Paul Miller, a technology writer for The Verge, performed a curious experiment over the last year: He quit the Internet. Miller replaced his smartphone with a feature phone. He got his news through TV and newspapers. He embarked on what he thought would be a liberating journey to find himself and a life not dominated by the immediacy of information and communication.

What he ultimately found was himself. Warts and all.

Noble But Naïve

Miller's experiment, while noble, reeks of naïveté. People like to think they can change the way they are by changing their circumstances. Oftentimes somebody will move to a new city and say, “I am going to be a whole different person now.” It rarely works that way. Real behavioral, emotional and characteristic change is not something that happens overnight.

At first, Miller’s experiment started well. He biked more, got outside and found that his attention span was longer. Life without the Internet, he found, was oddly liberating. 

For a little while, at least. 

Miller writes:

A year in, I don't ride my bike so much. My frisbee gathers dust. Most weeks I don't go out with people even once. My favorite place is the couch. I prop my feet up on the coffee table, play a video game, and listen to an audiobook. I pick a mindless game, like Borderlands 2 or Skate 3, and absently thumb the sticks through the game-world while my mind rests on the audiobook, or maybe just on nothing.

The Law Of Unintended Reality

It is undoubtedly true that the Internet is changing the intricacies of human behavior. This effect is especially pronounced among younger individuals who have known only a life with the Internet ever-available just a swipe or keystroke away.

Yet, ultimately, Internet or no, Miller’s own behavioral traits asserted themselves.

When I first read of Miller’s yearlong trial, my first thought was to applaud. I respected the project for its experimental and journalistic merits. I have seen other young people that have become disillusioned with the Internet and the life they lead on it and attempted to escape. Former ReadWrite author Jon Mitchell might describe himself that way. 

But as I thought about it a little more, Miller’s decision to leave the Internet struck me as, to be honest, kind of dumb. I wish there was a nicer word for it. But, instead of trying to cope with his perceived personal deficiencies, he fled from them.  It seems Miller had decided that his sense of self and worth was defined by the Web, so he tried to change things overnight. In the end, he just changed his location.

Miller admits to going through the modern psycho-sociological phenomenon known as a “quarter-life crisis.” This period of a person’s life, usually occurring between the ages of 24 to 26, is defined by a lack of definition. The behaviors, world concepts and sense of self built up since the teenage years come in doubt. These 20-somethings face the task of figuring out, yet again, who they really are. Sometimes they key on the notion that what had defined them before is the source of their problems and the best way to fix things is to completely disassociate with their previous life. For Miller, that definition of self stemmed from the Internet. He has lived on the Web since he was 12, earning his livelihood on it since he was 14. 

I totally get what was going on. My own story is not so different from Miller’s. I started cooking professionally when I was 14. By the time I was in my early 20s, I was a trained chef. By 25, I would’ve given anything to get out of the kitchen and be a different person. Though my experience was not tied to the Web, the framework was similar. While I was able to successfully change careers (to the Web, ironically), I did not change the type of human being I was. Only time did that.

The Unexamined Life

There is a reason that our series on stepping back from from the Internet life is called ReadWrite Pause and not ReadWrite Quit or ReadWrite Disconnect. We realize it is healthy to step away, read a book, write something by hand or just Digital Detox for a couple of days. But we also know the difference between taking a break and giving up.

The Internet is what we make of it. Luckily, I have never had a problem turning off the computer to read a long book or go on a long bike ride. I have learned to compartmentalize my digital self from my physical self. The Internet does not define me. It is a part of what I do and what makes me… me. But it is not the core of my existence. 

Miller, in the end, came to a similar conclusion:

But then I spoke with Nathan Jurgenson, a ‘net theorist’ who helped organize the conference [on Theorizing the Web]. He pointed out that there's a lot of "reality" in the virtual, and a lot of "virtual" in our reality. When we use a phone or a computer we're still flesh-and-blood humans, occupying time and space.

Maybe it's just me, but that seems kind of obvious.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

People want their television to work like a TV. Sending tweets on Twitter, posting photos on Facebook and browsing the Web are best left to smartphones and tablets. Indeed, more than 40% of U.S. households with Internet-enabled TVs haven't even bothered to hook them up to the Web, according to market researcher NPD Group.

This is not the future TV manufacturers expected.

RIP, Smart TV

In 2010, reimagining TVs as computer hybrids with big screens for the living room seemed to make lots of sense. Why not play games, run applications and surf the Web from the same box that shows movies and programming from a cable or satellite provider? Proponents quickly dubbed the new device the "smart TV."

Intel, sensing a new market for its microprocessors, was a huge supporter, saying the smart TV "could be the most significant change in television history." Yet by end of 2011, Intel had abandoned the smart TV business to focus on smartphones and tablets.

The main problem was that what Samsung, LG big TV makers delivered was a mishmash of applications that had nothing to do with watching TV — the main reason people gather around the big box in the first place. Unsurprisingly, very few consumers wanted to spend more for supposed next-generation television sets that included a bunch of features they didn't want in the first place.

Today, the TV is evolving much differently. Internet video now comes to the set via other devices such as the Apple TV, Roku and Boxee Box. Nearly six in 10 consumers who own an Internet-connected high-definition TV use such services to supplement pay TV subscriptions, NPD says.

As for other once-vaunted "smart TV" activities — reading or posting on Twitter or Facebook, reading digital books or magazines, video calling, shopping or gaming — well, they attract well below 10% of such people.

Second-Screen TV

Video is clearly what people want on their TVs, so pay TV providers have turned their attention to tablet apps. Instead of shipping expensive set-top boxes, service providers want people to use tablets to find movies, see what friends are watching and browse their favorite programming.

The apps will add to the enjoyment of watching TV by providing player stats in a baseball game or actor bios and behind-the-scene clips from the users' favorite shows. These apps could yield be a goldmine of subscriber data that can be fed to advertisers who could then turn around and use the information to target advertising.

Having an app that knows your viewing habits could be useful when you're traveling. Imagine connecting your tablet to the TV in a hotel room and immediately having the same viewing experience you have at home.

"The TV needs to be more like a docking station," Paul Gray, analyst for DisplaySearch, an NPD company, told me. "It needs to play nice with these mobile devices."

Panasonic is one of the first manufacturers to ship televisions capable of communicating wirelessly with a tablet. Rivals will surely follow suit, as manufacturers emphasize seamless integration with mobile devices.

Dumb Monitors Need Not Apply

To call these sets "dumb monitors" would oversimplify things. A lot of good engineering is needed to provide reliable interoperability with any tablet or smartphone, irrespective of whether it runs Android or Apple's iOS.

"I do contest people who say that TV ends up as sort of a big dumb monitor," Gray says. "You actually probably need quite a lot of intelligence, but it's kind of under the hood."

TV manufacturers, however, are still stuck in the same box they've long tried to escape: Their products are mostly all alike and thus hard to differentiate. Shifts in broadcast technology — such as NTSC to HD, and before long, HD to 4K — or screen technology (LCD vs. LED, for instance) enable some innovation, but once things shake out and picture quality is comparable across models, TV sets once again become commodites. That leaves Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and the rest with price cuts and not much more to lure buyers.

Commoditization is the curse of the consumer electronics industry. TV makers will look for ways to add value after the use of second-screen apps become mainstream. The trick will be to avoid another failure like the smart TV.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

The first public site on the World Wide Web — a rudimentary text-only primer on its use — once again lives at its original URL to celebrate the Web's 20th anniversary today.

CERN, the European science laboratory where the Web was born (and where physicists are now exploring the origins of the universe with the world's largest particle accelerator) first made the page public on April 30, 1993. A 1992 copy of the page had been available on the W3C servers, but only returned to its original location today. That's it below; click the image for a larger version.

You've come a long way, baby

CERN intends to collect, restore and preserve all of the digital material related to the Web's beginnings in order to turn info.cern.ch into a virtual museum and archive, reports the Verge. 

Turns out the world hadn't quite heard the last of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist and Reddit co-founder who killed himself in January. The makers of an unreleased documentary about the fight over the open Internet, War for the Web, have just released a snippet of unedited footage from what they call "the last video interview with Aaron Swartz." It's embedded below.

We don't have any way to independently verify the filmmakers' claim to Swartz's "last" video interview (it was filmed on July 10, 2012). And near as I can tell, the portion of the interview released so far — this clip is about eight minutes long, whereas the entire thing runs "several hours," according to the film's PR rep — doesn't appear to break much new ground.

In particular, it doesn't even raise the federal prosecution of Swartz for surreptitiously downloading — the feds termed it "stealing" — four million academic articles from an academic database called JSTOR, an overzealous pursuit that some critics believe contributed to Swartz's suicide. Unsurprisingly, the interview doesn't touch on Swartz's long battle with depression, either.

But it's still an engaging eight-minute conversation with a handsome and articulate activist who now looms as large — if not larger — in death as he did in life. The best part comes at around 5:00 in the interview, where Swartz waxes philosophical on the threat that copyright maximalism, as embodied in bills like SOPA and the ongoing war against digital piracy, poses to creativity and innovation.

See for yourself.

Update, 9:31am PT: Turns out this video is an eight-minute excerpt of a much longer interview, a fact that wasn't clear from the information the filmmakers' representative initially provided us. I've updated the item throughout to make that clear.

If you were to guess how many people logged in to Facebook in a single minute, what would you say? 10,000? 100,000? According to a new infographic posted by Intel, it's a staggering 277,000 logins every minute, even as six million Facebook pages are getting viewed in that same period.

The scale of the Internet is something that most of us have trouble understanding, because the numbers are so staggeringly big. That's why infographics like the one Intel put together last year are so helpful — by breaking down the Internet into what happens in one minute, the numbers are at least a little more manageable.

(See also: Peta, Exa, Yotta And Beyond: Big Data Reaches Cosmic Proportions [Infographic])

And it will do nothing but grow. By 2015, Intel estimates, the number of Internet connections will double that of the world's population.

Get out the popcorn and take a look at the infographic for more figures that will stretch your perception of what can happen in a single minute. (Click the image for a full-size version.)

[Update: The infographic referenced was produced in 2012, not 2013, and the article has been updated to reflect that.]

Images courtesy of Intel.

Microsoft has launched a Kenyan pilot network of solar-powered towers that tap into unlicensed "white space" frequencies to provide wireless connectivity to rural communities in the east African nation. Microsoft also said it would contribute "tens of millions of smart devices" in consumers and small businesses by 2016, with a phone it co-designed with Huawei.

Microsoft's work is being done as part of its Microsoft4Afrika Initiative, which aims to bring 1 million African businesses online and assist up to 200,000 Africans by teaching them entrepreneurship and other business skills. The technology deployed in Africa could be eventually deployed in the U.S.

You might think of this as a charity. It's not. In fact, this project highlights an interesting dichotomy with how some people see efforts by charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, plus celebrities like Bono and Bob Geldof, who allegedly collect money for Africa, but don't actually provide the means for Africa to grow - turning Africa into a "theme park for good intentions."

For Microsoft, this is about investment. 

"When we look at the world, many see China or the BRIC countries as the next big opportunity for growth," Ali Faramawy, corporate vice president, for Microsoft Middle East & Africa, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. "At Microsoft, we view the African continent as a game-changer in the global economy."

So what is Microsoft doing besides just donating money? Building.

Kenya Gets More Broadband

In collaboration with the government of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communications and Indigo Telecom Ltd., Microsoft said it would launch a pilot project, dubbed "Mawingu," delivering low-cost wireless broadband access to previously unserved locations near Nanyuki and Kalema, Kenya. The base stations use solar panels, often mounted on roofs, and conventional TV aerials, according to a video of the technology. 

So-called "white space" frequencies are the Wild West of radio, unlicensed spectrum not currently being used. As such, they run free of interference, which can improve their range and performance. Microsoft is teaming with Adaptrum to develop the base stations, while trying to convince local governments to adopt the technology continent-wide. Up to 6,000 people will eventually be served by the stations.

In the U.S., the technology is slowly making its way through the FCC, as long as it doen't impede licensed frequencies. The FCC is collecting "databases" of the available frequencies, so radio devices can stick to these white spaces.

First World Disconnect

Somewhat crassly, the video also includes scenes of Microsoft executives handing out Surface tablets to rural African students. The disparity between the brightly colored tablets and the packed dirt floors of the school does make one wonder whether Microsoft's money could be better spent, until the students begin quickly flicking through the tablets, and apparently start learning. Indigo Telecom chairman's metaphor of a "mist of information" floating over the school suddenly seems less hyperbolic. And yes, the kids can apparently use Windows 8.

Microsoft will also co-develop a low-cost Windows Phone 8 phone with Huawei, the Asian developer who has specialized in low-cost phones. The phone looks like any other Windows Phone: it's a customized version of the Ascend W1, launched at CES last month: 4-inch 480 x 800 touch LCD, 5 Mpixel camera, dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 and Adreno 305 GPU. More importantly, however, it can deliver up to 420 hours of standby time and 560 minutes of 3G talk time via aggressive power saving.  

The phone will initially be available in Angola, Egypt, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa later this month. The Huawei 4Afrika phone, which is the first in a series of smart devices branded with “4Afrika,” will be targeted toward university students, developers and first-time smartphone users, the company said.

It's not the first smartphone designed for the continent. Safaricom and Intel launched the Yolo in Nairobi last month, powered by Kenya's Safaricom.

Microsoft's Charity Track Record

Granted, it appears that Microsoft's 4Afrika Initiative will place millions of Windows Phones and Surface devices into Africa as part of the program through the next few years. Cynics will chuckle snidely and call this dumping failed products into a market where they'll never be seen again.

That's not the way it should be seen. Whether charity or investment, few companies take the time, or spend the money, to improve developing nations. Last September, Microsoft said it would "close the opportunity divide" through YouthSpark, funded by $500 million over three years.

Between July 2011 and June 2012, Microsoft gave $900 million in cash and software to more than 62,200 nonprofits worldwide, Microsoft representatives said. Of this total, nearly $100 million in cash alone was donated to charities through the employee giving program. Since 1983, Microsoft employees have raised $1 billion in cash (inclusive of the company match) for more than 31,000 nonprofits and community organizations around the world. Kenya's Daily Nation reported that Microsoft will spend the equivalent of $75 million as part of the 4Afrika Initative. That's 6.52 billion Kenyan shillings.

That kind of investment goes a long way in Africa.

(Updated at 3:39 PM with additional comment from Microsoft.)

Dan Lyons's provocative question about Why Do American’s Hate Android And Love Apple?, got me to thinking about even larger questions involving my fellow countrymen's relationship to technology.

A.J. Schuler, in his 2003 paper, "Resistance to Change," lays out 10 reasons why people resist change. His first two points may help us understand why we cling to technology that might not be the best for us.

1. The risk of change is seen as greater than the risk of standing still.
2. People feel connected to other people who are identified with the old way.

Why Did Macs Never Rule America?

Dan suggests one reason Americans support the iPhone is because "Apple is an American company, and Americans like to root for the home team." He also says "lawsuits against Android phone makers have been an effective form of marketing" and that Apple fanboys have depicted Android users as "low-class people who are uneducated, poor, cheap and too lacking in `taste.'"

While we might like the home team and being part of the cool-guy club, there is more to iPhone love than Apple and its "superior" marketing.

For instance, when Dan asks, “Why do such a huge majority of Americans go out of their way to choose Apple?” he is talking about smartphones - because as a country we are not really in love with Apple’s computers. According to Ars Technica even at their peak of popularity, the computers of Apple have never even been one third as popular as the iPhone.

From 1996 until his death, Steve Jobs tried fairly unsuccessfully to get Americans public to embrace the Mac the way they now love, love, love the iPhone. (As a former Apple employee, this is a problem that I lived first hand.)

For many years after Mac OS X’s initial release on March 24, 2001, it was arguably the best desktop operating system in the world. For one thing, OS X was far more secure than Windows XP. Whole agencies in the federal government could be taken down by a virus or worm attack, but their CIOs would cling to Windows XP like they were married to it.

Many businesses were even worse. And it isn't all about not liking Apple. Many companies still cling to Windows XP when almost anyone with computer experience will tell you that Windows 7 is a far superior operating system. And let's not even talk about Windows 8.

Because Everyone Else Is Doing It - And They Will Help You

So why are the 11-year-old Windows XP and the no-longer-clearly-superior iPhone still so beloved?

It could be because they were the first widely accepted products of their type. While the Macintosh brought us the first graphical user interface, it was never as widely accepted as Windows. People got used to Windows, and the risk of going to something different became greater than the risk of sticking with XP.

In a similar fashion there were smartphones before the iPhone - but Apple's breakthrough was the first one to be widely accepted.

In technology, "being connected to other people who are identified with the old way" also means that you have a support system of people to call if you screw things up.

If you needed assistance when Windows XP broke, you probably knew someone who could help. And if you have a problem with your iPhone, how hard is it to find another iPhone user?

Fast Food - But Not Fast Internet?

It is not just Microsoft’s operating systems or Apple’s smartphone technology that Americans cling to. We seem perfectly happy with slow Internet access that even Russia and the notably technology adverse British wouldn't tolerate.

“Technology adverse British” is actually a slam our friends across the pond do not deserve. The Brits have adopted smartphones faster than the United States.

It's An American Thing, You Wouldn't Understand

Still, I wonder how America, birthplace to the personal computer and so many other technologies, has become so complacent when it comes to adopting the latest and greatest. I worry about the security vulnerabilities caused by our government’s refusal to aggressively diversify its operating system portfolio.

But whatever you think of iPhones or Windows XP, there is one thing that we should all be able to rally around: faster Internet connections.

Once we see the positive results of forcing change even when we are comfortable hugging our cable modems, perhaps change will come easier to us the next time.

That's important, because a "good enough for me" attitude towards technology is not the best way to keep up with the global economy. And we might fall even further behind if our international competitors can see more on their larger smartphone screens.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Which generation rules the Internet? Conventional wisdom has it that the Millennials are the most connected cohort in history. The only problem is that the conventional wisdom may not be true. 

The inter-generational habits of Internet denizens have been revealed in a numbers-rich infographic posted this week, which reveals that among Baby Boomers, Generation X and the Millennial generations, it's the GenXers that spend more time online and produce more data than their children and their parents. (More analysis below the infographic...)

Wikibon's infographic pulls together a rich collection of stats, including the total data footprints of the three generations. Generation X leads the way, consuming 59.6GB of data per month, with Millennials close behind at 54.GB and Baby Boomers trailing with 44.8GBb.

TV vs. Work

Wikibon is not just counting computer and mobile surfing habits in its estimates… it's also added television watching to the tally. While Baby Boomers watch more traditional television than do the other two generations, the combination of traditional and online viewing still pushes the GenXers over the top for the video viewing data footprint.

Generation X, defined as those born between 1965-1983, also has a higher percentage of desktop computer owners and spends more time online. But their Millennial kids, born 1984-2002, have a higher percentage of Internet users, and dominate the mobile surfing habits.

One reason why Millennials have the lower footprint online than their parents is clearly the lack of television the kids are watching on TV sets (110 hours to their folks' 145 hours). Much of their video consumption happens online, where Millenials watch nearly 23.5 hours of video a month, compared to the less than 15 hours GenXers watch online.

But even taking TV out of the equation, Generation X and even Baby Boomers spend more time surfing on computers than do the young ones. One reason may lie in device preference, because kids are much more likely to use a mobile device than a computer to surf.

Another reason may be due to work: many Millennials are still in college, or just entering the workplace, and therefore aren't online for professional reasons as much as their parents and even their grandparents - who either haven't retired yet or are working a part-time job.

Data Generation Is Exploding!

But perhaps the most telling stat in this infographic can be be found at the very top: from the beginning of time until 2003, humans generated 5 billion gigabytes of data. That's 4.9 million terabytes, or 4.66 exabytes. Right now, we generate that much data every two days… and by 2014, we'll be creating that much data every 10 minutes. You think data is big now? This is the kind of stat that gets database engineers reaching for the nearest bottle (aspirin, vodka, it doesn't matter...).

As generations continue to adapt to new technologies and create this mega-data, their online habits could change, of course. And that evolution will remain of overwhelming interest to the marketers and entertainment companies who need to know where their intended audiences are hanging out online and what they are doing there.

What do you do if your teenage daughter is addicted to videogames and Internet porn? For one South Korea family, the answer is to enroll your daughter in a horse riding therapy program. And by all accounts, it did the trick.

Horse Therapy

I guess that’s one way to sublimate your daughter’s budding sexual desires. Reports Reuters:

Four months ago, the parents of a teenage South Korean girl were at their wits' end over her addiction to surfing the Internet for pornography.

Kim's parents tried art, music therapy and persistent nagging to try and stem their daughter's addiction.

When none of these worked, her school suggested the Riding Healing Center, a therapy organisation that uses horse-riding to cure emotional and behavioral disorders, which it believes are an underlying cause of internet addiction.

And the equine therapy worked! Kim used to send seven hours or more on her computer, but now her mother says she “barely goes on the Internet,” and when she does, “she makes a promise to me first about how long she will play on the computer.”

Fun With A Living Thing

Yoosook Joung, a Doctor of child psychiatry at Samsung Medical Centre, explained to Sky News the horse riding worked not just because it is "a very fun" physical activity, but also incorporates "a living thing" which ends up forging an "emotional connection" that can "help overcome Internet addiction."  

It is unclear if giving dogs and cats to those suffering from Internet addiction, which Korean government data estimates affects 680,000 children (or 10% of the total population under 19), would work as well as horses.

Besides this horse therapy program, which plans on building 30 additional facilities by 2022 to meet "rising demand," South Koreans have used anti-depressants as treatment for Starcraft 2 videogame addicts, and specifically for minors, instated a "Shutdown Law" that prevents anyone under the age of 16 from playing on the Internet past midnight. This Shutdown Law, however, is easily circumvented by teens like Kim who admitted to playing on the Internet all night long whenever her parents were away by using their accounts instead of hers.

Internet Addiction Is A Worldwide Problem

South Korea isn't the only Asian nation restricting minors' use of the Internet; Thailand banned the use of cyber cafes for minors from 10pm to 2pm in 2006, and the Philippines did something similar way back in 1999. The popularity of cyber cafes has waned given the accessibility of personal computers and smartphones, but the appeal of the Internet has not.      

Internet addiction is a buzzword in the United States as well, but a simpler solution - compared to giving everyone horses, anti-depressants or banning Internet usage at certain times for minors - would be education about the effects of being on the Internet for, say, seven or more hours a day.

Basically, the idea is that there is more to life than the Internet (gasp).  Dancing therapy, for instance, is successfully combating Internet addiction in teen males in China. 

Image courtesy of Lana K/Shutterstock.

Last week California Rep. Darrell Issa took to Reddit to introduce and field questions about his new draft law to keep the Internet free from legislative changes for the next two years. And the Republican politician got eaten alive by members of the left leaning site.  

Detractors challenged everything from Isaa's wishy-washy record with previous Internet regulation laws (he supported CISPA, the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, yet vocally opposed SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act) to the broad language of his new Internet American Moratorium Act (IAMA), calling it a backdoor way to curb the FCC's mandate on net neutrality and a PR move to use Reddit as a soapbox to appeal to the online demographic. 

This isn't Issa's first time to the Internet rodeo. He hosted a Reddit AMA exchange earlier this year (before President Obama did, see I Am A President - Obamamania Shuts Down Reddit) to speak on his regulation stance. In November, Isaa took to TechCrunch to explain Making Government Suck Less (seriously, that's the name of the article he wrote). The result there was very similar to his Reddit move: Issa got skewered.  

Questions And... Answers?

“I’m trying to create a two-year cooling off period on new Internet rules, regulations and laws. Period. I believe that is a good thing right now,” Issa said during the Reddit AMA. 

Issa, who his office described to me as a "frighteningly big geek," said while the move to introduce the bill on Reddit doesn't create greater transparency of the legislative process, it does spark debate and give a voice to the Internet. Hundreds of comments later, that's proved to be a huge understatement.  

"This was Congressman Issa’s second AMA, so he knew what to expect," Issa's office wrote in an email to RW. "Reddit users tend to value individual liberty, technology and open debate, values shared by the Congressman, and the AMA format itself is a good way to start the discussion on how government should or should not interfere with the Internet."

And Issas's office says the bill is not aimed at any particular policy or regulation. They frame it as a way for everyone potentially impacted by new Internet-related laws or rules to come together, learn from one another and actually understand the issues at stake.

What's Really Going On?

Here's the meat of the bill: "It is resolved in the House of Representatives and Senate that they shall not pass any new legislation for a period of 2 years from the date of enactment of this Act that would require individuals or corporations engaged in activities on the Internet to meet additional requirements or activities."

So what does this mean? Really?

Since most people and businesses are engaged in "activities on the Internet," the bill is a broad stretch, clearly over-reaching in its hopes to restrict Congress' power. It's likely more about gaining publicity and congressional support than actually becoming law. 

That's why Suji Mohanty, a cloud strategist at Hewlett Packard, is convinced of the futility of Isaa's proposal. "I do not see the bill passing," Mohanty said. "It could lead to a host of other issues such as lack of bipartisan support for any future legislation regarding net neutrality."

Internet Explorer is slowly, slightly, but significantly changing the Web.

Tuesday, Microsoft released a preview of IE10 running on Windows 7, as expected -- the same version that’s available for the new Windows 8, but translated into the older Windows 7. At the same time, executives with Microsoft’s IE team made the case that content providers have begun incorporating IE10-specific features into their sites, which would benefit those surfing on Microsoft’s latest OS, Windows 8, which has IE10 built in.

The move may be a response to Google’s Chrome, whose download page tells people to “get their Google back.” Google released both Google search apps and Chrome for Windows 8 last month, as well as a Windows RT-specific search app on Monday afternoon.

But with just the tiniest change to the functionality of Etsy.com, Pulse.me, and MSN, Microsoft is signaling that IE 10 might be taking a small step toward a more useful, and Microsoft-centric, Web.

Swiping To Save Time

Take Etsy, where shoppers can browse from literally hundreds of items in the jewelry section alone. Scroll down in the “brooch” section, for example, and a shopper can scroll, scroll, scroll down to the bottom. To get to the next page, those using IE9 and others have to click the right arrow at the bottom. On IE10, they simply swipe right anywhere along the list.

Is this revolutionary? Maybe not. Etsy could simply break up the list of items into smaller chunks, adding a floating navigation arrow on the site, or even adding navigation elements at the top of the list. But, according to Ryan Gavin, the general manager of Internet Explorer, the simple left and right swipe on sites that offer pages and pages of text -- shopping sites, discussion forums, and others -- is a feature that only IE10 offers. Under Windows 8, Google says that Chrome doesn’t even offer pinch-to-zoom. It’s a change that Windows 8 and its touch-centric interface has affected the Web.

“When I’m working with apps, when I’m working with People, when I’m working with the core Start Screen experience, all that works well,” Gavin said. “And then I go onto the Web. And then you have an experience bolted on to something else [with Chrome]. Consumers are saying that’s not what they want any more. They don’t want to think about those two [experiences]. That part, that touch, that whole fluidity, I think that will play a huge part of people’s choice on Windows 8.”

The difference between Chrome and Windows 8's implementation of IE10 is also an aesthetic one: On a tablet, Chrome shows up as a typical browser, with tabs. Microsoft's recent work with Contre Jour pulls the Web out of the browser, so that the Web app fills the screen. People can swipe in and out to expose the Windows 8 charms and other controls, but for the most part, the content fills the screen with no indication that it's inside a browser.

Windows 7: Speed, Windows 8: Touch

Within Windows 7, Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and even Safari are merely tenants in an office building: All five can hang their signs on the front door, and they all work well.

In that traditional environment, the focus is on speed, features and the ecosystem, Microsoft cited studies from NewRelic and StrangeLoop Networks showing that IE10 was significantly faster (if fractions of a second are significant) than other browsers. Rob Mauceri, the group program manager for Internet Explorer, said that maybe the most notable addition to IE10 on Windows 7 was hardware support for its approach to implementing standard 3D transformations, providing a “consistent and interoperable experience,” he said in an interview.

Within the Bing/IE combination and Google/Chrome ecosystem within Windows 7, data matters as much as presentation. Google’s search and Chrome apps tap into the Google ecosystem, creating value by leveraging past searches, referencing sites that Google+ friends may have highlighted, and sharing information back and forth across Google services, which, as Microsoft has pointed out, people don’t necessarily want.

Those ising IE9 won’t have to worry. The automatic upgrade capabilities built into Internet Explorer will mean that IE9 will upgrade itself to IE10 when the final version is released, probably some time next year. (You will still have to manually upgrade the preview version if they want to try it out.

IE has about 32.9% market share, according to StatCounter, versus 34.8% for Chrome. Net Applications calculates that IE has 54% of the desktop-PC market, followed by Firefox and Chrome. On Wikimedia, 30.6% of the site’s visitors use Chrome, followed by 22.01% on IE and 19.11% on Firefox. This all means that IE10, on Windows 7 or on Windows 8, will capture a significant portion of the Web.

Do You Want The Old Web, Or The New One?

That will influence content developers, too.

"We're going to be active on the tooling front, as well as more broadly active with the community, the libraries, the multiple building blocks that make developer's' lives easier as they start building these experiences," Gavin said, when asked whether developer tools or the browser itself were more important.

According to Gavin, developers will have to choose whether they build optimized experiences for browsers like Windows 8, or "lowest-common denominator" experiences that will work across the Web in a blah, vanilla fashion. Pulse.me went this route, supporting the swipe gesture within the Web page to allow users to move to the next story. That's a feature other content developers will have to choose to support, and they'll all have different answers, he said.

Originally, Gavin said, he "may or may not have been a huge fan of MSN,"  which was recently optimized for Windows 8 and IE10. "But I like this version," Gavin said. "It's so much like Windows 8. It feels consistent."

Gavin acknowledged that other browser vendors had designed in some of their own touch capabilities. And Windows 7's version of IE10 won't include any overt roadblocks, features that the browser will explictly identify as belonging to Windows 8. But the layout of these updated Web sites may underscore the real message: With Windows 8, Microsoft has designed its own Web. In it, Google, Mozilla, Opera and the others are merely guests.

In the age of cloud computing, it's an archaic thought: The livelihood of some popular websites currently rests on bucket brigades carrying diesel fuel up multiple flights of stairs just to keep generators running. But that's the reality as Lower Manhattan struggles with massive power outages and flooded understructures in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.

It's a decidedly 17th-century solution to a 21st-century problem. But it's the only way to get fuel to generators that are located in powerless high-rises when elevators are out of service and basement fuel pumps are incapacitated due to flooding.

For site admins at Fog Creek Software in New York, the solution is clear, albeit arduous: When diesel is delivered to their building at 75 Broad Street, the fuel is hand-delivered to the generators on the 17th floor via bucket brigade, giving the online service provider more hours of uptime while basement flooding is cleared and the building awaits power restoration from ConEd. Meanwhile, users of services like Trello, FogBugz and Copilot are basically in a holding pattern, knowing that one missed fuel delivery or downed generator is all that stands between uptime and downtime right now.

[Disclosure: ReadWrite is a Trello user.]

A Too-Common Tale Of Woe

Fog Creek is not alone in its situation. ISPs Peer1 and Internap both maintain facilities in the same building. Fog Creek and fellow ISP tenant Squarespace are working with Peer1 on the bucket brigade to keep servers going. Internap is reporting that since their fuel pumps were swamped, the facility was shut down after the generators' fuel ran out.

The story is being repeated across the New York Metro area, as data centers switch to back-up power on diesel generators as expected. But what no one counted on was the massive flooding that would compromise fuel systems and generators across the area hit by Sandy.

ISP Datagram was shoved off the grid Monday night when its 33 Whitehall facility had its basement flooded. This shut down high-volume sites like Gawker, Gizmodo and Buzzfeed. Gawker and Gizmodo are still running "emergency" pared-down sites, but Buzzfeed managed to get itself back up on its feet as early as Tuesday.

Clouds Can Help, Too

How was this done? Probably by the one method that every single Web customer in Lower Manhattan should be thinking about just as soon as the lights come on: BuzzFeed got its website on the cloud.

"In a nut, our engineering team moved everything over to Amazon Web Services, with one developer working overnight despite a tree falling through his roof," wrote BuzzFeed's Matt Buchanan.

Granted, it's not easy to just up and replicate your site to a cloud-based system. BuzzFeed's team was aided by the fact that much of the site's content was already replicated on Amazon, so they were halfway there.

"You might wonder why, of course, BuzzFeed, Gawker, and others aren't already all aboard the cloud train, ready to switch to different servers at the drop of a hat," Buchanan concluded. "The fact is, Amazon cloud service and other services like it weren't around when BuzzFeed and sites like Gawker and Huffington Post were architected years ago. If the site was built today, the architecture might look a bit more cloud-like than having a huge data center based in downtown Manhattan."

Hindsight has the benefit of being 20/20, it's true. But after the waters from Sandy recede, look for a lot more websites to gain a renewed focus on the cloud.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Although Sandy continues to be primarily a flooding event, High, sustained winds and some large fires are complicating life on and off the Internet.

Service issues for YouTube were widely reported Monday at 7:30 p.m. EDT, and were intermittent throughout the rest of the night, until they ended around 6 a.m. today. Tumblr's problems started at about the same time, with intermittent outages through the night.

Tumblr is based in Manhattan, bit it is likely that the social network's systems are co-located elsewhere. Other New York-based firms, like BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and Gawker likely have suffered Sandy's wrath. BuzzFeed was down last night through 8:30 a.m. today, HuffPost is in station-keeping mode due to a power outage at its offices, and Gawker is down.

The infrastructure of the Internet is solid so far, although edge-of-network problems continue to plague the East Coast, sending ripples  across the continent. According to the Internet Traffic Report (ITR), North American traffic was rated 67 out of 100 at 8:45 a.m. EDT today, with several Internet routers across the country reporting 100% packet loss. While many of the affected routers are on the Eastern Seaboard, several are not, which could mean there are systemic issues other than Sandy affecting traffic.

According to the ITR, traffic speed on the Internet dropped sharply from a rating of 69 just after 4:50 p.m. EDT Monday, just as winds from Sandy grew dangerous on the coast. Because of the size of the storm, high winds range as far west as Chicago, with scattered power and telecommunication outages reported throughout the immense affected area.

Sometime around 3:30 a.m., packet loss spiked briefly, indicating a significant disruption of Internet service, the cause of which was not clear.

Data centers in the affected region seemed to fare well.

Outage Analyzer indicated a few scattered outages, including a suspected outage at pro-market.net that affected 174 domains, and an earlier outage at ad provider ContextWeb. KDDI's Northeast U.S. servers also went down for two hours at 9:12 p.m., potentially impacting 675 domains. All of these servers were located in northern New Jersey, and as of post time, the problems were resolved.

Downrightnow is reporting some issues with Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Tumblr. While downrightnow is a useful tool, it gathers some of its data from anecdotal complaints on social-media services like Twitter. Given the scattered router problems on the East Coast, it is likely that customers' access to those services are only degraded.

Those who rely on Amazon Web Services will be pleased to note that their services are smoothly running in North America, with no problems reported. Google Apps and Google's App engine cloud service are also showing green lights across the board.

As Sandy moves north, dumping rain and pounding with winds, there is still a chance that some data centers will be affected by the storm. Certainly local and regional Internet service on the edge of the network will be affected, either through power or direct disruptions. For now, major service disruptions seem to have been avoided.

[Updated]

Equinix, one of the maintainers of a New York City-area Internet exchange, has released details on how it is weathering the storm. According to Sam Kapoor, Chief Global Operations Officr, "All sites in New York/New Jersey, and several in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., experienced power outages and customer loads were transferred to generator power.  All of these sites have at least 48 hours of fuel onsite with fuel vendors on standby to deliver more as needed. As of this morning, some of these sites are back on utility power, while some remain on generators.

"NY9 experienced a failed generator that impacted service to several customers. We made repairs and service was returned this morning. The site remains on generator power," Kapoor added. "Sites in New York and Washington, D.C. experienced water leaks. While most were minor and quickly contained, at least one leak at a New York site impacted a customer. We are currently working onsite with the customer to contain the issue."

Equinix clearly isn't taking their responsibilities lightly, either.

"To minimize the storm’s impact and prepare wherever possible, we tested generators, filled fuel tanks and made arrangements for backup fuel, arranged to have full time staff onsite at each facility to maintain operations, secured hotel rooms near the sites, and brought  in cots, MREs, and other emergency supplies, so that our Operations staff could comfortably support customers even in extreme conditions," Kapoor explained.

Image Courtesy of NASA

As Hurricane Sandy bears down on the U.S. East Coast, the high concentration of the country's Internet infrastructure in the path of the Category 1 storm means it is reasonable to expect potential outages of Internet and web sites through the next few days. But which providers and connections are most at risk?

(See Also: Preparing Your Smartphone - And Yourself - For Hurricane Sandy)

Sandy is expected, as midday Monday, to make landfall somewhere near Atlantic City, NJ sometime Monday evening. Though the storm is officially classified as Category 1 (maximum sustained winds from 74-95 mph), there's no escaping the fact that this is one large storm: according to Dr. Jeff Masters at Wunderground.com, "Sandy's tropical storm-force winds span an area of ocean 940 miles in diameter."

Internet Exchanges Threatened

With such a massive footprint, there is very little on the East Coast that won't be touched by Sandy in the next few days. Of particular interest to business and commerce is the status of their websites. Due to the positioning of six Internet exchanges in the vicinity of Sandy, many datacenters and cloud service providers could be potentially knocked out by the effects of the storm.

If you have ever wondered why there are so many cloud service providers in the Washington, DC, area, you can thank the Equinix Exchange in Ashburn, VA, an Internet exchange that ranks the DC area as 11th in the world for traffic, according to TeleGeography.com. The DC Metro area is on the very southern edge of the latest forecast track for Sandy, and even an indirect hit here could affect cloud service providers hosting thousands of websites.

Nearby Reston, VA, for instance, is home to datacenters owned by Iland Cloud Infrastructure, Sevtex, VPS Farm and one you may have heard of: Amazon Web Services, which handles high-profile websites such as Netflix, Pinterest and Heroku.

Ashburn itself is home to one of GoGrid's datacenters, and in Washington, DC lives mega-hosting service SoftLayer CloudLayer.

Farther up the Atlantic coast, the New York metro area (ranked 5th in world Internet traffic) has five Internet exchanges, and cloud providers like Linode, cloud3k, and Atlantic Metro are also based in the area. (See the end of the article for a complete list of cloud servicer providers as gathered from Data Center Map.)

Prep Time Is Critical

Fortunately, given the amount of time that these cloud providers and their customers have had to prepare for the onslaught of the storm, connectivity should be maintained for sites using these service providers. But individual businesses who host on-site in the area will have to rely on their own plans to maintain power and connection.

Based on the path of the storm, the New York and northern New Jersey datacenters would seem to be at the most risk right now, as high winds, local flooding and sustained power problems could eventually overwhelm any uninterrupted-power scenarios a provider could think of. If the Internet exchanges themselves go down, the effect on commercial and personal Internet traffic would be significant, and could cause problems for any emergency services relying on Internet communication to broadcast information to area residents.

With luck, Internet connectivity will be maintained, and online business will carry on. This will be the largest reliability and survivability test telecomm and Internet providers have had to face in a long time, how they prepared will make a big difference in whether they pass or fail.

Cloud Service Providers In Path Of Sandy

Delaware

Wilmington: IPR International

District of Columbia

Washington: SoftLayer CloudLayer

Maryland

Baltimore: OCOSA Cloud

New Jersey

Hudson County: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD

Newark: Linode

North Bergen: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD

Piscataway: cloud3k

Secaucus: infiniCloud logicworks

New York

New York: Atlantic Metro vCLOUD, Inerail, infiniCloud logicworks, Qube Virtual Data Center

Pennsylvania

Bethlehem: dbsi

Breinigsville: dbsi

Philadelphia: dbsi

Reading: IPR International

Virginia

Ashburn: GoGrid

Culpepper: Terremark Worldwide, Inc.

Reston: Amazon EC2, Iland Cloud Infrastructure, Sevtex, VPS Farm LLC

Vienna: Open Hosting

Internet Exchange Centers in Path of Sandy

Ashburn, VA: EQIX-ASH Equinix Exchange Ashburn

New York, NY: Big-APE The Big Apple Peering Exchange, EQIX-NYC (Equinix Exchange New York), NYIIX (New York International Internet eXchange), PAIX-NYC (Peering And Internet eXchange New York), TIE-NYC (Telx Internet Exchange New York)

Image Courtesy of NASA