Bridging such differences about how the Internet could or should be more regulated took center stage Tuesday at an "e-G8" meeting aimed to parlay the digital world's growing economic clout into a cohesive message for world leaders at the Group of Eight summit later this week in Normandy. The two-day Paris gathering has brought together Internet and media world gurus such as Google Inc. executive chairman Eric Schmidt, News Corp. Chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. more»
Pingdom has conducted a study on how today's two billion internet users around the world are spread over different time zones. Study found two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa. more»
Microsoft Program Manager, Jeb Haber, reports in a blog post that from browser data collected on user downloads, 1 out of every 14 programs downloaded is later confirmed as malware. Haber says: "Consumers need information to make better decisions. That said, IE9 adds another layer of defense against socially engineered attacks that now looks at the application being downloaded -- this is in addition to the URL-based protection described above. This new layer of protection is called SmartScreen Application Reputation." more»
Netflix has become the largest source of Internet traffic in North America, according Sandvine's Spring 2011 Global Internet Phenomena Report. Company further reports that currently, Real-Time Entertainment applications consume 49.2% of peak aggregate traffic, up from 29.5% in 2009 -- a 60% increase [see figture]. Sandvine forecasts that the Real-Time Entertainment category will represent 55-60% of peak aggregate traffic by the end of 2011. 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»
Caixin reports that the State Council, China's cabinet, has set up an office to regulate internet activity, according to an announcement released on May 4 via an official website. The new department, called the State Internet Information Office, will supervise online content management and process approvals of businesses involved in online news reporting, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua. The new agency is reported to have the authority to investigate and punish online content-providers if necessary. more»
Wout de Natris writes to report: "EU Commissioner for the Information Society Neelie Kroes today launched the EU co-funded project for the Internet of the future in which everything will be connected to everyone in the cloud. Here's the link to Mrs. Kroes' speech." more»
Telnic Limited, the registry operator for the .tel top level domain (TLD), today announced that its regional partner TelChina and China Mobile, a leading mobile phone company, have entered into a strategic relationship to develop Mobile-Pay services on the .tel platform. ... On this platform, users will not have to log on to various websites for payment, but accomplish it through the clicking of a Mobile-Pay link on a .tel page. 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»
With the recent passing of Paul Baran, IFTF is releasing an excerpt of a 1971 report in tribute, entitled "Brief descriptions of potential home information services." The excerpts are from the report titled, Toward a Study of Future Urban High-Capacity Telecommunications Systems, which included a handbook of forecasts for what was then called "broadband telecommunication and information services," later known as the Internet. more»
In pursuit of its efforts to improve Google search results, the company on Thursday announced the release of a new feature that enables users to block specific search results based on domain names. more»
Bevil Wooding writes to report: "Skype is looking to developing markets to increase its presence and its mobile business in places where smartphone use is less common. While Skype can be used on Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, Palm and Windows 6.5 devices, those are not as prevalent in developing countries. To overcome that obstacle, Skype has developed a mobile client for lower-end phones that do not have Wi-Fi or 3G capabilities and hope to win the trust of operators by holding out the benefit that mobile customers will need to buy data packages in order to use Skype over the cellular network." more»
Spencer Ackerman reporting in Wired: "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton vowed on Tuesday to invest $25 million for developers to build tools that online dissidents get around "thugs, hackers and censors." It's her attempt at giving teeth to the so-called "Internet Freedom Agenda" that she unveiled last year. ...Clinton pledged to take a "venture capital approach" to funding tools that allow online activists..." more»
On 8 June, 2011, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Akamai and Limelight Networks will be amongst some of the major organisations that will offer their content over IPv6 for a 24-hour "test drive". The goal of the Test Drive Day is to motivate organizations across the industry - Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies - to prepare their services for IPv6 to ensure a successful transition as IPv4 addresses run out. more»
Recently, we have witnessed the effective disappearance from the Internet of a website made infamous through international press coverage and political intrigue. The Internet Society is founded upon key principles of free expression and non discrimination that are essential to preserve the openness and utility of the Internet. We believe that this incident dramatically illustrates that those principles are currently at risk. more»
