Internet Archive

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.

"Evercookie is a javascript API available that produces extremely persistent cookies in a browser. Its goal is to identify a client even after they've removed standard cookies, Flash cookies (Local Shared Objects or LSOs), and others. Evercookie accomplishes this by storing the cookie data in several types of storage mechanisms that are available on the local browser. Additionally, if evercookie has found the user has removed any of the types of cookies in question, it recreates them using each mechanism available."

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.

When Google and Verizon unveiled their joint net neutrality policy proposal, in which the FCC would play a central role in governing the internet, I mentioned how the the FCC might not be the kind of institution you'd want to hand over control to over your pornography life line (also known as the internet). Over the past few days, the FCC pretty much reiterated just why they are no the right people to govern the web.

"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."

We're still in the slow news period, so let's talk about something we discussed before: blocking advertisements on websites. Up until, well, today, I didn't block ads - not because of some ethical objection or whatever, but simply because I couldn't be bothered to setup AdBlock. Today, after taking a closer look at some of the websites I frequent, I decided to take the plunge and install AdBlock on all my machines. The following set of screenshots should pretty much explain why.

Lots of talk on net neutrality this week, mostly due to the joint policy proposal from Google and Verzion. While many Americans are calling for government-imposed net neutrality rules, The New York Times' Eric Pfanner proposes a different solution - one that has been working wonders in Europe. And hey, what a coincidence - I'm European!

Google and Verizon's joint statement on net neutrality and the internet (which apparently consists of three separate internets) wasn't particularly well-received. Google has gone into damage-control mode, defending the policy proposal in a sort of get-the-facts-like weblog post.

Well, this is interesting. As some rumours already suggested, Google and Verizon have released a joint proposal for a legislative framework regarding net neutrality. This being Google and all, some of you may expect this to be all flower-farting unicorns darting across rainbows, but sadly, that's not the case. This proposal? Well, it's not good.

Between now and October 31, 2010, Microsoft is giving one-month passes to the Windows Azure platform to the first 500 developers to respond to the offer.

Hosting company RackSpace is open sourcing the software behind its cloud storage and computing platforms on Monday, the company is saying. The company is also preparing to launch OpenStack, an open source cloud platform, and will donate the open source code to that project.

Atheros and Wilocity have announced a partnership that will see the companies producing tri-band wireless devices capable of operating both at the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies used by 802.11n, as well as the 60GHz frequency required by upcoming WiGig systems. Besides combining the ubiquity and coverage of Wi-Fi with multi-gigabit speeds, the move will enable many new applications, among which there will be products featuring wireless PCI Express technology.

Audio and Video professionals swear by it, but if Microsoft sticks with its plans, Firewire may not be supported in Windows 8. This is following an industry trend with, for example, Apple itself phasing out firewire support in recent years.

Ever since the iPhone crashed AT&T's network, it has become common cause that the increase in mobile data, or rather data that is transmitted over the air, is going to grow. A lot. Networks are already straining to cope. But that's not the big problem, says Andrew Herbert, director of Microsoft's Cambridge Lab. The real problem, he says, is latency. Latency is the delay between sending a signal and receiving an acknowledgment of receipt. The time it takes light to circumnavigate the Earth, about 133 milliseconds, is a fundamental constraint on network speed.