Weighing the Internet

the-dark-kangaroo writes "Jason Striegel has taken Physics to a new dimension by 'Weighing the Internet.' Well, actually calculating the total number of users online in one day. The conclusion that was reached was that there are ~519 million users per day online. Also, 'From what we calculated, it would appear that roughly 41 percent of internet users did not log in that day.'"

what?

seriously.

what?

Re:what?

See, when I read "weight of the internet" I thought it was talking about Physical Weight. It'd be sweeter if you took all the bandwidth data divided it by the speed of light (or whatever), and came up with the weight of the individual electrons of data at any given moment. Now THAT would be "taking Physics to a new dimension"!

And everyone of them found out...

that their penis could be HUGE!

hmmm...

It's probably overweight too.

Does that count...

If i am on two computers at the same time? Isn't everyone? No?

Technique

What algorithim did they use? The one involving magic?

Weight:

The awswer is 42 (metric gigatons total).

Breakdown of Internet Weight:

10 gigatons of Flames.
20 gigatons of Spam.
10 gigatons of e-dicks.
2 gigatons of information.

Continues on...

Jason Striegel continued by saying that "we didn't count anyone from Slashdot, because, lets face it, sitting in front of your computer all day eating Doritos tends to skew the results".

Interesting

So 519 million users, each getting 10 spam messages a day....6 billion spam at the very least. 519 million users, and 519 billion pornographic web sites

He Ain't Heavy, He's My User

Accelerating electrons through wires makes them weigh more. And pushing photons through fibers makes them weigh more. I wonder how much extra weight the Internet accounts for? If we're going to count the users as the Internet's weight, we should also be asking "how pasty is the Internet?"

Still Logging In? The System Isn't Finished.

The Internet and the computer won't really be finished until the "booting up and logging in" are replaced with "turning it on and instantly getting what you want". We had nearly instant boots with 8-bit micros and ROMs. We gave 'em up for the flexibility of putting the OS on the hard disk. There was no need to log in when the thing wasn't networked. Alas, security concerns gave rise to the login; but we don't log in to our telephones, we just dial. There is no way to bring down the whole phone network just by dialing the wrong number or saying the wrong thing into it. So there is hope that one day the whole "boot up and login" hack that we're using can be eliminated. Then this whole "computer and the internet" project will be done. Of course, it was a government project wasn't it? Maybe that'w why it's taking so long to finish.

Slashdot effect

So, when does his server reach critical mass due to slashdotters?

Super size the net

Does the internet weigh more in the US?

hackaday

This was on hackaday already, you can check it out at http://www.hackaday.com/ [hackaday.com] Sorry slashdot, ain't the news site that it used to be. Maybe tomorrow will be better

Weighing the internet?

Perhaps a better term would be "Counting the people on the internet"? That weighing stuff is for things with, well, MASS.

Woah, not even close

This is so horribly full of conjectures, uncontrolled data resources, and just pure speculation. The figures are based off Alexa Toolbar users, and one website visitor ratio. The author uses these as the base of forumlating a simple division/multiplication approach to postulating the gross users of the internet.

Suggestion for more accurate collection of information. Talk to ICANN or that nifty website senderbase.org [senderbase.org] that has a broader view on traffic flow across the internet.

What does "online" mean?

The trouble with these kinds of measurements is not that it is hard to get the data. The trouble is that it is hard to get data that makes any sense and even harder to define what sort of sense it is supposed to make.

This isn't the 80's. People don't connect to the Internet in discrete blocks every few days. They are connected 24x7 either at home, work, even on their phones. Who is to say that somone who doesn't visit some popular website isn't online? Who is to say that a particular visit to a web site is even represents a person?

Slashdot effect to combat global warming?

Here's an idea: as there are clearly an enormous number of people accessible via the internet, if we could all be coordinated to use our weight by jumping up and down at a notified time, we may be able influence the rotational orbit of the Earth.

We could have time zone +0 GMT start jumping at one part of the day, then time zone +12 GMT do it twelve hours later.

The cumulative effect might be enough to push the Earth into a longer orbit, thus moving us further away from the sun and cooling the planet.

(Of course, it's not solely proximity to the sun that determines global temperature, and Newton's Third Law + the weight of the planet vs the weight of humans might have something to say about whether jumping would actually work, but don't let that spoil some silly science!)

Re:Slashdot effect to combat global warming?

Damn! Foiled again by conservation of momentum!

what the hell

Horrible Horrible "study".

"So we can figure out the number of people who view hackaday by dividing 72,500 by 1.4, which gives us roughly 51,800 daily viewers."

Wrong. Bad sample population, low sample size with ONE DAY, NO inclusion of error propagation across statistical barriers. When you multiply estimates, you multiply error as well.

"With this knowlege, you can easily estimate the traffic to other sites. If we go by the 471 million estimate, Slashdot gets a whopping 380,000 daily readers."

Pretty sure I F5 more than that.

"Alexa... Alexa... Alexa...etc."

I dont know about you but Alexa is bordering on adware with this. Call me paranoid, I dont care.

Also not everyone (like me) would sign up and run a dumb banner like this on their browser, so your sample excluedes pretty much everyone that got hit with the smarts bat growing up.

Perhaps im missing some gross humorous overtone, but mod article -1 Statistical Chicanery

Don't bother, TA doesn't tell us...

the answer to the really important question:

how many Libraries of Congress does it weigh?

horribly ?

and am horribly attracted to women everywhere,

'Horribly' is not accepted as standard word in scientific research publications. The description must be quantitative like 'and am 91% time attracted to women at 45% of the places'. A graph of level of attraction vs cup size would be great!!

Interesting Conclusions

Wait a second...didn't we conclude yesterday that 1/3 of all studies are bunk? Well, at least these guys did admit their data wasn't statistically valid ;).

I'm one of them!

I using the internet. Is anyone else here using the internet too? I'm so unique.

Physics?

What does this have to do with Physics? Sure, weight is a physical phenomenon. Does that mean that buying a half a pound of ham from the deli is taking "Physics to a new dimension"?

How about "Abusing statistics in an unconscionable manner."? That seems more apt.

-Peter

How heavy?

What portion were overwight?

That means AIM weighs ... 0.00000004% the Internet

If users equates weight that means the maximum weight of a buddy list in AIM (which is 150) weighs 0.00000004% the Internet. (Atkins) Instant Messenger, anyone?

So, SEC to validate Nielsen/NetRatings reports?

The numbers pumped through his equation seem to show inflated numbers or suspicion of inflated #'s.
Public reports of ratings and fraud have been mentioned in his blog, and we have LOTS and lots of cash related the Nielsen/NetRatings reports as the issue.

Sounds like the SEC FTC should start sniffing up Nielsen skirts.
SEC raids Nielsen next.

Bet the best buy stores around Nielsen's HQ will be out of shredders tonight.

"been there, done that..." (Stanislaw Lem)

...roughly 1978:

Professor A. ("Affidavit") Donda (the offspring of an unfortunate genetical experiment including 3 women and a microscope slide) invents "Svarnetics" (roughly: "Advanced Mumbo-Jumboistics") as a pretense to load the worlds biggest computer with as much data as possible to find out if information has physical weight. He succeeds; however at the moment information is actually so dense that it becomes matter/weighable it turns into an info-black-hole, swallowing all information so far accumulated by humankind. What's left are some issues of "Playboy" (remember: this was written in the late 70s).

In case you've never heard of Stanislaw Lem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Lem [wikipedia.org]

In his novels and short stories you will find tons of amazing stuff (bio-/cyber-jack-stories from the 50es, bizarre robot-love and one of the most disillusioned space-pilots ever ("Pirx"). Besides: Lem was the guy who wrote the novel "Solaris", decently turned into a movie by Andrei Tarkovsky and, more recently, but not quite as decently, by Steven Soderbergh.

Weight of electrons in use at any given time?

That would match the title of this article a bit better... anybody care to take a stabe at the number?

Assuming X number of electrons to store a bit, multiplied by the amount of traffic in a given day, multiplied by the weight of an electron.

In Stone, of course, because nothing beats an ancient, obscure weight system used by exactly ONE country on this planet.

Weight?

My old CRT weighs about 35 lbs. Does that count? Because I switched to a LCD, did the Internet loose weight?

Log in?

How do I "log in" to the internet?

Same math with BBC News data gives 609M

According to Alexa [alexa.com], BBC News [bbc.co.uk] has a daily reach of about 20,000 per million. After the London bombings last week, that shot up to about 32,000.

So a daily reach of 32,000 per million means that 0.032 of users visit the BBC News website.

Now according to this article [bbc.co.uk], the BBC news website had a record 115 million page views last Thursday, so with 5.9 page views per user (from Alexa), that's 19.49 million users.

Dividing 19.49 by 0.032 gives 609M.

Of course, something is totally out of whack because that article also states that the number of page views was 5 times normal, but that isn't reflected in either the reach or page views per user reported by Alexa.

Oblig. Cartman quote

Internet: "I'm not fat, I'm just sufficiently back-boned."

There are Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics.

This hits all three....

Numbers work out

The 41% off-line number matches what we see too. On our little (ADSL) ISP with 20,000 end users, we typicaly have 60% on line at any one time.

It can be measured, but not like that

The methodology presented here is deeply flawed: it extrapolates a large number based on a very small sample and on unsupported assumptions about browsing habits. Yet, it is possible to actually measure the number of users with some proper method.

The most obvious method is a basic opinion poll. Take a large enough random sample of the earth population, ask simple questions like "have you used the Internet ever, this year, this month, this week, today", compute the average and extrapolate.

In practice, taking a world-wide poll is not very practical, but it is certainly possible to perform polls on a country by country basis, and then compute the results. In fact, such polls are regularly conducted, and the results are just a google search away, at least for major countries.

Polls are snapshot at a moment in time, and this is problematic. If you don't pay attention, you end up adding the number of users measured in China last January, in the US last month, in Finland in May, etc. So, you want to complement the polls by an indication of trend, something that you can easily measure at frequent interval.

One possibility is to use Internet host counts, which can be obtained by sampling the DNS (see the Internet Domain Survey [isc.org]). One can measure the number of host in a country and the number of users at the time of the poll, the current number of host in the same country, and extrapolate.

There are other potential sources, e.g. measure the volume of traffic, the number of dial-up and broadband subscriptions, etc. Again, it is possible to link these numbers to various poll data, and maintain estimates.

By the way, the Internet Domain Survey in January 2005 showed 317.6 million IP addresses in use. The typical broadband connection uses one IP address per household, i.e. for 1 to maybe 4 or 5 users. A dial-up connection typically only use an address only a fraction of the time, so the ratio is even higher. Then, there are about 650 million PC available worlwide, many of which are shared. Based on that, there were probably somewhere between 500 millions and a billion users on the Internet.

So where are all the story comments on Slashdot?

Can anyone tell me, with all the users supposedly online and with the popularity of Slashdot, why are there so few comments per story? Amount of comments seems to be in the range of 100-1000. There are millions of readers. Why so few comments?

Im working on an exact count...

Im running an IP FingerPrint now. Should have an exact count in a few hours.

The study

This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.

What about weighing the information itself?

At least the minimal possible weight of the information.

(1) Calculate the minimum energy required to represent one bit.
(2) Calculate the number of bits stored on the Internet.
(3)Multiply (1) by (2) an divide by c^2.

I am not a physicist, but I'm sure there must be some physical minimum amount of energy required to ensure a single bit is in a determined state.

The weight of software

A guy I worked with (named John) used to tell this as one of his favorite "true life" stories:

In the eighties, John was working on software for an airborne project when a guy came in and said "I need to know how much your software weighs."

John said "the software doesn't really have weight."

"Nonsense," said the guy. "It must weigh something."

John attempted to explain how the software is just the setting of the bits on a ROM, and that loading the software has no effect on the weight of the unit.

"Well, I have 3 categories," the guy said. "Greater than twenty pounds; one to twenty pounds; or less than one pound."

John said (somewhat jokingly), "Oh, it's less than one pound."

At that point the guy gave John a smug look and said "See? I told you it had to weigh something!" and walked out.

Re:Troll

Um...that's TP man, TP for my bunghole. Wow, what a way to shame a memory...

Re:"Log in?"

Now we know where the error in their estimates came from. You're the one.