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And the fallout from Google's decision to drop H.264 support from its Chrome web browser continues to fall. Opera's Haavard - speaking on his own behalf - slammed the article which appeared on Ars Technica earlier today, while Micrsoft's Tim Sneath likened Google's move to the president of the United States banning English in favour of Esperanto. Also within, a rant (there's no other word for it) about the disrespect displayed by H.264 proponents towards the very open source community that saved and invigorated the web.

"Last month we delivered our first benchmarks of the Amazon EC2 Cloud, but those initial tests were limited to just a few of their cloud computing instances due to failures with the Ubuntu EC2 operating system on their other compute instances. Earlier this month we then showed how the Amazon EC2 Micro was comparable to a Nokia N900 and Intel Atom, but now we have a more exhaustive comparison complete of all major Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud types."

Over the last twelve months, AppRiver quarantined more than 38 billion spam messages, almost double the amount quarantined just two years ago. Of that total, 450 million messages contained viruses. To make things even worse, phishing techniques showed increasing sophistication and are likely to be ever-present during this year. Also, the ZeuS botnet remains highly dangerous as it continues to target financial information while social networking sites continue to be the prime locations for cyber criminals to prey on the naive and unsuspecting.

With yesterday's news that Google will be dropping H.264 support from the Chrome web browser, the internet was split in half. One one side, there's people who applaud the move, who are happy that Google is pushing an open, royalty-free and unencumbered video codec (irrespective of Google's motivation). On the other side, there are the H.264 supporters, who believe that H.264 is the one and only choice for HTML5 video. One of the most vocal and public figures in the latter group is John Gruber. Following his five questions for Google, here are ten questions for Gruber about WebM, H.264, and standards on the web.

"In the physical world, we have the right to print and sell books. Anyone trying to stop us would need to go to court. That right is weak in the UK (consider superinjunctions), but at least it exists. However, to set up a web site we need the cooperation of a domain name company, an ISP, and often a hosting company, any of which can be pressured to cut us off. In the US, no law explicitly requires this precarity. Rather, it is embodied in contracts that we have allowed those companies to establish as normal. It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment's notice." Recommended reading. I'm no fan of Stallman, but despite a bit too much dramatisation towards the end, this article aptly illustrates in layman's terms why the 'net needs to be free, open, and unregulated.

"In October Commtouch reported an 18% drop in global spam levels (comparing September and October). This was largely attributed to the closure of Spamit around the end of September. Spamit is the organization allegedly behind a fair percentage of the worlds pharmacy spam. Analysis of the spam trends to date reveals a further drop in the amounts of spam sent during Q4 2010. December's daily average was around 30% less than September's. The average spam level for the quarter was 83% down from 88% in Q3 2010. The beginning of December saw a low of nearly 74%."

For a number of days the websites of MasterCard, Visa, PayPal and others wre attacked by a group of WikiLeaks supporters ('hacktivists'). Although the group calls itself 'Anonymous', researchers at the DACS group of the University of Twente (UT), the Netherlands, discovered that these hacktivists are easily traceable, and therefore anything but anonymous.

InfoWorld's Peter Wayner launches the first in a series of articles on browser implementations of HTML5 capabilities. Focusing this round on the presentation layer, Wayner provides an overview of how Chrome, Firefox, IE, Opera, and Safari stand on HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, SVG, and WebGL, providing developers with tips, samples, and resources for making the most of today's HTML5 presentation layer technologies on today's browsers.

Amazon Web Services announced Route 53, a DNS web service giving a way to route Internet traffic to web applications by translating human readable names into numeric IP addresses. Amazon Route 53 can be used to route end users to multiple AWS services including Amazon EC2, an Amazon Elastic Load Balancer or an Amazon S3 bucket, and to infrastructure outside of AWS. The Amazon Route 53 global network of DNS servers is designed to automatically respond from the optimal network location, resulting in low DNS query latency for end users.

Guess I'm not the only one who thinks a war is brewing between 'the internet' and the establishment. "Early this morning, the WikiLeaks Twitter feed reposted a tweet from EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow. 'The first serious infowar is now engaged,' Barlow wrote. 'The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.' Barlow is no stranger to theatrical overstatement; this, after all, is the guy who in 1996 penned "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" that opened with the lines: 'Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.' Barlow was wrong about sovereignty. Despite its name, 'cyberspace' runs on physical infrastructure that sits in various governmental jurisdictions, and when sites like Wikileaks start irritating those governments, sovereignty is quite powerfully brought to bear. Still, his recent tweet is accurate. There's a war on for WikiLeaks, and it's being fought all over the world."

"Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that 'isn't just e-mail', but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread." Will not succeed. Email/Facebook is free, SMS isn't, especially not when those tiny 160-character messages are getting body-scanned or violated when crossing borders. I'd hate to use this technology only to end up with a massive phone bill.

"Last week, critics hammered Adobe over a report showing that Flash drained the new MacBook Air's battery life by several hours. It's not the first time Adobe has been in fisticuffs with Apple: the companies have been duking it out ever since Steve Jobs began ridiculing Flash and touting its alleged-killer, HTML5. Today, in an interview with Fast Company, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch answered critics who might say HTML5 is somehow more efficient than Flash."

Every now and then, you get these news item that make you feel like something's wrong. The item doesn't make sense, shouldn't be possible, and yet it is. Despite Microsoft's newfound commitment to web standards, it's still incredibly unnerving to see things like this - the W3C's first HTML5 compliance test, in which Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 6 outdoes all other browsers.

"Even though its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by Web standards fans, Adobe has been building tools that embrace HTML5. The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, and Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools. Now it seems Flash might be joining the party. At Adobe's MAX conference this week, Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5 (well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS and images)."