Notch up another useful pet project for the Raspberry Pi. Adafruit offers a tutorial for combining the Raspberry Pi and Tor, which routes traffic through a worldwide network to preserve anonymity. They christened it the Onion Pi, since Tor originailly stood for The Onion Router.

The project creates a wireless hotspot from any old Ethernet connection and automatically routes it through the Tor proxy. The little project is designed to put smartphones, game consoles, and other systems onto the Tor network that wouldn't normally be easy to route through a proxy, but it could also serve as a decent introduction to working with the Raspberry Pi and networking technology.

Assembling the entire thing is inexpensive--if you already have the Raspberry Pi and an Ethernet cable, all you'll have to shell out for is a USB Wi-Fi adapter and a 4GB SD card to hold Raspbian. Adafruit also sells an entire kit for $95, but if you don't care about a case for the Raspberry Pi, you can probably throw together the required parts for less than $50.

Getting the Onion Pi up and running is as simple as following Adafruit's instructions. Installing Tor requires a little command line work, but the directions are straightforward and easy to follow. With the wireless set up, you'll be one step closer to Internet anonymity--and so will anyone who comes to visit your house and uses your Wi-Fi network, since the access point itself routes data through the proxy.

Google has a wild, wild plan to bring high speed Internet to parts of the world where it's expensive or simply impossible to access. And it doesn't involve laying fiber lines. It involves balloons.

Once upon a time, hot air balloons were the future of transportation. In science fiction, like Jules Verne's 1863 novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, they were an almost magical form of transportation that made global travel a possibility. Even now, in steampunk, airships are held aloft by balloons as they cruise the skies. Our actual technological implementations of balloons are a bit more reserved--today we use airplanes to fly across the globe rather than zeppelins or hot air balloons--but high altitude balloons are still used in awesome science projects to carry sensors high into the Earth's stratosphere.

Google's cheekily-named Project Loon works much the same way. The company wants to use a network of balloons flying at twice the height of commercial jet airplanes to provide 3G-caliber Internet (or better) to the ground below. Imagine Wi-Fi coming from approximately 65,000 feet in the air, and you'll get the idea. But how could Google keep the balloons in place so far off the ground? They can't. Or, at least, they don't intend to.

"All we had to do was figure out how to control their path through the sky," writes Google project lead Mike Cassidy. "We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power."

Google put up a video explaining the technology behind Project Loon, and they're already well into the testing phase--a pilot program in New Zealand has a (potentially) lucky 50 people trying to connect to the balloons and using them for Internet access.

Google's simple "Internet for all" goal is audacious. It's hard to imagine putting forth the manpower to keep a global fleet of balloons in the sky, since they eventually deflate and fall back to Earth. Google can control that descent as well, refill the balloons, and send them skyward again, but doing that on a global scale would be an enormous task.

Still, their introductory video for Project Loon is sweet in that Pixar sort of way. Inspiring, even:

In late May, someone posed an interesting, though odd, question about Facebook: "How much research has gone into developing the Facebook ping sound?" That ping, which the Quora questioner complimented, sounds off when you receive a video call on Facebook. Then something weirder happened: a former Facebook designer responded that a lot of work had gone into that ping, and he laid out exactly how they'd created it.

The Atlantic picked up the story, and Wired got in touch with the designer, Everett Katigbak, to find out more. He talked about designing the ping as the basis for Facebook's future audio identity; other sounds would take a cue from the incoming video call ping to establish a consistent sound for the brand.

Photo credit: Flickr user stevendepolo via Creative Commons.

Wired writes "He wanted Facebook's audio identity to be pleasant, inviting and familiar." And the breakthrough moment that led to the ping came, oddly enough, from the pronunciation of Facebook. "“I thought there was something interesting to the two syllables and the intonation happened when people would say it,” Katigbak told Wired. When he showed his collaborator, an audio engineer named Jim McKee, a hand-drawn sketch of an audio wave with F-A-C-E-B-O-O-K written out below it, they had a revelation.

FACE coincidentally spelled out an F Major 7 chord (composed of the notes F, A, C, and E).

In his Quora response, Katigbak added more detail on why this chord worked so well:

You've probably heard by now: the NSA is listening to you. Or watching you. Or reading your Twitter feed. The news broke on Thursday that PRISM, a program run by the United States National Security Agency, was established post-9/11 to analyze the vast amounts of information flowing across cell phone networks and the Internet. Here's what The Washington Post wrote to introduce this story on Thursday:

"The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track foreign targets, according to a top-secret document obtained by The Washington Post."

Many, many people are upset about this news, and understandably so. But it's also confusing. Is this an illegal invasion of privacy? Are those Internet companies playing along? Let's take on the most important elements of the PRISM story one by one.

First up: PRISM is possible because Congress passed the Protect America Act in 2007 and the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, which "immunized private companies that cooperated voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection," writes the Washington Post.

Here's the gist of what the Protect America Act Added, via Wikipedia:

• The bill allowed the monitoring of all electronic communications of "Americans communicating with foreigners who are the targets of a U.S. terrorism investigation" without a court's order or oversight, so long as it is not targeted at one particular person "reasonably believed to be" inside the country.
• The Act removed the requirement for a FISA warrant for any communication which was foreign-related, even if the communication involved a U.S. location on the receiving or sending end of communication; all foreign-foreign communications were removed from warrant requirements, as well.[10]
• Experts claimed that this deceptively opened the door to domestic spying, given that many domestic U.S. communications passed via non-US locations, by virtue of old telephony network configurations.

Making a great animated GIF is an art form. Or it's a science. Either way, it's often a ton of work--editing GIFs is awkward in Photoshop and GIMP, and making a GIF from a video usually requires editing footage down into a small clip and importing that clip into dedicated GIF-making software. It's a pain, and GifCam is the cure. If this little app isn't already the de facto GIF-making software on the Internet, it probably will be soon.

GifCam is about as straightforward as a piece of software can be, and it just hit a 2.0 release on June 3, which makes it even better. Let's run through the basics before getting into the new features. And this is a good time to point out that GifCam is a Windows-only app, but it is free. There's not even an installer--just an EXE, which you can grab here.

GifCam essentially works like a screen recorder--you drag the window over a section of your desktop, resize it as you see fit, and press record. Want to turn a Youtube video into a GIF? Drag the box on top of the browser, click play, and click record. The record button's right-side drop-down menu also offers the choice between the default 10 fps, an intermediate 16fps or a high-speed 33 fps.

Now, chances are you'll end up with a few frames at the beginning or the end you don't want in the GIF. Maybe you want it to loop more seamlessly. GifCam's Edit button brings up a horizontally scrolling window of each frame in your new GIF-to-be.

Here you're given a few options.

Today, Google is rolling out new features for Gmail designed to help users manage the flood of legitimate mail that people may not actually want in their inbox. The new update is bringing the functions added in the Smartlabels lab to the masses, giving users automatic categorization of inbound emails into a few categories: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums.

Image Credit: Google

The update is rolling out to users now and should be available to all Gmail users in the next few weeks. The iOS and Android apps will be updated to use the new feature in the same timeframe.

Big day for Yahoo. Not only did Marissa Mayer announce the acquisition of Tumblr this morning, but Flickr has gone through its biggest revamp since the internet petitioned Mayer to save the photo service. The new Flickr site launched today, along with a new Android app with the same photo-centric interface (and full-resolution uploading capabilities) as its well-received iOS counterpart. Visit Flickr starting today and you'll see a redesigned front-page photostream of activity from friends, user landing pages that are reminiscent of Facebook and Instagram's profiles (with even bigger photos), and large text letting you know that you now have 1TB of free storage. Yup, that's terabyte with a T. But as Will is quick to point out, this ad-driven service may be a downgrade for existing Pro Flickr users who have been paying $25 a year for unlimited storage and no ads. So let's break down the features of the new free Flickr account and how it compares to the old free and Pro accounts.

Here's how the previous free Flickr account compares to the new free account. This applies to the vast majority of Flickr users (myself included), and is undeniably an improvement:

And here's how the new free Flickr account compares to the old Pro account:

The New York Times is reporting that ABC will be the first of the major broadcast networks to put all of its programming online to be streamed live to an iPad app. ABC, which was one of the first networks to release an on-demand video app for tablets when the iPad was first released in 2010, will debut this streaming service for its New York and Philadelphia viewers. That means that every second of video that those users would otherwise watch on their local ABC television station will be accessible via ABC's new "Watch ABC" app.

But this is no cord-cutting measure.

Here are the caveats to this plan, which ABC executives say was already in development prior to the announcement of Aereo and the litigation that has followed. First, only cable and satellite service subscribers will be able to tap into the ABC livestream, and will have to sign in to authenticate their subscription in the app, much like HBO subscribers have to do with HBO Go. Second, ABC says that making this content available (both in livestream and on-demand formats) in an app means that it'll gradually withhold that content from free-to-view services like Hulu and even its own ABC.com site. This would be to sweeten the deal for cable and satellite providers who want to ensure that users keep paying for that subscriptions.

Also, the livestream will have advertisements, but it won't be the same ads that are piped to broadcast viewers--they'll be digital ads like you'd find on ABC.com. And finally, ABC will only be able to expand this service to other markets if it can work out deals with the owners of its 200 affiliate stations. In the case of the east coast, many of those affiliates are owned by Hearst, which ABC has a good relationship with. There are many stakeholders that need to be appeased in making this happen, and the consumer is rarely on the top of that list.

One of the most interesting messages Google tries to get across in its Chromebook campaign is the idea that the hardware is disposable. If your Chromebook falls into a volcano or gets run over or stolen, you're out the cost of the hardware, but that's it. You don't lose any data, and the crook/volcano god doesn't get access to it either. All you have to do is grab a new Chromebook (or any PC that can run the Chrome browser) log in, and you're back in business.

Photo credit: Alex Washburn/Wired via Creative Commons.

Most of us can't use a Chromebook full-time. We use programs that don't yet run in a web browser, we play games that require local asset files and don't sync to the cloud, and we have a lot of data we need to hold onto--more than will fit onto a few lousy gigabytes of local storage. But we can take a page from the Chromebook, as it were, and make our data resilient and flexible--resilient, so a hardware loss doesn't mean data loss, and flexible, so that we can pick up pretty much any computer with an Internet connection and be able to work. After all, if you lose your Chromebook, you don't need to find another Chromebook to access your data; you just need to log in to your Google Account from anywhere.

In order to get Chromebook-level data security on our "real" computers, we need two things: good backup software, and good syncing software. All of your data deserves to be backed up, but not all of it needs to be immediately accessible. With a good backup, your data is safe, and with a good sync setup, you can have near-instant access to whatever subset of that data you deem worthy. The good news is that this is now really easy.

I'm not just idly pontificating; I just did some spring cleaning, including a clean Windows install on my desktop, and this is how I prepared, backed up, and synced my data.

Note that this guide is written from the perspective of a Windows user, but the main points are valid for Linux and Mac OS X users as well.

BitTorrent is the greatest peer-to-peer information technology in the history of the Internet so far. Which means, of course, that it's also the greatest piracy tool in the history of the Internet so far. Sometimes BitTorrent is used for more noble purposes--hosting content that would be expensive to keep on a solitary server, distributing open source software like Ubuntu. And Bittorrent, Inc., which invented the file sharing platform, is still trying to prove that torrenting can be good for more than stealing files. Enter the new Bundle file form, which BitTorrent hopes will encourage content creators to use the peer-to-peer network.

"The BitTorrent Bundle is not an album, an MP3, or an MOV," writes the BitTorrent Blog. "It’s a multimedia format. It’s an early build of a new type of torrent file where fan interaction, like email collection or donation, happens inside the torrent. We’re collaborating with electronic music innovators Ultra Music to see what happens when you let people choose how they want to connect with content."

The goal of the Bundle is to harness the strength of BitTorrent's peer-to-peer system without giving away everything for free. The blog compares the content to a flyer or a standalone storefront. "When you download the Ultra Bundle from BitTorrent, you get half the content gratis: the Dada Life remix of Dynasty, and the “Freaks of Nature” tour trailer. The other half of the content inside the file? It’s a functional record store, with content you can unlock using your email."

In this case, an email address grants access to the rest of the files within the Bundle. But the key to unlock content in a Bittorrent Bundle could easily be a PayPal account or a credit card, something to monetize an album sale without going through iTunes or hosting the files on an independent server. The idea ties in neatly with the concept of pay-what-you-want, as musicians could easily give away their music for free or offer a few tracks as a preview, with the rest locked behind a payment.

When piracy is easier, simpler, and faster than buying something, it thrives. The BitTorrent Bundle won't stop people from stealing, but it could quite possibly put a dent in piracy just like Netflix.

Web security experts have said many times that a longer password is better security--so long as you're using different passwords on different sites. Imayankeedoodledandy would be harder to crack than yank33, even without numbers or symbols. But sometimes we can't make longer passwords because, with little explanation, different websites have different restrictions in place that govern what can and can't go into a password. Ars Technica asked a few such companies to explain their password policies, and the answers they got aren't especially appeasing.

Some sites support passwords up to 64 characters with few descriptions. Evernote, for example, allows 64 character passwords and all symbols, but not spaces. And their explanation for this held up pretty well. Ars writes:

" 'Software needs to precisely determine how to treat leading and trailing spaces,' Dave Engberg, Evernote’s CTO, told Ars. 'Some UI frameworks and third-party applications would unreliably trim spaces, others would not.'

Adding support for spaces only in the middle of the password would make the regular expression defining them three times longer, Engberg said. And for that extra effort, the entropy (uncertainty of what character holds any given position in the password) would increase by only 1.5 percent.

One explanation is that phishing, malware, and password reuse are far bigger problems than password length.

Restrictions from other companies make less sense. Microsoft allows numbers, letters and symbols, but passwords have to be between 8 and 16 characters. AT&T allows between 8 and 24 characters, but only the symbols _ and - because "customers did not like typing them when using mobile phones." And Ars discovered that banking company Charles Schwab, which probably deals with the most vital information of the sites listed here, requires that passwords be between 6 and 8 characters. No explanation was given.

Microsoft's explanation was that phishing, malware, and password reuse are far bigger problems than password length. And that's probably true, but responsible passworders are only hampered by upper limit restrictions, especially when those limits are as small as 8 characters. Read the rest of the Ars Technica story for some reasons why short password restrictions can imply greater security issues, like companies storing passwords themselves, potentially leaving them vulnerable to hacking.

Archive.org may soon have a competitor for the Internet's broadest repository of cultural history. On Thursday, a post at DP.LA announced the launch of the Digital Public Library of America, an organization that "brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world." With government and non-profit funding, the DPLA aims to collect art and writing and film and make it freely available on the web.

Photo credit: University of Kentucky

The DPLA's executive director, Dan Cohen, spoke with The Atlantic about the digital catalog's launch. From a technology perspective, it sounds like the Digital Public Library plans to do some exciting stuff with everything it archives. One example: You can sort through the archives via a map view to find materials from different states or counties or cities. An even better example, which Cohen described to The Atlantic:

"All the data will be licensed under CC0 -- that's really a public domain declaration. It means that we're giving away all this data for free for people to use in whatever way they want. And we will have an API -- a very powerful API -- that third-party developers will be able to use to create innovative apps based on the contents of the DPLA. So if you're a developer of a mobile app, maybe one for a local walking tour of a city, you can take the material you already have and mix it up with all the great content from the DPLA for that particular location."

Some of the content in the library comes from sources you've probably heard of, like the Smithsonian, Harvard, and the National Archives. Cohen said the Smithsonian had already contributed over 800,000 items to the digital collection. But a lot of what they're getting comes from places that most of us would never find on our own, even though it's available online. Cohen said they're working with "about 42 state and regional digital libraries, things like the Digital Library of Georgia, Minnesota Digital Library, and Mountain West Digital Library, which covers Utah and parts of states right nearby. And those digital libraries, which I think are a little bit under the radar, are actually already doing an amazing job collecting digitized content from very small historic sites -- libraries, archives, and museums -- in their particular state or region."

Here's one of the 4000 or so moving images the Digital Public Library of America has collected so far--it's called The Communication Revolution, which seems like a fitting topic. The short discussion film includes famous scholar Marshall McLuhan talking about differences between forms of media.

In an Adblocked world, the Internet banner ad doesn't carry the advertising weight it once did. But it's also come a long way from its origins in 1994, which Digiday highlighted in a blog post on Friday titled "How the Banner Ad Was Born." The life of the banner ad stretches back to four years before Google existed and begins with Hotwired, a webzine spin-off of Wired magazine. As Digiday tells it, Hotwired needed to come up with a way to pay its writers. They coined the term banner ad.

"The idea arrived to create a dozen sections that would carry “banner” advertising," writes Digiday. "This wasn’t entirely original. Early Web service Prodigy had used similar methods, although it placed its banners at the bottom of the screen. (This led to the first ad blocker; a piece of plastic affixed to the bottom of monitors to obscure the dreaded advertising.) The ad was small and unobtrusive by necessity. 'We were designing for a 13-inch black and white screen,' said Hotwired’s CEO at the time, Andrew Anker. 'It was state of the art at the time.'

Photo credit: Flickr user SamahR via Creative Commons.

AT&T ended up becoming the first company to buy a banner ad on Hotwired. It cost the company $30,000 for three months. When the ad launched in October of 1994, it pulled in a 44 percent click-through rate, which is absolutely insane. Today's banner ad click-through rate has been holding steady at about 0.09 percent since 2008.

There were a lot of intersting firsts about AT&T's banner. Digiday describes how its creators had to fight for the idea of web advertising, which was uncharted water at the time. And the ad was only vaguely self-promotional. The advertisers shrewdly recognized that the Internet was, at that time, mostly the domain of artists and other creatives, so they didn't direclty attempt to sell AT&T services through the banner.

The banner led to a "a webpage that collected the early sites of great museums of the world," which was created by the advertisers. "AT&T would enable people to tour the great works of The Louvre, the Warhol Museum and others. The brand would be, as [interactive ad agency] Modem founder GM O’Connell preached, a service."

When the ad went up, it was hard-coded into the Hotwired page. There were no servers dedicated to delivering ads. The depth and breadth of today's analytical tools throw into relief just how basic that first ad was.

"Measuring how many ads were shown was a manual process," writes Digiday. "John Nardone, who joined Modem to lead its media department at the time, recalls getting log files from publishers in order to count the “hits” an ad got. Log files included hits for each piece of the page’s content; that meant combing through for the .jpg file associated with the ad. The first Web analytics tool was a highlighter pen."

A few short years ago we were still interacting with our smartphones like Scotty in Star Trek IV. "Computer? ... Computer? Hello computer." We wanted to talk to them, rather than type on their cramped screens, but they couldn't say anything back. Now things are different: Both Apple and Google are prioritizing systems that can listen, understand natural language, and talk back. And while Apple has given Siri a name and identity, Google's voice search doesn't have a catchy name. It's just Voice Search.

Someday, they want it to be the Star Trek computer. How's that for an identity? Majel Barrett-Roddenberry's voice, which brought the computer systems to life in Star Trek--and The Next Generation and basically every other Star Trek series and film--is probably the most iconic vocal representation of a computer in history. If Google wants to build the definitive computer that responds to natural language with articulate responses, what else could they possibly shoot for?

Image credit: Paramount

Of course, it's easy to use a sci-fi touchstone like Star Trek's computer system to get people excited; it's another thing altogether to actually try to build one. Slate's Farhad Manjoo has traced Google's Star Trek computer obsession back to 2010, when they were first hyping up voice search. Since then, Star Trek has consistently been a talking point, but it took awhile for him to realize just how serious they were:

" 'The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we're building,' Singhal told me. 'It is the ideal that we're aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically.' He added that the search team does refer to Star Trek internally when they’re discussing how to improve the search engine. 'It comes up often,' Singhal said. 'For instance, we might say, ‘Captain Kirk never pulled out a keyboard to ask a question.’ So in that way it becomes one of the design principles—we see that because the Star Trek computer actively relies on speech, if we want to do that we need to work to push the barrier of speech recognition and machine understanding.' "

Google's Star Trek dream obviously applies to voice search, but it applies to text-based inputs, too. You can see Google's desire to provide answers, rather than links, in its Knowledge Graph, which will give you definitions of words, convert ounces to gallons, or recognize a celebrity name and give you their fact sheet. Google Now offers a text-based version of their end goal--providing information without users explicitly asking for it.

For voice, natural langauge recognition is still a huge obstacle. And the questions people ask offer an immense challenge, too--an amazing 16 percent of Google queries are new every day. Google has to know more. That's a given. But the search engine's designers have to find new ways to understand and answer more questions, especially so that it can deal with open-ended queries like "Why is my best friend sad?"

Check out Slate's full article for more from Google's Amit Singhal on the future of search.

There's something important you should know about wireless range extenders before you buy one: they're not very good. If there are dead zones in your house where Wi-Fi signals can't reach, there are better ways to improve your coverage than Wi-FI extenders. But if you're set on one, the Netgear WN2500RP is the least bad.

You probably shouldn't buy an extender. The first thing you should try is moving your router to a central location in your house, if possible. Better placement may solve all your problems. If that doesn't work and the router you have is a few years old, I recommend getting a new one like the ASUS RT-N56u or the ASUS RT-N66u, our top picks. I'll explain why, and lay out all the alternatives to a wireless extender that I think will work better for you. After the explanation, if you still decide you need a Wi-Fi Extender, I'll tell you why the Netgear WN2500RP is the one I'd get.

Briefly: The Problem with Wi-Fi Extenders

Wi-Fi extenders (sometimes called wireless repeaters) seem like the obvious choice for helping a wireless router cover an entire house with Internet access. Essentially, they pick up a wireless signal just like your tablet or laptop, then rebroadcast that signal, giving you a second access point to connect to. But there's a big problem with that, which kind of cripples the functionality of extenders. Networking expert Tim Higgins wrote this about extenders on SmallNetBuilder in 2011:

"No matter what they are called or technology they use, repeaters start out with a minimum 50% throughput loss. The reason is that a repeater must receive, then retransmit each packet using the same radio on the same channel and with the same SSID. If the repeater is very efficient, then your loss will be close to 50%. But if it's not, throughput loss can be higher."

Thanks to that 50% loss in bandwidth right off the top, just about all wireless extenders suck.

Thanks to that 50% loss in bandwidth right off the top, just about all wireless extenders suck. But the technology has gotten a little better in the past year. If you have to get a Wi-Fi extender, it should be the $80 Netgear WN2500RP, which has a dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio. The extender can use one frequency to communicate with a router and another frequency to communicate with client devices, which bypasses that 50% hit to bandwidth.

Even so, a Wi-Fi extender is the last thing you should buy to improve your wireless network. The simple truth is that there are two better alternatives to consider first:

We've become so accustomed to the Internet as an instantaneous form of communication that it can often be interesting--and, of course, frustrating--when that instant speed breaks down. When that happens, packets are often at fault. Because networks rely on sending a packet of data and then receiving a confirmation that the data reached its destination, delays can happen with both sending and receiving. Maybe an important packet never arrives, or maybe a server hangs while it waits for our computer to tell it the last packet arrived. When an instant messaging chat becomes oddly delayed or a video call lags and freezes, we'll blame bandwidth or packet loss, but sometimes there's a different issue hampering our communication: the speed of light.

Ars Technica posted a networking primer that includes an emphasis on latency--the delay it takes between sending a signal from your computer and getting a response. And one of the big issues facing Internet-based communication is this: we can't make our data travel faster than the speed of light. The further your voice, bundled up in a packet, has to travel, the longer it's going to take to get there. And when we use satellites for communication, that's a long, long trip.

Photo Credit: Flickr user Arnybo via Creative Commons

"Communications satellites are in geostationary orbits, putting them about 35,786 kilometers above the equator," writes Ars Technica's Peter Bright. "Even if the satellite is directly overhead, a signal is going to have to travel 71,572 km—35,786 km up, 35,786 km down. If you're not on the equator, directly under the satellite, the distance is even greater. Even at light speed that's going to take 0.24 seconds; every message you send over the satellite link will arrive a quarter of a second later. The reply to the message will take another quarter of a second, for a total round trip time of half a second."

Bright points out that undersea cables, by comparison, are far shorter. The round trip for the US-Europe cable is only about 15,000 kilometers. Even though data doesn't quite travel as fast along a cable, it's still fast enough to bring the latency down to under 100 ms.

Memory buffers can also be a problem, according to Bright. He writes that cheap RAM prices have caused buffers in networking equipment like modems and routers to grow tremendously. That sounds like a good thing--we like having more RAM in our home PCs, after all--but having large buffers in networking equipment can cause problems.