Internet Archive

Because OSNews is technically a site from the US, and because the technology industry is decidedly a US-centric industry, we often talk about US politics having adverse effects on technology - or, the other way around. That's why I've been detailing the political movements here in The Netherlands with regards to net neutrality. After a lot of positive news, I've now got some bad news - bad news that involves the largest political party trying to block net neutrality - because one of its members of parliament, Afke Schaart, is a former KPN employee. And yes, KPN is the carrier that first announced it was going to block and throttle traffic.

If there is one organisation that I hold in very high regard and have a lot of respect for, it's the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF formed after a US Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games' office, back in 1990, which owned the Illuminati Online BBS and later the IO.com domain. As Slashdot reports, the IO.com domain has been sold, and all email, shell, and homepage services will be transferred. A piece of internet history, right here, and a landmark in the fight for online freedom and free speech.

"John Perry Barlow - EFF co-founder, Grateful Dead lyricist, and, improbably, now a rancher - arrived in Paris and began tweeting up a storm from the e-G8 summit gathered there this week to discuss the future of the Internet." Incredible what Sarkozy is planning - how about he focus on the many problems in France the people there are actually suffering from?

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. This weekend, we ran a story about the carrier situation in the The Netherlands. The largest carrier in The Netherlands has announced it's going to charge for services like IM and Skype, while the other two carriers were thinking about following suit. I stated I expected little from our politicians - but boy, turns out I was wrong. Basically the entire lower house - left to right, progressive to conservative - is not happy with the carriers' moves, and are now exploring options to prohibit them from implementing their plans - including the option to embed net neutrality in our telecommunications act. Go go... Politicians?!

"File Transfer Protocol (FTP) marks its 40th anniversary on Saturday (April 16). The venerable network protocol was first proposed by Abhay Bhushan of MIT in April 1971 as a means to transfer large files between disparate systems that made up ARPANet, the celebrated forerunner to the modern interweb. The protocol required a minimum of handshaking, and even more crucially was tolerant of temporary interruptions during long file transfer sessions, making it far more suitable for the job than anything available at the time or HTTP, which came years later."

A major win has been scored in Europe against the content industry and several governments who are trying to impose censorship on the internet through ISPs. The European Court of Justice, the highest court in Europe, gave a preliminary opinion which states that no ISP can be forced to filter the internet, especially not enforce copyright.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can now run their cloud applications on hardware dedicated to them. Amazon's EC2 uses virtualization, based on a customized version of the Xen hypervisor, to run multiple OSes and customers on a single physical machine. However, that way of running an IT infrastructure isn't a good fit for all users as some have regulatory or other restrictions that require physical isolation, according to an Amazon." Also: "Oh snap! Look who just ate Apple and Google's lunch here? Minutes ago, Amazon rolled out its very own music streaming service which is conveniently dubbed the Amazon Cloud Player."

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner offers a four-part series devoted to the new features of HTML5. Each articles examines the evolving spec in-depth, focusing on canvas, video, audio, and graphics for display options, including the canvas and video tags, Scalable Vector Graphics, and WebGL; local data storage, including Web Storage, Web Database, and other APIs designed to transform Web pages into local applications; data communications, for cross-document messaging, WebSockets, and other HTML5 APIs that improve website and browser interactivity; and forms, for increasing control over data input and validation.

"Today's release of Adobe Flash Player 10.2.152.26 is considered final by Adobe, according to the company's Flash Team Blog, and ushers in a new level of hardware-accelerated video decoding in most modern Intel Macs The company has dropped all support for PowerPC-based players, including security updates, in a clear sign that the 10.1/10.2 releases are a "reference" release for Flash playback."

Absolutely fantastic article over at Ars about a guy trying to hunt down Anonymous - which cost him and his company dearly. "Aaron Barr believed he had penetrated Anonymous. The loose hacker collective had been responsible for everything from anti-Scientology protests to pro-Wikileaks attacks on MasterCard and Visa, and the FBI was now after them. But matching their online identities to real-world names and locations proved daunting. Barr found a way to crack the code. But had he?" A comment to the article says it best: "Personally, I'm rooting for Anonymous. I may not care for their attitude or their methods sometimes, but I think a little fear and caution on the worst excesses of those who would impair our rights is good thing." Governments and companies should fear the people - not the other way around.

Microsoft did two things today. First, it released an H.264 plugin for HTML5 video for Google's Chrome web browser which makes use of Media Foundation. The usefulness of this plugin is limited, however, since it's only for Windows 7 users. Much more interesting is that Microsoft has opened the door to out-of-the-box WebM/VP8 support in Internet Explorer 9.

"Chrome's usage share for January has made it into double digits: the browser was used by 10.7 percent of Web users last month, up from 9.98 percent in December. It was a good month too for Safari, up to 6.30 percent from 5.89 percent the month before. The WebKit-powered browsers were the big winners: Microsoft's Internet Explorer was the big loser. Internet Explorer reached a new all-time low of 56 percent, down 1.08 percentage points from last month. Though Internet Explorer 8 continues to perform well - up 1.15 points from December - defections from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to other browsers continue to dominate, with those versions losing 1.63 and 0.47 points respectively. The beta of Internet Explorer 9 made minor gains, rising to 0.50 percent share. Firefox continues to hover between 22 and 23 points; its January share was 22.75 percent, erasing the small gains it made in December. Opera made small gains, up to 2.28 from 2.20 percent a month ago."

"I've always been a great fan of the law of unintended consequences. It takes you places. Unexpected places. Sometimes good, sometimes bad but never a dull moment. The recent kerfuffle over Pirate Bay is too well known to require detailed recounting here. What is really interesting though is where it might just eventually take us in terms of internet freedom. This article describes the one fallout of the legal judgements against Pirate Bay and how its response may unintentionally help to protect and promote internet freedoms."

"Sepaton today announced the next-generation operating system for its grid-based deduplication, backup appliance, the S2100-ES2. The new 64-bit operating system, combined with Intel's new Westmere processor, runs the updated appliance at twice the speeds of its predecessor, the company said."