So, while The Netherlands just adopted net neutrality, the US is now nearing a comprehensive agreement on a piracy crackdown system. It will include throttling internet speeds, limiting access to e.g. only the top 200 websites, and forced participation in an educational program on copyright. The system has been drafted by the White House, big content, and ISPs. I guess this is the final nail in the coffin for net neutrality in the land of the 'free'.

The Calligra Office Suite has announced its second snapshot release. The project, which is a fork of KOffice, is building a suite of productivity and creativity applications and is working towards its first formal end-user release due in October. The project is seeking feedback from end users particularly in the area of usability of the GUI. With this snapshot Calligra Office Words is claiming better compatibility with .docx than LibreOffice, and also claims to be approaching the best compatibility with legacy .doc formats.

After an epic vote fail in the lower house yesterday (labour accidentally voted against net neutrality lolfail), which was rectified today, The Netherlands has officially become the second country in the world, and the first in Europe, to turn net neutrality into law (okay, technically it needs to pass the senate, but that's more of a formality in our system). A big middle finger to Sarkozy, Cameron, and Obama. Hey Chile, ./fistbump.sh. We're honoured to follow in your footsteps!

We've taken the next step in Internet connectivity, and have IPv6-enabled this site for testing purposes. Of course, this will only work if your ISP or some third-party gateway provides you with IPv6 connectivity, which you can check here. If you're all set, try the IPv6 OSnews out at http://ipv6.osnews.com/ and let us know if you have any trouble with it.

Nokia may have gone with Windows Phone 7 for its future smartphone operating system, but until then, we now have the Nokia N9 to look at. Yes, a beautiful, top-of-the-line Nokia smartphone which runs MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan - but isn't this thing kind of a dead end? Also announced: the even prettier Nokia N950 Meego 1.2 developer device - only available to a limited number of developers. Sure to become a collectors' item.

"Mozilla's VP of Technical Strategy, Mike Shaver has rejected Microsoft's criticism of WebGL in which it said it would not implement the 3D graphics standard because of security issues in the design. Shaver says that "there is no question that the web needs 3D capabilities" to enable developers to create "advanced visualisations, games or new user interfaces" and points at Molehill (Adobe's 3D for Flash) and Microsoft's Silverlight 3D which are offering just those capabilities." One discussion of Microsofts WebGL criticism can be found here.

Daily time spent in mobile apps has now surpassed web consumption. The average user now spends 9% more time using mobile apps than the Internet. In June users spent an average of 81 minutes daily on mobile apps, compared to 74 minutes on the web.

Remember when Altavista was the search engine? Or Yahoo? They stuffed their search pages with useless, distracting crap, and using them became unpleasant. And then, bam, along came Google, with a simple, clear search page and uncluttered search results. However, now that Google has become this massive behemoth, tracking our every move, and tailoring our search results, leading to only being fed those pages you agree with - isn't it time for something new? Something simple? It might be, and you've undoubtedly heard of them: DuckDuckGo. I'm switching. Update: Just got an email from Gabriel Weinberg, the guy behind DuckDuckGo. The OSNews !bang (!osnews) is now live!

Since the opening up of the RISC OS source code, developers have been experimenting with the OS on modern ARM hardware. Recently, work has progressed on porting some vintage Acorn games to other platforms, including iOS and Windows. Paradise Games has released an iOS port of Inferno, and TBA Software has rendered BHP in OpenGL on Windows. TBA has also ported its TBAFS filing system to ARMv7 hardware and is investigating its TAG games engine and the modernisation of BBC BASIC. The Icon Bar has further details.

Haiku Alpha 3 has been in development for more than 14 months. In that time more than 800 bugs have been identified and fixed, major sections have been updated, applications have been added and updated, and great progress has been made in supporting additional hardware. Here is a summary of updates, more details can be found here. Also inside, interviews with some core Haiku developers.

Way back in old and boring January of this year, Microsoft announced they would be working together with the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community, with the goal of creating a stable, supported way for homebrew developers and people interested in homebrew applications to enable side-loading on their WP7 devices. Well, they took their sweet time, but the ChevronWP7 team (Rafael Rivera, Chris Walsh, and Long Zheng) and Microsoft have just announced the results.

Oh boy, what do we make of this? We haven't paid that much attention to the whole thing as of yet, but with a recent public statement on why they do what they do, I think it's about time to address this thing. Yes, Lulz Security, the hacking group (or whatever they are) that's been causing quite a bit of amok on the web lately.

In a blog post today, Adobe's Director of Open Source and Standards said: "we will be focusing on supporting partner implementations and will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux". McAllister says that "way back in 1999" he'd predicted "a significant market for desktop Linux by 2005. Obviously I was wrong. So we, Adobe, also need to shift with the market." Source code for AIR will be made available to partners so they can make their own Linux implementations if they so desire. Is there anyone in the audience who cares about no more AIR on Linux from Adobe? Anyone...?

"Today International Business Machines celebrated a relative rarity in the tech business - its one hundredth anniversary. By contrast Google is a mere 12 years old, Apple is 35, Microsoft is 36, and Hewlett-Packard is 72 years old." One of the most important companies in the computer industry. Congratulations, IBM, on to the next century! And we get to use our IBM logo for once. Yay!