Google Releases A Free, Interactive Book On Browsers and The Web

Google, in its pursuit of bringing awareness about Internet among the masses has executed a unique project in the form of an interactive book on web browsers and the Internet.
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Google's Bus to Internet Nirvana launched in Tamil Nadu

Google India has launched what is being dubbed the Google Bus. It is a specially furnished bus with Internet connectivity, which will be touring different towns in Tamil Nadu - a state of India. The aim of the bus is to introduce, inspire and educate the general populace on the power of the Internet and how it can benefit common people.

Seeking to attract more people on the information superhighway, the bus will be touring 15 towns in Tamil Nadu over a span of 45 days. India is projected to have Internet connectivity of around 20 million by the year 2010. And perhaps, the Google bus is Google's way of ensuring it gets to garner maximum portion of this pie. Google is providing updates of the bus trip at the specially set up The Internet Bus Project web page.

Internet is fault tolerant .... Not !

Internet has become a part and parcel of most of our lives. But I did not realize the extent to which I personally was dependent on the Internet till two days back when due to a major underwater cable breakdown in the Mediterranean sea, the Internet slowed to a crawl - well you can say it almost stopped. News reports say 60% of India was affected and over 70% of Egypt.

In India for instance, the three main service providers namely TATA owned VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel Ltd were affected. The repair of the sea cables is expected to take a minimum of 10 days even when conducted on a war footing. According to news reports, the cable snag occurred near Alexandria, off the coast of Egypt on Wednesday affecting ILD and Internet traffic to Europe and the US.

Checking email which we all took for granted was a big chore with opening a single email taking close to an hour. Most sites were not accessible. It did not help that over 90% of the popular sites on the Internet are hosted on a server based in the United states with no cross continental mirroring plan to meet such a scenario.

An exception was Google search which did not see any slowdown because it has data centers in every part of the world and is prepared to meet such emergencies.

This makes me wonder if it is wise to be more and more dependent on the Internet for carrying out even the most mundane but critical tasks like banking, paying bills and booking tickets. Now a days, more and more people are working from the safe confines of their home. As days go by we are getting more and more enmeshed in the online world and acquiring alternate identities. And keeping the Internet fault tolerant is turning out to be a very important factor in our personal wellbeing.

World map of Internet connectivity

Care to know the level of Internet connectivity in your country ? Or rather, you would like to know which all areas in the world are the most densely wired. Well here is a pictorial representation of the density of Internet connection.

Fig: Internet connectivity world map

The aptly named "Internet Map" is the creation of Cris Harrison. To create the set of visual maps, he made use of the data from the DIMES project which is a distributed scientific research project, aimed to study the structure and topology of the Internet - a purely volunteer effort on the lines of SETI@HOME project.

Not surprisingly, Europe, USA and Japan lead in the most wired areas in the world.

View the full set of maps of the internet connectivity across the world at Cris Harrison's site.

Care to break the law using GNU/Linux ? Then here are a couple of ways of getting free internet access.

The dawn of the internet era has seen more and more people jump on to the internet bandwagon and spend a significant part of their free as well as work time online. Each day we find different ways in which we can make use of the Internet and slowly but surely, the world wide web is getting more and more ingrained in our daily lives. And as with any popular medium, we find energy being dissipated in various quarters in getting free access to it by taking advantage of the loopholes found in the technology being used.

Doug has an interesting article where he describes how to use ICMP tunneling to get access to your neighbours internet connection.

ICMP stands for Internet Control Message Protocol which is used to carry the information about the status of the network. It has a wide variety of uses such as reporting on the availability of remote hosts, the errors in the underlying network and detecting network congestion. 'ping' - one of the most common programs which is used to test the network connectivity of up to three layers of OSI model uses ICMP to do its task.

And on a different note, Karl Bitz explains how to crack WEP using a machine running Ubuntu. The usual assumptions in both cases being that you as well as the neighbour in question rely on wireless technology to connect to the internet.

On a personal note, I do not support illegal ways of gaining things. In fact one very strong motivating factor for me to embrace GNU/Linux was the freedom from being dependent on (often pirated) proprietary software. But from a theoretical point of view, both the articles are interesting because they throw a wee bit more light on the technologies underlying the wireless internet access.