Internet Archive

Since the early days of the internet, it has fallen under control of ICANN, which in turn was bound by an agreement with the US Department of Commerce. As the internet grew bigger and more pervasive, intentional calls for severing the ties between ICANN and the US government grew stronger. Today, the US has ceded control over ICANN.

"The names are familiar: Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari. These relatively new browsers have been shaking the foundations of Internet Explorer's complete victory over Netscape. These new browsers are implementing fresh ideas and breaking out of the crusty browsers of the early 21st century. With the second browser wars in full swing, let's see where things stand and what's coming."

"With just over a week left before the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Department of Commerce, the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse (CADNA) urges the US government to closely re-examine ICANN's structure, governance, and oversight mechanisms before committing to any further long-term cooperation. Significant adjustments must be made to the JPA in order to remedy the egregious problems CADNA has found with ICANN." CADNA not only proposes that an audit be made of ICANN, but they also have released a "top-ten list" detailing the most prevalent problems they find in the non-profit organization.

Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, today laid out plans to enforce net neutrality upon the internet. While the FCC is a US-only entity, fact of the matter is that "control" over the internet lies within the US, so whatever the FCC decides, it will affect the rest of the world.

While browsing the ever-wider world web today, I came across a story about IBM's patent of a sort of "Facebook Remote Control." It was appalling. Do we seriously need more single-purpose devices that will enable us to sit around more wasting more time than we already do? Does anyone really need to seclude themselves from the world even more to publish their lives on yet another teen-infested network? Must we really always be connected to the net? Read on for my ramble concerning a dark side of technology.

Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the ideal of a truly standards-compliant Web will ever be possible given ongoing disagreements over HTML 5, including those most recently set in motion by Microsoft's latest concerns over the spec. "While some items on Microsoft's list seem like quibbles, others are valid issues," McAllister writes. And with others in the working group supporting the proposed additions in question as they stand, an impasse could conceivably be the end result. "Disagreements are an inevitable part of any standardization process. But if disagreements lead to irreconcilable differences, it calls in to question the validity of the final standard." So where does that leave HTML 5?

Microsoft's Bing search engine is getting a little help from a very smart friend. Wolfram Alpha and Bing have reached a licensing deal that allows Bing to present some of the specialized scientific and computational content that Wolfram Alpha generates, according to a source familiar with the deal. Representatives from Microsoft and Wolfram Research declined to comment on the deal.

The beta for Moonlight 2.0 is now available. It's considered feature complete and is ready to test against Silverlight 2.0-minded websites. Microsoft has already gone and released Silverlight 3.0, but the Moonlight team is pretty confident that users will generally be able to access most if not all web content while Silverlight 3.0 is still young. Moonlight will ask to update itself to the beta automatically in Firefox, but new users can also download the plugin.

"Linux: If a lack of third-party plug-in support (i.e. Flash) kept you from trying out Chrome on your Linux system, then avoid no longer. The 'early developer version' now supports many plug-ins, and they seem to work pretty well. You'll need to add --enable-plugins to your Chrome shortcut's command line operation to get the 'buggy' plug-in support, but it seems worth the hassle, as YouTube videos are playing relatively stable and smooth. Google's updated their alpha-level Chrome builds to include the newest start page tweaks as well, and it's generally a browser worth checking out, even if a few standard settings and convenience items are still missing."

The rumours and back-and-forths have been going on for as long as I can remember, but today, the deal was finally announced: Microsoft and Yahoo! have tied the knot - but only strictly related to internet search and advertising. The move is supposed to help both Yahoo! and Microsoft in their competition with Google.

We've been buying Wireless N draft devices for two years now, and some of us were holding our breaths to see if we'd have to replace that N hardware sooner than expected. Your uber-fast wireless hardware, if you even utilize its speed, is safe. The Wi-Fi Alliance said that the final standard of 802.11n will essentially remain the same with only a few minor additions; most if not all Draft 2.0 hardware will still function properly with final-version hardware. What's more is that the Wi-Fi Alliance also said that the final version of 802.11n will be effective in September and products will start testing the complete version later in the month.

It is not a secret that Apple is showing resistance to supporting Adobe's flash on the iPhone and that their efforts to add new features to HTML/CSS is driven towards reducing their dependence on Flash. Going further in that direction, the new hardware accelerated 3D CSS visual effects proposed for standards inclusion will be supported in Snow Leopard's Safari (it is already available in the latest Webkit nighty builds). An new impressive demo of the technology is available at Charles Ying blog.

A day earlier than expected, Microsoft has released version 3 of its Flash alternative Silverlight, including a number of related tools to aid in Silverlight development. It comes with a whole lot of new features.

Web browsers have become ever more important for our computers. Instead of the browser displaying static HTML pages, they now handle complex web applications, ranging from social networking to text editors to online banking, and everything in between. While some browsers have finally started treating the browser more like an operating system (Chrome and Internet Explorer 8), those are just baby steps. The real thing is coming with Microsoft's Gazelle, a research project which applies operating system concepts to the browser.