NetDynam 2.0

(source page)

What you see is the result of a large-scale scan of web sites favorites icons (“favicons”) using the Nmap security scanner and the Nmap Scripting Engine (NSE).

The sites scanned were the one million domain names with the greatest “reach” according to Alexa on January 19, 2010, plus the one million names created by prepending “www.” to the former.

For each of these, an NSE script downloaded the favicon, calculated its MD5 hash, then summed the reach of the sites under each hash. 328,427 unique icons were retrieved; of those, 288,945 were loadable by PerlMagick and the remaining 39,482 were considered non–image files.

The reach was not know exactly for every site. On January 27, 2010, the reach was looked up for a sample of 178 sites, and the reach of the remaining sites was calculated by the formula reach = 66.1682 × rank0.9337. The formula comes from a linear regression of log(reach) versus log(rank) of the sampled sites. This chart shows the closeness of the fit between the estimate and sample: (see chart).

The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons, those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach, are scaled to 8 × 8 pixels at 600 pixels per inch, or about 0.34 mm on a side. The larger icons are scaled proportionally, their size however being constrained to be a multiple of 8 pixels. The largest icon is 5,968 × 5,968 pixels, and the whole diagram is 18,720 × 18,720.

Details of the scan: The script first retrieved the root document and searched for an element of the form

. If such an element was present, the favicon was retrieved from the given URL. If the element did not exist, or if the URL could not be retrieved, the favicon was looked for at /favicon.ico. Up to five redirects were followed for every document retireved. An icon was considered to belong to a domain name even when redirects led away from that domain name, or the icon was on a different domain. After redirects, only response with an HTTP status code of 200 were counted. When multiple icons were present in a file, the image with the greatest size and color depth is shown.

Viewer beware: The chart should not be taken as authoritative of the popularity of the sites presented, because of the inaccuracy of large, over-Internet scans. Sites were only counted if their favicon could be downloaded. Because of the unpredictable network effects, some sites, such as Bing, Baidu, and Amazon, are shown smaller than they should be.

My web home, squareONE, was fetched to reveal the following assessment:

http://www.squareone-learning.com 10000 bytes in 0.00 seconds.

http://www.squareone-learning.com/favicon.ico 2550 bytes in 0.00 seconds.

Online lookup: The icon is at (16.960, 16.200) and is 1056 × 1056 pixels.

Putting it in the top 1 million web sites. Yowza!!!

[a slightly rant-like post, with inspiration from some of our more outlandish and nauseating local public speakers and spruikers, e.g. alan bond, piers ackerman, miranda devine, and andrew bolt ]

recently i lamented on the list that the majority of us in the land of oz were not likely to put up much complaint other than complaint itself when government and/or big business threaten to take over our lives or encroach on civil liberties, our so-called ‘rights’ to privacy and so on. i mean in the light of “the threat of terrorism” (now that “communism” does not hold us all in its thrall of scaredydom), the previous govt here put sniffer dogs on the streets. they also prevented people from publicly expressing their disapproval of bush coming to town, spending many of our tax dollars on enormous surveillance cameras in downtown sydney – for our own protection of course. meanwhile, people line up at hospitals to be seen, and the river systems on which we all depend for something we can’t do without are being sucked dry… for me, govt promises of “we will cut taxes” has a hollow ring to it, when they spend the taxes i would willingly give, on items that do not benefit anyone except those who have enough income to avoid paying what they should in the first place… and i say the ability to control and survey the media, and other means of public and private communication does not benefit the public in any way.
to me, there will always be criminals – but it depends on who makes the laws as to who or what acts are deemed as ‘criminal’. i would rather put up with petty criminals and burglars (which btw i may not need to put up with if 1) smack was supplied by govt, 2) poor or unemployed people were given a place to live and a living income, and 3) advertisers were not paid as much by rich companies to entice us to desire and think we need more crap in order to make us feel better about ourselves) than the big corporate criminals and government criminals who sometimes indirectly are allowed to get away with murder, or at least a whole pile of booty earned off the back of their poor gullible workers who dutifully complain when their company cannot employ them anymore since they cannot make enough profit off them to enable their profligate and eminently enviable lifestyles to continue in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed.

but then those with the wherewithal – either in brains, aesthetic skills, or financial backing – are occasionally called upon to show their cards. and right on cue, after me saying we are not about to do anything down here.. well one of us has flown the coop to do his crowing, over to europe and various bunkers (such as iceland) i don’t doubt… julian assange thinks it about time to release a whole pile of documents to the media. just to see what they will make of it. naturally, he didn’t give them to the SMH (sydney morning herald), but the SMH had to get in on some of the act, and have posted a mashed-up video with some editorial comment by the ed. see this video article from today’s SMH for example for the local take on the matter.

but probably better to check out the guardian UK who have a video of assange defending his decision to release the documents.

here is thewikileaks link posted previously on netdynam – but i’m guessing maybe you won’t be able to get a service there for a while…

and now, today, dick smith, notable self-proclained capitalist, entrepreneur and start-up businessman responsible for dick smith electronics stores nationwide…. uses his spare cash for amusing (to me) advertisements in the local murdoch press…

it’s on another matter, content-wise, but it is another approach to the “what’s to be done” lament i often intone…

Every once in awhile I like to just sift through the grist that is being processed on the great wide interweb and take a gander at trends and events that feel like they are going to be important building blocks in the near future.

To this I add a first level of links that allow further exploration of what this technology is about and what it is linked to:

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/24645/page1/

So we have a new way to manipulate data that allows a different insight to emerge from massive amounts of information.

The television series CSI and its geographical offshoots have always pushed technological advances with their fancy computer graphics, image enhancing and hand or voice controlled computer displays. Now we see the next steps. One truism that has prevailed from the early days of computer use is that the greater the capacity of the system the larger and more sophisticated projects than can then be undertaken. There’s a problem in the programming industry with its much larger programs and applications where the coder/developer can no longer hold the whole picture in their mind. These two tools alone have implications for that entire paradigm.

The charge into Cyberspace has been blunted by technology that is not up to the word and idea visions of William Gibson et al nor the movie maker’s spin ala the Matrix.

Technological advancements are accelerating and convergence is a growing force. My smartphone is the end result of this convergence. The former incarnation required a large physical box connected to a wire based network, a camera, a video camera, a library, a typewriter, an entire postal system, a boombox, a tape recorder, a bookstore, a video store plus many, many more separate systems and infrastructures.

A lazy Sunday that has brought some new insights to my daily ruminations. To sum up I wish to drag you a bit sideways into my mind space and I offer as a final tidbit this piece:

http://spiffy.ci.uiuc.edu/~kline/Stuff/internet-rant.html/

here’s a well-researched and lengthy article examining the issue of privacy, and the legalities surrounding the matter of ‘identity’ in the digital age – starting with instances of employers using online searches to determine whether or not employees should keep their jobs, or even be employed in the first place. alerted to this on the email list by one of our old hands, and well worth the read.

the discussion in the article is based on the fact that we have the ability now to keep permanent records of everything everyone has ever posted or written on the internet. the article also deals with the potential of web3.0 to search and find almost anything anyone might wish to track…using new technologies such as face recognition for example….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html

this will only work on thursday afternoon i suspect, between 1.30 and 2.50pm vancouver time, but thought i’d try embedding it here anyway as a test.

the URL and blurb is pasted underneath the embed as well. the link takes you to the vid page and from there you can link back to the congress site and abstracts of the plenary speakers as well.

usually we try to go to the annual SFL gabfest and cult meeting, but pecuniary disadvantage prevented us this year.

Live streaming video by Ustream

Greetings from ISFC 37!

I’m writing to let you know that on Thursday afternoon 22nd July, 1.30 – 2.55, Vancouver time, the discussion in the interactive session at the Congress will be audiostreamed through the web. The session will involve the plenary speakers (except for Terrence Deacon, who has to return to Berkeley early after giving a brilliant plenary this morning).

The link to access the streaming is:

http://dlc5.lled.educ.ubc.ca/ISFC_interactive_session/

We have also arranged 5 digital, multilingual chat rooms, in which people at the congress will comment on the interaction for listeners in Brazil (Português), India (English), India (Hindi) and China (Chinese). People participating in the chat rooms will also be able to feed questions into the UBC-based interaction.