While certain companies are always viewed with a suspicious eye, certain others are considered a joke. Google, on the other hand is considered the son of God despite its evils.

With the explosion of Web 2.0 services, I find it a pain to sign on to Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, and the million other sites that have mushroomed. (I’m paranoid about staying signed on to sites with everyone and their brothers abusing beacons). So, on this day, the 13th of November 2008, I nominate our friendly neighbourhood do-no-evil company to implement a single sign on that I can indiscriminately blindly trust.

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Its not the most reliable metric and is probably the easiest to critique, but it is definitely interesting to look at the pledges to download Firefox 3.0 as a measure of Worldwide Internet penetration given the stark contrast that the data presents.

Pledges to download Firefox 3.0 on June 17th 2008 for a Guinness Record

It is Interesting to note that the entire African continent as well as the Middle-East are severely under-represented. The numbers from India, South-East Asia and China are nothing special given their population.

Oh, by the way, download Firefox 3.0 today and be part of a Guinness World Record!

Update: The actual downloads reflect a similar trend.

Downloads of Firefox 3.0 on June 17th 2008

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I was glancing through the BGP Instability Report which is a measure of the number of updates from various ASes over the past month. For a stable network, the number of updates must be relatively low.

I don’t understand why five of the top twenty most active ASes must be Indian ISPs. For a country with 3.6% of the World’s internet users and 0.5174% of the World’s IP addresses, it does seem more than a bit unusual.

It does point to very incompetent ISPs.

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More genius:

[14:45:27 jaidev@~]$ host -t mx yahoogroups.com
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 10 mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 20 mta1.grp.vip.re1.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta12.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta13.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
yahoogroups.com mail is handled by 30 mta14.grp.scd.yahoo.com.
[14:45:31 jaidev@~]$ telnet mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com 25
Trying 66.218.67.194...
Connected to mta2.grp.vip.scd.yahoo.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 yahoogroups.com ESMTP
helo <censored>
250 yahoogroups.com
mail from: <censored>
250 ok
rcpt to: <censored>@yahoogroups.com
250 ok
data
354 go ahead
Subject: Photos
.
554 we cannot accept this message because it appears to contain virus (#5.7.1)
quit
221 yahoogroups.com
Connection closed by foreign host.


Yahoogroups just refuses to accept emails with a subject line containing just Photos. Wow, my spamassassin setup is better than that.

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