Internet Archive

Spam Turns 30

Internet 29 Comments
There are many things concerning the internet that are decidedly not amusing. The internet can be a source of viruses and other forms of malware, which affect computers worldwide. It can provide refuge for the sick and perverted, who use the depths and anonymity of the internet to distribute material that goes beyond any imagination. It can also be a hotbed for other dangerous activities like crime and terrorism. However, I think I speak for many when I say that spam is the one thing that bothers us all on a continuous basis.
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Programming the Mesh

Internet 4 Comments
Back at MIX, the Live Platform Services team announced a new standard APP-based protocol for accessing your Live data, and at Web 2.0 the Live Mesh team has announced plans to extend that API with synchronization-ready access to data, devices, application and activity feeds. Ori Amiga shows a number of demos showing the native Mesh feeds, WPF applications using Mesh, a Silverlight client that supports working on and offline, a custom Facebook application that syncs Facebook photos with Live Mesh, a Mac client that sends photos to Live Mesh and even LINQ queries over Mesh objects.
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Open Sourcing OSNews’ Mobile Detection Kit

Internet 32 Comments
We were always proud of OSNews' (and Gnomefiles.org's) mobile capabilities. We spent years collecting keywords to be able to automatically redirect or serve a mobile-formatted or WAP-formatted (wap.osnews.com) page to less capable browsers. We believe that this script can recognize 99% of the world's non-desktop browsers. We gave special care to not only phones, but PDAs, gaming devices, text browsers, even weird embedded systems browsers that most users have never heard of. Now, it's time to open source our PHP detection script so others can use it on their sites too. Download here, and read the included readme.txt file too before using. It explains what is what, and what its difference is compared to similar solutions found elsewhere. You can see the work this detection script does in our mobile statistics (OSNews serves about 1500 pageviews per day on non-desktop browsers via this script).
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Enabling Web Accessibility

  Submitted by jmalasko Internet 3 Comments
aDesigner is "a disability simulator that helps designers ensure that their content and applications are accessible and usable by the visually impaired. The new version adds support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Flash content; presentation simulation function for ODF documents." Ever since the first graphic designers started to try to bend HTML to their will, people have complained that many web sites subvert the standards that early web architects designed to make navigating easier for the visually impaired. Read more for more discussion...
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Joel Spolsky on Web Standards

Internet 53 Comments
"You're about to see the mother of all flamewars on internet groups where web developers hang out. This upcoming battle will be presided over by Dean Hachamovitch, the Microsoft veteran currently running the team that's going to bring you the next version of Internet Explorer, 8.0. The IE 8 team is in the process of making a decision that lies perfectly, exactly, precisely on the fault line smack in the middle of two different ways of looking at the world. It's the difference between conservatives and liberals, it's the difference between 'idealists' and 'realists', it's a huge global jihad dividing members of the same family, engineers against computer scientists, and Lexuses vs. olive trees. And there's no solution. But it will be really, really entertaining to watch, because 99% of the participants in the flame wars are not going to understand what they're talking about. It's not just entertainment: it's required reading for every developer who needs to design interoperable systems. The flame war will revolve around the issue of something called 'web standards'."
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ICANN Finally Begins Updated IP Standard Rollout

Internet 4 Comments
Today, the non-profit organization in charge of the Internet's fundamental naming structure finally began migrating its root servers to IP version 6. ICANN today is finally beginning the long, and perhaps arduous, process of upgrading its root servers to incorporate IPv6 records. Though the updated protocol has been in the post-development phase for over ten years, it has seen very limited uptake outside of the enterprise sector.
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ICANN Makes Case for Freedom From US Oversight

Internet 30 Comments
ICANN, the group charged with overseeing the Internet's addressing system, has submitted a report to the US Department of Commerce in which it argues that the time has come to end US oversight. In October 2006, the Department of Commerce and ICANN signed the Joint Project Agreement, a three-year pact that extended Commerce's oversight of the body, while leaving open the possibility that the group would become independent as soon as April of this year. In the new report, ICANN argues that it has already met the requirements for independence and should therefore be freed from oversight.
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W3C Publishes HTML 5 Draft

  Submitted by irbis Internet 12 Comments
"W3C today published an early draft of HTML 5, a major revision of the markup language for the Web. The HTML Working Group is creating HTML 5 to be the open, royalty-free specification for rich Web content and Web applications. The group operates entirely in public with nearly five hundred participants, including representatives from W3C Members ACCESS, AOL, Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera. Some of the most interesting new features for authors are APIs for drawing two-dimensional graphics, embedding and controlling audio and video content, maintaining persistent client-side data storage, and for enabling users to edit documents and parts of documents interactively. Authors write HTML 5 using either a 'classic' HTML syntax or an XML syntax, according to application demands. See a list of changes from HTML 4."
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Web Icon Set to Be Discontinued

  Submitted by Adurbe Internet 66 Comments
"The browser that helped kick-start the commercial web is to cease development because of lack of users. Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 February 2008, the company has said. In the mid-1990s the browser was used by more than 90% of the web population, but numbers have slipped to just 0.6%. In particular, the browser has faced competition from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which is now used by nearly 80% of all web users."
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Samba Team Receives Microsoft Protocol Documentation

  Submitted by diegocg Internet 145 Comments
"Today the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation, a non-profit organization created by the Software Freedom Law Center, signed an agreement with Microsoft to receive the protocol documentation needed to fully interoperate with the Microsoft Windows workgroup server products and to make them available to Free Software projects such as Samba. Microsoft was required to make this information available to competitors as part of the European Commission March 24th 2004 Decision in the antitrust lawsuit, after losing their appeal against that decision on September 17th 2007."
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A Preview of HTML 5

  Submitted by irbis Internet 90 Comments
"The web is constantly evolving. New and innovative websites are being created every day, pushing the boundaries of HTML in every direction. HTML 4 has been around for nearly a decade now, and publishers seeking new techniques to provide enhanced functionality are being held back by the constraints of the language and browsers. To give authors more flexibility and interoperability, and enable more interactive and exciting websites and applications, HTML 5 introduces and enhances a wide range of features including form controls, APIs, multimedia, structure, and semantics."
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Ten New Things in WebKit 3

  Submitted by Hakime Internet 3 Comments
"Lately we've been talking about a lot of great new features in the latest development trunk of WebKit - features like web fonts, client-side database storage, CSS transforms and CSS animation. These features will likely make it to an official release someday. But I'd like to take a step back and talk about some older features, namely all the great stuff in our recent stable release. Apple recently released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, including Safari 3. The latest Safari is also included in Mac OS X 10.4.11, the latest update to Tiger. A corresponding version is available as the latest Safari for Windows Beta, including the new features and lots of stability and usability improvements. Apple's site can tell you a lot about the new end-user features of Safari 3. But a lot of the goodness is on the inside, in the WebKit engine that powers Safari. Here's a list of ten of the most exciting engine enhancements since the Safari 2 version of WebKit, with lots of details and demos. These features are all included in the WebKit that comes with Safari 3 - you don't have to download nightlies or anything else to get them."
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Luke Schierer Discusses Pidgin, Open Source, Life

  Submitted by irbis Internet 7 Comments
"Luke Schierer started using Pidgin (then known as Gaim) in 1999, not long after its first release. He officially joined the project in 2001, after being on the IRC channel and helping out for a few several months. He is now one of the core developers. Somewhere between his full time job working with Linux clusters and his time spent developing Pidgin, he finds time to tell PC World about his life, open source and Pidgin."
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First Look at Microsoft’s Tafiti: Sexy Silverlight Searching

  Submitted by WPFRez Internet 46 Comments
"Microsoft has released a new showcase of its Silverlight web development frameworks, a graphical search engine called Tafiti. Tafiti, which means 'do research' in Swahili, is an experimental frontend to Microsoft's Live Search engine. It presents search options in three panes on the screen: the left pane is for entering search queries and switching between image, RSS, Web, and News, the middle pane contains the search results, and the right pane is used to 'dock' results using drag-and-drop for looking at later."
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