Internet Archive

European Parliament passes full net neutrality

Thom Holwerda 2014-04-03 Internet 8 Comments

Two years ago, The Netherlands was the first European country to codify full net neutrality, and at the time, I expressed the hope that it would serve as a template for EU-wide net neutrality. Well, good news everyone: the European Parliament just accepted full net neutrality, essentially a copy/paste from the Dutch law.

We did get lucky, though - the original proposal included an exception for undefined "special services", a potentially massive loophole for ISPs. Thanks to Dutch European parliament member Marietje Schaake, the special services exemption was dropped, so that strong net neutrality has now been codified EU-wide - at least by the EP.

In addition, today's set of new legislation also includes an end to roaming charges within the EU, which is great news for the travelers among us. All in all, a good day for the web.

Surfing the modern web with ancient browsers

Thom Holwerda 2014-03-22 Internet 37 Comments

I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem - the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to microsoft.com with IE 1.5 or qnx.com with the last version of Voyager. This just doesn't work. With rapid progression of web standards, the situation will only be getting worse in time. Something had to be done.

This is some really cool stuff.

Revelations of NSA spying cost US tech companies

Thom Holwerda 2014-03-21 Internet 42 Comments

Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil.

IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to reassure foreign customers that their information is safe from prying eyes in the United States government.

And tech companies abroad, from Europe to South America, say they are gaining customers that are shunning United States providers, suspicious because of the revelations by Edward J. Snowden that tied these providers to the National Security Agency’s vast surveillance program.

Right. Because, as we all know, European governments did not fully comply with the US spying programs, nor have they similar programs of their own.

High time some smart company develops a very simple and straightforward 'personal cloud'; a simple, large box with loads of storage that you dump in the basement somewhere, with pre-configured email, internet storage, and so on. Also offer the ability to have multiple of these things tied to the same account for data duplication, so you can, say, dump one of them at a trusted friend's home. Make it platform-agnostic and encrypted, et voila.

Doesn't sound like something that's terribly hard to do.

Inside DuckDuckGo, Google’s tiniest, fiercest competitor

Thom Holwerda 2014-02-20 Internet 35 Comments

When Gabriel Weinberg launched a search engine in 2008, plenty of people thought he was insane. How could DuckDuckGo, a tiny, Philadelphia-based startup, go up against Google? One way, he wagered, was by respecting user privacy. Six years later, we're living in the post-Snowden era, and the idea doesn't seem so crazy.

In fact, DuckDuckGo is exploding.

I wonder what the future holds for DuckDuckGo. Will there be a point where people leave Google Search completely, instead of just casting curious glances at DDG?

Facebook acquires WhatsApp

Thom Holwerda 2014-02-19 Internet 78 Comments

Facebook today announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire WhatsApp, a rapidly growing cross-platform mobile messaging company, for a total of approximately $16 billion, including $4 billion in cash and approximately $12 billion worth of Facebook shares. The agreement also provides for an additional $3 billion in restricted stock units to be granted to WhatsApp’s founders and employees that will vest over four years subsequent to closing.

A huge deal. WhatsApp is one of the biggest messaging services is in the world - maybe even the biggest.

Tim Berners-Lee: we need to re-decentralise the web

Thom Holwerda 2014-02-06 Internet 115 Comments

Speaking with Wired editor David Rowan at an event launching the magazine's March issue, Tim Berners-Lee said that although part of this is about keeping an eye on for-profit internet monopolies such as search engines and social networks, the greatest danger is the emergence of a balkanised web.

"I want a web that's open, works internationally, works as well as possible and is not nation-based," Berners-Lee told the audience, which included Martha Lane Fox, Jake Davis (AKA Topiary) and Lily Cole. He suggested one example to the contrary: "What I don't want is a web where the Brazilian government has every social network's data stored on servers on Brazilian soil. That would make it so difficult to set one up."

A government never gives up a power it already has. The control it currently has over the web will not be relinquished.

Google’s Schmidt sees encryption killing censorship

Thom Holwerda 2013-11-21 Internet 75 Comments

"We can end government censorship in a decade," Schmidt said during a speech in Washington. "The solution to government surveillance is to encrypt everything."

Setting aside the entertaining aspect of the source of said statement, I don't think encryption in and of itself is enough. Encryption performed by companies is useless, since we know by now that companies - US or otherwise - are more than eager to bend over backwards to please their governments.

What we need is encryption that we perform ourselves, so that neither governments nor companies are involved. I imagine some sort of box between your home network and the internet, that encrypts and decrypts everything, regardless of source or destination. This box obviously needs to run open source software, otherwise we'd be right back where we started.

Is something like that even possible?

English has a new preposition, because internet

Thom Holwerda 2013-11-19 Internet 40 Comments

The word "because," in standard English usage, is a subordinating conjunction, which means that it connects two parts of a sentence in which one (the subordinate) explains the other. In that capacity, "because" has two distinct forms. It can be followed either by a finite clause (I'm reading this because ) or by a prepositional phrase (I'm reading this because ). These two forms are, traditionally, the only ones to which "because" lends itself.

I mention all that ... because language. Because evolution. Because there is another way to use "because." Linguists are calling it the "prepositional-because." Or the "because-noun."

I'm a sucker for this kind of stuff. This is language changing before our very eyes - and thanks to the internet, it happens out in the open, in an easy documentable way, and at an incredibly fast pace.

Technology leaves nothing untouched.

Google outage: internet traffic plunges 40%

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-19 Internet 23 Comments

Worldwide internet traffic plunged by around 40% as Google services suffered a complete black-out, according to web analytics experts.

The tech company said all of its services from Google Search to Gmail to YouTube to Google Drive went down for between one and five minutes last night.

The reason for the outage is not yet known, and Google refused to provide any further information when contacted by Sky News Online.

According to web analytics firm GoSquared, global internet traffic fell by around 40% during the black-out, reflecting Google's massive grip on the web.

Woah.

Obama administration wants to revive part of SOPA

Thom Holwerda 2013-08-06 Internet 26 Comments

You probably remember the online outrage over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) copyright enforcement proposal. Last week, the Department of Commerce's Internet Policy Task Force released a report on digital copyright policy that endorsed one piece of the controversial proposal: making the streaming of copyrighted works a felony.

This man has been such a deception.

NSA program collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the net’

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-31 Internet 72 Comments

From The Guardian:

A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its "widest reaching" system for developing intelligence from the internet.

This is not PRISM - but a different system. The slides are damning, as always.

It validates claims made by Edward Snowden, and makes it clear that US government officials have been lying all along. There's no court order required for any of this - in a supposedly modern democracy. Crazy.

Remember, remember: British PM to enact internet censorship

Thom Holwerda 2013-07-22 Internet 60 Comments

"Every household in Britain connected to the internet will be obliged to declare whether they want to maintain access to online pornography, David Cameron will announce on Monday." And so, the UK nanny state turns to straight up censorship. Let's look at some of the authoritarian policies that David Cameron wishes to enact.

Guest post by Beta 2013-06-08 Internet 10 Comments

"Bruce Lawson started a very interesting discussion about the Encrypted Media Extensions to HTML a few months ago, with learned and interesting commentary from John Foliot and others. After devoting some thought to this, I believe that the amount of argument around this subject is at least partially caused by its separation of the web from the spirit of the web."

arkOS: self-host everything

Thom Holwerda 2013-06-07 Internet 10 Comments

"It allows you to easily host your own website, email, 'cloud' and more, all within arm's reach. It does this by interfacing with existing software and allowing the user to easily update and change settings with a graphical interface. No more need to depend on external cloud services, which can be insecure 'walled gardens' that require you to give up control over your data. arkOS will have several different components that come together to make a seamless self-hosting experience possible on your Raspberry Pi. Each of these components will work with each other out-of-the-box, allowing you to host your websites, email, social networking accounts, cloud services, and many other things from your arkOS node." I have to look into this.

Camino browser no longer developed

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-31 Internet 35 Comments

"After a decade-long run, Camino is no longer being developed, and we encourage all users to upgrade to a more modern browser. Camino is increasingly lagging behind the fast pace of changes on the web, and more importantly it is not receiving security updates, making it increasingly unsafe to use."

Twenty years ago, the web was donated to mankind

Thom Holwerda 2013-05-02 Internet 33 Comments

Exactly twenty years ago, a document was published that played a huge role in establishing the web as we know it today. Twenty years later, and this simple and straightforward document is proof of an irrefutable fact: while closed technologies can change markets, open technologies can change the world.

jQuery 2.0 released

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-18 Internet 15 Comments

"As promised, this version leaves behind the older Internet Explorer 6, 7, and 8 browsers. In return it is smaller, faster, and can be used in JavaScript environments where the code needed for old-IE compatibility often causes problems of its own. But don't worry, the jQuery team still supports the 1.x branch which does run on IE 6/7/8. You can (and should) continue to use jQuery 1.9 (and the upcoming 1.10) on web sites that need to accommodate older browsers."

Does WebKit face a troubled future now that Google is gone?

Thom Holwerda 2013-04-08 Internet 25 Comments

Peter Bright has summarised some of the post-fork discussions on the WebKit mailinglists. "Now that Google is going its own way and developing its rendering engine independently of the WebKit project, both sides of the split are starting the work of removing all the things they don't actually need. This is already causing some tensions among WebKit users and Web developers, as it could lead to the removal of technology that they use or technology that is in the process of being standardized. This is leading some to question whether Apple is willing or able to fill in the gaps that Google has left." There's a clear winner and loser here.

Submitted by MOS6510 2013-03-28 Internet 39 Comments

"The New York Times this morning published a story about the Spamhaus DDoS attack and how CloudFlare helped mitigate it and keep the site online. The Times calls the attack the largest known DDoS attack ever on the Internet. We wrote about the attack last week. At the time, it was a large attack, sending 85Gbps of traffic. Since then, the attack got much worse. Here are some of the technical details of what we've seen."

Lack of Competition Holds Back U.S. Broadband

jackson 2013-01-24 Internet 41 Comments

In the past, OS News has discussed how U.S. broadband access lags many other countries in terms of cost, speed, and availability. Now, this detailed report from the New America Foundation tells why. It all comes down to a lack of competition among the carriers, which can be traced back to the days when cable companies were granted local monopolies. The report argues that "...data caps... are hardly a necessity. Rather, they are motivated by a desire to further increase revenues from existing subscribers and protect legacy services such as cable television from competing Internet services." The report's conclusion: don't expect improvements without legislative action.