ReadWriteWeb

And here we all thought we were changing the world and creating The Future. 74% of online adults say they use the Web for no reason whatsoever. The Internet is just there, dangling over our heads like a mobile full of planets and kitties and smiley faces, and we're just staring up at it from our cribs like a bunch of little babies.

At least, that's what this Pew Internet study is getting at, I think. It gives a bunch of different numbers, really. They range from 53%-ish to 81%-ish. It's pretty hard to nail down. Anyway, various kinds of people use the Internet for various kinds of things, including nothing. Here are some charts and graphs to look at.

Facebook's population is currently at 800 million users, which is slightly more users than the Internet of early 2004, based on data from InternetWorldStats.com. Check out a chart chronicling the growth of the Internet after the jump.

Tim Berners-Lee, to his credit, did not invent the Internet. He did have one good idea. He was not the first person or even the twelfth with the same idea, but he did make it work. Yet most of the underlying work - the bringing together of dozens of communications systems with slightly or wildly varying protocols - was done before him. He just plugged it in, and for that, he gets most of the credit.

What made the Internet, and thus the Web, possible - the thing that, without which, Tim Berners-Lee would still be watching reruns of "Eastenders" - was a decision. The major carriers of electronic mail, whose business it had become to route messages to each other's members, collectively reached a truce. They decided that the long, endless fight over who has the biggest volume, the longest distance, the fastest network, so that one could charge the others more postage than it was being charged, was too expensive and was stifling progress. They decided to call off the war. I know. I was on the phone with them the moment it happened.

Well, maybe Paul Baran didn't invent the Internet exactly*, but his work on its forerunner, ARPANET, made it possible. Baran, 84, died yesterday at his home in Palo Alto, according to the New York Times.

While working at the RAND Corporation in the early Sixties, Baran outlined a method for dissembling information into "message blocks" in order to move them through a network, reassembling them at the end point. This method has come to be known as "packet switching."

On February 18 the Libyan Internet appeared shut down across the whole of the country. That state of affairs did not last long and since then, the Internet has been intermittent as pro- and anti-government forces fight it out.

Today, however, Rensys confirmed a report we mentioned from journalist Lisa Goldman that the Internet is 100% down for the North African country. The shutdown, even in the areas controlled by opponents of the current government, seems complete.

When the Libyan government pulled the plug on the country's Internet access on Friday, many outside the country were concerned about the implications the shutdown would have on the country's top level domain (TLD). After all, the .ly domain is a popular alternative to the .com, used by a number of companies, but arguably most commonly associated with its usage as a URL shortener.

No surprise then, John Borthwick, CEO of Bit.ly was quick to respond to an inquiry on the Q&A site Quora that asked if .ly services would be interrupted with Libya offline.

Rensys reports that Libya has completely shut down their Internet as of midnight Saturday local time.

"Renesys confirms that the 13 globally routed Libyan network prefixes were withdrawn... and Libya is off the Internet. One Libyan route originated by Telecom Italia directly is still BGP-reachable, but inbound traceroutes appear to die in Palermo. A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete. "

According to a press release from the International Telecommunications Union, a new undersea data cable connected to Cuba this week will increase the amount of the country's data and video transmission speed 3,000-fold when it becomes operation this summer.

The ALBA-1 cable arrived in Siboney on February 9th, linking the eastern Cuban town to the cable's start-point in the Venezuelan port city of La Guaira. The second part of the project will lead from Cuba to Ochos Rios in Jamaica.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development has come up with a figure of $90 million for the financial cost of the Egyptian Internet blackout. It may be much higher.

Egyptian authorities ordered the country's major ISPs to shut down on January 27th. They turned them back on February 2nd, leaving the country in the informational dark for six days.

Turn on the "No Vacancy" sign. The Internet has run out of room.

At a ceremony this morning in Florida, the last block of IPv4 addresses were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries, whose job it is to further distribute these final addresses to others.

Today's announcement has been anticipated for quite some time, as the explosion of Internet-enabled devices and the growing number of Internet users has accelerated the demand for IP addresses.