Green Bits - The Greener Internet Initiative

You've bought a hybrid car, insulated your home and bought power smart appliances, but have you given a though to greening your Internet use?

That's the latest source of carbon being targeted by a group calling itself the Greener Internet Initiative.

Their goal is to reduce the carbon footprint of data been sent over the Internet.

Everyone knows that you need electricity to run your computer, printer, scanner and router, but maybe you've forgotten that it takes energy to send the data itself down the cable and around the world.

All of those ones and zeroes need power to get from one place to another. "Well, the ones do," explains GII spokesperson Randolph Gatling.

"As we all know, data is transmitted as a series of ones and zeroes. The zeroes don't take up any extra energy, because they just ride the carrier wave as blank space, but the one is transmitted as a spike in voltage which is then decoded on the receiving end as a one. All of those quadrillion ones being transmitted every second add up to a huge amount of electricity usage across the planet.

On average, you can expect an equal number of ones and zeroes in a transmission, but the GII wants software companies, developers and also the average Internet user to make a conscious effort to use fewer ones.

To explain how this can be done, it's necessary to give a quick tutorial on how computers store numbers and letters.

In the simplest example, all characters are translated to a seven bit binary code called ASCII.

The letter 'A' for example, translates to: 100 0001, and the letter 'E' translates to: 100 0101.

As you can see, only two ones occur in an A, whereas three ones occur in an 'E'. The 'E' therefore, takes 50% more energy to transmit across the Internet.

We asked ourselves the question, "How can we reduce the amount of electricity used by the Internet?" And the answer, obviously, is to use letters whose ASCII translations contain fewer ones.

A lower case 'w' encodes to: 111 0111. Six out of seven bits are ones! This letter is clearly very expensive with respect to carbon usage.

Whereas letters like A (100 0001), B (100 0010), H (100 1000) and P (101 0000) are greener choices.

The GII has come up with a three-point manifesto of sorts, that urges its adherents to abide by the following rules:

1) Programmers - name your variables, table names, column names, etc. using only the greenest characters. For example, instead of recklessly naming a variable wo_no7, consider naming it RK!BR0.

w (111 0111) o (110 1111) _ (101 1111) n (110 1110) o (110 1111) 7 (011 0111) = 34 ones out of 42 bits

R (101 0010) K (100 1011) ! (010 0001) B (100 0010) R (101 0010) 0 (011 0000) = 16 ones out of 42 bits! A more than 50% saving in energy!

2) Software Companies - use compressions algorithms that re-encode data to character sets that use only green characters.

3) Internet users - Ask yourself, "Do I really need to send an e-mail to Uncle Frank (41) when an e-mail to Aunt Gertie (40) will help save the planet?"

"In the future," Gatling notes, "your hand-held device will have an additional option when writing a message.

Where we now have an auto-correct feature that offers dictionary words to help you complete a word, we will also have an Auto-Green option that automatically changes words in your e-mails or texts to synonyms that have a smaller carbon footprint.

For example, when you send a text that reads, "The landlord called, and your apartment is flooding," your text will be Auto-Greened to "The lessor rang, and your bedsit is inundated."

Gatling summed it up with the GII's motto: Saving the Earth, one Bit at a time.

Sorry Uncle Frank.