Category Archives: Internet

Where we all are

SPDY For iOS

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It has come to my attention that work is being done (3rd party) to bring SPDY to iOS. Awesome!

However, I can’t help but think that Apple is already working to bring SPDY to iOS perhaps as soon as iOS 6. I say this simply because it would bring a speed improvement without involving more Tx/Rx or upping CPU power consumption. It just improves network utilization. In fact since it improves utilization it possibly could improve battery life by reducing the radio usage.

I’d also like to see the Nitro JavaScript engine available outside of Safari so UIWebView implementations could take advantage. Supposedly that’s a WebKit2 thing, but I’ve heard/seen little of WebKit2. I suspect SPDY will happen first.

Facebook’s IPO Filing

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There’s not really much to say about Facebook’s IPO filing other than we all knew the day would eventually come. People love to look at the number of users as the measure of the company, but the truth is users come and go, all empires eventually fall. They have since the dawn of man. It’s a terrible measure of what a company has done, and is capable of doing. Eventually market saturation will be reached. It’s unsustainable to grow quicker than the world’s population. Everyone but Wall Street and some tech blogs know that.

What really matters is a company’s DNA. For Facebook that’s the willingness to be agile, the willingness to push things, and the willingness to change. That may occasionally backfire, however it’s proven to generally work out quite well. Especially when Facebook is willing to back down and revise as it has in the past. Mark Zuckerberg’s goal is pretty lofty, especially given the world and it’s people are struggling to figure out privacy in a connected world.

To quote him in 2010: “we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected”. Balancing this mission and not crossing the line will be the challenge Facebook will face for years to come. I’ve criticized them several times in the past for either not doing enough, or not giving enough priority to the right to control privacy. Lately I’ve got less to complain about. I think that’s good for everyone.

Notifications For Better Engagement

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One thing I’ve learned repeatedly over the years is that good notification systems create great engagement and encourage habitual users.

The biggest problem with any product/service is getting people to come back. “Drive by” users aren’t terribly difficult. Google will bring you those with a little work. However your business comes from users coming back repeatedly. Those are you’re true “users”. They are the ones who will bring others.

Today, I think Facebook and Twitter are the perfect example of companies who understand and utilize this strategy in a way that amazes me. Lets look at this:

Facebook

They are the biggest, so I’ll go through it first. The first method of notification is the obvious alerts when logged into the site. You can keep it open and use it as a client, it works great. Facebook also has one of the best email notification systems on the net. You can reply to a comment or message by simply replying to the email. No “app” to install. Even an old Blackberry can participate. Even people where Facebook is restricted but email works can participate (stereotypical corporate office). Email is the worlds greatest API. They take full advantage of it.

On top of that Facebook apps have push notification for smart phone users. Facebook also supports SMS notifications. They additionally support XMPP (Jabber) so you can use a desktop client with their messaging service.

One thing I never understood is why they don’t officially support and continue their desktop notification service. With a trivial amount of work it would be an even better retention method. However the API’s are clearly there for client support (several use it).

Facebook doesn’t exploit this system for marketing or PR. It’s just a useful way to interact with their system. It’s an interface. It’s an API.

Twitter

Twitter is another company that gets notifications. The most obvious again is their website. Secondly their apps support push notifications. Twitter is also pretty good about email notifications however they don’t accept replies over email. They also support SMS (i.e. “Text follow raccettura to 40404″).

Twitter lastly has an open API and even supports desktop apps like Twitter for Mac and TweetDeck. They encourage their users to stay on constantly and keep up. It’s part of what keeps users addicted to the service.

Again, they don’t market. They just keep users interacting.

Google+, Quora, etc.

I won’t judge Google+ just yet, they are pretty new still. Quora does a pretty good job with notifications however the balance between annoying and useful hasn’t quite been met, at least in my opinion.

It’s easy to overlook this “detail”, but for many users, this is the interface, realize it or not.
I won’t

90% Of Web Traffic Is Video

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There’s a lot of talk about the prediction from YouTube’s Robert Kyncl that video will be 90% of internet traffic. This sounds shocking until you realize it’s not, and doesn’t really mean much in context of the internet.

This number presumably is at least partially based on a prediction by Cisco who makes routers that carry that internet traffic. They even bought Flip (an unfortunate tale) simply to help drive video on the internet and presumably drive up the need for routers, their main business. They might have a bias.

The reality is video already is, and will continue to be the vast majority of Internet traffic. However that doesn’t mean people are spending as much time on it as the numbers will make you believe. Video per minute of online activity is just insanely high bandwidth and expensive. The percentage of bandwidth is meaningless, what matters is where people spend their time.

Video compresses very poorly in comparison to text and audio (interestingly, speech compresses fairly well these days). Video these days either streaming or progressive download is still a very bandwidth intensive activity.

This webpage is likely under 160 KB for you and loads in about 300 ms. You’ll spend statistically a few minutes reading this, perhaps slightly less if you just skim for the numbers. The takeaway is experiencing: this blog post is about 160 KB over a few minutes assuming you visit the site, and don’t use an RSS reader (go ahead RSS users, try it).

Now lets figure out what video is typically. Most web video these days is still H.264, and generally 640×480 (480p) or 1280×720 (720p). Most laptops today are pretty cheap and just can’t handle 1080p, certainly their displays aren’t good enough to show a measurable difference, not to mention the buffering time annoys people, so we’ll ignore it’s existence.

I want to make this a little realistic, so to figure out a bitrate, we’ll use the standard formula for what Adobe calls ‘ideal’ in the H.264 Primer, and what most seem to use these days:

[image width] x [image height] x [framerate] x [motion rank] x 0.07 = [desired bitrate]

For 1280×720 that means:

1280 x 720 x 24 x 2 x 0.07 = 3,096,576 bps = ~3000 kbps

And for 640×480:

640 x 480 x 24 x 2 x 0.07 = 1,032,192 bps = ~1000 kbps

This sounds about right. As of today, Wikipedia lists the bandwidth range for 720p at 2–2.9 Mbit/sec and for 480p at 0.8–1 Mbit/sec. So we know we’re on track.

That’s all the math we really need to do. Google can do the conversions for us:

For 720p:

3000 kbps = 1,318.35938 Megabytes / hour = 22 MB / min

For 480p:

1000 kbps = 439.453125 Megabytes / hour  = 7.3 MB / min

Going back to the example of this blog permalink, at 160 KB for a few minutes of reading vs. 7,475 KB for one minute of 480p video. That is why video is 90% of traffic.

Video growth is huge, but it’s not nearly as one sided as the stats will lead you to believe.

Improving DNS CDN Performance With edns-client-subnet

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Several months ago I wrote about how third party DNS services often slow you down since a DNS query is only one part of the equation and many websites use DNS to help their CDN figure out what servers are closest (and fastest). A few proposals to fix this have floated around, one is finally making headway.

Google, Bitgravity, CDNetworks, DNS.com and Edgecast have deployed support for edns-client-subnet. The idea is pretty simple. It passes part of your IP address (only part as to keep it semi-anonymous) in the request. A server that supports this extension can use it to geotarget and find a CDN node closest to you. Previously the best that could be done was using the location of the DNS server, which in many cases could be far away.

Still missing is support from some heavyweights like Akamai, who is the largest CDN, Limelight Networks and Level3. This is a pretty solid proposal with minimal negative implications. They are only passing part of the origin IP address, so it wouldn’t be a privacy invasion. In theory any website you browse could already harvest the IP you are using, this is just making part of it accessible to a partner who is already serving data on their behalf.

The Ultimate Human Supercomputer

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For most of my life there’s been a list known as the TOP500. The list of the fastest computers in the world. The fastest today is K computer, built by Fujitsu. We refer to them as “computers”, but in reality they are large rooms filled with servers that operate in coordination with one and other to solve a problem. They are individual nodes that work together.

I think this ranking is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Peak Tflops isn’t necessarily what matters anymore in terms of solving problems. I propose that the internet itself is the fastest and most powerful computer in terms of it’s ability to solve complicated problems. We haven’t figured out how to fully utilize it, we don’t even know it’s capacity or how to optimize it yet. But we know it has amazing potential already.

A photographer during the Vancouver riots (loosing in hockey is a real first world problem isn’t it?) photographed an anonymous kissing couple. In less than 24hrs they were identified. Someone requested help identifying the source of some amazing Nazi era photographs on a Tuesday morning. By Tuesday evening the photographer and the back story were coming into focus. There are no algorithms for these problems.

Things like tagging photos, status updates, tweets, wiki’s, and the ability to index, search, sort them in near real-time is at it’s infancy. We’ve barely got the technology to handle data at this magnitude, much less optimize, and realize it’s full potential. Already it can solve things that you can’t brute force using a supercomputer. At some point we’ll be able to question this “machine” and it will know who most likely would know and who shouldn’t be bothered even seeing the question. This isn’t artificial intelligence, this is computer network assisted human intelligence collaboration.

The internet likely won’t solve π to a trillion places anytime soon, if ever. We’ll leave that dull task to a “simplistic” supercomputer. But it’s important to not underestimate the power of the collective human brain. It’s already able to solve very obscure and complicated questions with ease and can be used without a degree in computer science. It’s only 2011. Just 10 years ago we couldn’t solve the above questions nearly as quickly, or perhaps at all if the person(s) with an answer wasn’t online. Imagine what 2021 will bring.

The Web As We Know It Is Being Threatened

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From Scientific American:

The Web as we know it, however, is being threatened in different ways. Some of its most successful inhabitants have begun to chip away at its principles. Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web. Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights.

If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want. The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides.

- Tim Berners-Lee

The same web we credit with promoting freedom and taking down dictatorships is under attack itself. Will the web in 10 years still have the power to shift political power?

Tim Berners-Lee may know a thing or two about the web.

$7.5M For 666,624 IPv4 Addresses

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I’ve mentioned the pending IPv4 shortage before. The latest news is Nortel Networks IPv4 block being sold:

Nortel Networks Corp. is doing its bit to alleviate the Internet space crunch, selling 666,624 IP addresses to Microsoft Corp. for $7.5 million.

So cost per IP address is:

$7.5 M / 666,624 = $11.25

$7.5 M sounds higher than it really is. To put this in perspective, a typical web host leases dedicated IP’s for customers who want an IP rather than name based hosting. This is necessary for things like SSL certificates. They will typically charge $1-2/month per IP address meaning they make anywhere from $12-$24/yearly revenue per IP. When you look at it that way, $11.25 really doesn’t seem that outrageous. It’s a decent investment considering an IPv4 address will be normal for at least another 2-4 years (likely more).

Microsoft has played in the business services role in many respects from webmail to hosting (I think that’s now part of Office Live). As they ramp up their cloud offering they will need to offer IPv4 compatible SSL services on customer domains. I think this will pay off pretty quickly.

However, I don’t think we’ll see to many IPv4 purchases like this, the market is still somewhat limited in my opinion.

Final IPv4 Unicast Address Allocations

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For better or worse this really is a momentous moment for the internet. The full letter from the IETF Chair is as follows (copied for posterity):

You have probably already heard the news, but just to make sure no one is left out of the loop, I am posting this note.

The last five /8 IPv4 address blocks were assigned today.

Two /8s were recently allocated to APNIC, which triggered the implementation of the Exhaustion Phase set out in the Global Policy for the Allocation of the Remaining IPv4 Address Space. Today in Miami, Florida in a very nice ceremony, this policy was implemented, and each RIR received one of the final /8 address blocks. As of now, there are no more unallocated IPv4 unicast /8s in the IANA pool. The current status of the IPv4 address space can be seen in the IANA IPv4 Address Space Registry at:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/ipv4-address-space/ipv4-address-space.xhtml

We have all known that this day was coming for a long time. In preparation, the IETF developed IPv6. IPv6 is ready, and it has been ready for a long time. This milestone simply increases the urgency for IPv6 deployment. The explosive growth of the Internet can only continue with the bigger address space offered by IPv6.

The depletion of the IANA IPv4 address pool is not a crisis. Next week the Internet will not be significantly different that it was a week ago. There will not be any notable short-term effects caused by the empty IANA IPv4 address pool.

There is no crisis, but there is a need for action so that the Internet can continue to grow. The transition to IPv6 requires the attention of many actors. However, our parents, spouses, and children will be largely unaware of the transition. They will continue to be amazed of the endless possibilities offered by the growing Internet. For them, this milestone will remain insignificant.

To the universal deployment of IPv6,
Russ

Who knew we’d eventually run out (Vint Cerf says himself he never imagined how much would be needed). It’s crazy when you think about it. It’s important however to remember however that the distribution is hardly efficient and lots of companies own way more IPv4 space than they will ever actually use.

I’ve pretty much gotten through my software stack IPv6 wise, but have yet to begun network and configuration to support it. Hopefully soon enough I’ll have everything running dual stack.

Undersea Cable Map

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Undersea Cable Map

Cable Map is an awesome website that shows known under sea cables on an interactive map (powered by Bing). It shows that there are actually many under sea cables. I mentioned a few months ago that most intercontinental data travels through undersea cables.

I should note that the locations on the map are approximate for security reasons. Because their damage could cost millions and disrupt worldwide communications only their operators and select contractors know where they actually come ashore.

The image above links to a big static version of the map just in case the site someday goes dark.