Web

Internet Society Releases Paper on “What Really Matters About the Internet”

Internet Society has released a paper today highlighting the importance of understanding what is important and unchanging about the Internet. more

No External Attacks Behind GoDaddy’s Major Outage, Says Company

GoDaddy.com has reported today that the Web hosting outage that involved thousands and possibly millions of websites on Monday was due to internal issues and did not involve any attacks by hackers. The outage lasted for about four hours and affected mainly small-business sites. GoDaddy.com hosts more than 5 million websites. more

Sweden Tops World Wide Web Foundation’s Web Index, Making Best Use of Internet Access

Sweden has been recognized as making the best use of its Internet access, according to the first annual World Wide Web Foundation's Web Index survey. The Web Index aims to be the world’s first multi-dimensional measure of the Web’s growth, utility and impact on people and nations. more

Leading Global Standards Organizations Endorse ‘OpenStand’ Principles

Five leading group of global organizations - IEEE, Internet Architecture Board (IAB), Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), Internet Society and World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - today announced that they have signed a statement affirming the importance of a jointly developed set of principles establishing a modern paradigm for global, open standards. The group have invited other standards organizations, governments, corporations and technology innovators globally to endorse the principles. more

Mobile Users Now and in the Future: A Snapshot

Like many of us in the technology industry, I am captivated by the growing adoption of mobile. It's changing multiple industries at a pace that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago. And my own interest accelerated when Afilias acquired another Irish company named dotMobi. ...since a mobile domain is not useful without mobile sites, dotMobi developed a site-building tool called goMobi that is used globally by hundreds of thousands of site owners. Because of that, we have unique information about who is using the mobile Web, and how they're using it. more

Carriage vs. Content

Does anyone remember the Internet before Google? And no, using Google to ask about the pre-Google Internet is not going to work all that well! For those of you who can recall the Internet of around 2000, do you also recall what debates were raging at the time? Let me give you a hand in answering that question. One big debate at the time was all about the relationship between the carriage service operators and the content providers, and, as usual, it was all about money. The debate was about who owed who money, and how much. Ten years later and it seems that nothing much has changed. more

Who Says You Can’t Have Fun at The IETF?

A new IETF draft has been published that specifies a new HTTP status code for legally restricted resources. That is, if the government restricts your access to the web page, return this code (similar to how something not found is a 404). The error code: 451. From the Internet Draft, if the user tries to access a page, but access to the page is restricted by the government, display the following... more

WebRTC/RTCWEB Congestion Control Workshop on July 28 in Vancouver

As we start moving more real-time communications into web browsers with the upcoming WebRTC/RTCWEB offerings, what do we do about congestion control? How do we ensure that all these browser-based communications sessions share the network fairly? With RTC capabilities now already available in builds for browsers such as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, how do we deal with the expected increase in voice, video, chat and data traffic? more

How Many of the New gTLDs Will Fail?

I was just asked the question: How many of the new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) will fail? This poor listener might have hoped for one sentence as response, but that subject is too interesting to be brief. In this scenario you can't look to historical data to measure or predict the success rate of the new TLDs because past new TLDs have been largely managed by big businesses who have strong revenue streams from other business lines that they could use to support a slacking TLD. more

Vint Cerf: The Launch of a New Larger Internet

In preparation for the World IPv6 Launch tomorrow, Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, and a founding father of the Internet, discusses the next version of the Internet, and why we need it.  more

Google Applies for New TLDs Including .google, .docs, .youtube, .lol

In a blog post today, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, Vint Cerf, has revealed various new Top-Level Domains (TLDs) which the company has submitted applications to ICANN for. Vint Cerf writes: "Given this [TLD] expansion process, we decided to submit applications for new TLDs, which generally fall into four categories..." more

Google Notifying Half a Million Users Affected By DNSChanger

Google has announced that it has started undertaking an effort to notify roughly half a million people whose computers or home routers are infected with a well-publicized form of malware known as DNSChanger. "After successfully alerting a million users last summer to a different type of malware, we've replicated this method and have started showing warnings via a special message that will appear at the top of the Google search results page for users with affected devices." more

Facebook Size Estimates

At a staggering $100 billion dollar valuation and reported 900 million users, Facebook represents a massive presence in the global economy. From an Internet infrastructure perspective, Facebook also ranks amongst the largest of the "hyper giants" generating a significant share of daily global Internet traffic. This blog explore Facebook's size in terms of its Internet traffic contribution. more

FBI Pushing Plans to Force Surveillance Backdoors on Social Networks, VoIP, and Email Providers

Declan McCullagh reporting in CNET: "The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance. In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities..." more

Are Banks Finally Taking E-Payments Seriously?

For the first time ever bankers have launched an EFTPOS advertising campaign. Could this be an indication that they are becoming worried about the competition they are getting from internet companies such as PayPal, Amazon, Google and Apple (iTunes)? The digital economy is growing much faster than the bricks-and-mortar economy and, while EFTPOS is not going away anytime soon, an increasingly large amount of money is now bypassing their systems. more