Core Dump

Instead of installing every single extension for every task into the same Firefox profile, why not separate them into separate profiles, organized by task? Think of Firefox like an Operating System for the web, and each profile as a separate application—one profile is used for basic web browsing, another for writing, another for web development, and so on.

Most of the writers at Lifehacker HQ use different profiles for writing, researching, and personal browsing on a daily basis. It keeps your Firefox instances running smoother, and each profile is streamlined for accomplishing the kind of things you want to accomplish with that profile.

Labels: Internet, software

Labels: Internet

Here's what's really going on. HTML 5 is already working its way into the underpinnings of web apps you use every day, making them faster and more stable than those relying on Java or other plugins. They're more like real apps. It's helping us inch closer to the dream of having real applications available at all times, on any platform.

HTML is also setting forth a vision of media—specifically video—that doesn't rely on crashy, resource-intensive proprietary plugins. Look in your plugins folder, you will probably see four video plugins at a minimum. HTML is a standard with an optimistic view of the future: You launch your browser, and whatever site you visit, whatever media you choose to play, your browser just magically supports it, without the frustration, confusion and added instability of a plug-in.

But at heart HTML is just a framework, a glimpse, and an ideal: Its real effect on the internet continues to be defined by the companies and web developers who choose to adopt its many pieces—and it is further shaped by those who don't.

Labels: Internet

Obama is the first truly wired president, the first to have Internet access at his desk and to converse regularly via e-mail. This fingertip access sends him "constantly" online, said one senior adviser, and the information he finds there influences his thinking and some of his deliberations. He also "uses the Internet like a normal adult," said another aide, "reading news articles, checking sports scores."

As for what Obama reads online, his advisers said he looks for offbeat blogs and news stories, tracking down firsthand reporting and seeking out writers with opinions about his policies. Obama was particularly interested in Atlantic Online's Andrew Sullivan's tweeting of the Iranian elections last year, said an aide, who requested anonymity to discuss what influences the president.

When they spoke for attribution, administration officials played down the notion of a Googling commander in chief.

"I don't think time permits him to be surfing all the time," Axelrod said, adding that the president reads "magazines like crazy," including the New Yorker, the Economist, Sports Illustrated and Rolling Stone. "There are some commentators whose views he's interested in, and he'll read blog items."

Labels: Internet, politics

Labels: Internet, security

And before you dismiss the chart outright, check out your cable company's channel packages. Replace content provider fees with new network backbone charges, and cable packages with traffic or website packages, and hey, look, shit—this doesn't seem so crazy, does it? Click here for the full version. [Reddit via Crunchgear]

Labels: Internet, politics

The internet is an integral part of our children’s education; it’s critical to our employment; it’s how we stay in touch with distant relatives. It’s how we engage with government. It’s the single wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of assembly. It isn’t just a conduit for getting a few naughty free movies, it is the circulatory system of the information age.

To understand just how disproportionate this is, consider the corollary: what if Peter Mandelson proposed a rule to terminate the internet access of any movie studio or record company accused of three baseless copyright claims against the public? We could go down to all Universal offices and data centres with a huge pair of boltcutters and snip its net wires at the junction box.

It would be a corporate death penalty. Families that receive this penalty — without a judge or trial — will face a similar terminal fate, cut off from the system that connects them to life and livelihood.

Labels: intellectual property, Internet, politics

The goal of Raindrop is to make email and messaging personal again, and allow complete customizability in how you manage that information. It brings in content from multiple, sources such as Twitter, RSS feeds, and email, and presents it in one central, web-based front end. Thus, instead of having to watch multiple sources just to keep up on your personal conversations, you can focus on one single bucket.

Raindrop can also decide which conversations are important to you and your life, and "bubble up" that information to the top—while keeping the less important messages out of the way. In addition, like all Mozilla projects, Raindrop will be extensible—whether through HTML, Java, CSS, or APIs—in order for you to further personalize your experience.

Labels: Internet, software

Let’s look up close at one element of this flourishing ecosystem: the gradual rise of science blogs as a serious medium for research. It’s easy to miss the impact of blogs on research, because most science blogs focus on outreach. But more and more blogs contain high quality research content. Look at Terry Tao’s wonderful series of posts explaining one of the biggest breakthroughs in recent mathematical history, the proof of the Poincare conjecture. Or Tim Gowers recent experiment in “massively collaborative mathematics”, using open source principles to successfully attack a significant mathematical problem. Or Richard Lipton’s excellent series of posts exploring his ideas for solving a major problem in computer science, namely, finding a fast algorithm for factoring large numbers. Scientific publishers should be terrified that some of the world’s best scientists, people at or near their research peak, people whose time is at a premium, are spending hundreds of hours each year creating original research content for their blogs, content that in many cases would be difficult or impossible to publish in a conventional journal. What we’re seeing here is a spectacular expansion in the range of the blog medium. By comparison, the journals are standing still.

Labels: Internet, science

The Internet’s great promise is to make the world's information universally accessible and useful. So how come when you arrive at the most popular dating site in the US you find a stream of anonymous come-ons intermixed with insults, ads for prostitutes, naked pictures, and obvious scams? In a design straight from the earliest days of the Web, miscellaneous posts compete for attention on page after page of blue links, undifferentiated by tags or ratings or even usernames. Millions of people apparently believe that love awaits here, but it is well hidden. Is this really the best we can do?

Odd perhaps, but no odder than what you see at the most popular job-search site: another wasteland of hypertext links, one line after another, without recommendations or networking features or even protection against duplicate postings. Subject to a highly unpredictable filtering system that produces daily outrage among people whose help-wanted ads have been removed without explanation, this site not only beats its competitors—Monster, CareerBuilder, Yahoo's HotJobs—but garners more traffic than all of them combined. Are our standards really so low?

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

• The sandbox: Play around with Google's next-generation search infrastructure.

• Google News: Increases the size of its news archive.

• Google Images: Gets direct search options.

Labels: Internet, reference

Coalescing in an online chat room, members of the group, known as Pranknet, use the telephone to carry out cruel and outrageous hoaxes, which they broadcast live around-the-clock on the Internet. Masquerading as hotel employees, emergency service workers, and representatives of fire alarm companies, "Dex" and his cohorts have successfully prodded unwitting victims to destroy hotel rooms and lobbies, set off sprinkler systems, activate fire alarms, and damage assorted fast food restaurants.

But while Pranknet's hoaxes have caused millions of dollars in damages, it is the group's efforts to degrade and frighten targets that makes it even more odious. For example, a bizarre July 20 prank ended with a hotel worker actually sipping from a urine sample provided by a guest at a Homewood Suites in Kentucky. Additionally, at least twice this year, fast food workers--fearing that they would suffer burns after being doused by chemicals from a fire suppression system--stripped off their clothes on the sidewalk outside their respective restaurants.

"Dex", who took his nickname from the lead character in "Dexter," the Showtime series about a serial killer who murders serial killers, is bitingly contemptuous of law enforcement and its ability to stop Pranknet or locate its members. When a victim warns him that they are contacting police, he laughs derisively and offers to provide cops with a crayon to trace his number. He and his followers place their prank calls via Skype, confident that the Internet phone service sufficiently cloaks their identities and whereabouts.

Labels: Internet, security, society

Labels: Internet, technical communication

Labels: Internet

We should recognize that Canada was once a leader in the area. In the late 1990s, we became the first country in the world to ensure that every school from coast to coast to coast was connected to the Internet. Soon after that we launched the National Broadband Task Force committed to developing a strategy to ensure that all Canadians had access to high-speed networks.

In the years since that task force, Canada's global standing has steadily declined. Many Europeans countries have eclipsed Canada in its broadband rankings. The Telecommunications Policy Review Panel from a couple of years ago undertook a detailed analysis of the Canadian marketplace with the goal of identifying whether the market could be relied upon to ensure that all Canadians would have access to broadband. Their conclusion was that it would not be relied upon. The panel concluded that at least 5 per cent of Canadians — hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens — will be without broadband access without public involvement. Last week, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, OECD, released its latest report on global broadband, and the results should be mandatory reading for anyone concerned with these issues. Canada ranked ninth out of the 30 OECD countries on broadband penetration. That is not great, but the situation becomes even worse once you delve into the details on pricing and speed.

First, Canada is relatively expensive, ranking fourteenth for monthly subscription costs at $45.65. By comparison, Japan costs $30.46 cents and the U.K. is $30.63. Second, the Canadian Internet is slow, ranking twenty-fourth out of the 30 OECD countries. It is truly a different Internet experience for people in Japan, Korea and France, where the speed allows for applications and opportunities that we do not have. Moreover, Canada lags behind in fibre connections direct to home fibre with 0 per cent penetration, according to the OECD. By comparison, Japan sits at 48 per cent, Korea at 43 per cent, Sweden at 20 per cent and the United States, which has been slow in this area, is at 4 per cent. Third, when you combine speed and pricing, Canada drops to twenty-eighth out of the 30 OECD countries for price per megabyte. In other words, as consumers, we pay more for less — higher prices, slower speeds. Fourth, in addition, Canada is one of only four OECD countries where consumers have no alternative but to take a service with bit caps. That means the service provider caps the amount of bandwidth that the consumer can use each month. In almost every other OECD country, consumers at least have a choice between providers that use bit caps and those that do not.

Labels: intellectual property, Internet, politics

Labels: Internet, reference

Labels: Internet

Kicking off our conversation, Stephen remarks that, “Wolfram|Alpha isn’t really a search engine, because we compute the answers, and we discover new truths. If anything, you might call it a platonic search engine, unearthing eternal truths that may never have been written down before.”

Despite his disclaimer, Wolfram|Alpha looks like a search engine, in that there’s a one-line box where you type in a question. The output appears a second or two later, as a page of text and graphics below the box. What's happening behind the scenes? Rather than looking up the answer to your question, Wolfram|Alpha figures out what your question means, looks up the necessary data to answer your question, computes an answer, designs a page to present the answer in a pleasing way, and sends the page back to your computer.

Let me give three random examples. If you enter the query, “3/26/2009 + 90 days” you’ll get a page that gives a date ninety days later than the first date. If you enter “mt. everest height length of golden gate” you’ll get a page expressing the height of Mount Everest as a multiple of the length of the Golden Gate Bridge. If you enter “temperature in los gatos,” you’ll get something like the current temperature, a graph of the temperatures over the last week with projections for the next few days, and a graph of the temperatures over the last year.

Labels: computing, Internet

Labels: Internet, security

Labels: Internet, software

Labels: Internet, software

For the past 13 years, the Internet Archive has been growing rapidly, most recently by about 100TB of data per month. Until last year, the site had been using a more traditional data center filled with 800 standard Linux servers, each with four hard drives. The new Sun Modular Datacenter that powers it now is on Sun's campus in Santa Clara, Calif., and houses eight racks filled with 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers with dual- or quad-core x86 processors running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each Sun server is combined with an array of 48 1TB hard drives. The server unit is referred to as a "Thumper."

The Sun Modular Datacenter houses 63 Sun Fire x4500 servers running Solaris 10 with ZFS. Each server has 48TB of capacity.

"The only thing needed besides [the shipping container] are the network connections, a chilled water supply and electricity," said Dave Douglas, Sun's chief sustainability officer. "Customers using this tend to be people running out of data center space and need something quickly or need a data center in remote area where mobility is key."

Labels: Internet, technology

First things first. Google has for a long time had synonym searching. You can put a tilde (~) in front of the word and Google would find not only your keyword but words similar in meaning. To see this feature in action search for ~flowers. Wondering what words Google are actually finding? Search for ~flowers -flowers. You’ll spot the synonyms without your keyword.

The new feature is for suggested related searches, and they are a little more complicated. If you ran the search above take a look at the bottom of the page. You’ll find links to several searches including “biology plants”, “funny cards”, “pollination plants”, and “rhino cards” (rhino cards?) Even with these related searches you’ll note that Google is covering a lot of ground, from plant science to gift giving and special occasions. (If you give Google an even more general search — like say chips — the related searches get even broader, ranging from Erik Estrada to Lays Chips to, um, Doritos.)

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, software

That group of results brought it home to me that there needs to be more categorization of the sources here, or failing that some really rudimentary search filters could be instituted — like limiting sources to top level domain (.edu or .uk instead of .com, for example.) Maybe visitors could participate in tagging sources? There should also be a way to keep the focus strictly on the question. When I ask “Should I get a cat or a dog?” and get an answer to “The lady I write to asked me to send her some money. What should I do?” then there is a lack of precision that is not going to make it easy for the searcher.

I like the breadth of sources that this search engine covers, and 13 million questions is a good start. But there needs to be a way to get more focused.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, reference, software

The Web 2.0 revolution has also affected publishing. I found my publisher was not promoting my books into the global marketplace as they had promised, so I have self-published using Web 2.0 resources. Others have been unable to get published at all, and so have self-published, to find themselves with best sellers on their hands and conventional publishers offering them million-dollar contacts. Print-on-demand technology is revolutionising publishing as we speak. I can supply my book as a PDF file to a printer who can cost effectively print and despatch a single copy; no more huge print runs resulting in volumes of remaindered stock.

What else is being radically changed as Web 2.0 developers get better and better at what they do, and are enabling ordinary users to do more and more of what they once had to pay professionals to do?

I am writing this using the Blog template in Word 2007 and will hit a button in Word to save it to my Google blog. From there it will distribute itself across a range of other sites with no human intervention. Now how sweet is that?

Labels: Internet, Microsoft Word, Office 2007

Labels: Internet, technical communication

What would a post-print Times look like? Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow The Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.

Labels: Internet, news, society

Labels: Internet, security

Labels: Internet, politics

Many submissions call on the CRTC to continue the regulatory exemption for new media, including the wireless industry, Google, telecom industry, the NHL, and the broadcasters. On the other hand, ACTRA and SOCAN lead the charge for a new, highly regulated Internet. SOCAN's vision is astonishing, calling for at least 51 percent Canadian content requirements for Canadian commercial websites. ACTRA calls for full Cancon rules for new media and wants the CRTC to licence new media undertakings, arguing that "the Commission should also require that those who are making programs available from Canada, through the Internet or to mobile receiving devices, for viewing at a time and place chosen by the user be licensed." Note that ACTRA also believes that user generated content should regulated under the Broadcasting Act.

Labels: intellectual property, Internet

Labels: Internet

Every time I think about moving back to Canada some day, I remind myself of how miserable the national Internet infrastructure is -- and how awful the big telcos are, and how weak-kneed and ass-licking the telcoms regulator is -- and I realize I can't possibly move home. The Internet's where I live, it's how I earn my income. Living on Canada's Internet would be better than living on China's Internet, say, but that's a pretty low bar to hurdle.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

And these kinds of annotations transcend the world of comics and scifi nerdery. Music journalist Alex Ross released a book last year about twentieth century music called The Rest is Noise, which he supplemented by creating an elaborate, stand-alone annotation website. A massive compendium of twentieth-century musical terms, with definitions and illustrative sound files, his site can be read alongside the book to enrich the experience immeasurably. Or it can be absorbed on its own, as a musical dictionary.

There are many other examples: Some created by the authors of books, and others like Wolk's created by knowledgeable readers. These javascript:void(0)electronic footnote sites do not replace books, but they make reading feel like an erudite discussion rather than a lecture. They also make it possible for authors to write far more complicated and nuanced books. Confused readers have an easy place to go if they want to understand a crucial reference or idea, while in-the-know readers can have fun adding their own annotations to the web.

Labels: books, Internet

I just checked my feed on Bloglines, and sure enough, it stopped updating last March. If you’re one of the 599 people who are listed as subscribers to this site via Bloglines, you’ve been cheated. And if that’s your only lifeline to me, you will, ironically, never read this post.

So is anyone out there still using Bloglines? If so, why haven’t you switched to Newsgator or Google Reader?

Labels: Internet, software

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, video

Labels: Internet, software

Labels: Internet

Ubiquity has grown out of a product called Enso, an open-source project originally developed by the start-up Humanized. When Mozilla snatched up Enso’s developers, the project went with them and has now emerged as this new UI for Firefox.

Here are some other commands:

tinyurl (generates a tiny URL for any long URL)
add-to-calendar (adds an event to Google Calendar, support for others soon)
check-calendar (give it a day or a date and it lists your GCal events)
calculate (any mathematical expression)
close-tab (plus a name, and it will close the relevant tab)
define (look up any word in Answers.com’s dictionary)
get-email-address (look up a contact name)
map (type any location to get a Google Map)

You can also instantly search sites like Ajavascript:void(0)mazon, Flickr, eBay, Google, MSN, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Yelp or YouTube. You can see results right there in the Ubiquity window (like this Wikipedia search). There are a dozen or so other commands like “view-source” and “Bugzilla” that are of special interest to web developers, plus some commands for interacting with web forms. With Ubiquity installed, you can see a full list at any time by typing “command-list.”

Labels: Internet, software

It's hard to completely kill off something as totally decentralized as Usenet; as long as two servers agree to share the NNTP protocol, it'll continue on in some fashion. But the Usenet I mourn is long gone, anyway, or long-transformed into interlocking comments on LiveJournals and the forums boards on tech-support Web sites. Obviously, people lead lives, converse, and learn on the Internet far more broadly than they did in 1993. But give me a moment's nostalgia for a Net that had one place to go, that everybody knew about, but nobody owned.

Labels: Internet

The "Cannot Find Server" web page is typically shown to a user when they type in a web address that does not exist. The purpose of the page is to inform the user that the web site does not exist or a lookup error has occurred so a correction can be made.

Using DPI technology, Rogers inspects the web address request and if it determines that a web surfer has mistakenly entered an invalid web address, Rogers redirects the request and serves up an ad laden webpage selling Rogers products and services rather than allowing the informative "Cannot find server" web page to be displayed.

The result is a confused web browser who has no idea why his or her browser has been hijacked and is now on a Rogers search page.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

Web-based productivity suites have made a transition. While at first they simply imitated desktop applications in a Web browser, the current versions add features that begin to integrate the social computing features of the Web. At the same time, they've begun to grow away from simply imitating Microsoft Office to developing personalities of their own.

They share common ingredients, but the recipes vary. Google Docs begins with Google's deep understanding of Web application development and yields apps that are consistently usable, if not always feature-rich. ThinkFree comes from the opposite direction: It began by working hard to replicate the Office user experience in a browser and now needs to focus on Web-enabling the apps. Zoho seems to have the best understanding of the value the Web adds to productivity apps, but Zoho applications don't always match the usability of Google's.

Labels: Internet, software

• Getting Organized
• Finding Inspiration
• Getting Gigs
• Communicating with Vendors, Editors, and Partners
• Networking and Marketing
• Just for Writing
• Staying Grounded
• Productivity Tools
• Getting Paid
• Fun Little Extras
• Protecting Your Livelihood

Labels: Internet

In many ways HTML 5 is an exciting development, as it offers a huge and comprehensive range of new semantics and APIs. This has to be a good thing—we’ve outgrown HTML 4 and it’s no longer fit for our purposes. However, the lack of serious focus on accessibility, the over-emphasis on the needs of authoring tools and RPC applications, and the excessively pragmatic attempt to sanction existing bad practices are all causes for concern.

But what is particularly interesting, I think, is how HTML 5 came about in the first place. The W3C didn’t initiate it; rather, it was drafted and developed by an independent group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) and only later embraced by the W3C.

I find it extremely pertinent to note how such a major development was beyond the vision of the W3C and had to be kicked into life independently. We saw the same situation with microformats, and both of these instances suggest the W3C has grown incapable of innovating. This stagnation is possibly a facet of its excessive bureaucracy—a tendency for all large and established organizations.

Labels: Internet

With the explosion of bandwidth-hungry habits such as peer-to-peer file sharing, video streaming and teleworking, experts are warning that Canadian ISPs are reaching the limits of their capacity under the current infrastructure. But while service providers in other countries are investing in new technology to increase capacity, Canadian telcos are trying to curb high-use customers through methods like throttling, or degrading the speed of clients who use peer-to-peer software.

As individuals and businesses hunger for more bandwidth, proponents of Fibre to the Home (FTTH) technology say putting the brakes on user activity is a tactic that can't last.

"Companies are trying to stand firm and squeeze more bandwidth out of their copper technology because they can't go back (to investors) and say they need more money to run fibre all the way to the home," said David St. John, spokesperson for the FTTH Council.

Labels: Internet

The debut of Find How makes it even simpler to find good instructional material on the web. Instead of having to wade through Google results that include people asking unanswered questions and misinformation, you can search only for material that provides "how-to" information. KnowHow promises to offer links only to "trusted" sources of information. Virtually any topic you can think of is categorized and available; making reaching for the manual or Help menu even more of a measure of last resort.

Labels: Internet

Sure; the Internet Archive is a non-profit library, specifically a non-profit digital library. Historically we've had a special focus on things that were created digitally and the web. It's one of our biggest and best-known collections. But we've been increasingly involved in digitizing other media--audio, video, and especially now books. The theory behind the Archive is that given what technology now makes possible, we can give everyone access to all of human knowledge. There really shouldn't be any barriers once we work out some of the technical and funding issues; it's within our reach.

Starting in 1996 the Internet Archive, which was founded by Brewster Kahle, started collecting the web and for a while it was a dark archive. It was crawling the web just like search engines except it wasn't running a current search engine. It was just storing the material for the future. I believe it was in 2000 or 2001 that it was first opened to the public via our well-known Way Back Machine. As it stands now, we have about 11 years starting from late 1996 of captured websites; it's well over 100 billion captured URLs at specific dates and is well over a petabyte of compressed data. That is again just one of the products at the Archive; we've also been a major sponsor and operator of book scanning efforts in partnership in the past with both Yahoo and Microsoft and libraries around the world.

Labels: Internet

To observe this year’s twin anniversaries, Vanity Fair set out to do something that has never been done: to compile an oral history, speaking with scores of people involved in every stage of the Internet’s development, from the 1950s onward. From more than 100 hours of interviews we have distilled and edited their words into a concise narrative of the past half-century—a history of the Internet in the words of the people who made it.

Jann Wenner is the founder and editor of Rolling Stone.

Jann Wenner: Jim and Marc set up a demonstration. I’d never seen a hyperlink before. I don’t think anybody had. And it was kind of drop-dead amazing. That you could click on this blue, highlighted, underlined word and then, bam, go to a whole new level of information was dazzling. So I said, Look, this is fantastic, I get it, but I don’t want to go through the cost of building a Web site. We didn’t have the staff or the technology, let alone the money, to do such a thing. But I would invest in two seconds. And I actually sent them a check, but they sent the check back. They said, If you don’t build a Web site, we’re not taking your money.

Labels: history, Internet

Labels: Internet, technical communication

Labels: Another thing to worry about, Internet, politics

If there's a truism on the Internet, it's that everyone wants an address that ends in .com. An address like that means prestige and global stature, which is why it's almost impossible to get a good one any more. Online startups have long since been reduced to mangling the language in new and exciting ways just to find a free domain name. I was about to suggest “Snuzz.com” as an example of the kind of unfortunate domain name that's still free, but upon checking, I see that it's been taken, too.

Not so north of the border! In fact, you could register Snuzz.ca right this instant, because the market for Internet addresses just isn't as hot. To a certain extent, it's understandable: Who wants to look provincial on the world stage?

Labels: Internet

A major sin among Web sites is a failure to use the HTML ALT attribute, which can be used to attach a descriptive label to a non-text item. If an image, for example, has an ALT label, the screen reader will read it. Otherwise it is forced to read the file name, which often amounts to useless gibberish.

There are accepted guidelines for designing accessible Web sites, especially the guidelines derived from Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended. Cyndi Rowland, director of WebAIM, an accessibility organization at Utah State University in Logan, noted that the guidelines are mandatory for federal Web sites and for organizations doing business with the U.S. government. A number of states have also adopted the guidelines.

Labels: Internet, software

Techdirt, Slashdot and Canadian law Professor Michael Geist all discuss our report yesterday on Bell Canada's decision to start throttling traffic of their residential wholesalers before it hits their networks without telling those ISPs they were doing so. The result was a flurry of angry users, and executives at major ISPs who had to explain why they "broke" promises not to throttle traffic. Popular Canadian ISP Teksavvy met with Bell Canada today, and CEO Rocky Gaudrault says Bell is confirming the practice:
Click for full size
They're now openly acknowledging that they are rolling out a full throttling process. They plan to have things fully throttled by April 7th. All BT and P2P traffic will be affected. They claim they are allowed to do so according to their Terms and Services under the Fair Usage Policy in the tariffed contracts... We'll be looking into this shortly.
In other words, Bell Canada is using their monopoly power to degrade the quality of the bandwidth headed to ISP partners. The move makes those competitors immediately less of a threat -- given Sympatico throttles their own customers and wouldn't want a competitor offering better service.

Labels: Internet

Using their new powers under the Patriot Act, U.S. intelligence officials can scan documents, pick out certain words and create profiles of the authors - a frightening challenge to academic freedom, Mr. Puk said.

For instance, a Lakehead researcher with a Middle Eastern name, researching anthrax or nuclear energy, might find himself denied entry to the United States without ever knowing why. "You would have no idea what they are up to with your information until, perhaps, it is too late," Mr. Puk said. "We don't want to be subject to laws of the Patriot Act."

Labels: Internet, security

Labels: Internet, photography

At the moment most search engines, particularly Google, identify relevance for a particular topic using the interconnections between sites as much as they do the text on any single page.

The semantic web promises to change this because it helps to capture the meaning of data on a page and so give machines classifying or searching the web the capability to work out its relevance to a particular topic.

In an entry on Yahoo's blog, Amit Kumar, director of product management for the company's search site, said it was now starting to back key semantic web standards.

Mr Kumar said despite "remarkable progress" being made on how to classify meaning on webpages, the benefits of this work have not been felt by the average web user.

What was lacking, he added, was a compelling reason or "killer app" to use the semantic web technology.

"We believe that app can be web search," he wrote.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, music

Wired.com: I'm wondering how you see that division between the browser and a platform like AIR. AIR apps have a different look and feel, more "desktoppy" than browser-based web apps. But is that where things are headed? Do people want to retain the desktop behaviors? Psychologically, don't you think that the shift to web apps has put people into the mindframe of "OK, now I can do everything inside the browser?"

KL: I think that AIR and the browser are complimentary. They're going to co-exist. If you think about the experience in the browser right now, it's going from site to site, from page to page. It's somewhat of an ephemeral experience. For people who rely on particular applications on the internet and use them frequently, they want to give them a greater presence in the computing environment. Those are the applications I imagine you'd want to collect on your computer. Those would run on AIR. Then they can be in your Start menu or in your Dock. They can notify you when things change. You can have a closer relationship with those applications than you would in the context of a browser.

E-mail applications are a great example. There's a huge move of e-mail applications to the web, but in the browser, you need to be online to access your archived communications. You can't be notified of new messages that are urgent unless you have the browser window open. So it's about letting those applications you depend on live up to their full potential and have the richest experience.

Labels: Internet, software

With blog posts, rather than 10 articles, you get about one hundred times that. I have about 200 feeds integrated into my Google Reader. I’d say on average, I scan down 20 post titles until I find one that’s interesting to me. The quality ratio, then, is 1:20.

On the surface, the ratio looks better for print media. However, here’s the key piece of information: I have 1,000+ blog posts in my feedreader at least weekly, and only one issue of Intercom that comes out monthly. Mathematically, that means on average there are 200 good blog posts for every 5 good articles in Intercom per month. And of those 200 blog posts, at least 5% of them have the appealing content that the editorial process sometimes takes away.

Labels: Internet

Toronto-based Rogers has a close relationship with Yahoo, which manages the e-mail service that's included with Rogers Internet subscriptions.

A similar relationship exists between Microsoft's MSN and Bell Canada's Sympatico, which is a rival to Rogers throughout many of Ontario's largest markets.

Analysts said Friday they don't expected the Canadian companies will want to change things if Microsoft is successful in buying Yahoo, even though it would mean the two rivals would ultimately be partners of the software giant.

Labels: Internet

Define an implicit method for Boolean rules (AND and OR rules) based on normal search patterns — do not ask users to compose Boolean queries. A system that has worked for me is this: If a user selects several different search parameters, perform an AND search between them (e.g., Sony AND Portable). If they choose multiple values for the same parameter, perform an OR search (e.g., Sony OR Panasonic). However, if parameters (such as product features) are clearly non-exclusive, perform an AND search (e.g., Portable AND “HD ready”).

Recognize that quick searches, text searches, and advanced searches may be built with different technologies (e.g., direct database searches, a Google box, or a content management system). You may need to work closely with the developers to make a seamless transition between technologies.

If there are many parameters (more than 15), consider reducing complexity by hiding less used ones under a “see more…” link below the displayed options. Clicking it should display all the options without a page refresh. Evaluate your search logs to make sure you are exposing the right ones. Consider rotating the exposed ones to discover potential popular features, as exposed options will naturally get more usage.

Labels: Internet, software

* Support for RSS feeds within the page markup
* New tags for embedding media like audio or video files
* Tags like article or dialog> which can be used to markup items like the main body of a blog post or the transcript of a conversation respectively
* The canvas tag, which can be used to render moving graphics like data visualizations or games
* New tools for building better forms and user menus

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

His finger descends slowly to the black keyboard and hovers over the "enter" button. Then we spring the trap.

Eckersley's BitTorrent controller flickers for a second, showing that his computer is "seeding" our file to the Melbourne computer. Then everything stops. The transmission fails, and to an untrained eye, the problem appears to be with BitTorrent.

But Eckersley is running a Net monitor application called Wireshark, which works like an online customs officer checking the packets going out of the computer here and into the one in Melbourne. What Eckersley finds is damning. Someone or something has interceded in the transmission and told the computers to stop talking.

And that something, experts have concluded, is Comcast.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

For his Fundamentals of Physics course, the site offers an index to each session as well as a syllabus. Lecture 1, on Newtonian mechanics, includes an mp3 file of the audio, streaming video in several formats, a transcript, a problem set (with solutions) and even a course survey. The entire course can also be downloaded at once, with individual audio and video files available for playback on iPods or other devices.

Unlike the static cameras and uneven quality of lectures on the University of California at Berkeley’s YouTube portal, for example, Yale’s appear professionally produced. Shankar, for one, says he can’t imagine his course being useful on the Web without the accompanying video. “In physics, you write all the equations on the blackboard ... you talk a bit and you write a bit.... You need the camera to show the board all the time,” he said.

The six other courses being offered so far are Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics, Modern Poetry, Death (Philosophy 176), Introduction to Political Philosophy, Introduction to Psychology and Introduction to the Old Testament. Besides their popularity and general introductory nature, Shankar suggested that Yale initially chose courses taught by experienced or award-winning lecturers — those who would best represent the university off campus and online.

Labels: Internet

These changes significantly improve the reliability, security, and performance of HTML applications. The simplification of the language reduces the cost of training of web developers. It incorporates the best practices of Ajax development. It provides extensibility without complexity. The deltas from HTML 4 are generalizations and reductions, which should make browser implementation more straightforward. This is particularly important for mobile devices that cannot tolerate the power demands of complex platforms. The only new feature here is the module, which is critical for security. Modules makes safe mashups possible.

Labels: Internet

"(Canada's) federal government is not doing much but talking a hell of a lot," says Richard Cox, chief information officer for the European-based Spamhaus Project, a not-for-profit organization of IT professionals that monitors the sewer-like outpouring of global spam.

While a spokesman for Industry Canada says the country was ranked 17th on a "Dirty Dozen Spam-Relaying Countries List" last year, Spamhaus currently has us ranked eighth in the world as a haven for spammers. It says Canada is a comfortable home to spam gangs, including a notorious outfit based on the West coast and others in the Toronto area.

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, software

Once your ajaxWindows computer is setup you can access it from any Macintosh, Microsoft or Linux computer. It runs best with Firefox, but can also run on Internet Explorer with the addition of an ActiveX plugin. You will experience a full functioning desktop operating system with the ability to drag icons around, navigate through folders, customize your menus, and of course launch applications.

Included in the default ajaxWindows desktop is a rich library of free applications. There are office type applications that Ajax13 has authored to open, edit and save Microsoft Publish PostOffice formatted documents. These include ajaxWrite for Microsoft Word documents and ajaxPresents for Powerpoint files. There is also a wide range of best-of-the-web applications preloaded.

Labels: Internet, software

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Labels: health, Internet

Even well-formed HTML pages are harder to process than they should be because of the lack of structure. You have to figure out where the section breaks go by analyzing header levels. Sidebars, footers, headers, navigation menus, main content sections, and individual stories are marked up by the catch-all div element. HTML 5 adds new elements to specifically identify each of these common constructs:

* section: A part or chapter in a book, a section in a chapter, or essentially anything that has its own heading in HTML 4
* header: The page header shown on the page; not the same as the head element
* footer: The page footer where the fine print goes; the signature in an e-mail message
* nav: A collection of links to other pages
* article: An independent entry in a blog, magazine, compendium, and so forth

Labels: Internet, technical communication

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Labels: Internet, software

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet

Labels: Internet, software

Herald on Sunday inquiries have revealed that the response was triggered by Telecom's internal email monitoring system, which exists to "prevent misuse of email technologies in the workplace and act as a deterrent to harassment," according to Lenska Papich, public relations manager for Telecom's broadband and online division. "Our systems internally detect a number of words, including both the words gay and heterosexual, that could be deemed as inappropriate for use at work."

Labels: Internet

n March of 2007, the CRB (Copyright Royalty Board) released the rates for 2006-2010. Not only have they have gone up drastically - by 2010, the rates will be 150% higher than the 2005 rates. In addition, and more problematic for independent web radio stations: the way royalties are computed has changed: stations can no longer pay based on our gross revenue but have to pay based "aggregate tuning hours". For SomaFM, this means our royalties for 2006 will be increased retroactively from about $20,000 to about $600,000. That's more than 3 times what we made in 2006. And our royalties for 2007, based on our current audience size, will be over $1 million dollars, and over $1.5 million by 2009. That's if our audience size stays the same.

Now SoundExchange says these rates are fair. Since the hearings were closed to the public, we don't know everything that was presented to come up with these supposed fair rates. But we have heard that the rates were based on mis-information, including the fact that the numbers were based on on-demand music subscription services. The bottom line is that the new rates are so high that US-based internet radio as we know it will go away. Even big players like Pandora have said they don't have a viable business plan with these new increases in royalties.

Labels: Internet

* an ISP licensing system to be administered by the CRTC that is defined so broadly that it would seemingly capture anyone offering a wifi connection
* a "know your subscriber" requirement where ISPs would be required to deny service to past offenders (though the ISP would escape liability if upon learning of an offending customer, it terminated service and notified the Minister of Industry)
* a new power that would allow the Minister of Industry to order an ISP to block access to content that promotes violence against women, promotes hatred, or contains child pornography. ISPs that fail to block face possible jail time for the company's directors and officers.
* the Minister of Industry can prescribe special powers to facilitate searches of electronic data systems (ie. lawful access)

Labels: Internet, politics

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The Toronto scanning centre was the Internet Archive's first attempt at large-volume book digitization, starting with a pilot project in 2004 at U of T's Kelly Library. Insiders call the current operation, housed at Robarts Library, the Thirteen Scribes. That's a whimsical reference to the monks and others who hand-lettered books before the invention of the printing press in the mid-15th century.

The "scribes" here are a combination of people and custom-built machines that can each scan up to 500 book pages in an hour. Multiply that by 13 such set-ups and two seven-hour shifts every weekday and you can see how the scanning centre manages to copy more than 1,000 books a week.

"It's very industrial," says Juszel.

Labels: books, Internet

Labels: Internet, software

I wouldn't wish our experience on my worst enemy, but...it does help to put things into perspective.

We are not special. We are just ordinary library people. We are human - we falter and stand up again. We learn and do better the next time. There are thousands of us all over the country - all over the world. And, we are just doing our job, because defending intellectual freedom is just as much a part of our job as reading to third graders and helping people find American Gods on CD.

We will not trade our ideals for what is easy and "practical". We will not trade them for a single word. Our eyes are open and it takes more than an abused scrotum to make us blink.

Labels: Internet, politics

Labels: Internet, software

A number of industry groups, mostly based in the United States, are relying on e-mail to get the message out that peer-to-peer file sharing is illegal. Thousands of the e-mails are being sent to Canadian users each month under a program known as "notice and notice."

Major Canadian internet service providers including Rogers, Bell and Telus have voluntarily agreed to distribute the notices to their customers on behalf of the industry associations. Telus forwards an average of 4,000 notices every month.

Labels: Internet, politics

Every time I go to the United States (I have just returned from two weeks in Washington), I am astonished by the antic security, by the proliferation of admonitions and alarms and inchoate fear. Now it is illegal to carry toothpaste on airplanes. I find myself wondering: Is this just another spasm of periodic hysteria, like Prohibition, the Sixties, and a Commie Under Every Bed? Or is it calculated political programming?

I have long said that the purpose of TSA is to convince us that we are subjects, not citizens. I doubt that most people involved know this. Most TSA employees probably truly believe they are heroically trying to keep Americans safe. What this says about their intelligence and/or gullibility I leave as an exercise to the reader.

Labels: Internet, politics

Experts said the unusually powerful attacks lasted as long as 12 hours but passed largely unnoticed by most computer users, a testament to the resiliency of the Internet. Behind the scenes, computer scientists worldwide raced to cope with enormous volumes of data that threatened to saturate some of the Internet's most vital pipelines.

Labels: Internet, security