A new study has determined that Internet usage is highest at 11 p.m. Eastern Time. Although there's a big jump around 4 p.m. - people at work getting bored, probably - and a gradual increase in traffic starting at 8, it turns out that 11 is peak time. I can definitely speculate about what so many people might be doing online at that hour of the night, but it turns out that I don't have to. The study looked at that, too. If you guessed "porn," you're right! Traffic for pornography (and Internet video in general) plays a big part in the 11 p.m. spike.

While YouTube viewing is at its highest around midnight, gaming peaks at 8 and stays strong until 11. The study's authors speculate that's because a high number of World of Warcraft raids are planned around those times. No word from 7-11 on whether sales of Funyuns and Mtn. Dew see a big increase around 7. The study seems to have used a large enough sample to be reliable: the participating ISPs account for about half of North American traffic.

So there's this thing called "the Internet." You may have heard of it.. 15 years ago, Tom Brokaw filed a report about this strange thing, and today it looks like something out of a time capsule. Of course, the fun thing about Time Capsules is opening them, so it was awfully nice of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to post an early Brokaw report on the Internet on Hulu.

In it, Brokaw visits the "computer convention" in Las Vegas, and talks to Bill Gates, and Eric Schmidt, among others about the internet. What's funny about the clip is that Tom Brokaw, Bill Gates, and other people don't look that different, but the computers shown in the video look ancient, as do the little bits of internet content shown in the video.

[via The Business Insider]

There wasn't a whole lot remarkable about my Sunday this week. We're still thawing out here in the Great White North, so my son and I were relaxing and watching The Super Friends on TV. The longer we watched (and the more blown away I became with just how awesomely bad that cartoon really was), my mind started to wander.

"I must be reading too many blog posts," I said to myself, "because I'm starting to imagine the characters as web browsers." As the train of thought steamed ahead unimpeded, here's what I came up with.

Firefox as Batman
Like the Dark Knight, Firefox doesn't actually have super powers. What he does have is experience, a little kung fu, and a vast arsenal of tools he can clip to his belt before heading into battle. I don't know if any evildoer really killed Firefox's parents, but you sure don't hear much from Netscape anymore.

Unlike Batman, however, Firefox is actually good friends with The Penguin.

I love the quote from playwright John Allen, who really understood how "Internet" could connect physically disparate affinity groups. John also says, "there's an interesting kind of restraint that you find. ...There's not a lot of put-downs... not screenfulls of 'go to hell.'" My how times of changed. These days anonymity and "Internet" are synonymous with flame wars and cyberbullying. One can only hope that recent pleas for civility on the web will get us back to these good ol' days of newsgroups and bulletin boards.

We'll keep an eye out for more retro videos and post them here.

As Lee has already noted, today is Data Privacy Day. Since Lee has already covered Windows users, I'm offering up my list of privacy tools, utilities and practices for Mac OS X and Linux (various distributions).

As always, please leave additional suggestions in the comments.

File/Disk Encryption Tools

• FileVault(Mac) - Mac OS X's built-in encryption tool, FileVault (access it by going to System Preferences, selecting Security and clickin on the FileVault tab in OS X 10.5 Leopard) isn't a completely robust encryption service (it encrypts your home folders, not the entire disk) - but it is easy to use and effective in protecting your home folder data.
• TrueCrypt(Mac and Linux) - TrueCrypt is a cross-platform app (it works with Windows too) that will encrypt your entire drive.
• dm-crypt (Linux) - dm-crypt, the successor to cryptoloop, supports encrypting whole disks, partitions, logical volumes and files. TrueCrypt is going to be easier to use, but dm-crypt might be the better solution depending on your needs and file system.

Instant Messaging

• Adium (Mac) - Adium, the best IM client available for the Mac supports OTREcryption, so you can be sure your conversations are encrypted both ways.
• Kopete(Linux) - Kopte, KDE's instant messenger has an OTR Pluging available for encrypting conversations.

I know, I know, this headline smacks of ageism. I mean, I live in Canada, which is the country that has one of the highest percentage of people over the age of 60 that are online in some capacity. But seriously, although most of you geeks reading this have a strong grasp of the way the internet works, could you explain it to your parents or grandparents in a way that they can understand? How about explaining it to your kids? I know I've struggled with that in the past.

That's why I'm pointing you to this article by Chris and Jenny Ford, which explains the web in simple terms. All of the basics are there, from "What is a website?" to "How can I get my own domain name?", or my personal favorite, "How does my computer find websites?". Helpfully, the answer section for each question ends with a video explanation.

So next time you're struggling to explain some basic aspect of the web to someone, consider just directing them to Chris and Jenny's site. And if you've read through the article and viewed all of their videos, go ahead and get yourself your internet diploma. You deserve it.

Here's a question for all our elderly readers: Do any of you remember the primitive era affectionately called 1995, and hearing your college professors speak hopefully (or possibly lament) that soon all the information and media ever created would be up on this web thing and easily accessible and available free of charge? Do you remember how many people went out and bought those state of the art 486s and bleeding edge Pentium I computers, and signed on with AOL or Compuserve or Mindspring to fire up Netscape, stumble on to Yahoo! only to discover the truth.

Even back then, there was a lot of stuff online that was technically information or visual/audible media. It was free, much of it, anyway, as well. I spent way too many hours watching an oddity called a webcam update at shockingly fast one minute intervals, as it delivered grainy black and white stlll images of some forgotten webmaster's painted turtle in California to my desktop in Northern Virginia.

As far as exotic, fine art work or rare, priceless tomes of great knowledge went -- it wasn't all accessible online, or necessarly free if it happened to be available. But for a good portion of the '90s, people who hadn't been online much, or were in denial, insisted it was out there.

There dawns the new century, and the myth of "it's all there, free" started to fade away with the old beige Pentium I and II computers. Things went the other way, though. Every day there was more information on the internet from all sorts of sources, and some of it (shock, awe) was free, or at least accessible to some degree. Is it irony or karma? Who knows? Many people are floored, now, to discover how much useful, cool, credible information is available online free of charge.

So just in time to go back to school (or to impress your friends with your innate intelligence), I've found a few sites and tricks for getting really great information online without additional tuition fees.

I remember being a little girl, and watching my friends fuss about what their babies would like if they married George Michael, or Michael Jackson (so I am not only carbon-dating myself, but I'm also showing how naive my friends and I were). Oh, c'mon, I never fussed about these things. I was too busy playing with the Commodore PET.

The Commodore PET could only dream of doing the things modern computers (or little girls) do. Today, its dreams have come true with the introduction of (cough) MakeMeBabies.com. Okay, this site is for entertainment purposes only. The resulting child of any of these unions, holy, unholy, or otherwise, may not be true to life. Yet all of us here at Download Squad are wasting way too much time spreading our genes throughout Hollywood.

They'll thank us later, for sure.

The results of our fooling around (hate the game, not the playaz, guys) produced some interesting (if extremely disturbing) results. My (real life) husband and I had a blonde child that was much too good looking to have come from either of us. Never mind that neither of us are blonde. Antonio Banderas and I produced a child that had some serious facial issues. Interestingly enough, fellow Download Squad lady bloggers (why aren't the guy Squadders doing this too?) seemed to have children with similar facial issues. Actually, we all seemed to have the same child with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Antonio Banderas.

So what do you all think? One trick algorithm putting similar features on generic children's heads? Or is it a deeper conspiracy? Do all the guys in Hollywood have the same genetic structure? Are they all inbred? Or maybe... Maybe it's all of us here at Download Squad. We'll never tell.

[via Jay Martinez.com]

Kevin Kowalewski of Seneca College wanted to build something for the summer. Instead of the usual tree house or go kart he decided to build a BitTorrent client, in a browser.

Torrent Relay's interface is pretty easy to figure out and works with all the mainstream browsers including those found on the PS3, Wii or iPhone. Either upload or paste the url of the torrent file and let the site do its thing. After a bit, you're taken to another page to initiate the download.

Keep in mind that this is a summer project so don't be surprise if you get a lot of "server busy" messages and are asked to donate or click an ad. Currently downloads over 400MB are not permitted, so no Kubuntu downloads for you.

We can see the value of a service like this once cloud computing really takes off and everything lives in the clouds. This way we're still able to get our weekly fix of Bleach.

In many ways, I'm pretty old school. When I learned HTML, I painstakingly handcoded my pages in the esteemed Notepad. Only when I became a master of HTML-fu did I allow myself to try Dreamweaver. (Okay, fine, the ability to buy a license with educational pricing may have had a lot to do with it, too.)

I loved Dreamweaver. One of the things that always made me a little sad when I first tried Linux was that there wasn't a real Dreamweaver-esque type application. Times have changed, however. There are a number of HTML/web development applications out there that are free (as in speech and beer) and feature filled.

But I'd be really amiss if I just mentioned Linux HTML editors in a vacuum. There are a number of tools readily available in repositories that make coding, layout, uploading, and testing easy and (dare I say it) fun.

Because seriously, if it isn't fun, what's the point?

Over the next few weeks we're going to take a look at web development tools in Linux. We'll do a run down of some popular XHTML/HTML editors, FTP and transfer software, and neat little tools for creating content that make some of the drudgery of "back-end" web work less painful.

Over the past few days there has been increasing furor over a claim made by some "electro-sensitive" folks in Santa Fe that wifi in public buildings violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. Because these people are electro-sensitive (and this sensitivity can be to all sorts of electromagnetic fields, in things like cell phones, or microwaves, or, we'd imagine, things like transformer stations and circuit boxes), they can't enter public buildings due to the horrible health effects they experience. These health effects range from chest pains, to leg numbness, to shortness of breath, and headaches.

Is wifi dangerous? Are cell phones dangerous? There is some debate about various cancers that may or may not result from having a cell phone pasted to your ear and your laptop constantly humming on your lap, but most cancers don't immediately cause things like, oh, chest pain, leg numbness, or shortness of breath. The verdict is still out on long term effects at this point anyway, and we take the stance that something is eventually going to kill us. Life is too short to live in constant fear, or without an internet connection.

Panic attacks cause the above symptoms. Generalized anxiety does as well. An "allergic" reaction to wifi? Eh.

We look at it this way. Right now, we're sitting in a residential area about eight miles outside of a major city. Turning on our wireless connection and sniffing around reveals eleven wifi networks in the area. Eleven that we could in theory connect with successfully, if they are unsecured. Eleven that are not blocked by things like walls, or doors, or tinfoil hats. We are not in a business district in a city.

Can you imagine the rogue wifi signals that are shooting around Santa Fe? Do the electro-sensitive people believe that wifi respects physical boundaries, and that walking by a coffee shop or public building with wifi is different than walking into one? If so, would they walk by a coffee shop with wifi while the door was open? Would the wireless, ahem, rush out the open door? Is there any place in the US where you can be in a city, or moderately populated town, and not be in range of some wireless signal?

Flashforward2008 is going to be in San Francisco this August. This annual conference is directed at Flash designers and developers and those who aspire to be called a designer or developer. Every year Flashforward features a Film Festival with open nominations of the best Flash content out there. In 2008 the categories have changed to the following:

1. Application
2. Cartoon/Story/Narrative
3. Code
4. Experimental/Art
5. Game
6. Motion Graphics
7. Navigation/Experience
8. Sound
9. Typography
10. Video

Anyone can submit links to Flash based works in all categories that are 'innovative and compelling.' Previous winners include Paper Vision 3d, the MoMA Contemporary Voice exhibition, and the amazing Tokyo Plastic. If you do submit a nomination to Flashforward2008 via the official film festival page, please let us know in the comments below with a link. The deadline for nominations is Father's Day, June 15, 2008.

A sassy 13 year-old Virginian laid the smack-down on a vacuum instead of doing his chores and then was caught looking at porn by his tech savvy mother, who stumbled upon some very suspicious looking cookies (not pictured above) stored on the computer's browser. Unhappy with his recent behavior, how does a mother punish a boy in this day and age?

Grounding him to his room would only be a blessing: video games, TV, the Internet, movies, phone, etc. Getting him to do chores has already proved fruitless. Perhaps in another time-period, she would've beat him into a coma with a yard stick, but today's politically correct nation requires Parenting 2.0 -- officially trademarked, copyrighted, and owned by T-Mobile.

It's like the song says, "Everybody plays the fool."

The FBI reports that US consumers lost a record 239 million dollars to Internet scammers and thieves in 2007. Given the record number of spam emails being sent (which accounted for 75% of the Internet scams), and the mass amounts of money being made by scammers worldwide, this really shouldn't surprise us; it's kind of like reporting that peanut butter goes well with jelly.

Internet scams are a hot, and a big, business.

A couple interesting tidbits:

Even though the amount lost this year was higher, the actual number of complaints was down. This means that scammers are focusing more and more on big ticked items, such as work-at-home schemes and so forth.

Lately, some ISPs have been using BitTorrent throttling techniques to prevent BitTorrent programs from working properly. It is understandable that ISPs need to manage their networks in order to ensure that every customer gets a fair share of the bandwidth pie, but as individuals, traffic throttling techniques take away from the service we were promised when signing up.

If you choose to share the data collected via the Network Status Monitor, the Azureus team may analyze and compare it with the data collected from other users in order to develop ways of circumventing BitTorrent throttling. The plug-in only works on Windows machines for now, but Mac support is coming.