping”
Speaking to MSN, a BT spokesman acknowledged the issue but downplayed its severity. “It’s a commercial issue for certain internet service providers. If usage patterns progressively increase because customers are doing things which are increasing their use of bandwidth, and if those customers are charged a fixed price for a fixed amount of bandwidth, then there is a question about whether certain business models are sustainable.
“On a technical level: can the network physically cope? As things stand, the network is coping. Though if you were to ask whether the network in shape for the streaming of multiple broadcast-quality TV-type signals all over the internet to every home in the land… then that will probably require considerable investment in the network.” Because although the internet advances very quickly, the large-scale infrastructure that supports it, delivering it to homes and offices around the country, has not quite kept up.
The hardware problem
The internet video boom is being handled in the UK by networks which, in many places, were originally intended to carry voice calls only. It is testament to some very clever engineering that old hardware has been enabled to cope with as much as it has – but this cannot go on forever.
The problem lies not with the modern fibre optics and underground cabling of the internet’s main motorways, whose high technology and vast capacities mean data can zip from one part of the world to another in next to no time. The limiting factor comes at the last stage of the journey: in the routers, switches and copper wires that run finally from an exchange into a home.
When it comes to broadband speeds, the UK already lags behind many other countries. About 90 per cent of South Korea is hooked up with an average advertised broadband speed of 43 Mbps. In France the average is about 44 Mbps, whereas Japan has an astounding 90 Mbps. These figures all put the ‘up to 8 Mbps’ connections typically offered by UK providers in the shade.
A return to dial-up speeds?
What would a ‘broadband crunch’ mean for UK internet users? The Nemertes report predicts that if the problem is not addressed, users could be looking at a gradual return to the speeds of the dial-up networking of yesteryear. For those of us who know the joys of 28.8 kilobits per second modems, this is a worrying prospect.
The study says the slow-down will change our experience of the web. “[In the future] it may take more than one attempt to confirm an online purchase or it may take longer to download the latest video from YouTube,” says the report. More significant still is the crunch’s potential braking effect on internet progress. Online innovations – the next YouTube, iPlayer, eBay, or something entirely new and different – might simply not get off the ground if networks cannot support them.
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It’s not difficult to see why large-scale internet infrastructure has been neglected: upgrading such a system is a mammoth task. Although installing speedy fibre optic connections to homes nationwide is the most obvious of solutions, it represents an enormous expense and a huge amount of work. With the internet working adequately for the time being, many would hardly see the need for an upgrade, not to mention resent the digging up of roads across the country. Finally, there is the issue of who would foot the multi-billion pound bill.
An expensive project
When internet service providers have to compete with each other’s prices to win customers, an expensive, long-term project like fibre-to-the-home does not appeal. This, however understandably, leads to an approach that may not be viable in the long run.
Other providers believe they already have the problem in hand. “We will be rolling out a 50 Mbps service on our entire network at the end of the year,” Virgin Media told MSN. “”The technology we are putting into the network can theoretically cope with 300 Mbps upstream and downstream simultaneously. 50 Mbps is a good upgrade for now.”
This year, BT will trial 100Mbps fibre-to-the-home connections at an estate of new homes in Ebbsfleet, with a view to using the project as a feasibility study for further high-speed connections.
Who should cover the costs?
Alternatively, we might ask those who generate the demand for bandwidth to cough up. There have already been whispers that the likes of YouTube and iPlayer should contribute to the networks that support their services. But then could these services realistically remain free?
The solution might well require a government-funded initiative. It would be a worthy endeavour, one that would drive the nation’s technology forward and prepare us for the exponential growth of the internet. But it would also ultimately be a project funded by taxpayer money - and thus not necessarily popular.
The government recently launched a review on next-generation broadband access. “Its purpose is to look at the government can pave the way for faster broadband and minimise the cost for private sector investment – and what barriers there are to that investment,” a spokesperson for the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform told MSN. “Still, the roll-out of next-generation access should be private sector led, with minor public sector intervention.”
Looking ahead
The way forward – and the extent of the ‘broadband crunch’ threat – is not yet altogether clear. The solution may be something other than to fibre-to-the-home; it may not involve any kind of cabling at all. To bridge the sluggish so-called ‘last mile’ between exchange and home, wireless broadband services are another option for enabling the next generation of internet access.
“New wireless WiMAX technology shows it possible to achieve download speed of up to 65 Mbps at close range to users,” says David Hill of Spirent Communications, a telecommunications testing firm. “This would be sufficient to plug many of the gaps in the internet infrastructure quickly and at much lower cost and inconvenience than digging up roads to lay new cable.”
Finally, Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards recently proposed an altogether different approach: using our existing sewer network to house internet infrastructure. It was a tentative suggestion, with Richards recommending further study. “We need to establish what the position is here and whether or not duct access has a role to play in the development of competitive next-generation access. So, in cooperation with operators we intend to undertake a survey of the existing duct network.”
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May 1st, 2008 DJB
Internet Innovators
These are the Internet Innovators that have had a direct and profound impact on our daily lives.
The internet has come a long way since it spun its first Web.
We highlight an internet innovator that has perhaps received less recognition than they deserve: the unsung hero of the Domain Name System.
Dr Paul V. Mockapetris
Dr Paul V. Mockapetris is the man who wrote the internet address book. The Domain Name system was invented in 1983 at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute.
The innovation was borne out of a shortcoming of a very early Internet (ARPAnet) and the Domain Name System was seen as a way around this limitation.
What is a DNS?
The DNS can be considered the nuts and bolts of the internet.
DNS stands for Domain Name System, in simple terms it translates a hostname e.g. www.stonerocket.net into an IP address.
Each IP (Internet Protocol) address serves as a unique identifier and acts as a locator for one device to communicate with another. An IP address is made up of a string of numbers which all follow a similar format; four numbers, each ranging from 0 to 255 and separated by decimal points.
Today, we commonly refer to the Domain Name as a URL. A Domain Name is easier to remember than a string of numbers. Can you imagine trying to tell someone the name of a really cool website but instead having to recite an IP address? The URL eliminates this hassle, being memorable and a lot simpler to remember.
In order for a website to succeed the necessity for a good Domain Name is crucial. The Domain Name you use can have a huge impact in the way that both people and search engine spiders view your site.
Throughout his career Mockapetris has made many contributions to the research community, before the days of Ethernet he conducted some work with early LAN (Local Area Network) technology. He is also credited as assisting in the creation of the first SMTP e-mail server alongside Jonathan Postel in 1982.
Did you know that the first DNS implementation was nicknamed ‘Jeeves’.
Paul Mockapetris would later become the Director of ISI’s High Performance Computing and Communications Division. and is currently Chief Scientist and Chairman of the Board at Nominum, Inc.
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April 14th, 2008 DJB
Web designers making very old mistakes are letting malicious hackers hijack visitors to their sites, say experts.
Many of the loopholes left in the code created for websites have been known about for almost a decade say the security researchers.
The poor practices are proving very attractive to hi-tech criminals looking for a ready source of victims.
According to Symantec the number of sites vulnerable in this way almost doubled during the last half of 2007.
Wholly vulnerable
Kevin Hogan, director of security operations at Symantec, said the bug-ridden web code was putting visitors to many entirely innocent sites at risk.
“It overturns the whole notion that if you stay away from gambling and porn sites you are okay,” he said.
The attack that a malicious hacker can carry out via these web code vulnerabilities is known as cross-site scripting (abbreviated as XSS).
Typically these involve lax control of the data being swapped between a web server and the browser program someone is using to interact with it.
An XSS vulnerability could, for instance, allow attackers to steal the login credentials of a visitor to a site.
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 It’s such a target rich environment I do not think the attackers need to have a very sophisticated way to harvest sites for vulnerabilities 
Chris Wysopal, Veracode |
Mr Hogan said more and more attackers were looking for websites that were vulnerable to these scripting attacks because they required little work to mount.
By contrast, said Mr Hogan, a phishing attack required the creation of tempting e-mails, fake servers and dead-drops to gather data.
In its most recent Internet Security Threat Report Symantec identified 11,253 specific XSS vulnerabilities in the last six months of 2007. Six months earlier the count stood at 6,961.
Symantec said there were likely many more that had not reported vulnerabilities.
Drawing its data from XSSED which gathers data on these vulnerabilities, Symantec said only 473 of these loopholes had so far been fixed.
Website administrators had a poor record of closing loopholes, it said.
“Attackers…, can expect that [a] site maintainer will not address the vulnerability in a reasonable amount of time, if at all,” said the report.
“There are a lot more websites out there that are prone to this,” said Mr Hogan. “It’s a much bigger proposition to make a safe website than it is to patch a browser.”
Chris Wysopal, co-founder and chief technology officer at Veracode which produces online tools that scan code for security flaws, said the problem was getting worse.
“I do not see trends slowing this down,” he said.
XSS attacks were becoming more popular because more and more websites were writing their own snippets of code so visitors could get more out of a site, he said.
Unfortunately, he added, the same mistakes were being made in this custom code years after they were first discovered.
“The problem was identified eight years ago or so,” he said. “Over time attackers have figured out better and more interesting things to do with cross-site scripting.”
He added: “It’s such a target rich environment I do not think the attackers need to have a very sophisticated way to harvest sites for vulnerabilities.”
Automated web tools were available that can scan custom web code and highlight vulnerabilities but few web designers used them, said Mr Wysopal.
“The awareness is not there that if you write code you need to test it before you put it out there,” he said.
Source: BBC News
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March 4th, 2008 DJB
One word. Linkbait.
Linkbaiting may sound like a negative thing, but really, it isn’t. Basically, linkbait is really good content. Viral content, that people just naturally link to, and share. These are the kinds of things that people love to share on Social Bookmarking sites, like Digg.com.
Linkbait comes in several varieties, including news, humor, or resources (tools, tutorials, etc..)
Examples of Good Link Bait
http://www.shoemoney.com/gallery/v/m…check.jpg.html (amazing picture, and yes, it’s real.)
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors (tutorial)
http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/ (viral idea)
A carefully planned linkbait campaign can draw hundreds, if not thousands of links. This will have a very positive effect on your search engine ranking. Try searching for search ranking factors or million dollars. See any of the sites above coming up #1?
Tips for Linkbait:
1. Come up with a good idea. Make sure it’s good. Otherwise, there’s no point in even bothering.
2. Create your Link bait.
One important tip is to have your target keywords in the url or file name. Reason being is that anchor text in links is a huge ranking factor, and a lot of people will just use your url as anchor text, so it helps if you have your keywords there.
3. Submit your linkbait
(or better yet, get someone else to submit it) to the Social Bookmarking Sites.
http://www.digg.com
http://www.reddit.com
http://www.netscape.com
http://del.icio.us
http://www.stumbleupon.com
4. Cross your fingers.
Getting popular on these sites isn’t easy. And if you actually do make it, you better be ready, because it will easily crash your site, and get you booted off of your cheap shared hosting. But remember, the traffic isn’t what you’re after. If it stays, that’s definitely good, but it usually doesn’t. It’s the links you are going for.
More on Linkbaiting:
http://www.jimboykin.com/linkbait-linkbait-linkbait/
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad…d-linkbaiting/
http://performancing.com/node/38
__________________
Search Engine Optimization Tutorial
A Free Guide to Help You Drive Targeted Traffic to Your Website
Author- B Jones of dnscoop.com
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March 4th, 2008 DJB
Get More Traffic from Social Bookmarking Sites!
Do you want to get even more traffic from the massively popular social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us and Reddit? Well heres how I found out how to get traffic back to my site.
When you first start using social bookmarking sites you may notice almost every bookmark gets hit on (Ive had a few bookmarks with over 100,000 hits) but after a while your bookmarks get less and traffic until its a virtual stand still.
That bugged me for a while because I was submitting great content and I was getting no traffic back from them. So I thought It may have been my account with the big social bookmarking sites, I asked some of my online buddys to bookmark some pages for me thinking that would do the trick.
Guess what? Nothing happened! That also stumbled me for a while aswell. Until one day on the offchance I was on one of my sites but not on the usual domain for the site it was an unused domain I have parked on my web hosting account.
I noticed a traffic spike, I had put out a social bookmark using the domain parked on my hosting account never realized which domain it was on. A couple of days later I was a little bored so I decided to try it again with a web page that I had recently made.
It worked traffic was coming to my site again from the social bookmarking sites.
Ok well thats how started to revive traffic back to my sites, Heres a nice simple tutorial for you to do the same.
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Got a domain right? Buy up the cheaper alternatives yoursite.info/.cn etc etc or you can use any domain you like its your decision.
Park The Domain! on the hosting account that are planning to bookmark a page on “example - your original site mysite.com/bookmarked-page.php would be mysite.cn/bookmarked-page.php”
Bookmark it! Now go ahead and bookmark the page! “using the parked domain”
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The method I posted has worked for everyone I have told so far that have experienced the same issue with traffic from social bookmarking sites. So I thought I would share my thoughts with you all. Please post a comment on the post if it works for you “which im sure it will”
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