Google and IP addresses

Just like a street address determines the recipient of a letter, an IP address (short for Internet Protocol address) is used to identify computers on the Internet. When your computer sends a request, such as a Google query, it tags the request with its IP address in order for the response to be sent back to your computer -- just like a return address on a letter. IP addresses are sequences of numbers that are usually displayed in readable notations, such as 172.16.254.1 (for IPv4) and 2001:db8:0:1234:0:567:8:1 (for IPv6).

When you type the query [ what is my ip ], Google will respond by showing you the IP address of the computer from which the query was received. In the simplest case, this IP address uniquely identifies your computer among all computers on the Internet. There are, however, several network configurations that may cause Google to receive an IP address that differs from the one assigned to your computer. For example, if you have a home network or a corporate network, devices are usually assigned "internal" IP addresses by a Network Address Translator (NAT) located within your router or modem. The NAT hides the internal IP addresses from websites, making the entire home network appear to outside computers to have a single, "external" IP address. In this case, we will show you the external IP address assigned to your home. Other network configurations, such as proxies, can also cause the IP address received by Google to differ from the actual IP address of your computer.

2 Million Internet Addicts in South Korea

Day and night, Lee Mi-hwa's son stays on his computer, slaying dragons in his online fantasy world while his dinner and homework sit untouched on a dinner table in Korea.

Lee says the 15-year-old fights his mother's attempts to make him log off, screaming and physically lashing out at her entreaties. She pulls up her sleeves to reveal bruises she says come from his blows.

Her son is among some two million people classified by the government as "internet addicts" in South Korea, a nation of 49 million considered one of the most technologically wired in the world.

Some are becoming increasingly violent. Last month, a couple let their three-month-old starve while they raised a virtual child in an online game, spending most of their days at an internet cafe instead of caring for their newborn, police said.

The baby looked like "a mummy" because she had not been fed for so long, according to a police officer who investigated the case. He asked that his name not be used because the investigation was still under way.

In February, a 22-year-old bludgeoned his mother to death for "nagging" him about playing internet games, police said. He then played games online for hours, paying with his mother's credit card, a police statement said.

Such incidents have alarmed the country, with the public calling for better measures against gaming addictions. The government announced last month it would take action by restricting access to popular online games, and is sending counselors to elementary schools to teach children about healthy internet usage.

"It's a little ironic that what was invented to make our lives better has come to make it worse for some," said Park Hye-kyung, director of the I Will Center, a government-funded counseling center created in December to focus on the growing issue of internet addiction."Internet addiction" may not be recognised as a medical condition or psychiatric disorder, but it often serves as a symptom of more serious underlying mental disorders such as attention deficit disorder and depression, said Dr Kim Tae-hoon, a psychiatrist who treats teenagers.

Kim said the internet is almost too readily available in South Korea. More than 90 per cent of homes have broadband access, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. In addition to widespread broadband, internet cafes known as "PC rooms" are open 24 hours throughout the country.

"In South Korea it's easier for citizens to play online games than to invest in their offline personal relations through face-to-face conversations," he added. "People are becoming growingly numb to human interaction."

Three out of 10 adults and some 26 per cent of teenagers are addicted gamers, according to Eo Gee-jun, president of the Korea Computer Life Institute.

"Children start to play internet games when they become fourth- or fifth-graders," Eo told The Korea Times newspaper last month. "They tend to be more attached to them as they grow up."

The Culture Ministry announced a joint project with major South Korean gaming companies earlier this month to implement a "late-night shutdown" on internet games popular among young users. Access to three games will be blocked from midnight until 8am to users aged under 18 when the program goes into effect later this year.

The ministry urged top game providers to monitor users by their national ID numbers, which include their ages, and to allow parents to check whether their children are using their IDs to play after hours.

And starting next year, gamers will be able to install free programs onto their computers that limit their access to the internet, the government said last month.

"Government policies are important but it's also crucial for the public to take charge as well," said Lee Young-ah, an official at the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism. "We want to alert as many people as possible on the seriousness of internet addiction so that individuals can start monitoring themselves."

Nexon, a major South Korean gaming company, says the curfew is a first step in the battle against online addiction.

"We want to create a healthy culture of enjoying our games and not suffering from them as an illness," said Nexon spokesman Lee Young-ho.

The government has earmarked 10 billion won ($9.7 million) to educate the public about the dangers of online addiction and to fund counseling centers for the web-obsessed.

Park, the director of the I Will Center, warned precocious school-age gamers will find a way to get their fix.

"Clever kids know how to work their way around any hurdles to gaming, and I am sure they can quickly find a way to get around this one as well," she said. Her counselors visit elementary schools to teach children about safe Internet usage in hopes of preventing Internet addiction early on.

Lee Mi-hwa says she is counting the days until the curfew goes into effect in the fall.

She said her son stays up most nights posing online as "Julian," a handsome, dragon-slaying superstar who saves his beautiful princess girlfriend from fire-spitting monsters.

By day, he's sullen and unresponsive, flunking his classes and unable to communicate with his family except with screams and blows, she said as her son sat nearby, immersed in his computer game.

Lee says she's desperate for any measure that might bring her son out of his internet bubble.

"I'm hoping that this new curfew will be (his) saving grace," she said, wiping away tears with her sleeve.

The ITGS Blog: Pharmacy on a Chip

The ITGS Blog: Pharmacy on a Chip: Researchers at MIT have developed what they're hoping will be something of a pharmacy on a chip. These are wirelessly controlled and pr...

Apple's iBook Initiative to Revolutionize Technology

The core focus of business is to address a problem. And the problem in education when it comes to the digital space isn’t a lack of content or publishing solutions; the problem is discovering quality. Education has enough content. There is more generic content out there for any individual subject than is possible to know. There are digitally proficient teachers who customize and repackage that content and those tools in ways that are appropriate for the students in their classes — from kindergartens and high schools into colleges and universities. Anyone in education knows there is a fast-growing community of teachers online doing their best to share the best tools, the best content and the best news ideas that they can. The problem is how we determine what is the best-quality content. Essentially, the problem is not access to educational content, but rather sifting through all the available content out there for the best quality products that you need. 


Apple is only adding to the problem by offering more tools to create and share content. In doing so, it will contribute to the feeling many have of being overwhelmed and overloaded with content, which they are struggling to sort through and are left to their own devices to sort, rate and organize. 


Apple relies heavily on the crowd to do this. But for many areas, the crowd is not enough.

Areas such as education and health that the whole population is interested in and has an investment in, but which they don’t all have an in-depth knowledge of, require more than just the crowd to make decisions about what constitutes the best-quality content and tools. Education is not the type of activity you want directed by a popularity contest.

But for Apple to continue to ignore the importance of helping parents and educators sort through and make sense of the tens of thousands of apps in the education section of the iTunes App Store is a missed opportunity to lead another revolution.

Jobs rendered obsolete?

The U.S. Postal Service appears to be the latest casualty in digital technology's slow but steady replacement of working humans. Due to rise in the technology sector, the post office will have to scale back its operations drastically, or simply shut down altogether. That's 600,000 people who would be out of work, and another 480,000 pensioners facing an adjustment in terms. 


People are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than they did four years ago, opting for electronic bill payment and other net-enabled means of communication over envelopes and stamps. And this change isn't only being seen in the postal service industry, but is affecting countless other domains as well. Shortly, technology will be replacing all the manual and menial jobs that once belonged to workers. 

Technologies such as the assembly line were less important for making production faster than for making it cheaper, and labourers more replaceable. Now that we're in the digital age, we're using technology the same way: to increase efficiency, lay off more people, and increase corporate profits.

Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs. 

While this is certainly bad for workers and unions, you have to wonder just how truly bad is it for people. Isn't this what all this technology was for in the first place? The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with "career" be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful? 

Study finds that 30% of Americans still do not use the internet.

According to to the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), approximately 30% of registered US citizens still do not use the internet for anything, whether it be shopping, taxes, surfing, or social media. Given roughly 300 million US citizens at the date of the study, there's roughly 91 million people who still do not use the commodity we find so common. Among these 91 million people, around 40% of them say that they simply do not think they need it. In a society that so heavily depends upon the internet for communication, the fact that so many people still do not see the use of internet is quite baffling. For others, internet access is simply too expensive to afford. However, in February 2010, the FCC announced their "100 Squared Initiative" where they planned to provide 100 million American households with 100 Mbps downstream internet connections.

Regardless of the reasons, in this day and age, not having internet access is almost like being illiterate. Without the internet, many doors are closed and so many facets of the world are off limit. Yet a large portion of American citizens still don't see the importance of an internet connection.

IBM drills holes into optical chips for terabit-per-second speed

IBM researchers have built a prototype optical chip that can transfer a terabit of data per second, using an innovative design requiring 48 tiny holes drilled into a standard CMOS chip, facilitating the movement of light. This new technology is much faster and much more power-efficient than today's optics. 


Optical chips, which move data with light instead of electrons, are commonly used for interconnects in today's supercomputers and can be found in IBM systems such as Power 775 and Blue Gene. Optical technology is favored over electrical for transmitting high-bandwidth data over longer distances, which is why it's used for telecommunications networks.


The Holey Optochip uses 4.7 watts in delivering nearly one trillion bits per second, enough to download 500 HD movies. At 5.2 mm by 5.8 mm, it's about one-eighth the size of a dime.


IBM researches have recently said that: "We're in a group within IBM Research, looking at communications technologies we'll need for future computers, particularly for crunching big data, and analytics applications when you have to have tons of bandwidth in the system," he said. "Our mission is to prototype technologies and show what's possible, to drive the industry to commercial solutions that we can then procure and put into our systems."


IBM researchers also recently made a breakthrough in quantum computing, which could eventually lead to computers exponentially more powerful than today's.