loosy|goosy|ness - Blog

Email

• 90 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2009.
• 247 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
• 1.4 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
• 100 million – New email users since the year before.
• 81% – The percentage of emails that were spam.
• 92% – Peak spam levels late in the year.
• 24% – Increase in spam since last year.
• 200 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 81% are spam).

Websites

• 234 million – The number of websites as of December 2009.
• 47 million – Added websites in 2009.

Web servers

• 13.9% – The growth of Apache websites in 2009.
• -22.1% – The growth of IIS websites in 2009.
• 35.0% – The growth of Google GFE websites in 2009.
• 384.4% – The growth of Nginx websites in 2009.
• -72.4% – The growth of Lighttpd websites in 2009.

Domain names

• 81.8 million – .COM domain names at the end of 2009.
• 12.3 million – .NET domain names at the end of 2009.
• 7.8 million – .ORG domain names at the end of 2009.
• 76.3 million – The number of country code top-level domains (e.g. .CN, .UK, .DE, etc.).
• 187 million – The number of domain names across all top-level domains (October 2009).
• 8% – The increase in domain names since the year before.

Internet users

• 1.73 billion – Internet users worldwide (September 2009).
• 18% – Increase in Internet users since the previous year.
• 738,257,230 – Internet users in Asia.
• 418,029,796 – Internet users in Europe.
• 252,908,000 – Internet users in North America.
• 179,031,479 – Internet users in Latin America / Caribbean.
• 67,371,700 – Internet users in Africa.
• 57,425,046 – Internet users in the Middle East.
• 20,970,490 – Internet users in Oceania / Australia.

Social media

• 126 million – The number of blogs on the Internet (as tracked by BlogPulse).
• 84% – Percent of social network sites with more women than men.
• 27.3 million – Number of tweets on Twitter per day (November, 2009)
• 57% – Percentage of Twitter’s user base located in the United States.
• 4.25 million – People following @aplusk (Ashton Kutcher, Twitter’s most followed user).
• 350 million – People on Facebook.
• 50% – Percentage of Facebook users that log in every day.
• 500,000 – The number of active Facebook applications.

Images

• 4 billion – Photos hosted by Flickr (October 2009).
• 2.5 billion – Photos uploaded each month to Facebook.
• 30 billion – At the current rate, the number of photos uploaded to Facebook per year.

Videos

• 1 billion – The total number of videos YouTube serves in one day.
• 12.2 billion – Videos viewed per month on YouTube in the US (November 2009).
• 924 million – Videos viewed per month on Hulu in the US (November 2009).
• 182 – The number of online videos the average Internet user watches in a month (USA).
• 82% – Percentage of Internet users that view videos online (USA).
• 39.4% – YouTube online video market share (USA).
• 81.9% – Percentage of embedded videos on blogs that are YouTube videos.

Web browsers

Malicious software

• 148,000 – New zombie computers created per day (used in botnets for sending spam, etc.)
• 2.6 million – Amount of malicious code threats at the start of 2009 (viruses, trojans, etc.)
• 921,143 – The number of new malicious code signatures added by Symantec in Q4 2009.

Data sources: Website and web server stats from Netcraft. Domain name stats from Verisign and Webhosting.info. Internet user stats from Internet World Stats. Web browser stats from Net Applications. Email stats from Radicati Group. Spam stats from McAfee. Malware stats from Symantec (and here) and McAfee. Online video stats from Comscore, Sysomos and YouTube. Photo stats from Flickr and Facebook. Social media stats from BlogPulse, Pingdom (here and here), Twittercounter, Facebook and GigaOm.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for the iPhone to support Adobe’s Flash software: Apple’s terms-of-service agreement prohibits it.

Although Adobe says it is working on a version of its popular Flash player for the iPhone, Apple is unlikely ever to permit it to appear in the handset’s App Store, no matter how much customers want it.

“I’m pretty skeptical that Flash could be implemented in a way that doesn’t violate the Terms of Service of the developer’s agreement,” said Bart Decrem, CEO of Tapulous, developer of the popular Tap Tap Revenge iPhone game.

Flash is Adobe’s highly popular platform for displaying interactive graphics, animations and multimedia within a browser. According to Adobe, 98 percent of desktop computers currently support Flash, which has led to its widespread use by web developers. Adobe’s recent announcement that it is working on a version of Flash for Windows Mobile has prompted speculation that an iPhone version might be coming soon. But the speculators may be waiting in vain, based on Apple’s TOS and the company’s history of tightly controlling applications for its smartphone platform.

Allowing Flash — which is a development platform of its own — would just be too dangerous for Apple, a company that enjoys exerting total dominance over its hardware and the software that runs on it. Flash has evolved from being a mere animation player into a multimedia platform capable of running applications of its own. That means Flash would open a new door for application developers to get their software onto the iPhone: Just code them in Flash and put them on a web page. In so doing, Flash would divert business from the App Store, as well as enable publishers to distribute music, videos and movies that could compete with the iTunes Store.

Apple’s well aware of these problems, which is why the company wrote a clause in its iPhone developers’ Terms of Service agreement (.pdf) that prohibits Flash from appearing on the iPhone:

“An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise,” reads clause 3.3.2 of the iPhone SDK agreement, which was recently published on WikiLeaks. “No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple’s Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s).”

This could come as major disappointment to iPhone owners, as the lack of Flash support has been a paramount complaint about the handset since its release. No Flash means that the iPhone browser is incapable of displaying a large portion of the internet. For example, free Flash games aren’t supported, videos can’t be streamed from the vastly popular television and movie site Hulu, and websites that use Flash to render content or navigation won’t work on the iPhone.

It’s no wonder Adobe is expressing reluctance about the prospects of Flash for iPhone. The company on Monday demonstrated a version of Flash for Windows
Mobile handsets. And all that product manager Michele Turner could say about iPhone was, “We are working on Flash on the iPhone, but it is really up to Apple.”

Adam Dann, CEO of Nullriver, agrees that Flash would take away some of Apple’s control. Apple eventually banned Nullriver’s application NetShare because it violated AT&T Terms of Service agreement by turning the iPhone into a wireless modem for tethering. If Apple introduced Flash to iPhone, it’s possible Nullriver could code a Flash version of NetShare, repeating that violation, Dann said.

Dann added that the only way Flash could ever appear on the iPhone is if Adobe offered an extremely stripped-down version of the software. But even if there is a “Flash Lite” for iPhone, that just reinforces the point that the handset’s owners still will not have a true Flash experience.

And aside from taking software control away from Apple, Flash would introduce a slew of other potential headaches as well. Flash apps could hurt battery life, suck up the graphics-processing unit’s power, use an inordinate amount of memory, or potentially introduce security risks. Apple has plenty of customer complaints to address about the iPhone; the last thing it needs is to add Adobe and Flash to the pile.

In August, Britain’s Advertising Standards Authority pulled an iPhone advertisement because the commercial said, “All the parts of the internet are on the iPhone.” The lack of Flash and Java support on iPhone were enough for the ad to be deemed misleading. And it’s looking like Apple won’t be able to air that ad again.

Apple did not return phone calls for comment.

[via wired], [Download Apple iPhone SDK Agreement via wikileaks]

Its nearly hear. Microsoft has officially announced that next Tuesday on the 24th of November Power Pack 3 will be available via Windows Update.

The release will be available in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish and users must have Windows Home Server with Power Pack 2 already installed on their home server to receive the update.

Power Pack 3 (PP3) improves the Windows Home Server experience with both Windows 7 and Windows Media Center by providing backup and restore of computers running Windows 7, Windows 7 Libraries integration, enhancements for Windows Media Center, and better support for notebook computers.

That’s new in PP3:

• Windows 7 Libraries integration
  When you install the Windows Home Server Connector and log on a computer running Windows 7, you can access the Windows Home Server shared folders from the Windows 7 libraries.
• Windows 7 Action Center backup warning suppression
  After you install the Windows Home Server Connector to enable the home server backup for your computer running Windows 7, you can suppress the Action Center warning reminding you that Windows Backup has not been set up.
• Windows 7 power settings
  You can configure your computer running Windows 7 to wake up at a scheduled backup time and then go back to sleep after the backup finishes.
• Console support for Windows 7
  Windows 7 is properly displayed as the operating system shown in the Computers & Backup tab.
• Windows Search
  Windows Search 4 is included to improve query search times, indexing times, and reliability. Extended Remote Discovery increases the efficiency of searching across all your libraries running Windows Search 4.  Files encrypted with EFS are now supported.
• TV archive
  Windows Home Server can automatically archive recorded TV by moving your recordings from a Windows Media Center computer to your home server in the format of your choice.  This enables playback in the correct format for your home computers and/or portable devices.
• Console view
  You can view information about your home server’s storage space, hard drives, backup status, and more from Windows Media Center.

Can’t wait till Tuesday, can you?

Microsoft announced a broad range of new functionality for Bing, its search engine, on Nov. 11. In addition to incorporating results from Wolfram Alpha, a "computational engine" that provides a definitive numerical answer to a search query, the revamped Bing offers a more robust video page—with feeds from MSN Video, Hulu, and ABC—and more intensive search in categories such as local events and cities.

In a sign of the increased importance of social networking to corporations such as Microsoft and Google, Bing has also incorporated Facebook and Twitter into its search features.

New study places Firefox at the top of vulnerability list for for the first half of 2009:

Application security vendor Cenzic today released its security trends report for the first half of 2009 application. In it, Cenzic claims that the Mozilla's Firefox browser led the field of Web browsers in terms of total vulnerabilities.

According to Cenzic, Firefox accounted for 44 percent of all browser vulnerabilities reported in the first half of 2009. In contrast, Apple's Safari had 35 percent of all reported browser vulnerability, Microsoft's Internet Explorer was third at 15 percent and Opera had just six percent share.

The 2009 figures stand in contrast to Cenzic's Q3/Q4 2008 report, where IE accounted for 43 percent of all reported Web browser vulnerabilities and Firefox followed closely at 39 percent.

As to why Firefox's numbers were so high, Cenzic has a few ideas.

"It's a combination of different things," Lars Ewe, CTO of Cenzic, told InternetNews.com. "They've gotten more traction as a browser, which is good for them and the more you get used the more exposure you have. As well a fair amount of the vulnerabilities have come by way of plug-ins."

One key area that Ewe said was responsible for a number of reported Firefox vulnerabilities is with how the browser handles plug-ins.

"The plug-in architecture that they have is a selling fact for the browser and one of the reasons why I love using it," Ewe said. "They can't control security aspects of all the plug-ins and the vulnerabilities are a side effect of that."

Mozilla has made numerous efforts this year to bolster its plug-in security. Recently they launched a plug-in checker service to ensure that users are running up-to-date versions. The Firefox 3.0.9 update, which came out in April, specifically addressed several key plug-in vulnerabilities.

Though Firefox had the highest number of vulnerabilities, that doesn't necessarily mean that Firefox users were more vulnerable.

Ewe said that Cenzic looked at all reported vulnerabilities. There is no specific differentiation for zero day bugs in the browser vulnerability count either. All that raises the question of how Cenzic actually came up with their vulnerability counts in the first place.

"The process that we follow is looking at a number of different vulnerability databases and sources that we have and trying to come up with a fair percentage based on the deviations we see between the databases," Ewe said. "You could make the argument, that's its 40 percent or 42 percent and there might be some variation on how you analyze it, but certainly it's not off by 20 percent."

While the Cenzic report shows Firefox at the top of the browser vulnerability pile, Ewe was quick to note that Cenzic uses Mozilla technology within its own solutions.

"Full disclosure here, Mozilla plays an important role in Cenzic's solution," Ewe said. "We are actually sitting on top of Mozilla as our agent of preference for scanning sites."

Cenzic develops an application scanning solution that uses the underlying Mozilla browser technology to test out security on Web site insides of a real browser context.

"We have a technology that we refer to as stateful assessment technology," Ewe said. "The idea behind it is to have as faithful an interaction with a Web site as possible and to determine vulnerabilities not on simple signatures but on behavioral basis of the application."

Ewe explained that when you do a cross-site scripting attack with a signature-based approach you'd just look for a server response that would indicate that the script tag has been injected. He added that the problem with that approach is that it's not faithful and the security researcher doesn't know if there is any additional logic on the client side that takes care of the script tag.

"If you want to be really faithful in the process you need to have full rendering capabilities and have all the JavaScript event handling," Ewe said. "So we leverage the entire Firefox architecture in order for us to actually have as faithful an interaction with a server as possible and maintain the client state. That results in low false-positives."

Source: www.internetnews.com

This exploration combines ideas for more natural multi-touch hardware with a smartly simplified canvas interface:

Source: http://10gui.com

Zune HD is the latest player in the Zune device family, available in 16GB and 32GB capacities and is the first touch screen Zune with HD functionality and powerful technology to give consumers a different way to experience music and video on-the-go.

• HD Radio –Zune HD comes with a built-in FM HD Radio receiver enabling users to tune to more free stations with even better clarity and sound quality.
• HD Video Out – Connect your Zune HD to the optional Zune Premium A/V docking station and watch HD videos, TV shows and movies in your large screen TV in 720p high definition
• Internet Browser and Wi-Fi - Zune HD includes a full-screen Internet browser optimized for multi-touch and Wi-Fi connectivity

Zune Software

• QuickPlay – A whole new user interface that offers one-click access to your favorites, and recent activity on both the PC and your Zune HD
• Smart DJ -  With one click, Zune becomes your personal DJ, creating and serving you an endless playlist based on the genre, style and influences of the song or artist you choose

Zune Services (Zune Marketplace and Zune.net)

• For the first time, Zune Marketplace is offering full-length movies in HD and SD format for download and rental; download HD TV shows and movies and watch them on your Zune or PC.  Or with the optional A/V docking station, watch them in high definition on your HDTV
• Zune.net Streaming - With a Zune Pass, stream music directly from Zune.net from any internet-connected computer.  No client software download needed
• Zune Pass - Access nearly 6 million songs for only $14.99 a month and keep 10 free MP3 downloads each month 
• Zune Pass + SmartDJ - If you have a Zune Pass you can use SmartDJ to stream an endless playlist from the nearly 6 million song Zune catalog from any internet connected PC via Zune.net, no download required

Expansion into Xbox

• Later this fall, Microsoft will bring the Zune video service to the nearly 20 million Xbox Live users as Zune becomes the video store for Xbox Live
• “Buy Once, Play Anywhere” - Consumers will be able to buy a movie once and watch it on multiple devices:  Xbox 360, Zune device and PC

Pricing

• Zune HD 16GB for $219.99 on Amazon (as of 9/17/09)
• Zune HD 32GB for $289.99 on Amazon (as of 9/17/09)

Zune HD is available in the retail channel on Sept 15, but for the time being the Zune HD device will remain US only.

Learn more: http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/zunehd/default.htm

Slingbox owners love their devices. They allow you to watch your home television content anywhere you are in the world with an Internet connection. A new startup, Spawn Labs, launching today at TechCrunch50 wants to extend that concept to video games.

But Spawn Labs offering is actually a bit more robust because it includes a social element as well. A key part to playing video games is playing them against other people. And with the Spawn HD Pro appliance, you’ll be able to do just that. Say a friend has an Xbox 360 in California and wants to play a game against you, but you’re in New York. From New York, you would simply install the Spawn Player application on your computer, and you could remotely connect to their system, to play a game.

The key to all of this is of course the Spawn HD Pro box, which will retail for $199 (available on their site today). These boxes will be able to transmit HD-quality (720p) content over the Internet to the computer on the other end. On those computers, users can play the game with an input device of their choosing.

The idea of playing popular video games over the web is a hot area right now. The two most well-known names in this field are OnLive and OTOY. But both of those are attempting to use their own servers to create a completely online experience, Spawn Labs is simply allowing you to take an existing console and transmit the content over the Internet. Of course, one potential issue with this method is that someone must be on the other end (where the console is) to make sure it has the game disc you want to play inside of it.

Eventually, the plan is to expand Spawn Labs’ technology beyond video games as well. They’d basically like to handle any and all video content over their box. Computers, other set-top boxes, and even mobile devices are all in the pipeline to be hooked up to Spawn Labs’ services.

Today, President and CEO David Wilson presented alongside QA engineer Daniel Bethke.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.

Q: Is it a weakness to have one game in at a time?
DW: That is something we thought about, but the direction of the industry is to have games on console’s hard drives.

Q: How do the graphics travel? And is this software on the console itself eventually?
DW: When you’re in a bandwidth constrained around, the network will downscale.

Q: So this is more targeted in the home?
DW: We’re targeting both.

Q: The bet is that customers will pay $200 for a hardware device to play games remotely. How often do players do that?
DW: Right now they can’t do it. But there is a strong desire for this. We have orders from several of the top game developers in the world for this.

Q: What kind of support?
DW: It runs any game on the supported consoles. (Xbox 360, Wii, Gabecube, PS3, etc)

Q: This also assumes the player has their controller?
DW: You don’t need one, but you can use any controller you want.

Q:  What about the handhelds?
DW: Theoretically yes, not sure yet though.

Pictures:

Source: http://www.techcrunch.com