Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, warned on Wednesday that government plans to block access to illicit filesharing websites could set a "disastrous precedent" for freedom of speech. "If there is a law that requires DNSs to do X and it's passed by both houses of congress and signed by the president of the United States and we disagree with it then we would still fight it. If it's a request the answer is we wouldn't do it, if it's a discussion we wouldn't do it." more»
Digital Civil Rights in Europe reports: "During an investors day on 10 May 2011 in London, Dutch Internet service provider KPN admitted to using deep packet inspection (DPI) technology, to determine the use of certain applications by its mobile internet customers. Vodafone soon followed with an announcement that it used this technology for traffic shaping. The Dutch minister of Economic Affairs within days announced an investigation into KPN's practices and promised to publish the results within two weeks." more»
Google yesterday dove deep into its Chrome notebook project at its annual Google I/O conference. The company has had the notebook operating system in beta for almost two years now. Google announced the first market-ready Chromebooks from partners Samsung and Acer. The Chrome OS is dependent on the cloud for storage and various web-based applications. The result is a machine that boots in a matter of seconds and carries very little in the line of native hardware. more»
In the fourth quarter of 2010, a mobile provider in Greece (GR-1) had the highest average connection speed, at just over 4.5 Mbps, according to Akamai's latest State of the Internet Report. "The mobile providers in Slovakia and Russia that had previously been reported as having the highest average connection speeds were removed from consideration in the fourth quarter, as further research determined that their autonomous systems carried a mix of traffic from fixed and mobile connections." more»
A new research on native IPv6 traffic across six large providers in North America and Europe suggest that despite fifteen years of IPv6 standards development, vendor releases and advocacy, only a small fraction of the Internet has adopted IPv6. "The slow rate of IPv6 adoption stems from equal parts of technical/design hurdles, lack of economic incentives and general dearth of IPv6 content." more»
Two decades after creating the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee says humans have become so reliant on it that access to the Web should now be considered a basic right. "Access to the Web is now a human right. It's possible to live without the Web. It's not possible to live without water. But if you've got water, then the difference between somebody who is connected to the Web and is part of the information society, and someone who (is not) is growing bigger and bigger." more»
The U.S. Sate Department annual human rights report released on Friday has expressed concerns over the increasing trend among governments spending more time, money and attention in efforts to control their citizens access to the Internet and other communication means. To aid people seeking to speak out, the U.S. government is helping to finance circumvention technologies to avoid firewalls, reports the Associated Press. "To deal with governments hacking computers or intimidating dissenters, the U.S. government has trained 5,000 people from around the world on how to leave less of a trace on the Internet." more»
Thomas Claburn reporting in InformationWeek: "In a move that could further dampen its business prospects in China, Google is accusing Chinese authorities of interfering with its Gmail service and attempting to conceal that interference. Google says that Gmail users in China have been reporting difficulties using Gmail and that it has checked its systems and found no problems. ...'This is a government blockage carefully designed to look like the problem is with Gmail,' says Google." more»
James Cowie from Renesys reports: "8.9 magnitude earthquake in Japan has had surprisingly limited impacts on the structure and routing dynamics of the regional Internet. Of roughly 6,000 Japanese network prefixes in the global routing table, only about 100 were temporarily withdrawn from service -- and that number has actually decreased in the hours since the event. Other carriers around the region have reported congestion and drops in traffic due to follow-on effects of the quake, but most websites are up and operational, and the Internet is available to support critical communications." more»
In a Renesys blog post, James Cowie writes: "Why did Libya put its Internet in 'warm standby mode' instead of just taking it down, as Egypt did? Perhaps because they're learning from Mubarak's experience. Cutting off the Internet at the routing level (powering down the Internet exchange point, going after the remaining providers with secret police to enact a low-level shutdown) was a technically unsophisticated desperation move on Egypt's part." more»
As fighting inside the country intensifies, Libya's links to the net appear to have been completely severed. Net monitoring and security firms are reporting that no net traffic is entering or leaving Libyan net space. Renesys said the outage was more than just a "blip" as many sites have been unreachable for more than 12 hours. more»
Chloe Albanesius reporting in PC Magazine: "Internet access in Libya was severed for several hours this weekend, as protestors took to the streets to demand an end to the 40-year reign of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. On Friday night, Internet monitoring firm Renesys said in a blog post that 'Libya is off the Internet.'" more»
Wayne Rash reporting in eWeek: "The decision by the Egyptian government last week to shut down Internet access to the outside world has demonstrated that keeping people away from this global resource is virtually impossible. But that should be no surprise. When the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency developed the Internet, it was designed to be nearly impossible to kill. The designers did their jobs well, as the Egyptian government discovered to it's sorrow." more»
Renesys reports that Internet services in Egypt have been restored. According to the report, Egyptian Internet providers returned to the Internet at 09:29:31 UTC (11:29am Cairo time). "Websites such as the Egyptian Stock Exchange, Commercial International Bank of Egypt, MCDR, and the US Embassy in Cairo, are once again reachable. All major Egyptian ISPs appear to have readvertised routes to their domestic customer networks in the global routing table."
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Robert McMillan reporting from IDG News Service: "Egypt is now off the grid. Four days after the Egyptian government ordered Internet service providers to disconnect from the Internet, the country's last working Internet company has abruptly vanished from cyberspace. Noor Group, a small service provider that hosted Internet connections for the country's stock exchange and other businesses, became completely unreachable at around 10:46 p.m." more»
