[nycbug-talk] Africa Network Traffic

[Alex Pilosov]

On Sat, 6 Oct 2007, Bjorn Nelson wrote:

> I think Ike is just looking for correlations he can use to get an
> understanding of network traffic in Africa, he probably has a good
> understanding of how the internet works.  Although the internet is going
> to have various levels that obfuscate this, it's probably not normally
> distributed.  I think the biggest trick to this project will be making
> things discrete.  It's like when working on grid computing and you are
> trying to figure out why certain jobs run slow or trying to estimate how
> long a job will run.  You have the data from the hardware but it's
> trying to find which metric correlates with your job times, and this
> won't be 100% either, but you need find an imperfect match that you are
> comfortable with and then put your faith in that metric and make
> decisions based on it.  So for Ike or Ike's friend, he is going to need
> to keep his question vague and general to make sure he stays on track,
> he will get imperfect data and correlations but he will need to find
> one's that he will be comfortable with, i.e. they can be explained to
> correlate to a certain percentage of error and the rare situations where
> those metrics might be wrong, they are also explained.  If they can get
> a few metrics that agree to some level, or can be explained when they
> don't agree then he will have good research.
The above was ran through vagosity filter, and result was an empty set.

> So how does he get web cache data?  Does akamai show their stats, albeit
> in reverse because you want their customer (source) rather their
> customer's customer (us)?  Are they even public?  Are there companies
> that are and can this data be compared with what percent of the market
> in Africa they actually have?
a) akam won't give you that data
b) akam's data has absolutely no correlation to anything he requested.

> The actual research data is best had from the science and technology
> library at 34/Madison or if you know someone at Baruch or CUNY, they
> have access to research databases like Factiva or Lexis-Nexis and a
> great library with business research on 24th/Lex.  I am sure some of the
> High Falutin Columbia guys can toot their own horn as well.
Libraries are so 80s. Get down with googol.

-alex