The research community has developed many tools to try to map the topology of the Internet. As the Internet is a decentralised network composed of more thank 30000 different networks, it is very difficult (and perhaps impossible) to obtain a detailed map of the network. The most widely use to infer the router-level topology of the Internet is traceroute.

RFC1149 entitled IP over avian carriers is one of those RFCs that were published on April 1st. It describes a method to carry IP packets by using pigeons. RFC1149 was designed during the dialup era and packets were printed on sheets of papers before being attached to pigeons and a scanner was used by the recipient to recover the packet. Among all the April fools RFCs that have been written, RFC1149 is one of the few that has actually been implemented.

The patent protection system was designed a long time ago to encourage companies to publicly disclose their industrial and trade secrets so that other companies could use them later. In exchange of this public disclosure, companies received a protection as a period of exclusive usage. In recent years, we've seen a growth in the number of submitted patents and surprisingly, the patent examiners have granted patents to dubious inventions such as :

On September 1st, gmail was down for about 100 minutes. This is not the first time that gmail suffered from a failure and probably not the last one neither...

More and more software development is done by teams that rely on version control systems to share the source code and work together. Researchers also frequently use version control systems to cooperate on writing articles. CVS that was the defacto standard in the early days has been replaced in many environments by subversion. Recently, git and mercurial were proposed as a better alternative to subversion.

Based on data collected from 67 different ISPs, Arbor Networks has started to analyse the behaviour of Internet traffic. In a first blog post that should be followed by others, Craig Labovitz compares the daily evolution of the volume of Internet traffic in both the US and Europe.

What would google do ? is the intriguing title of the new book written by Jeff Jarvis