A significant number of iPhone owners have chosen to circumvent Apple’s default iPhone OS installation with a hacked version that lets them install applications from outside the App Store, have applications running in the background, and so on. It’s called, as you probably know, “jailbreaking”.

There are a lot of jailbroken iPhones out there. Exactly how many is hard to tell, but there are estimates that as many as 8.5% of all iPhones and iPod Touches are jailbroken. That number comes from Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, a kind of alternative app store for jailbroken iPhones.

So where in the world is it most common to jailbreak your iPhone?

Countries where iPhone jailbreaking is most common

If you study where searches for “jailbreak iPhone” are most common, you should get an indication of what regions of the world are most inclined to this practice. So once again, Google Insights for Search comes to the rescue. We looked at search statistics for the last 12 months and got the following results.

Top 10 countries/regions:

1. Singapore
2. Hong Kong
3. France
4. Switzerland
5. Australia
6. Austria
7. Sweden
8. United States
9. Netherlands
10. United Arab Emirates

Some of the countries hovering just outside the top 10 list are: Norway, Iceland, Germany, Canada and Malaysia.

So there you have it. Based on Google’s search statistics, here is the situation when it comes to jailbreaking iPhones:

• Singapore is the most jailbreak-happy country in the world.
• The English-speaking country where jailbreaking is the most common is Australia.
• Interestingly, the United States, Apple’s home market, is in the top 10. These are normalized numbers, so the US doesn’t get this position simply because it’s a big country with lots of iPhone users.
• France is the European country where jailbreaking iPhones is the most common.

To conclude, a breakdown by larger regions

If we aggregate the top 10 countries into larger regions, we get the following distribution:

• Europe: 5 (France, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, the Netherlands)
• Asia: 2 (the top two regions; Singapore and Hong Kong)
• North America: 1 (USA)
• Middle East: 1 (United Arab Emirates)
• Australia/Oceania: 1 (Australia)

Half of the top 10 are European countries. This could be a side effect of the fact that Europe houses a large portion of the world’s developed countries, countries that are likely to have a good amount of iPhone users (and smartphone users in general).

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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