Interesting Facts

According to a survey carried out by (of all people) Hillary Blinds, having access to the internet is more important to young people in the UK than daylight, hot water, the NHS, or a good night's sleep. (So, it looks like we will end up with a generation of pasty faced, smelly, tired young people in poor health.)

The Social Media site Friends Reunited is closing down as it is unable to cover its costs. (It launched in 2000 and was extremely popular in the UK, with over 12 million members in 2005, almost 50% of UK internet users back then.  Sadly, since then, rivals like Facebook have ensured its demise.)

According to research by the UK communications regulator Ofcom, the fairy lights on your Christmas tree can slow down your WiFi. (The research also revealed that nearly 6 million homes and offices in the UK have underperforming Wi-Fi, and it's not just fairy lights that can affect speeds: other electronic devices, including lamps, speakers, TVs and monitors can, and I believe a wet dog walking through the room will also block the signal. I often get told that WiFi is fine for our online sessions, but now I feel justified in my statement to people, use a broadband cable.)

The highly successful travel website Trip Advisor was founded in February 2000 in a small office above a pizza shop called Kosta’s in Needham, Massachusetts, USA. (15 years later and the reviews on the site now have more than 10 billion words, that's nearly 12,000 times the number of words in the complete works of Shakespeare. The most reviewed city is London – with over 1.8 million reviews of the city’s hotels, restaurants and attractions.)

Under new laws in the UK, internet trolls face up to two years in jail.  Credit: Vector.me (by laobc)  (This quadruples the current maximum six-month term and follows several high profile cases. Under the act, which does not apply to Scotland, it is an offence to send another person a letter or electronic communication that contains an indecent or grossly offensive message or threat.)

According to figures from the Halifax, of every £100.00 spent in the UK (not including credit), debit cards account for £28.87, direct debits for £19.90, so-called ‘faster payments’, which covers internet and smartphone transactions, for £12.81, cheques £11.28, standing orders £7.82 and 'other' methods of paying bills £1.34. (This means that only £17.99, is spent in cold, hard cash, down by £3.03 on a year ago, So maybe the death knell is already ringing for the money in your pocket. +Andrey Orlov  - It's funny how sometimes people ask me a question in a session, and then it crops up in the news.  :) )

According to Cisco, mobile internet devices 'will outnumber humans by the end of this year'. (Seemingly the growth in the use of smartphones and tablets will see more than 7bn – the world's current population – in use.  Growth in Asia, the Pacific and Africa is driving this phenomenal increase. The downside is the existing internet infrastructure is coming under increasing strain.)

Hundreds of thousands of internet users around the world could lose their connectivity if they fail to check their devices for malware. (Malware could have taken over their machines more than a year ago and the number of computers that may be infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, although it is down from about 360,000 in April. It all began when hackers took control of more than 570,000 infected computers around the world. Last year, the FBI set brought in a private company to install two clean internet servers to take over for the malicious servers, so people would not suddenly lose internet access, but that temporary system will be shut down at 4.01am UK time on Monday. To check whether a computer is infected, users can visit a website run by the group brought in by the FBI: http://www.dcwg.org.)

American-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the organisation in charge of the expansion. (They received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.  The breakdown of requests is as follows:- North America: 911 applications Europe: 675 applications Asia-Pacific: 303 applications Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications Africa: 17 applications 116 of the applications were for non-Latin alphabets.) Source

According to ZDNet, 51 per cent of website traffic is through automated software programs, often with      malicious activity in mind. (The breakdown of an average site’s traffic is as follows: - 5% = hacking tools looking for an unpatched or new vulnerability within a site. - 5% = scrapers. - 2% = automated comment spammers. - 19% = “spies” collating competitive intelligence. - 20% = search engines (non-human traffic but benign). - 49% = real people who are actually browsing the Internet. Maybe I should cut my visitor logs in half.) Source

According to file-sharing blog Torrent Freak, the action film Fast Five was the most pirated film of 2011, having been downloaded illegally 9.2 million times. (The Hangover II was second, followed by Thor, Source Code and I am Number Four. I can only say that it just shows people who pirate films don't seem to have very good taste.)

Libel cases in the UK involving social sites, have doubled. (According to legal information company Sweet and Maxwell, between 2008-2009 there were three cases, but from 2009-10, there were 7. Celebrities are even using monitoring services to keep tabs on what is being said about them on social sites. Whatever happened to "the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about?)

According to research carried out by internet consultancy firm Envisional, the number of illegally downloaded films in the UK has gone up nearly 30% in five years. (According to their research, in 2010, the top five box office films in the UK were illegally downloaded a total of 1.4 million times. I just wonder where they get the patience to wait for the download! Or is it the fact that people are downloading these films that my internet is so slow?)

According to online measurement body UKOM, Facebook attracted more visitors in the UK than Microsoft. (Yes Facebook had 26.8 million visitors in Britain in May 2011, beating the 26.2 million who visited Microsoft's MSN, Windows and Bing sites combined.  Google is still top of the pile with 33.9 million visitors, whilst Twitter's UK audience was just 6.1 million.  I dread to think how much heat their servers produce coping with all those visitors.)

The Department of Homeland Security has the power to seize websites! (They can seek U.S. court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through the sites’ domain registration. To date they have confiscated 128 domains. The lastest domains to be seized are:- Re1ease.net Watchnewfilms.com Dvdcollectionsale.com Dvdscollection.com Dvdsetsonline.com Newstylerolex.com Overbestmall.com And my favourite: Mygolfaccessory.com The seizures are part of an operation called "Operation in Our Sites." Who says Feds don't have a sense of humour? Do you think they'd go after the people who keep nicking my content?)

As many as 60% of online profiles are fake. (This is especially common on dating sites, where member's profiles often feature stock images found on the internet, sometimes of pornography actresses or models. But it's not always the person featured in the profile who lies. An Englishman was featured in a fake gay profile by a so called friend, but he had the last laugh as he was awarded $45,000 in a libel case he brought against the former friend. Of course, I would never lie on my profile.)

In 2010, ICM had more than 110,000 pre-reservations for .xxx domains. (According to their website this now stands at 297,261. There's no getting away from it sex sells. I'm almost tempted to set up PinkFluffyBunnies.xxx, and have it full of pictures of pink fluffy bunnies.)

Internet overseer Icann has given final approval to the creation of the xxx internet domain, which will be dedicated to pornography. (This ends a 10-year battle over forming a virtual red-light district. The good news is it will make it easier to block such sites, the bad news is it will be easier to find such sites. I just hope it's a great big flop, but I doubt it will be.)

The US president has the authority to disconnect computer systems and servers from the internet in the event of a national emergency. (Seemingly a law was passed in 1942, when after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt was given the broad power to commandeer or shut down telephone and telegraph networks. 70 years on there are no telegraph networks, and the telephone is only one of many means of communication. Although the 1942 law makes no mention of the internet it does say "any facility or station for wire communication". The good news is wifi should be safe.)

According to the internet search engine, Ask Jeeves, the top ten unanswerable questions, based on around 1.1 billion queries, are as follows:- What is the meaning of life? Is there a God? Do blondes have more fun? What is the best diet?  Is there anybody out there?  Who is the most famous person in the world? What is love? What is the secret of happiness? Did Tony Soprano die?  How long will I live? (If like me you had no idea why number 9 appeared in the list, seemingly it relates to the final episode of a popular US drama, The Sopranos. and lots of people have asked about what happened to the character "Tony Soprano".  Sorry, I haven't a clue.)