Carrier pigeon vs. internet upload speeds

In some rural areas, upload speeds are crawlingly slow, which can make it difficult to send things on the internet. In some cases, a carrier pigeon might even be faster. For The Washington Post, Janice Kai Chen did the math so you know which one to use:

Racing pigeons clock an average of 40 miles per hour and typically race up to 400 miles, roughly from D.C. to Boston, according to the American Racing Pigeon Union. With the boost of a tailwind, pigeons have been recorded going as fast as 110 mph and as far as 1,000 miles.

At certain data volumes and distances, the pigeon is a quicker option for large swaths of rural America, where internet speeds can lag far behind the national average.

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Slow internet for the same price as fast internet

When you pay for internet, it seems like a reasonable expectation that if you pay the same monthly rate as someone a few blocks from you, you get a similar speed. This is commonly not always the case. Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin, for The Markup, with the analysis:

The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.

The neighborhoods offered the worst deals had lower median incomes in nine out of 10 cities in the analysis. In two-thirds of the cities where The Markup had enough data to compare, the providers gave the worst offers to the least-White neighborhoods.

When you compare by Mbps per dollar, you get prices hundreds of times more expensive for crawling internet.

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Settling all the internet debates in one go with a bunch of polling

The internet was once this fun place where people had goofy debates about how to pronounce “gif” (with a hard g), the color of a dress (blue and black), and whether or not a hot dog is a sandwich (no). That place is no more, leaving unsettled debates just floating around out there.

Luckily, Neal Agarwal compiled the hot debates in one place to settle the scores once and for all.

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Change in internet usage since the virus

Your schedule changed. The time spent in front of or using a screen probably shifted. Using data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, Ella Koeze and Nathaniel Popper for The New York Times look at how these changes are reflected in average daily traffic for major websites and apps.

More video games, more social apps, and more virus news.

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Internet under the sea

To connect servers around the world, there are actual cables that run under the ocean. The New York Times mapped current and future cables, with a focus on the ones owned by Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. “Content providers like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon now own or lease more than half of the undersea bandwidth.” Sure. Totally fine.

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Fake internet

Max Read for New York Magazine describes the fake-ness of internet through the metrics, the people, and the content:

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

I wonder how the fake-ness level online compares to fraud IRL.

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Tech generations, as seen through video source, music players, and internet access

In a fun piece by Reuben Fischer-Baum, reporting for The Washington Post:

In the past three decades, the United States has seen staggering technological changes. In 1984, just 8 percent of households had a personal computer, the World Wide Web was still five years away, and cell phones were enormous. Americans born that year are only 33 years old.

Here’s how some key parts of our technological lives have shifted, split loosely into early, middle and current stages.

There will always be a place in my heart that longs for the good ol’ days of my Walkman, modem sounds, and the phone-less outdoors. Tear.

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Changing internet markets for sex work

The internet changed how sex workers and clients find each other and how the former does business. Allison Schrager, Christopher Groskopf, and Scott Cunningham, reporting for Quartz, delve into actual numbers using scraped data from The Erotic Review:

Sex work is as old as civilization, but in the past 20 years the market for illegal sex services has undergone a radical transformation thanks to the internet, upending how it is sold and priced. There are now more women selling sex, more overall encounters, and—unlike in many other industries disrupted by the web—higher wages for workers.

Also safer (although still with its inherent risks).

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Microsoft Tools for Academics: An interview with Alex Wade

Microsoft Tools for Academics: An interview with Alex Wade   Posted February 16, 2016 by Jen Laloup in Podcast post-info AddThis Sharing Buttons above Academics increasingly use web scale Internet searches to discover new research.  In

Live cyber attack map

Internet attack map

Norse monitors cyber attacks in real-time. This is their map of what's going on. (All I hear is pew, pew, pew when I watch it.) [via Boing Boing]

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