If it's stats you want, this is an interesting insight. A wide variety of sources from around the Web were used to put this post together and Pingdom.com also did some additional calculations to get even more numbers to chew on – this is as at January 12, 2011. It's a good kind of information overload!
Email
* 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
* 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
* 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
* 480 million – New email users since the year before.
* 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam.
* 262 billion – The number of spam emails per day (assuming 89% are spam).
* 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide.
* 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate.
By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.
In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.
Former Minnesota governor, navy SEAL, and pro rassler Ventura has a new truTVshow investigating but not necessarily debunking conspiracy theories. This companion to the program, a sort of teaser, dissects such famed objects of unending speculation as the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations. Ventura concludes that none of those were twisted-loner crimes but rather resulted from conspiracies of varying vastness. Anent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ventura asserts that “our government engaged in a massive cover-up” and had “ties to the hijackers.” He ventures that “unanswered questions remain about how the towers were brought down and whether a plane really struck the Pentagon” and that the “Bush Administration either knew about the plan” or “had a hand in it.” Heady, paranoiac stuff, to be sure, but there are even more forthright charges regarding the assassination of Malcolm X, the Jonestown massacre, and the “stolen” elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, and, for that matter, 1980. Believable? Some of it. An action-packed read? You bet. –Mike Tribby
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley resigned yesterday facing an Obama Administration backlash against his remarksdeclaring the treatment of suspected leaker Pfc. Bradley E. Manning “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
The conditions of Private Manning's detention became the subject of controversy when his lawyer complained that Manning was being involuntarily forced to surrender his clothing to his Quantico military guards each night, supposedly in order to protect him from self-injury. Neither Manning, his attorney, nor any competent medical authority had requested any such “protection.” Instead, the compulsory nudity was widely perceived as a punitive measure, prompting protests from Amnesty International, among others. (We urged the DoD Inspector General to investigate the matter, to no known effect.)
Mr. Crowley, an uncompromising critic of leaks of classified information, is no friend of Private Manning who, he said, “is in the right place” (i.e., in jail). It was the gratuitous abuse of the prisoner that he deemed “ridiculous and counterproductive and stupid.”
He was right. In America, the pre-trial detention of any person who has not been convicted of a crime should be beyond reproach. In the Manning case (and in too many others), it hasn't been.
Though in criticizing Defense Department detention policy Mr. Crowley was clearly outside of his bureaucratic “lane,” he deserves credit for speaking out on a matter of principle. In an intelligent system of government, such views would be freely aired and honestly attended to. But it seems that there is not much place for such speech in the current Administration.
Phi Beta Iota: Worth reading, candid, interesting at multiple levels, not least of which is that the New York Times is still his source of record, and he assumes that CIA has a grip on social media–never mind that Jim Clapper just got slammed for not having a clue on precisely that. Good people trapped in a bad system…
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton's chief spokesman resigned Sunday, three days after he publicly criticized the treatment in confinement of WikiLeaks suspect Army Pfc. Bradley Manning as “counterproductive and stupid.”
Phi Beta Iota: This man should have been honored for telling the truth. You can tell a great deal about a government by how it handles such situations.
The United States and the world are now a good two decades into the Internet revolution, or what was once called the information age. The past generation has seen a blizzard of mind-boggling developments in communication, ranging from the World Wide Web and broadband, to ubiquitous cell phones that are quickly becoming high-powered wireless computers in their own right. Firms such as Google, Amazon, Craigslist, and Facebook have become iconic. Immersion in the digital world is now or soon to be a requirement for successful participation in society. The subject for debate is no longer whether the Internet can be regarded as a technological development in the same class as television or the telephone. Increasingly, the debate is turning to whether this is a communication revolution closer to the advent of the printing press.
. . . . . . .
The Internet, or more broadly, the digital revolution is truly changing the world at multiple levels. But it has also failed to deliver on much of the promise that was once seen as implicit in its technology. If the Internet was expected to provide more competitive markets and accountable businesses, open government, an end to corruption, and decreasing inequality-or, to put it baldly, increased human happiness-it has been a disappointment. To put it another way, if the Internet actually improved the world over the past twenty years as much as its champions once predicted, we dread to think where the world would be if it had never existed.
Phi Beta Iota: What has become clear to our collective is that the Internet really does need to be free, and that includes the software, the spectrum, and the access to knowledge. The Autonomous Internet is a non-negotiable first step toward a prosperous world at peace.
I've known Ran Hock for close to twenty years, and now that Mary Ellen Bates (MEB) and Reva Basch are retired (see their last books below), Ran is more or less the last man standing in the independent information brokerage domain, at least that I know. Arno Reuser, the genius librarian and top Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) pioneer in Europe still tells me that just listening to Ran Hock once a year (he was always the pre-conference to my conference) made him appear to be the most intellegent searcher in his organization for another year…Arno was being modest, he is his own pioneer, but the point is important. Ran Hock remains the one person I would consider essential for training a cadre to make proper use of the Internet.
John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney
6 Stars–The ONE Essential Reference