Internet Archive

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)."

"Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is 'going dark' as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone. Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications - including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct 'peer to peer' messaging like Skype - to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages." I could quote Benjamin Franklin again - but I'm starting to suspect that our politicians (this isn't just a US thing, it happens all over the world) have no respect for the wise men and women who fought for the principles we are now trying to shove upon the rest of the world. How can the west push freedom and liberty around the world while at the same time taking them away at home?

Now this is a subject sure to cause some discussion among all of you. LifeHacker's Adam Pash is arguing that Chrome has overtaken Firefox as the browser of choice for what he calls 'power users'; polls among LifeHacker's readership indeed seem to confirm just that. He also gives a number of reasons as to why this is the case.

Four months ago, amidst a backlash from government regulators and privacy advocates, Google stopped collecting Wi-Fi data with its Street View cars. But that doesn't mean Google has stopped collecting wireless data altogether, and neither have other companies such as Apple.

I attended VM World last week, and as you might imagine, it was "cloud computing" this and "cloud computing" that the whole time. The hype factor for the cloud is in overdrive right now. But is it warranted? A lot of people, even tech-oriented ones, outside of the data center sysadmin types, wonder what all the hype is about. I've come to believe that cloud computing is major computing revolution, but for most computing users, it's an invisible one.

"Researchers in South Korea have built a networking router that transmits data at record speeds from components found in most high-end desktop computers. A team from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology created the router, which transmits data at nearly 40 gigabytes per second--many times faster than the previous record for such a device."

"If you've been following check-ins for the last year or so, then you already know that some dedicated contributors have been working on a MathML implementation in WebKit. I am very pleased to announce that the implementation is now turned on by default in the WebKit build and in WebKit Nightlies! Big thanks to Alex Milowski, Francois Sausset, and everyone else who has worked on MathML in WebKit."