Internet Archive

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.

According to data compiled by StatCounter, Firefox overtook Internet Explorer (IE) as the dominant browser in Europe at the end of 2010. During December, 38.11% of internet page views involved Mozilla's Firefox web browser, whilst Internet Explorer fell back to second place with 37.52%.

"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%."

"A divided Federal Communications Commission has approved new rules meant to prohibit broadband companies from interfering with Internet traffic flowing to their customers. The 3-2 vote Tuesday marks a major victory for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has spent more than a year trying to craft a compromise. The FCC's three Democrats voted to pass the rules, while the two Republicans opposed them, calling them unnecessary regulation. The new rules are likely to face intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill once Republicans take over the House. Meanwhile, public interest groups decried the regulations as too weak, particularly for wireless systems."

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.

It looks like several companies are learning what happens when you mess with the internet - and they're learning it the hard way. Several major companies have been hit by the collective powers of Anonymous after 4chan launched several distributed denial-of-service attacks. What many have been predicting for a long time now has finally happened: an actual war between the powers that be on one side, and the internet on the other. Update: PayPal has admitted their WikiLeaks snub came after pressure from the US government, and Datacell, which takes care of payments to Wikileaks, is threatening to sue MasterCard over Wikileaks' account suspension. Update II: Visa.com is down due to the attack. Update III: PayPal has caved under the pressure, and will release the funds in the WikiLeaks account.

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."

The Pirate Bay trial may currently not be going alright, but Peter Sunde, Swedish co-founder of The Pirate Bay, is already working on his next project. Surely spurred by the recent seizures of domains by Big Content the US government, Sunde has unveiled he's working on an open, distributed alternative to ICANN's root server.

"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."

"What if you could essentially fake your death online - completely delete any trace of yourself from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, forums, Usenet, and anywhere else there might be some record of your existence. Such a concept is largely impossible today, especially given complications from services like Facebook combined with caches and mirrors of practically everything ever e-created. The European Commission wants to change that."

"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)."

"Microsoft today announced that it has partnered with Cloud.com to provide integration and support of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to the OpenStack project, an open source cloud computing platform. The addition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V provides organizations and service providers running a mix of Microsoft and non-Microsoft infrastructure with greater flexibility when using OpenStack."

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."