I'm not sure that the data is really correct, but what if you built a report that analyzed how many addresses were given out to each man, woman and child on a per country basis. That is what this report tried to do.

Michigan now has more cell phones than land lines.  A report indicates that the number of land lines is shrinking -- so it's not the pace of growth that is being compared.  In real terms the number of phone lines with wires is not just shinking but smaller in number than mobile phones.

Speedtest is a nifty little bandwidth tester that gives you some indication of the capability of your connection -- as tested from various servers around the world.  My office pays for 4Mbps service and the tests I did got 3.731Mbps from Los Angeles, 3.851Mbps from Chicago and 1.329Mbps from London.  The latency for the Chicago test averaged 54 milliseconds, Los ANgeles 111ms, and London 143 ms.  Upload rates clock in at about 320Kbps.

The failure to agree on a standard to replace the old 802.11g wireless networking standard is becoming ridiculous.  In fact, it is starting to remind me of those days when there were three separate and non-interoperable standards for 56k analog modems.  I'm not sure if you remember those days, but they cost consumers tons of money -- none of the equipment worked together.  Deja vu?

It's nice to be able to have a blog editor in your back pocket.  I rather like blogware's web-based interface, but I've always been interested in getting a local tool working for formatting blog entries.  I think I would use my blog more often if I had a local tool for entering articles.

I tried this after reading a review at an interesting web site run by Paul Stamatiou.  Interesting stuff.  Also interesting is a bashing of a Motorola Q!

I'm sort of fond of this web-based outlining and information management tool. It's called Backpack and I'm just in the process of trying out the free version. More later if I find it particularly useful.
There's another service that I'm fond of called NetVibes that allows you to do RSS aggregation in "Personalized Google" like screens.

Here's the idea: you get this little Skype Wi-Fi phone and connect to any Wi-Fi network. When you turn it on it asks you for your user name and password and then, voila!, your contact list and profile is downloaded to the phone. You can make calls from any public (or, if you have credentials, private networks) Wi-Fi network. Combined with SkypeOut this might be worth investigating.

The US Supreme Court has established quite clearly where its priorities lie: with large holders of intellectual property and copyright. In a ruling today the court indicated that networks are responsible for their customer's behavior. That is a real problem for media sharing networks -- even those that simply link customers together, rather than store the files themselves. What's deplorable about this is that suing ISPs won't be far off. If the networks can be held liable for the activites of subscribers independent activities, what about subscribers of ISPs and their activities. Bad, bad, bad.

I always find statistics interesting -- after all, part of my job is modelling utilization of Internet resources based on trends and changes in the marketplace. What is interesting about this report is the growth rate of broadband utilization in the UK. Among the G7 nations, the UK is seeing a 16.5% growth rate in the adoption of broadband. That is not a sustainable growth rate, of course, but it points to the success that broadband providers have had in the UK. It also points to the fact that new devices in the home will have to be supported with those broadband connections.

One of the most useful anti-spam measures is the authentication of the sender's SMTP server. This makes it possible to eliminate the phishing attacks that are so common. For instance, a mail message that appears to be from PayPal and requests that you update account data. The sender's email address looks valid and the mail looks genuine, but the links in the email take you to somebody else's site. Now it appears that two of the proposals for authenticating email (is the message really from who it says it is from?) have been approved by the IESG: this short article from Slashdot.

Rumors abound on the internet about Netflix "throttling" users. The basic idea is to ship movies later so that you get fewer movies a month and preserve revenue for Netflix. I'm not so sure that I'm a victim of this, but there is a site on the Web that shows my statistics at Netflix in the last year or so.

This Newsmap is my favorite way to read the news at Google.  It sorts the news by topic and then provides a map of each topic that is weighted by the number of stories it finds on the topic.

Here's how it works.  As you type Google looks at what you type and starts building a word list that is related to what you are providing.  For instance, when I type "Madison" I get "Madison Square Garden" and "Madison Public Library" and so forth.  You get the idea.

What is really interesting -- again, I should get a life here -- is the number links that each of the suggested search term has behind it.  As an example, "Madison Square Garden" has about the same number of entries as "Madison Weather." 

This makes for just one more interesting toy on Google - the Web's playground.

On Leoville, Leo Laporte reports that:

"AOL is giving its seal of approval to a reworked Microsoft anti-spam proposal. The technology, known as Sender ID, was rejected by the IETF last month because it was encumbered by Microsoft patents. The patent has been restated but it’s not clear whether open source advocates will accept the new proposal."

"rejected by the IETF" is strange wording in this case.  The proposal was soundly rejected by the open source community who disagreed -- not with the technology -- but with the license that was needed in order to incorporate the technology into products.  That AOL has accepted the proposal is an important development because AOL is a major player in the anti-spam effort, it understands the real place of authenticated mail, and it must have worked with Redmond behind the scenes to try to reach a compromise that was impossible in the volunteer world of the IETF.