Internet Brownouts

Internet users face regular “brownouts” that will freeze their computers as capacity runs out in cyberspace, according to research to be published later this year.


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Predicting the future

Real-time web search – which scours only the latest updates to services like Twitter – is currently generating quite a buzz because it can provide a glimpse of what people around the world are thinking or doing at any given moment.

The latest research from Google, though, suggests that real-time results could be even more powerful – they may reveal the future as well as the present.

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Could the net become self-aware

In engineering terms, it is easy to see qualitative similarities between the human brain and the internet's complex network of nodes, as they both hold, process, recall and transmit information. "The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind," says Ben Goertzel, chair of the Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute, an organisation inevitably based in cyberspace. "It might already have a degree of consciousness".

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The Internet has yet to stop working

Spurred by a new wave of Skype-linked families, Hulu-watching flash mobs, and HD-video downloaders, global internet traffic is likely to quadruple by 2012. That’s an internet 75 times larger than it was just five years ago. It will be generating 27 exabytes—nearly 7 billion DVDs worth—of data each month.

Internet service providers are simply ramping up their infrastructure upgrade plans in response to the traffic growth.

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A Terabit Internet

Two groups of engineers—one from Australia and Denmark and the other from California—have independently created new optics technologies that could greatly increase the Internet’s speed limits. The key to the new technologies is nonlinear optics, in which physics allows for an optical fiber’s properties to be adjusted from moment to moment.

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Peer-To-Patent via the USPTO

By using the power of the Internet to tap the wisdom of the masses, Peer-to-Patent aims to dig up hard-to-find "prior art" — evidence that an invention already exists or is obvious and therefore doesn't deserve a patent.

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Peer-to-Patent Community

First Terabit Speed Computing

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego have achieved world-record speeds for real-time signal processing in an effort to meet ambitious goals set by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop the first Terabit-scale technology for optical processing. The technology could have widespread ramifications for networking, computing, defense and other industries.

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2008 --186.7 million websites

The Internet was populated with more than 186.7 million websites at the end of 2008, according to data released by Netcraft.

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