China’s Internet is notoriously censored. Former Geekosystem Managing Editor Robert Quigley once visited China and attempted to hold a conversation with me over GChat. He got kicked off for five minutes at a time for every thirty or so minutes of usage. So, if you want to experience what Internet censorship of even the most bland sites and services like GMail and GChat feels like, install this China Channel extension, and be happy you didn’t have to shell out the money to go to China and be annoyed by actual Internet censorship.

There’s a lot of talk that SOPA will essentially destroy U.S. Internet and cause digital plague that will creep out to the web at large. If you needed a case study, keep on eye Belarus, which has just illegalized the use of foreign websites. The law is aimed chiefly at companies conducting business on the web, but extends to your average citizen as well. If you live in Belarus and initiate a transaction with a non-domestic domain, you are breaking the law, guilty of a misdemeanor, and can face fines of up to $125.

A team of computer scientists, engineers, and physicists from Caltech and University of Victoria have broken the speed record for a sustained , computer-to-computer transfer over a network, at 186 gigabits per second. The transfer was completed over a distance of 134 miles, between the SuperComputing 2011 convention in Seattle and the University of Victoria Computer Centre in Canada. Whereas other transfer records are much higher, this transfer record was set with commercially available components.

Artist Pieterjan Grandry has broken a major barrier between the unreality of the Internet and the rest of the real world. Grandry has successfully taken animated GIFs and made them analog. His device, based on a pre-film form of entertainment called a phenakistoscope, uses frames from a GIF printed onto transparent material as individual frames and placed on a wheel. Once spun and illuminated, the images form a single moving picture — in this case, a head bobbing cat. Now with a few million of these things, we could recreate the entirety of Tumblr, sans Internet.

Take a look at the analog animated GIF player in action, conveniently in animated GIF form, after the break.

Being global and all, sometimes it’s a little hard to know whether or not the Internet is awake. If you’re social media-ing across the globe, trying to blow up on reddit, or trying to get the most out of your tweets, that’s information that might matter to you. Also, it’s just interesting to know. Designer Bård Edlund decided to try and tackle this question in a particularly interesting way by coming up with an animated infographic that separates Internet users by country and attempts to display their probable sleep patterns and, by extension, when they’re on the ‘net.

When you’re trying to figure out statistics about something as nebulous and pervasive as “the Internet,” you’re going to have to performs some interesting mental contortions. After all, how many things out there are connected to the Internet? How many of those things would you consider to be actively “using” it, how much power is there in the world? All valid and difficult questions, valid and difficult questions that Justin Ma and Barath Raghavan, of UC Berkeley and the International Computer Science Institute respectively, were determined to tackle.

By looking at previously published research, the two were able to estimate that there are somewhere around 750 million laptops, a billion smartphones, and about 100 million servers in the world. On top of that, they added the power these devices consume, the power consumed to make these devices, average device life-span, and power to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers. All said and done, they came up with a range of 170-307 Gigawatts that are devoted to Internet use; enough to power 140-253 time-traveling DeLoreans.

In early December when the new top-level .xxx domains launch, PETA plans to launch a porn site using the domain in order to promote animal rights and raise the awareness of veganism through a mix of pornography and footage of animal suffering. Lindsay Rajt, associate director of campaigns for PETA, explains:

“We’re hoping to reach a whole new audience of people, some of whom will be shocked by graphic images that maybe they didn’t anticipate seeing when they went to the PETA triple-X site.”

While most non-pornographic outlets are probably frantically attempting to scoop up all of the .xxx domains related to their brand in order to park on them to prevent any mischievous activity, PETA seems to be embracing the chance to host pornography on a PETA-branded .xxx domain.

While modern day Internet users may have a tacit understanding that the net of the past is very different from how we know it today, they probably don’t realize how different. Enter Olduse.net, a website that re-creates that good ol’ Usenet feel. With Olduse, you can browse the hottest tech news of 1981 and see what’s buzzing in the IBM newsletter. What you can’t do is use your mouse, and just forget about multitouch all together.

For the uninitiated (or simply, the under 50), Usenet was an early precursor to email and web forums. Once logged in, users could select from newsgroups and read posts from other users. Amazingly, the proprietor of Olduse updates the site daily with the latest news from 30 years ago. Today, you can see all the posts up to September 13, 1981. Tomorrow, all the posts from September 14 will be available for viewing.

While the site really doesn’t have much of a function, it’s another fascinating look at the archaeology of the early Internet. In this digital age, we don’t bury the past to preserve it, we dredge it up and re-package it.

(Olduse.net via BoingBoing, Olduse.net mirror available here)

You know how you have browser-based games or listicles about your favorite celebrity breakups open in your browser window right now, but have mastered the art of alt+tabbing back to your spreadsheet when your supervisor walks by? Well, according to a new study, you may just want to leave that session of Civ World up and running next time your supervisor hovers around your desk, because wasting time on the Internet may actually increase your productivity.

Google is testing out the ol’ Infinite Scroll with their web search results. Instead of scrolling to the bottom of the page when searching for nefarious, embarrassing terms and hitting the “Next” link below the customary “Goooooooooogle,” the infinite scrolling feature will display a “show more results” button, similar to the Google Images infinite scrolling feature. Search Engine Land reports that a Google spokesperson has confirmed the testing of the infinite scroll feature. Head on past the jump to see a video of the infinite scroll in action, and in another language.