"The Internet? It's so busy nobody uses it any more." - not the slogan of www.yogi-berra.com, surprisingly enough [1] Welcome to the first issue of NetBITS, a new publication from TidBITS Electronic Publishing

Recent surveys show that there are roughly 26 million machines connected to the Internet at any given time. Some of these include dialup modem connections, but since those modems are in use most of the time, they count. Given the number of machines and the number of connections and the size of the Internet, how does any one machine find another in this vast maze? The answer isn't simple, but it's more straightforward than I'd imagined when first trying to figure this out in late 1994. Back then, the Engsts and I were a few of the Seattle-area "pioneers" of the Internet, and we would puzzle out these issues in order to explain them to our readers and colleagues, and to use them in our day-to-day work on the Net

Question: Why Aren't I Seeing Full ISDN Speeds? I'm using two-channel ISDN, and I should see nearly 128 Kbps. Instead, I'm only getting about 70 Kbps at the fastest

Question: Who's Visiting My Web Site? I'd like to know exactly who comes to my home page. Is this possible? Answer: It's almost impossible to know exactly who visits your Web site, even though you can learn many details about visits to your site

Question: How Do You Pronounce "URL"? I'm confused - I've heard people say "earls" and "you are ells" when they're talking about URLs

Running Connectix's new Virtual PC is a little eerie. Within a minute of double-clicking its icon, you have a Windows 95 startup screen staring you in the face

UUNET Technologies, a major, top-level Internet service provider with a multi-million dollar nationwide network, recently announced plans to phase out arrangements with other networks to carry Internet traffic free of charge across its network, unless the other networks had substantial, national investments in infrastructure

I recently spent some time wrestling with software upgrades, and discovered some hidden morsels in a couple of Global Village downloads. Although some of these enhancements have been available for a while, I chose to wait and bulk-update my PowerBook in one session

You wouldn't think the guy that John Markoff of the New York Times described as one of the greatest computer security experts in the world could have his domain name ripped off, would you? It appears the InterNIC is not immune to many of the forces that Tsutomu Shimomura and Markoff wrote about in Takedown, their book about the tracking of hacker Kevin Mitnick

The National Science Foundation (NSF) changed the funding picture last week on one of the few remaining U.S. federally funded Internet projects. The NSF and the InterNIC's Registration Services division, which registers and maintains domain names, announced that beginning at midnight on 14-Sep-95, all new domain name registrations under its authority would cost $100 and include two years of registration

Most people believe that the Internet is still a project funded by the U.S. government. This includes a handful of journalists I had lunch with recently who write about PCs, online services, and the Internet

I was saddened to read of the Quadra 700's demise. Once again, Apple has cancelled a model which, despite clear advantages, doesn't fit into their price and product line structure