The organization responsible for managing the assignment of domain names and IP addresses has approved a new plan to allow non-Latin characters in Web extensions.
Known as Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), the system is designed to globalize the Net so regions around the world can use their own local alphabet characters to surf in cyberspace, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said Friday.
Calling IDNs the "biggest technical change" to the Internet since its birth 40 years ago, ICANN unanimously approved the plan on the final day of its six-day conference in Seoul.
IDNs will allow domain names to be to be written in native character sets, such as Chinese, Arabic, and Greek. In charge of managing domain names, ICANN has argued that IDNs are necessary to expand use of the Web in regions where people don't understand English. Since its inception, the Internet has been limited to the Latin character set used by the U.S. and many other nations.
"The coming introduction of non-Latin characters represents the biggest technical change to the Internet since it was created four decades ago," said ICANN chairman Peter Dengate Thrush in a statement. "Right now Internet address endings are limited to Latin characters--A to Z. But the Fast Track Process is the first step in bringing the 100,000 characters of the languages of the world online for domain names."
To expedite the new plan, ICANN will launch a Fast Track process on November 16. At that time, the organization will begin accepting applications from countries for new top level domains, or Internet extensions, based on each nation's character set.
Initially, the change will apply only to local country codes, such as .kr for Korea and .ru for Russia. Major top level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .net., and .org won't see non-Latin editions just yet. But ICANN is pushing to make progress on these major TLDs and hopes to include them in the IDN system before long.
ICANN had discussed and debated IDNs for years, during which time much testing, development, and global cooperation were needed to jump start the new system.
"This is a culmination of years of work, tests, study and discussion by the ICANN community," said Thrush. "To see this finally start to unfold is to see the beginning of an historic change in the Internet and who uses it."
ICANN has won a major battle over the abusive tactic of domain tasting, said the organization in a report released Wednesday.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is responsible for managing and doling out Internet domain names.
It's not an easy job. And making it harder was a scheme used by some registrars known as domain tasting. Someone would buy up lots of domain names, try them out, and then get rid of the unprofitable ones, all without losing any money. As long as the registrar dumped the domains within the five-day grace period, known as the Add Grace Period (AGP), a full refund was given.
Designed by ICANN to help registrars who made errors in their domain names, the grace period refund was quickly abused by Web sites that populated their domains with lots of ad links that redirected visitors to other sites. It also led to the unavailability of popular names that were scooped up by domain tasters.
In June 2008, ICANN decided to act. The organization stopped refunding the 20-cent annual fee for each registered deleted domain name beyond a certain limit.
But since 20 cents per domain wasn't much of a penalty, ICANN got tougher. The organization began charging registrars $6.75 (the cost of a current .org domain) or higher for each deleted domain beyond a certain limit during the grace period.
In its report, ICANN used the following example to illustrate the policy change:
Someone registers 1,000 domain names and gets rid of 300 of them during the grace period. Under the policy, the registrar is allowed up to 70 deletions. The remaining 230 cost 20 cents each for a total of $46. Plus, each excessive deletion costs the registrar at least $6.75. Dumping 230 domain names rings up a bill of $1,552.50 for a grand total of $1,598.50.
ICANN said the new policy resulted in a 99.7 percent decrease in domain deletions from June 2008 to April 2009.
(Credit:
ICANN)
Weeks ago, the news of Michael Jackson's passing brought major news sites to their knees, so Tuesday's memorial service for the singer was expected to bring similar results.
This time it appears sites were better prepared for the traffic onslaught.
According to Gomez Incorporated, a company that monitors Web usage quality, there were both slowdowns and outages, including one that dramatically slowed Twitter's performance. The company analyzed performance on seven news sites from multiple locations during Tuesday's event, with some of the biggest slowdowns coming to streaming video. Asia experienced a 40 percent increase in what the company calls "stalling issues," with the U.S. experiencing an increase of around 5 percent.
One of those news outlets that was serving up live streaming video was CNN, which according to internal data, topped out at 781,000 concurrent streams of the event. Between midnight EDT and 4 p.m. the site also pulled in 11 million unique users who turned 72 million pages.
Ustream, which provided live streaming in a partnership with CBS, says the event was the "largest ever" that had been hosted on the service, in part because it was a worldwide broadcast. The service had 4.6 million streams of the memorial going, made up from 1.6 million unique users. It also had more than 12,000 messages posted every minute to its built-in user chat rooms. (CNET News is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.)
Besides slowdowns in streaming video, news sites also had lower availability, which means some users were unable to access them. Gomez recorded that number as low as 98.2 percent, whereas the sites usually maintain uptime in excess of 99.65 percent. Response times also took a hit. News sites experienced double, and nearly triple the load time to serve up pages. In the case of Twitter, many users were unable to view or post messages to the service. At what was seemingly the peak of Twitter's load, Gomez benchmarked it as taking around 62 seconds for the site's home page to load, then allow users to log in--a process that normally takes just a few seconds.
Update: See also Larry Dignan's analysis over at ZDNet. He points to data host Akamai's visualization tool, which shows real-time activity on its sites which represent around 20 percent of the Web's traffic. There's a noticeable bump around the time the memorial service begins.
Internet Web traffic hit its peak right around the beginning of the service, according to Akamai.
(Credit: CNET / Akamai)CNET News' Greg Sandoval contributed to this report.
If you've been following the headlines of late you'll find that StatCounter's research arm, a Web tracking service most Webheads are familiar with, has gone from afterthought to player in just a few short months.
Credit a few handy Bing-happy press releases and handy browser market share stats.
There's a good bit of hubbub about IE market share, which has dropped off since March (Techmeme). The big question is whether we should believe the numbers (below is the year over year trends).
(Credit:
StatCounter)
Let's look at the methodology and history of StatCounter's research effort. StatCounter launched its Global Stats service in March. The service primarily measures search, browsers and operating systems.
Here's how StatCounter compiles its states. It tracks its 2 million members globally with 40 percent of that total in the U.S. and 25 percent in Europe. Overall, StatCounter analyzes about 4 billion page loads a month.
The sample certainly sounds large enough to be valid. However, Net Applications, which has been a go-to browser market share tracker, has said it its analyzing "some significant variations in browser and operating system statistics" for June. It remains to be seen whether Net Applications will verify what StatCounter is claiming for IE market share.
Net Applications has this to say about its methodology:
We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of live stats customers. The data is compiled from approximately 160 million visitors per month. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly, weekly, daily and hourly basis.
Meanwhile, a statement from Net Applications gives another reason to be mildly skeptical about writing that obit for IE market share. Apparently, IE 8's compatibility mode with IE 7 has lead to some underreporting of IE 8 market share. This wrinkle basically means IE 7 historically got more market share.
Simply put, there enough wrinkles out there to have some healthy skepticism for now about rapid fire market share claims. For instance, StatCounter was claiming Bing made market share gains in its early days. The rub: Bing's market share success will be measured in months and years not days. In the meantime, StatCounter is happy to detail Bing's loss of momentum too.
Perhaps IE's market share has collapsed, but a cross section of data from multiple sources--including panel approaches from comScore and Nielsen--would be helpful.
Online video is really taking off, according to stats firm ComScore. Not that we should be particularly surprised by that assertion. But the leader in the space, Google's YouTube, during October pulled in 100 million viewers in the U.S. for a market share of almost 40 percent.
That market share is about the same as it was this spring. But lower in the ranks, there's some change afoot. Video content hub Hulu, a joint venture between NBC Universal and News Corp., has edged its way into sixth place behind YouTube, Fox Interactive Media (which owns MySpace and its MySpaceTV platform), Yahoo, Microsoft, and Viacom. Rounding out the top 10 are AOL, Turner, Disney (which owns ABC), and CBS (which publishes CNET News).
In October, 77 percent of U.S. Internet users watched online video, and the average viewer watched a whopping 274 minutes of video on the Web. That's only four hours over the course of a month, but considering how short many online videos are, it's a lot.
What'll be interesting to see: Whether this changes with November's forthcoming stats, now that the presidential election is over. Keep in mind how many people were watching political Saturday Night Live skits, campaign speeches, and that disastrous Katie Couric-Sarah Palin interview.
Updated at 7 p.m. PDT with Google comment.
Google's calculator has troubles with some large numbers.
(Credit: Google)Google's calculator has some trouble handling math with some large numbers, an issue that's not unheard of in computing circles but that might not sit well at a supremely nerdy company that's named after a humongous number.
The errors appear, though not consistently, with some very large numbers. For example, 2,999,999,999,999,999 minus 2,999,999,999,999,998 should be 1, but Google calculator shows it as 0.
It's not a simple case of a cutoff where things fall apart, though. 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,995 incorrectly equals 0, but 1,999,999,999,999,999 minus 1,999,999,999,999,993 correctly equals 6. And 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,001 incorrectly equals 0, but 400,000,000,000,002 minus 400,000,000,000,000 correctly equals 2.
Perhaps most amusing for the schadenfreude crowd, Google botches some math involving a googol, which is 1 followed by 100 zeros. The quantity of a googol plus one, minus a googol, equals 0 rather than the correct result, 1.
Cutting Google some slack
To be sure, math is difficult at this scale, where special methods for encoding numbers must be used if fine precision is to be maintained. Happily for those building calculators, though, it's a relatively unusual requirement in the real world: when measuring numbers on the magnitude of the distances between stars, it's rare that precision of a few centimeters can be obtained. And it's also rare that such precision actually is relevant.
Big numbers are often expressed with a two-part floating-point format, with some small number (the mantissa) multiplied by 10 to some power (the exponent). For example, Google's revenue in the second quarter was $1.25 billion, which also can be expressed as $1,250,000,000, or as $1.25 times 10 to the power of 9, or as $1.25 x 10^9. Floating-point math is good at spanning vast ranges of numbers, but typically the first component only keeps track of limited number of digits, so the small change falls by the wayside.
Precise math on computers is compounded by the fact that computers typically work in binary math, with digits of only 0 or 1, whereas people operate in decimal math, with digits running from 0 through 9. Accuracy is compromised when computers convert numbers into binary for processing, then back to base 10 to show us the results.
Indeed, even with decades of computing technology already under our belts, it wasn't until IBM's latest flagship Power6 processor that even Big Blue could do actual decimal math without converting into binary and back.
Ordinary calculators quickly run out of steam when trying to deal with large numbers. Sure, Google may have some issues, but most handheld calculators don't even let you type the number 1,999,999,999,999,993 much less do some mathematical operation on it. And there's not a big market for software such as Wolfram Research's Mathematica that can get the math right.
Google acknowledged its math is imperfect. "We are aware that the calculator tool in Google Web search is not working properly for certain calculations, and we are looking into this problem further. We apologize for any problems that this causes our users," the company said in a statement.
So big math is deceptively difficult. Should Google be forgiven for shortchanging us a bit when it comes to significant digits?
No, Google should do better
Nah. Any company that named itself after a big number must be held to a higher standard.
It might slow down calculations fractionally if Google had to detect when a large but high-precision number was involved, then send that calculation to a different server equipped with a more advanced math algorithm. And Google is rightly focused on server response, since users search more when the search engine is faster. But this issue is part of Google's core culture and image. Google muffing the math is like a politician wrapping himself in a flag that's got an extra couple stars.
After all, this is the company that decided to raise $2,718,281,828 billion in its IPO, a reference to "e," the base of natural logarithms, and that invited job applicants who could solve a math puzzle.
Ideally, Google could fix the algorithm. That's what Microsoft did with a recent Excel math problem and Intel did--at great expense--with the notorious FDIV bug that afflicted some Pentium processors in the 1990s.
Others have found limits with Google's calculator. For example, 2.00135558564^1023 is interpreted by Google's calculator as 1.79769313 x 10^308. But increase that number by one eensy little amount to 2.00135558565^1023, and Google interprets it as a search, not a math problem.
Which leads me to my final thought. In that last example, Google punts on the math and shows a mere search result, which isn't likely to lead anyone astray. It's what's called a graceful failure mode. It's better to show no results than bad results. That's especially important given that the very calculations where people would use a calculator are the very ones where, unlike the examples above, people aren't going to notice an error.
(Via Google Blogoscoped.)
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