Google going great, greater, the greatest?

In 2010 the figure was a mere 6%, but according to the monitoring firm DeepField, data to and from Google now accounts for a quarter of all traffic in the US across the internet. We all knew that Google was big, but until now no one was sure just how big they were, at least in the US. When it comes to sheer bandwidth demand at certain times of the day, the winner is Netflix, but in terms of overall traffic Google beats Netflix, Twitter and Facebook combined. Remember that Google includes YouTube and a wide range of other services.

The blocking of the internet debate has risen again, this time in the UK over the blocking of porn. Blocking has been tried here in Thailand and many other places with limited success. Technically savvy users know how to bypass most blocking strategies that have been used against gambling, politically sensitive material, and in this case, porn. In general, politicians all over the planet have minimal understanding of the internet and how it works so they make grand pronouncements on protecting a country and its citizens from the evils of online data. Back in the real world, things are not as simple. That said I’m all for purveyors of child porn being hunted down and at the very least being put away for a very long time.

Yes people are still making new hard drives. Seagate, for example, has a new 4TB drive aimed at bringing down the cost per GB and spins at 5,900rpm, but still with a 6Gbit/s SATA interface. The other model spins at 10,000rpm, is a 2.5-inch SASD drive with 900GB or 1.2TB, with a very fast data-transfer rate and is RAID enabled. Expect other manufacturers to compete in the near future.

At the same time the growth and expansion of the solid state drive (SSD) is also moving along with Samsung announcing a new range that tops out at 1.6TB including both 400 and 800GB versions. These are 3Gbit/s units based on a 3-bitper-cell design as part of the standard NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) range. The slower and less expensive EVO SSD range now comes in 120GB, 250GB, 500GB, 750GB and 1TB versions. Of course if you want that 1.6TB drive I suspect you will need a rather large bank balance. For those in the UK, simply change dollars to pounds. I’m not kidding here, if a device is $10 in the US, then for some reason those in Europe pay 10 and those in the UK pay £10.

What’s 13 inches and would make Steve Jobs turn in his grave? The answer is the rumoured supersized iPad and the larger screen iPhones that are apparently under consideration in the hallowed halls of Apple. If these do come out they will violate the old ‘‘not too many devices in the same space’’ rule that Mr Jobs followed for many years. What Apple really has up its sleeve will have to wait for the inevitable pre-release leak.

So how do you keep data for a really long time? Southampton Uni scientists reckon quartz holds the answer. Or at least pulsed femtosecond laser-written data bits in fused nano-structured quartz glass. Bet you didn’t think of that one when I posed the question. It is a bit technical and the rest of the description uses sentences like data bits that are located in a 5D space and technologies like double refraction. The result some time in the future could be long-term storage written quickly using 3-bit dots. On the downside, you currently need an electron microscope to read it back, but perhaps they will improve on that part of the puzzle over time.

The Germans have been at it again and now they say they can crack your smartphone encryption and take over your device. Actually, network operators have been able to do that for quite a while now and indeed the system only works if they know your code. You may remember I mentioned a while back that a GSM network is based on a secret code shared between your SIM and the network itself. Until now these keys have remained safe. Now it turns out there are two flaws in the GSM system that when put together can open up a can of worms — and your phone. When a certain type of SMS is sent to your phone, it allows the right or wrong person to get your secret key. With the SMS message, a phone using the older 56DES encryption, new computing power and a rainbow table, the key can be revealed and your phone hacked. It is estimated that about a quarter of current phones are vulnerable. I suspect a lot of people are working on solving this and you may be given a new SIM sometime in the future.