We present Hubble, a system designed to identify and diagnose reachability problems on the Internet in real-time. Using Hubble, we are able to evaluate the extent to which global reachability is violated: how many prefixes are reachable from some vantages and not others, and how long do these problems persist?

Whereas previous work focused on either reachability within a single AS or simple passive monitoring of BGP updates, we have designed Hubble to unify RouteViews and distributed vantage points into a system that can perform active probe monitoring and diagnosis of reachability problems to about 90% of the Internet's edge prefixes. Our results show that 10% of prefixes experience reachability problems on a given day.

Beyond identifying problems, Hubble gathers data and can trigger measurements to help troubleshoot and categorize commonly occuring reachability problems in real-time. Is a prefix currently unreachable from portions of the Internet? Is the problem due to issues with multi-homed failover? Is some AS dropping all traffic to the prefix? Hubble can provide answers to these questions.

See also, from last year, Towards IP Geolocation Using Delay and Topology Measurements.

Real-time Blackhole Analysis with Hubble

Eager buyers shopping for one of the new MacBook Pro laptops at Apple Inc.'s online store have noticed that opting for the fastest-possible hard drive extends the ship date from 1-3 days to 4-6 weeks.

Apple did not immediately reply to questions about why customers had to wait a month or more for a MacBook Pro equipped with the faster drive.

MacBook Pro fast disk option means slow shipping

20% of the world's Internet traffic is delivered over the Akamai platform. We combine this global scope with constant data collection to construct an accurate and comprehensive picture of what's happening on the Internet. Bookmark this page to check the world's online behavior at any given moment -- How fast is data moving? Where's the most congestion? What events are causing spikes in Web activity?

Previously, only Akamai and our customers had access to this information. Now we're opening that window into the online universe.

Check out the "Attacks" tab on the Real-time Web Monitor. The News Monitor is also interesting; you might want to try a widget.

Visualizing Global Web Performance with Akamai

The Photosynth Technology Preview is a taste of the newest - and, we hope, most exciting - way to view photos on a computer. Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next.

In our collections, you can access gigabytes of photos in seconds, view a scene from nearly any angle, find similar photos with a single click, and zoom in to make the smallest detail as big as your monitor.

To see it in action, you can watch a TED presentation:

Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation. Its architect, Blaise Aguera y Arcas, shows it off in this standing-ovation demo. Curious about that speck in corner? Dive into a freefall and watch as the speck becomes a gargoyle. With an unpleasant grimace. And an ant-sized chip in its lower left molar. "Perhaps the most amazing demo I've seen this year," wrote Ethan Zuckerman, after TED2007. Indeed, Photosynth might utterly transform the way we manipulate and experience digital images.

Microsoft Live Labs: Photosynth

Let readers search your blog, bookmarks, blogroll and more...all from one little box.

Lijit allows you to easily create your own search engine, which searches your blog, blogroll, bookmarks, photos, and more. By offering the Lijit Search Wijit on your blog, readers can search all of YOU and receive amazingly relevant results. In turn, Lijit gives you detailed statistics about the searches performed, such that you can better understand and serve your reader community.

Lijit

Some of you may remember the Gallery of Computation, which was popular here a few years ago.

Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

If you liked Brian Eno's 77 Million Paintings, you might be interested in this software.

Processing 1.0 (BETA)

The BoGo Light is a scientific, eco-friendly breakthrough that is making an impact worldwide. From Cairo to Cape Town, from the Caribbean to the Amazon, it is improving the lives of individuals, families, and entire villages by replacing costly kerosene, candles, and disposable battery flashlights with an affordable, long lasting, solar flashlight.

BoGo means Buy one, Give one. We want our lights to benefit the less fortunate; therefore, with each light purchased in the developed world, a second identical light will be donated to an organization that will distribute it in the developing world with our direct financial support. Give the Gift of Light, and Help Us Change the World!

BoGo Light - Help Light the World!

"You just put on the gloves and go," Parent explains. "Think turbo PowerPoint."

Within five years "you could use gesture recognition to get rid of the remote control," predicts Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner.

File Gesture Studios and GoodPoint alongside Jeff Han's multi-touch displays.

The Mind-Bending New World Of Work

Bruce Sterling wants to fund the Industrial Memetics Institute.

"I'm shocked that I understood every damn thing Benkler's saying. Online experiences need to be granular, modular, and integratable. Furthermore, I didn't know about self-selection, humanization, and trust construction. I'd love to see that industrialized. Norm creation, transparency, peer review, discipline, yeah, all of that's lacking today. Internet institutions lack sustainability. They have the lifetime of my skin. They get bought out. The available platforms for self-expression are terrible. I use seven word processors, all of them terrible."

"Why are social applications businesses? Why aren't they political parties?"

"I hang out at a lot of gigs like this. Everybody's sticking it to the man; nobody's the man. What if the state of Vermont gets metal-spined ubiquitous broadband? If it leaks over state borders, are you going to sell connectivity? Will they make sure nobody in New Hampshire can 'steal' Wi-fi? What if New Hampshire becomes the next Baltic-style e-state, the next Estonia?"

What you build, you cannot contain or control. "I'm a cyberpunk. Information wants to be free. It used to be hard to find, but Google was my apotheosis. We now have this unbelievable tidal wave of information. There's no end to it. It's endlessly seductive. Suddenly, your skills at ferreting out obscure information are almost worthless. Now they don't want to pay you. I say, follow your bliss. I spend more time with Google now than with novels and magazines. I'm swimming in it. I'm marinating it."

"Follow your bliss into the abyss. That's my new bumper sticker. This is the abyss. This is where my explorations led me. You guys are the denizens of the abyss. I strap on my diver helmet and go into the internet as far as you can go. You're the guys laying the pipe. It's a cyberpunk Mariana Trench in this room. I have to cheer you. Thank you for having us here."

Freedom to Connect | Summary

A security researcher at ShmooCon on Saturday demonstrated, but did not release, a tool that turns the PCs of unknowing Web surfers into hacker help.

As expected, SPI Dynamics researcher Billy Hoffman demonstrated a Web application vulnerability scanner written in JavaScript. The tool, called Jikto, can make an unsuspecting Web user's PC silently crawl and audit public Web sites, and send the results to a third party, Hoffman said.

"The whole point was to show how scary cross-site scripting has become."

"Once one person has talked about the ability to do it, it doesn't take that long for somebody else to come up with it," said one ShmooCon attendee who asked to remain anonymous. "It will come out."

There are already 50k hits for a Google search on "Jitko". A few comments from around the web: Jeremiah Grossman, of Whitehat Security, and "Pascal". Anurag Agarwal offered a Reflection on Billy Hoffman, along with a photo:

This week on Reflection we have a very young guy from the webappsec field.

Billy’s knowledge on Ajax is tremendous ... his ability to think differently has helped him achieve so much in such a short time.

I got a chance to meet with him in the WASC meetup at RSA. He is a very lively character. Let me put it this way, if billy is a part of a conversation, you won’t get bored even if you just stand there and listen.

JavaScript bug hunting tool demonstrated