Internet Archive

Dutch Lower House Opposes Carriers Blocking Services

Internet 17 Comments
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?!
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Dutch Carriers To Fragment Web, Disregard Customer Privacy

Internet 63 Comments
You know all that talk about net neutrality in the US? How for instance Verizon and Google want net neutrality to apply only to something they call the 'wired' internet, which is apparently somehow different from the 'mobile' internet? Well, while you Americans are only talking about it, us Dutch are once again way ahead of the curve: the largest of the three main carriers has announced its intention to start charging extra for services like VoIP, instant messaging, Facebook, and so on, with the other two carriers contemplating similar moves. The dark future of the web, right here in my glorified swamp.
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FTP Turns 40

Internet 12 Comments
"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."
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Camino To Go WebKit as Mozilla Drops Gecko Embedding

Internet 34 Comments
"Camino - the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface - is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen."
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Dedicated Hardware Now Available in Amazon’s cloud

Internet 5 Comments
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."
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In-Depth Look at HTML5

Internet 2 Comments
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.
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IE9/Firefox4/Chrome10 to Be Released Together ?

Internet 3 Comments
In the description of this session of SXSW 2011: Voices From The HTML5 Trenches: Browser Wars IV, it says: "Every major browser vendor -- Apple, Opera, IE, Chrome, and Firefox -- will have a significant browser release by SxSW 2011." IE team has confirmed it by an annouchment, now we can wait and see if IE9, Firefox 4, Chrome 10, Opera Mini 6 for Tablets and Safari (???) will be released all together.
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Flash Player 10.2 Out of Beta, Drops All PPC Support

Internet 15 Comments
"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."
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How One Man Tracked Down Anonymous – And Paid a Heavy Price

Internet 49 Comments
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.
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Chrome Takes 10% Usage Share, IE Continues to Lose

Internet 23 Comments
"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."
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Internet Infrastructure – Who Should Pay?

Internet 74 Comments
There is a falling out between governments & ISPs on the one hand and consumer groups and companies like YouTube and Netflix on the other. Lately more punitive measures affecting these companies and consumers have emerged that include increased throttling, greater per-usage billing and lower internet caps. The internet as whole is struggling to find a self-sustaining business model that supports the rising speed and bandwidth requirements of consumers and online media purveyors. The conflict boils down to who should pay and to what degree they should pay.
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Pirate Bay, Decentralised P2P-DNS, ICANN

  Submitted by fsmag Internet 18 Comments
"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."
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Microsoft, Opera’s Haavard Respond to Google’s H.264 Move

Internet 198 Comments
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.
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Extensive Benchmarks of Amazon’s EC2 Compute Cloud

  Submitted by vodoomoth Internet No Comments
"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."
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