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.

So, let's see here. In a typical day, it looks like half of The Millennials in the U.S. go online just, you know, cuz. There's a line there for all adults, but it's blotchy and dotted and doesn't go all the way to the end, so you can't really tell what that stat is. It's okay, though. There's another chart in here.

Yeah, so I guess what's different about this one is that the one up there says "on a typical day," and this one doesn't. It's impossible to tell from the sentences in this blog post, which all kind of seem like the same sentence rewritten a bunch of different ways. Or am I having a stroke?

Well anyway, these lines look similar, but not as steep as the other ones, meaning that a bigger proportion of grownups use the Web for no reason "in a typical day" than they do... um... at all.

So, there ya go! Conclusions! The Pew Internet post contains lots of conclusions, like the fact that people have more computers and faster Internet connections, which contributes to the ability to use the Internet, so that's fascinating.

Then it talks about how "the internet has become a competitor to all kinds of other leisure activities," although it clarifies that "the competition is fuzzy."

And that's about it. Do you feel informed? I don't. This report sucked. So why the hell is it on Techmeme?

See also, The Big Secret About Cats On The Internet.

To put this into perspective, keep in mind that the Internet population of Europe, including Russia, is 727 million, and that of Asia is 922 million, which lands Facebook smack dab in the middle:

In December 2008, Facebook only had 140 million users.

Facebook's active user base is made up of 38% of the entire current Internet population.

Images via InternetWorldStats, Pingdom and UnicornParty.

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."

To understand the development of package switching as Baran outlined it, it is important to remember that its creation took place at the height of the Cold War between the U.S. and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies. The innovation was security-based. By separating a message into parts, sending the parts by redundant routes, and only putting them back into coherent form at the end, it would make them much less likely to be intercepted. It would also ensure delivery even if individual nodes in the network were compromised or destroyed.

He outlined his full proposal in what the Computer History Museum described as "a 13-volume set of reports defining in detail an all digital nationally distributed network for digital voice and data."

Baran was born in Poland, emigrated to the U.S. and took a degree in electrical engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Baran worked on the Univac at the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company and for Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles while earning a Masters in Engineering at UCLA. At that point he joined RAND.

It wasn't until 1969 that anyone actually built a network like the one Baran described. That was the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or Arpanet. The ARPANET was eventually replaced by the National Science Foundation Network, which grew into what we now know as the Internet.

Baran was preceded in death by his wife Evelyn, who passed away in 2007, and is survived by his son, David, three grandchildren and his companion Ruth Rothman.

*That was Al Gore, of course

Photo of Baran from the Computer History Museum | map from the ARPANET Completion Report | other sources: RAND, About

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.

"After a quiet week, we received reports tonight that Libyans in Tripoli were suddenly unable to use various Internet communications utilities...All of the Libyan-hosted government websites we tested (i.e., the ones that are actually hosted in Libya, and not elsewhere) were unreachable... Tonight, however, we suspect that someone has turned off the tap on the Libyan Internet again, this time leaving the routes in place."

Google's Transparency Report bears out this picture as these graphics show.

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.

There'll be no interruption, according to Borthwick. "For .ly domains to be unresolvable the five .ly root servers that are authoritative *all* have to be offline, or responding with empty responses," he writes. "Of the five root nameservers for the .ly TLD: two are based in Oregon, one is in the Netherlands and two are in Libya."

Borthwick's response should serve to reassure users of Bit.ly, at the very least. He says that the company will keep the service running, including "offering options around which top level domains you use." Try .mp, for example (that's the TLD for the Northern Mariana Islands).

Or, Maybe We Should Worry

However, Kim Davies cautions against a "sense of false confidence" and says we shouldn't think "that country-code domains are impervious to these kinds of government-mandated Internet shutdowns." He agrees that the effect of an Internet shutdown may not be immediate, but the effects can still be "devastating."

Davies points out that the servers outside of Libya are still reliant - eventually -on obtaining updates from the .ly registry within the country. "If they are unable to succeed in getting updates, at some point they will consider the data they have stale and stop providing information on the .LY domain." Davies pegs that at 28 days.

Unlike Egypt, which was offline for a week, Libya has had intermittent Internet access. The Next Web posits that the shutdowns in Libya echo some sort of nightly curfew - off at 11pm and on again at dawn. This makes it likely that other DNS servers will update their records and the .ly domains will continue working.

Nevertheless, it's worth noting that this isn't the first problem that those outside of Libya have had with the TLD. Last fall, the Libyan government shut down Vb.ly, the URL shortener run by sex writer violet blue. The domain was yanked because of its content - as it "fell outside of Libyan Islamic/Sharia Law."

All this should serve as a cautionary tale for anyone obtaining a domain - in Libya or, frankly, elsewhere, as TLDs fall under government scrutiny and seizure, no matter the country.

"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. "

On January 27, as an attempt to interfere with protester communications with each other and with the outside world, Egypt shut down its Internet connections.

However, Telecomix has already provided dial-up access for Libyans.

Libya has been wracked by iits #feb17 protests for several days, with 84 people killed by security forces, according to Human Rights Watch.

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 Venezuela-Cuba joint project has been advertised as a triumph against the United States embargo of the island nation. Venezuela's Gran Caribe and Cuba's Transbit hired a Chinese subsidiary of the French company Alcatel-Lucent to lay the cable at a cost of $70 million. It took 19 days for the specialized cable-laying ship, Île de Batz to make the journey from Venezuela.

The project is an indication of how important the Internet is, even to countries whose relationship to communications is antagonistic. Currently, virtually no private Cuban citizens can secure an Internet connection. To blog, Cuba's small blogger community must copy their posts onto a thumb-drive and sneak into a dollar-only hotel to post, or to email the post to compatriots outside the country.

Cuba's Bloggers

According to a leaked diplomatic cable, the Cuban government is more afraid of this small but powerful group of bloggers than it is of its entire old-style dissident population.

Nevertheless, according to the press release:

"Cuban officials say the country's priority will be to build more public telecentres and improve Internet access at schools, hospitals and scientific institutions."

Look for Hugo Chávez's government to provide its Cuban counterpart with extensive filtering tools, perhaps by passing on software and hardware made by American companies like Cisco and McAfee.

Siboney photo by Klaus Schaefer | Île de Batz photo from Wikimedia Commons | other sources: BBC, AP/TMC, Cuba Standard

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.

According to the OECD:

"(T)his amount does not include the secondary economic impacts (such as) e-commerce, tourism and call centres. In fact, the IT services and outsourcing sector in Egypt has been a growing part of the economy and relies heavily on the Internet and communications networks. IT outsourcing firms in Egypt made USD 1 billion in revenues in 2010 (or around USD 3 million per working day), servicing overseas customers through call centres, helpdesks, etc."

In its coverage, by Parmy Olson, Forbes added that outsourcing revenue of $3 million per day. Further, they calculated "businesses that simply require the Internet to operate, along with Egypt's e-commerce industry" at an additional $1 million per day.

Given that extra $4 million per day for five days, Forbes' calculations add $20 million to Egypt's loss, for a grand total of $110 million.

Although the Internet came back online fairly quickly, it took people time to discover that fact and boot up. Even when the country was wired again, complaints persisted of exceptionally slow connections, possibly on purpose as a kind of stealth block. That, combined with the fact that five down days is a rather conservative number (as I said, it seemed more like six to me), I wouldn't be surprised to find the ultimate figure to be more along the lines of $135 million.

As Forbes' Olson points out:

"(T)here's also the long-term effect of the blackout on future business. Foreign companies will hardly be falling over themselves to invest in a telecommunications infrastructure that could be shut down at a moment's notice."

For those in the high-tech industry, the reality of one of their own being snatched off the street may linger when fear for the stability of information access is a thing of the past.

Currency images via Wikipedia.

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.

Fear not: There's IPv6

Lest cries of "the Internet is running out of room!" sound like the uproad surrounding Y2K ("everything is going to break!"), average Internet customers don't need to panic about today's announcement. While the last block of IPv4 addresses have been allocated to regional registries, they do still have some to distribute. And there are millions of unused IPv4 addresses.

But those won't last, and it's now up to the Internet to make the switch from IPv4 to IPv6. IPv6 jumps from 32- to 128-bit, which will give an almost unlimited number of addresses.

The Difficult Transition

But making the switch isn't easy. Even though IPv6 was standardized more than a decade ago, there has been no real incentive to upgrade networks' compatibility - until now.

As Dave Thaler, software architect at Microsoft and Internet Engineer Task Force (IETF) co-chair, tells Ars Technica, "The IETF has actually been preparing for this day for a long time. ... [W]e've developed transition technologies to ease the transition to IPv6, while also looking at the impact of carrier-grade NATs [network address translations]. In short, the depletion of the IANA IPv4 address pool is not a crisis, and will not have any notable short-term effects."

But with the allocation of the last block of IPv4 addresses today, the move to IPv6 just got a little bit more urgent. To help make the transition easier, many major technology companies - including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo - will be participating in World IPv6 Day later this year, a test to make sure their systems are ready to make the switch.

Ostensibly aimed to shut down protests, the actions seemed to do no such thing as crowds continued to grow on the streets, demanding that President Hosni Mubarak step down - something he now says he'll do later this year.

Nonetheless many are still on the streets. And while those outside Egypt may be able to reach Egyptian websites (I can bring up the page for the Suez Canal Authority, for example) the Internet seems to only be available within Egypt in pockets. However, as you can see via the statistics from the monitoring service RIPE below, connectivity is slowly coming back to the country.

There are a couple of ways: audio tweeting and dialup.

Dialup: a number of people and groups are providing dialup numbers for those inside Egypt trying to get out to Tweet, email and so on.

If you have additional methods, please let us know in the comments.

Thanks to Carl Levinson

Following Egypt's severing of its main ISP connections to the Internet, Syria has now reportedly done the same. Possibly anticipating the political wildfire that has leapt from Tunis to Algeria to Libya and now to Egypt, authorities may be trying a preemptive block.

Syria certainly is a candidate for revolt: One of the real tyrants in the Arab world, it possesses an outsized security apparatus, little in the way of citizen rights, a smart, young population and a fear of the Internet.

I asked Ammar Abdulhamid, a fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution and Syrian dissident about what's happening. Ammar follows movements in Syria closely and is in contact with people inside the country.

"I am still talking to ppl on Facebook, so it doesn't seem to be true, but it could still happen."

Like all wholesale shut-offs, if this is happening, it is happening in bits and pieces as the government severs ISPs or sites from their routers.

We'll update this story as we get more information.

Damascus photo by N. Macca | other sources: Huffington Post

Reports are pouring in, many to Twitterers via landline, that the country has been "cut off" and is now a "black hole."

Reports from Cairo, Alexandria and elsewhere in the country indicate the block is wholesale and countrywide.

CNN's Ben Wedeman commented, "No internet, no SMS, what is next? Mobile phones and land lines? So much for stability" and asked "Will #Egypt totally cut communications with the outside world?"

That depends, I think, on whether the idea now is to disrupt communications between groups of protesters or to lay a blackout curtain across Egypt to mask a total crackdown. As many as eight protesters, three in Cairo and five in Suez, have been killed, along with one policeman. I think if landlines and mobile go, the question must become, is the Egyptian government planning a wholesale massacre? (AP has raw footage of security forces converging, then killing a protester. Please be warned. This is some vicious shit.)

Those in and outside of Egypt have pledged to keep as much in connection to one another using whichever avenues remain. This is one of those times, however, in which the presence of functioning traditional journalists will pick up from the citizens who had been reporting on the ground.

UPDATES

Further reports indicate Vodafone will be shutting down mobile service and Facebook videos uploaded by those who retain Internet connection are getting deleted. Can anyone confirm?

Egyptian interior ministry's "decisive measures" may be code for "massacre" now that the Internet's largely dark.

Egyptian Internet cut-off documented by Rensys. Big four Egyptian ISPs, on which the majority of Egyptians, and Egyptian businesses and organizations, rely are offline.

As of 12:35 p.m. (PST), all communications seem to be cut off "except landlines from 5 star hotels & Nour ISP" according to a source in the region (but not in the country).

When rumors hit the protesters that the Egyptian Museum was going to be looted due to abrupt police abandonment, they ringed it with their own bodies to protect it.

Another source, a journalist said:

"Latest I've read/heard confirmed:

1) 93 percent of 'net traffic blocked. Only one ISP, Noor, is still up and running.

2) Cell service cut off, per government order, in various places -- may be countrywide now, but what I read suggested that they asked it to be selective (probably not in tourist destinations, for example).

3) Some landlines, particularly in Cairo, are reported down as well."

The study examined user activity specifically to try to gauge the influence of "emotional content" on users' behavior. Using sentiment analysis, the researchers looked at content, separating "objective" and "subjective", and then examined users' responses - whether they were objective or subjective, and in the case of the latter, positive or negative. The figure at the right shows the users' global activity (a) in relation to their emotional expression (e).

According to the researchers, "negative emotions are a motivation that incline forum participants to express their opinion (as well as emotion) writing a post. The active users are those characterized with negative emotions and they seem to be the key agents that sustain discussion in the thread. Finally, we have shown that negative emotions accelerate user's local activity in the thread," something that doesn't mean they participate the same way on a global level.

Researchers do admit that this dataset has a strong bias towards negative emotional content. It is, after all, only a study on those posting on a BBC news forum. The rest of the world's Internet commenters are much more rational and positive, right?

Distribution of Speeds - Within and Across Countries

Based on all countries' speeds - not just the top 50's - the world average Internet speed clocks in at around 1.8 Mbits/s. A little over a fifth of Internet connections are 5 Mbits/s or faster, and more than half are 2 Mbits/s or faster.

The most colorful chart in the Royal Pingdom report looks not just at the average speed within a country, but how speeds are distributed. This graphic shows that while the slowest connection speeds (256 kbit/s) have almost disappeared in most countries, that they still comprise a good proportion of how much of the world connects to the Internet.