Category: Internet

Topic du jour is the Australian government’s sneaky pre-Christmas release of their plans to censor the internet, after some mock-trials “proving” the filter will be effective and won’t have any adverse side effect – Crikey leads off with – Conroy’s internet filter: so what?.

“Our pilot, and the experience of ISPs in many Western democracies, shows that ISP-level filtering of a defined list of URLs can be delivered with 100% accuracy,” Senator Stephen Conroy said yesterday when announcing that mandatory internet censorship — sorry, “filtering” — is going ahead.

“It also demonstrated that it can be done with negligible impact on internet speed.”

Conroy is right on both counts, as it happens — provided you gloss over that reference to “many” unnamed democracies. I wouldn’t call a dozen countries with ISP-level filtering “many”, and in some of them filtering isn’t mandatory. And provided you restrict your aims precisely to those carefully worded factoids cherry-picked from Enex TestLab’s trial report.

And provided you never make a mistake.

Blocking a defined list of URLs [specific web addresses] such as the ACMA blacklist of Refused Classification material, even 100% of it, falls far short of “protecting” children from “inappropriate” material, to use the wording of Labor’s original cyber-safety policy.

Google’s index passed a trillion web pages a year and a half ago. ACMA’s manually compiled blacklist of a thousand-odd URLs reported by concerned citizens is a token drop in that ocean, a mere 0.0000001%.

ACMA told Senate Estimates that of the 1175 URLs on their blacklist on September 30, 54% were Refused Classification material, and only 33% of those related to child sexual abuse. The rest of the blacklist? 41% was X18+ material, and 5% was R18+ material without a “restricted access system” to prevent access by minors.

The same key problems with a filter-based approach, which Crikey has reported many times before, are confirmed by the Enex report.

If you go beyond the pre-defined ACMA blacklist to catch a wider range of content, the false positive rate — material blocked when it shouldn’t be — is still up to 3.4%. Enex’s examples include the incorrect blocking of “sperm whales” and “robin red breast”. In the industry, this is known as the Scunthorpe Problem.

Australia’s biggest telco, Telstra, wasn’t part of the official trial, but it conducted its own tests and discussed the results with Enex.

“Telstra found its filtering solution was not effective in the case of non-web based protocols such as instant messaging, peer-to-peer [file sharing like BitTorrent] or chat rooms. Enex confirms that this is also the case for all filters presented in the pilot.”

For all filters.

Telstra also reported that its filtering system could be overloaded if pages on heavy traffic sites like YouTube ended up on the blacklist. Every request for anything on YouTube would have to be routed to the secret filter box to see whether it was listed.

“This is also the case for all filters presented in the pilot,” reports Enex.

For all filters.

In any event, as the Enex report reminds us, “A technically competent user could, if they wished, circumvent the filtering technology.” In its own tests, Telstra didn’t even bother testing circumvention because they take it as given.

Bernard Keane thinks its just another bizarre example of Labor’s urge to play wedge politics instead of governing responsibly – Net filtering won’t work, so what is Conroy up to? (I think he’s underestimating their control freak impulses personally but he may have a point).

It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen as breathtakingly mendacious a policy announcement as yesterday’s declaration by Stephen Conroy that the government would introduce internet censorship.

It’s one thing to hold off on an announcement (which Conroy admitted he’d been sitting on since October) until the week before Christmas, when half the serious journalists in the country are on the other side of the world. That had its reward, with minimal, and decidedly thin, coverage of the announcement in the mainstream media today.

It’s quite another, even in these days of spin and media management, for a government minister to stand up and blatantly declare that black is white, and the government will be proceeding on the basis of that fact.

The internet “filtering” trial — perhaps we should drop the “filter” term, and call it what it is, censorship — was carefully structured by the government so that the filtering technology tested would meet low benchmarks and limited performance requirements. But it looks an awful lot like one of the reasons the government sat on the trial outcome for so long was because most of the trial results failed to meet even the minimal hurdles set up by the government.

On the basis of the trial report, even advocates of censorship could not support what Conroy has proposed, on the basis that it just doesn’t work.

That’s why Conroy, in charging ahead yesterday, had to tell a series of patent untruths. That filtering could be done with “100% accuracy”, when the trial saw up to 3.4% of web content (which means tens of million of web pages worldwide) wrongly blocked.

That the “wild claims” that censorship affects internet speed have been “put to bed” when the trial, despite trying to define the problem away by declaring “negligible” effect on usage speed as less than 10%, saw speed reductions of 30-40%.

Or the big lie, that filtering works, when several filters were bypassed more often than not (in one case, more than 90%), and the only filter that defeated nearly all efforts to circumvent it was the one with the 40%+ performance degradation. …

The government’s real objective here is to shore up its family-friendly credentials. While the technologically literate may laugh at the trial outcome, and free speech advocates rail at censorship, Kevin Rudd and Stephen Conroy know they’re a tiny minority of voters. This is all about giving ill-informed and often lazy parents, most of whom think that you can “stumble upon” p-rnography on the internet, the illusion that their children are safe, even as their kids circumvent the mechanism and go looking for s-xual material, which is what kids have always done. That parents should be active monitors of what their kids consume in the media is apparently old-fashioned thinking.

It isn’t about changing votes, so much as solidifying the government’s branding in the minds of mainstream voters as morally middle-of-the-road and supportive of families.

The other target is the coalition. Hitherto, particularly under Nick Minchin, the coalition has been hostile to the filtering scheme. But in the end, the coalition — which in the face of Green opposition will be necessary for Conroy’s Bill to pass the Senate — may struggle to oppose it. Blocking the Bill will enable the government to portray the coalition as out-of-touch with families and “mainstream values”. The value of censorship as a wedge far exceeds any losses that will accrue from a few IT nerds.

And if the technically competent, as the report says, can bypass these filters easily, what’s the issue? Geeks can have an uncensored internet, while your average suburban mum and dad are happy their kids won’t be clicking onto child abuse while doing their homework.

This is where this political stunt has serious consequences, and where the issue stops being about the ineffectiveness of filtering technology and about freedom of speech. Conroy insists that the censorship will only be about RC-material. “So for people wanting to campaign on the basis that we’re going to maybe slip political content in — we will never support that. And if someone proposes that I will be on the floor of Parliament arguing against it.”

Good to hear, minister, and I actually believe you. But you’re in effect asking us to trust not just you but every politician in the future. We’ve all seen the confected moral panics that the tabloid media, and politicians, are happy to use. Maybe it’s an unsavoury incident on a reality TV show. Maybe it’s a particularly foul-mouthed chef. The results are the same — the demand for politicians to censor, to block, to ban and restrict.

And that’s before we get to the moralisers and the demonisers. Maybe it’s euthanasia, accepted and legal in other countries but banned from discussion in Australia. Maybe it’s junk-food advertising, or alcohol advertising, another alleged source of vexation to parents.

The government’s censorship proposal locks in a universal mechanism that can be extended at will by politicians. Those who want to circumvent it will be able to, yes, but the bulk of the population will be subject to it, barely aware that it’s there — like they are barely aware that politicians have already banned the online expression of certain ideas such as euthanasia.

Do you trust politicians with such a mechanism?

GetUP has a campaign going against the “great firewall” – Tear down the great firewall.

Senator Conroy thinks he can sneak his plan to censor the internet in as Australia settles in for Christmas. As he considers the future of the scheme he needs to know that we’ll be watching every step of the way.

At this crucial moment send Senator Conroy a quick message to let him know what you think of his plans to censor Australia’s internet.

Crikey’s Bernard Keane has an interesting essay on how to avoid getting a form letter response to your complaints to the government – and how to make them aware of the impact of clogged bandwidth – Bernard Keane’s guide to writing to Ministers.

If your first instinct upon hearing about the Rudd-Conroy plan to censor the internet is to email Stephen Conroy, your local member and Labor senators from your state to protest, wait up.

Or, in fact, do it anyway, then read this.

Let me explain some facts about writing to ministers, drawn from my sordid, blood-soaked and adventure-filled time as a public servant.

For a start, understand that few ministers if any read their correspondence. It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that it’s not humanly possible to read even a fraction of the amount of emails, faxes and letters they get. So the chances of you directly influencing a Minister with your particularly brilliant insight into the issue are zip. Deal with it. Things don’t work like that.

Their staff will read correspondence, but only when considering a reply prepared by their Department.

And that is only a small proportion of the actual volume of correspondence received. Some is answered directly by bureaucrats. But much of it is simply binned. Don’t waste your time sending off a letter pre-prepared by some enthusiastic online advocacy group, where you sign at the bottom, endorsing the nicely-phrased sentiments at the top. They’re called “campaign” ministerials and are binned without being read or replied to (but please don’t tell the Friends of the ABC, who rely heavily on that technique, and haven’t had a letter to Canberra read for two decades).

Most non-campaign letters and emails – some departments still won’t reply to emails but demand your snail mail address, perhaps out of residual loyalty to Australia Post – are answered using what’s called “standard words” – a reply that ostensibly covers the issue raised but which normally says as little as possible. They say as little as possible because the mindset of bureaucrats and ministerial advisers is to keep as many options open as possible, except when there is a particular message that the Government wants to hammer.

Standard words are worked up by bureaucrats and edited and signed off by the Minister’s staff when they’re happy the words are risk-free or convey the desired message. In most departments, they are then loaded into electronic ministerial correspondence systems. This means a bureaucrat doesn’t even need to cut-and-paste into a Word document, merely tell the system to use a particular set of standard words under the name, address, salutation and opening paragraph, which have all been electronically entered already.

So if you send off an angry email or letter about net filtering, all you’ll likely get is an automatically-generated reply giving you the standard words on the issue. There’ll be minimal human involvement in the writing of it until it is stuffed into an envelope and dispatched.

You may not think it’s very democratic or consultative, but it’s a damn sight more efficient than processing correspondence by hand.

But if you can’t have any impact on policy, you can have an impact on the level of resources used to answer your letter. And that resource is the time of bureaucrats – the same bureaucrats who advise Conroy on policy, and implement his decisions. In most Departments, ministerial replies have to be approved by SES Band 1 officers before being sent to the Minister’s office, which means many replies consume the precious time both of senior bureaucrats and ministerial advisers. Many Departments also have formal agreements with Ministers that a certain proportion of correspondence will be answered within a certain period of time. If they’re not, more people have to be put into answering correspondence.

So if you want to consume as much of the Department of Broadband’s time as possible, here’s what to do. There’s not much you can do to avoid receiving a standard reply. But you don’t have to confine your missive to net filtering. Throw in some other topics. That means someone will have to put together a reply using standard words from different areas, which is a lot more complicated and can’t be done automatically. Ask about the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN). That means someone in the NBN area has to provide some words. Ask about Telstra. That’s another area entirely that has to provide input. If there’s three or four topics in your letter, bureaucrats will start arguing to avoid having to be responsible for it. The NBN area will tell the net filtering area it’s their responsibility to collate the response. The net filtering area will try to off-load it to the Telstra area. A Band 1 in one area will make changes and the whole lot will have to be re-approved by a Band 1 in another area.

Throw in something on Australia Post. Ask about something obscure. They may not have standard words at all and someone will have to actually prepare a proper reply.

You see, once your letter stops being a standard rant about filtering and requires actual work, the amount of time taken to prepare a response can snowball dramatically.

You can also use the Government’s system for allocating correspondence. As a start, always write to your MP first, even if it’s a Coalition MP. They will send the letter to Conroy and ask for a response to provide to you. MPs – even Opposition MPs – must get a response no matter what, as part of the civilities of politics, and it normally has to come from the Minister himself. But write to other Ministers as well. Ask Kim Carr what the impact of filtering will be on Australia’s IT industry. Ask Jenny Macklin what impact she thinks it will have on families. Ask Robert McClelland what the penalties will be for breaches of the mandatory filtering requirements. And ask Kevin Rudd how a Government that understands the need to bring Australia’s online infrastructure into the 21st century wants to drag it back to the 19th when it comes to content regulation.

All of those letters will have to go from the recipient’s department to Conroy’s Department for a response, then back to the originating Department, where they might add some additional material of their own. If you come up with a particularly complicated issue, the bureaucrats might start disagreeing with each other. Innovation bureaucrats might think Broadband’s net filter standard words doesn’t quite answer your question and want something else.

And don’t ask the same questions in different letters, otherwise they’ll bin them and tell you they understand you’ve separately written to your MP/another Minister/Kevin Rudd and here’s your job lot reply. Ask different questions and raise different issues.

And be pleasant. Apart from anything else, if there’s too much abuse in a letter, it gets thrown out (quite rightly). But these are decent, hard-working bureaucrats and regardless of what you think of Stephen Conroy, they deserve civility and respect.

Most of all, get your friends, acquaintances, family members, work colleagues, passing strangers, all writing. The bureaucratic capacity to handle ministerial correspondence is a lot like the net filters trialled earlier this year. At low levels of traffic they work OK, but once the traffic picks up, things start to choke up. That’s when Stephen Conroy and his office might start to notice that things are slowing down.

The United States has begun planning talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee to strengthen Internet security and limit military use of cyberspace. American and Russian officials have very different interpretations of the talks so far, but the simple fact that the United States is even participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia’s overtures. Officials familiar with the talks say that the Obama administration realized more nations were developing cyberweapons, and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race.

In the past two years, Internet-based attacks on government and corporate computer systems have increased to thousands a day. Seldom ever identified hackers have been credited with compromising Pentagon computers, stealing industrial secrets and temporarily jamming government and corporate Web sites. President Obama ordered a review of the nation’s Internet security policies in February and is preparing to name an official to coordinate a national policy.

Russian officials have stated that increasing challenges posed by military activities to civilian computer networks would be best dealt with by an international treaty, similar to treaties that have limited the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The United States had always resisted, arguing that it was impossible to draw a line between the commercial and military uses of software and hardware. Recently, people familiar with the discussions say there has been a thaw. Courtesy of nytimes.com

Do you and your children realize that nothing you write via e-mail, Facebook and similar social media is private?  Instead it has the potential of going public. When you write, what you consider a private e-mail to someone, you can be surprised to find they have posted it publicly on Facebook, etc.

Gossip Image: sxc.hu

There may be nothing wrong with the e-mail, but has more private details than you feel the world should know.  It also has the potential of offending any people you may have mentioned.

Some people have no qualms about airing their clean and dirty laundry, their innermost feelings, family secrets, their financial challenges on social sites where the whole world has access.  Even if you’ve only admitted specific people as your friends, posting to them, replying to them expands the circle of people who have access to your information.  Also, those friends may decide to make it more public without your permission.

So…teach your children that if they want privacy, they need to be very careful about what they post and to whom they post.  Young people, as well as older, don’t seem to realize the ramifications of the Internet and how it can spread information you don’t want made public or in the way you may have expressed it to a close friend or relative.

The same goes for text messaging.  You may find that someone is posting your private texts to them on social media.  They simply want to share, but perhaps it isn’t something you want shared with everyone.  They really should ask your permission because, by copyright law, you own what you wrote and pictures you took.  However, most people are ignorant of this.

The lesson seems to be….THINK before you write to ANYONE or post anything.  What you write and pictures you take may reach the world without you wanting them to.

Post from: Blisstree

Privacy No Longer Private on the Internet

Security researchers for Amazon recently spotted the Zeus botnet running an unauthorized command and control center on the company’s EC2 cloud computing infrastructure. This is the first known time that Amazon Web Services’ cloud infrastructure has been used for this type of illegal activity, according to onw of the security researchers in question. The hackers reportedly got onto Amazon’s infrastructure by first hacking into a Web site that Amazon’s servers hosted, and then installing their command and control infrastructure stealthily.

The security company declined to say whose Web site was used to get onto Amazon’s cloud, but the Zeus software has now been removed. Zeus is a password-stealing botnet. Variants of this malware have been linked to over $100 million in bank fraud in the past year.

In the past few years, law enforcement takedowns and bad publicity have made it more difficult for criminals to host their sneaky infrastructure through legitimate or even semi-legitimate datacenters, so they have been steadily moving to Web-based services. Courtesy of infoworld.com

Bruce Schneier effectively refutes Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s assertion that we should all accept that Big Brother is watching us, and it’s OK.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

[…]

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar yourself in your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser (unfortunately there is no toolbar available for Safari, Opera or Chrome. Then set your website as your homepage. Everytime you open your browser, the Alexa toolbar will count this as being one visitor. While your at it, encourage others to install the Alexa Toolbar. Tell your mom and sister that you need to install a security update for their browser, install the toolbar, and set your own site as their homepage (something you should do anyway ).

Do you have other ways of increasing the Alexa rank, then don’t be afraid to share them in the comments below. And to the ones who are reading this article, and don’t have the Alexa Toolbar installed yet: go to Alexa.com, install the toolbar, and head back over here!!!!

First of all, let’s see what this Alexa Rank is, and why it may be of importance to you.

Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, and delivers information on traffic levels for websites. Alexa gathers this information through its toolbar, which can be downloaded and installed from alexa.com.

Alexa may not be as well known as Google’s PageRank, but still has quite some influence. Alexa Rank is very much used amongst webmasters, to value a website. This means that if you are ever thinking of selling your website, or offering advertisement space on it, the Alexa Rank of your website will come into play, and will even be a main factor to decide the prices.

How is Alexa Rank defined?

Let’s see what Alexa itself has to say about that:

“The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.

The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)”

What is the problem with Alexa?

Alexa needs the visitors to have the toolbar installed, or else it doesn’t see the visit to the website. Since the only people concerned about the Alexa Rank are webmasters (for the value for ads and reselling), the majority of people who have this toolbar installed are webmasters. So, to be correct, the Alexa Rank shows you how popular your website is, amongst webmasters mostly. However, since these are the ones you need when you want to sell ads, or sell your website, that is a good thing.

How do you increase your Alexa Rank?

Above all, it is the same as with any other rank, it is a numbers game. If your audience grows, so will your Alexa Rank, simply because of the overall growth. A larger audience is created by creating and keep creating high quality content, and getting a large number of incoming links (for which the great content works wonders too…).

However, there are a few things you can do to increase your Alexa Rank.

1. Install the Alexa Toolbar yourself in your Firefox or Internet Explorer browser (unfortunately there is no toolbar available for Safari, Opera or Chrome. Then set your website as your homepage. Everytime you open your browser, the Alexa toolbar will count this as being one visitor. While your at it, encourage others to install the Alexa Toolbar. Tell your mom and sister that you need to install a security update for their browser, install the toolbar, and set your own site as their homepage (something you should do anyway ).

2. Put the Alexa rank widget up on your website. It shows your Alexa Rank to your visitors, and it will receive quite some clicks (depending on your traffic of course, again, it is a numbers game). It is said (but not proven) that these clicks count as visitors, even if the visitor doesn’t have the Alexa Toolbar installed.

3. Write a blogpost or article about Alexa. Loads and loads of webmasters want to increase their Alexa rank. They are looking for articles such as this one. If your article is written well (which I hope in this case), it will attract many webmasters. With the toolbar installed. Your rank will peak!

4. Generally write webmaster-related content, and create a webmasters-tool or most-valued-webmasters-links page.  If you write content or have specific pages that attract webmasters,… Well, remember the previous tip!

5. Be active on webmaster and seo forums and blogs, and show your URL there. Be it in your profile, your sig, or by providing usefull answers and  referring to articles you wrote about the topic. Again, many webmasters, many Alexa toolbars, increased ranking.

6. Get discovered by the Asian websurfers. Apparently, Asian webusers are very fond of the Alexa toolbar. Getting into that market will increase your Alexa Rank. You can get started there by adding your url to some asian directories, participating in Asian forums or social media, or get to know someone Asian who can spread your url.

7. Get your pages Dugg or StumbledUpon. If your content is of high linkworthy quality, chances are high that you will get Dugg or StumbledUpon. This will massively increase your traffic, and thus (the numbers game again), your Alexa rank. If you keep this up (keep on writing high quality content), your overall rankings and incoming links will boost through the roof!

Do you have other ways of increasing the Alexa rank, then don’t be afraid to share them in the comments below. And to the ones who are reading this article, and don’t have the Alexa Toolbar installed yet: go to Alexa.com, install the toolbar, and head back over here!!!!

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WordPress is one of the easiest to use and most powerful blogging platforms around.  The versatility of WordPress is its greatest feature, it has the ability to act as a blog and also as a static web site.  The ease of use when it comes to both updating your site as well as maintaining it is phenomenal.

One of the WordPress features that holds the bulk of the power of the software package is the utilization of plugins.  Plugins allow your blog to perform or display specific functions and are highly customizable in almost every way.  They are also easy to use as generally all it takes to put them into use is activating them in the admin screen of the WordPress platform.

Here is a look at some of the most valuable plugins you can use to enhance your blog.

Akismet – Probably the first plugin you should activate, it helps keep spam comments from needing to be moderated, and will save you hours and hours of time, over and over again.

All In One SEO Pack – A great SEO plugin that gives each post its own Title, Keywords, and description. If you want get your blog ranked by the search engines, get this pluging!

Subscribe To Comments – This plugin is a nice way to get an RSS feed for the comments to each post.

WordPress Database Backup – This is essential as it helps lessen the chance that all of your blog info will be lost.  This plugin automatically backs up all of your database information and emails them to you at the exact time each day or week you specify.

AdRotator – This is a simple to use plugin that allows you to enter a list of banner or box ads, even text ads, that will be displayed on your site.  Then, each time a new page is opened or the same page is refreshed, a new ad appears in that one spot that you have specified.  This can also be used for cycling random photos or quotes too.

Sociable – A very cool plugin that puts links to all the popular social networking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg at the end of each post.  This is very handy as it allows your readers to bookmark them right there at the site of the post they are already reading. You can see the plugin in action below this post.

Related Posts (YARPP – Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) – This is a powerful plugin that allows readers to view other posts that you have written and they might be interested in. Massively increases your pageviews, and decreases your bouncerate (read more about bouncerate). And again, you can see the plugin in action below this post (check out the suggestions I would say! )

Google Sitemaps – A nice plugin that helps to insure that Google knows about each and every post and page that makes up your site. Call it a necessitiy. It is one.

NextGen Gallery – A very easy to use photo gallery plugin that allows you to place single images, slideshows, and full blown galleries into posts and pages.

Using all of these WordPress plugins, and others as well, you have the ability to convert your standard blog into a web based masterpiece.  The plugins provided for use with the WordPress blogging platform are the single best reason to choose WordPress as the package that runs your blog.  With the wide variety of options available through the thousands of available plugins made for WordPress, it will be no time before you have one of the best blogs on the internet working for you.

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Egypt has apparently started registering the first Arabic-language internet domain names at dot.msr during the 4th Internet Governance Forum (happening in its very own seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh) in a move critics of the regime’s perspective on free speech and internet freedom find hypocritical and probably on par with the US or Libya heading up the UN Human Rights Commission. The move came Monday after ICANN, the international organization that handles domain naming, began registration for non-Latin-character domain names.

Arabic domain names could tear down the English-only internet and usher in a a new era of access and participation that could encourage Arabic businesses to engage with the web not to mention the less educated and unilingual Arabic speakers in the 22 Arabic-speaking states of the Middle East.

Or it could usher in a time of cyber-sovereignty, with countries vying for control over who controls which languages. Will Saudi Arabia fight to control Arabic naming? What happens if someone wants to register a curse word (apparently f*ck.me was snatched up as soon as .me was made available) or a slur against Islam? I wonder how (not if) this will be regulated… What is the process for asserting ownership or making legal claims? As this professor noted “If somebody who lives in Vancouver wants to register ‘dot Tibet,’ what’s the process for objecting to that, if the Chinese government feels that’s inappropriate? And who decides what’s appropriate and what’s not?”

But the language expansion also undermines American hegemony over the vast information infrastructure that has so impacted the daily lives of richer nations where connectivity and computer ownership are the norm. Although the majority of web pages may be in English today,this is likely to change in the near future (Chinese is predicted to become the most popular language of the internet).

So what does this mean for the mechanics of the web business? Well, search engine optimization (or SEO in the parlance of the biz as it were) just got a lot more interesting. URLs play a key role in SEO and until now non-Latin languages were locked out of some of the most lucrative aspects of online development. For example, commercialization of the internet and use by businesses in the Arab world lags behind that of the US and Western Europe in part because Arabic is not as competitive as English online. That’s about to change.

What do I mean by the last statement? Well, this article describes how Google, for example, determines page rank (which for many business translates into a measure of its existential worth as well as its financial and PR health)

“Google looks at many elements to determine how to rank relevance, but the URL has been one of the most paramount. That’s why people spend lots of money buying up heavily searched single- or double-word URLs. Those who jump into the search fray and buy up the new domain names consisting of heavily searched-on words, such as free, games, music, cell phones and sex, will capitalize on ranking for those words in search engines, according to Eli Feldblum CTO and founder at RankAbove, an Israeli-based SEO company.”

SPDY (speedy) es un proyecto de Google para hacer de Chrome mucho mas rápido. Lo haría reviendo las conexiones entre los servidores web y los navegadores.

Desde siempre, HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) ha sido la norma que permite a los servidores web y navegadores comunicarse para la transformación de los bits y bytes servidos de un servidor Web en una página Web en su navegador. Según google, SPDY haría esto de una manera mucho mas rápida, con velocidades de hasta un 55% mayores respecto a HTTP.

Actualmente los desarrolladores de SPDY creen que han llegado a la etapa en que su equipo podría beneficiase de la participación activa, la retroalimentación y la asistencia de la comunidad. Lo que nos hace pensar que esta bastante maduro y muy pronto podremos verlo en acción.

Enlaces

Documentación
Codigo
Fuente googleresearch – vía, cnet

En el blog de youtube acaban de anunciar el apoyo para ver vídeos de alta definición 1080p a partir de la semana que viene. Ahora el modo HD en youtube tendra las dos opciones, la actual 720p o 1080p, dependiendo de la resolución de la fuente original claro esta.

Esta mejora viene muy bien ya que cada vez mas hay mas cámaras que soportan esta resolución y en varios hogares ya se pueden encontrar monitores con soporte Full HD. Si tienes una pantalla wide screen y un equipo lo suficientemente potente como para mover estos videos lo vas a agradecer.

Si quieres ya puedes probar este video en Full HD y ver si tu pc lo puede reproducir correctamente.

Yesterday’s trip down memory lane with the Gopher protocol got me thinking about all the other protocols I used to use, and those that I continue to use on a regular basis. There’s little doubt that hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is one of the most widely used protocols on the Internet today. But there are a host of other protocols used every day! Let’s look at a few of my current favorites, and some that have gone the way of the Dodo bird.

Before I get started, I think we should break out protocols that one uses intentionally, and those ancillary protocols that get used in the normal execution of your other protocols. For example, every time I visit a web page I intentionally use the HTTP protocol. But unless I’m manually keying in IP addresses, there’s an awful lot of DNS traffic taking place, too. I don’t intentionally use the DNS protocol: it happens behind the scenes as I’m using my web browser. So with that out of the way, here are the protocols I intentionally choose to use on a regular basis:

HTTP
No surprise here. I write for CrunchGear, so I use HTTP (TCP port 80) to access the WordPress back-end to compose stories. I visit product web pages. I watch videos at YouTube and Hulu. I compose email at GMail. HTTP is the king of protocols.

SSH
As a systems administrator, I use the Secure Shell protocol (TCP port 22) daily to access the variety of Linux systems I maintain. Whether for my day job, or my personal web server, I’d be dead in the water without SSH. I also use SSH as a SOCKS proxy so that I can access a variety of resources using my home IP address. This is particularly useful when I’m using an untrusted wireless network: the link from my laptop to my proxy server is encrypted, shielding my traffic from anyone snooping that wireless network.

IRC
I use Internet Relay Chat to communicate and collaborate on a number of projects. It’s also a terrific way to get ad hoc support on open source programs that I use. I’m usually idling in one or two channels. I prefer IRC over IM, usually, but can’t really give a good explanation as to why.

X
As a Linux user, I use the X Window protocol all the time. Sometimes it’s to display applications running on my local machine; and sometimes it’s to display applications running from one of the server I maintain.

Some of the lesser used, but still important, protocols I use include

• DNS: as mentioned above, the Domain Name System is a supporting protocol that makes our use of the Internet vastly easier. It’s really the backbone of the modern Internet, if you think about it. It uses TCP and UDP ports 53.
• SMTP: like DNS, Simple Mail Transport Protocol is one of those things that keeps the Internet alive without being in-your-face all the time. Every time you send an email — whether you use Thunderbird, or Outlook, or GMail, or Hotmail — the messages travel back and forth using SMTP. It uses TCP port 25.
• ICMP: the Internet Control Message Protocol is one of those protocols people use without even thinking about it. Every time you ping a host to see if your Internet connection is working, you’re using ICMP.
• BitTorrent: I don’t use it too much, but I know a lot of people who do. BitTorrent easily accounts for a large percentage of daily Internet traffic today.
• FTP: the File Transfer Protocol is still heavily used today. Downloading drivers and patches is the dominant use, but it’s still a handy tool for getting any kind of file transferred.
• Telnet is something I still use when I must, though I try hard to avoid it since it has basically no security at all. I use telnet to manage some Ethernet switches at my day job.
• NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, is used for accessing Usenet. I’ve never dipped my toes into the dark waters of Usenet, though John and Nicholas have. I envy their bravery.

But these are all modern — or at least currently utilized — protocols. What about the stuff from yesteryear? As I mentioned in my Gopher post yesterday, I started using the Internet by way of a SLIP, and later PPP, connection. Prior to accessing the Internet, I was using Bulletin Board Systems, which had their own suite of protocols:

• ZMODEM was the very first piece of software I ever bought. I paid for a license for the shareware file transfer protocol so that I could download files from the various BBSes faster.
• Before ZMODEM, I was using XMODEM to download files. Surprisingly, I still occasionally use XMODEM to transfer switch firmware to an Ethernet switch I manage!
• A dabbled with BiModem for a bit, in order to streamline the simultaneous sending and receiving of files.
• FidoNet is one of those supporting protocols from which I benefited, but never really used directly. It allowed the BBSes I used to communicate with other BBSes, thereby increasing the number of people with whom I could connect. I spent most of my time on systems running WWIV, which had it’s own protocol for inter-board communication called WWIVnet.

So how about you? What protocols do you use regularly? Which protocols from days of yore do you miss?

1.Market Research
Market Research aims to find out how much market share for products or services you sell. Your business will not work best when limited market share. Major indicator / small share of this market can you find out the Google Keyword Tool.
Example:
If you sell a product “Muslim fashion,” then look at the Google Keyword Tool is
analysis
The larger “search volume” of the word / phrase associated with “Muslim fashion”
greater share of existing markets, and vice versa. The word / phrase is what is called “keywords”
“No matter what business you are in, you must know what words people use when they search for your products online.”
You should know that “keywords” what people type in “search box” search engines when looking for products like you’re selling. Keywords that you should note that you will need it at the time to optimize your website and your product packaging.
Knowledge of these keywords is the main capital in the SEO (search engine optimization).

2. Competitor Analysis
After knowing the existing market share, then you have to “learn” from your competitors. Visit the site at least 10 of which appear on the first page of Google search results that sell similar products. Consider the following a few important things:
– Design website (user-friendly website recommended)
– Photos + wording / text
– Corporate identity (credibility + trust)
– Product presentation (categorized)
– Pricing (packages, discount / promo etc.)
– Booking terms, payment method, delivery options
– Website branding
– SEO aspects
– Uniqueness is most important – so do NOT copy!

Now look at your website, make sure you do not do too much mistakes 9 in designing the website as follows:
– Not to include information “Contact”
– Many “broken links”
– Information that is not up-to-date
– Too many fonts and colors yg different – different
– Not include “HOME” on the page in
– Button “Back” disabled
– Opening a new window (target_blank) each opened a new page
– Loading is slow
– Apply advanced technology that has not been popular

3. Market penetration and Win Competition
“What makes you different to your Competitors?”
The question should be can I answer any product or service pack, if I do not know her answers – I’m not going to sell it.
[i] Unique Product
If you pack your product exactly what the majority of your competitors, then you will be hard to penetrate / penetrate the market. If the product is exactly what the reason for turning to Customer you? Yes, you already know the answer, “lower prices” – the most popular steps and shortcuts to simply survive.
Business practices “not healthy” to always be “sacrificed” prices will damage the business climate
and competition. If prices continue to cut, then you have to press the cost of production
gradually reducing the product quality is difficult to disappoint customers
get repeated customer orders decreased by reducing the employee’s business
all the limitations and waiting for a good reason to be “shut down”. “…. so, be unique ”
Because if you packed your product is different, then the price was supposed to be different. Even better if your product is exclusive (not imitate someone else) – then this will be the main reason for customers to find you.

4. Internet marketing strategy
More than 80% of internet users rely on search engines as a means of information seekers (based on research from Georgia Tech’s GVU Center). This amount will continue to grow given the search engine is the easiest and fastest in the search for information. More importantly, your information will fall on the right person, because a search on the search engine tailored to the keyword / keywords and grouping system is highly structured directory.

Source : fernandositindaon

http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/time/topstories&source=imag&val=3

A Pew Internet & American Life study has refuted the idea that use of the Internet necessarily leads to decreased social isolation. Quite the opposite!, yelled a character in a Charles Dickens novel. It turns out that as people continually use things like Twitter, Facebook, and the like, they’re both expanding their social circle and increasing contact with said circle.

The old way of thinking was that spending all day on the computer would come at the expense of maintaining meaningful human contact. Can’t talk to someone about The Issues of the Day online, right? (Wrong, but whatever.)

Some bullet points, because those are easy to write:

• People who use mobile phones have a 12 percent larger discussion circle (people you talk to about Important Stuff) than non-mobile users

• The diversity of a person’s “core network” is 25 percent larger for mobile phone users, and 15 percent larger for basic Internet users

• People who use social networks tend to have “real” social networks that are more diverse than people who don’t

• Internet users are no less likely to have a chat with their neighbor than someone who doesn’t use the Internet all that much

You can read the full study here, or, like me, just be content with the executive summary. My interest in social networks died some time ago, but hooray for all the folks out there who keep bringing the thunder.

via Yahoo

More FCC news for you, this Wednesday morning (and before Droid news consumes us all). The agency is considering taking some of the bandwidth that is currently allocated to digital television, and auctioning it off so that broadband companies can bid on it. The point, of course, is to increase the availability of wireless broadband.

There’s a few sides here, each with some valid points. You’ve got the current TV station owners who, as you might expect, don’t want to lose any spectrum, even if you compensate them with giant bags of money. Then there’s the broadband companies who are all, “Please oh please let us have the spectrum, so we can create some new broadband service, and sit back and watch the money roll in.” You’ve got people who are against the move because it might put in jeopardy the spectrum that the federal government spent billions of dollars convincing people to switch to (the switch to digital TV). And then you’ve got people who just hate the FCC, and think that regulating the Internet isn’t even part of its charge.

It’s important to keep in mind that, by definition, the spectrum belongs to all of us, as citizens. It should be used in such a way that is beneficial to the most citizens and not just a handful of TV station owners, for example.

Now, will this even happen, auctioning off some spectrum so that broadband companies will bid? It might happen, but no rules will be put in place till February at the next big FCC meeting.

A strong argument in favor of this: broadband access is simply more useful than traditional TV. You can only watch TV, which is fine. With broadband, you can watch, sure, but you can also participate (in debates relevant to you: PS3 vs. Xbox, the public option vs. something else, etc.), which is vital to having a fully informed citizenry.

But don’t freak out: the FCC can say, come February, “Yeah, we can’t do that broadband spectrum auction thing. Sorry. Next question.”

Nicholas here, fresh off freaking out over Shogun Rua’s loss last night. (I hate to use the word “robbed,” but Mr. Rua was 100 percent robbed last night. Later today: watching Dream 12!) I just wanted to draw your attention to a New York Times essay I just stumbled upon. It’s about the Internet, and our increased dependence upon it. It’s pretty short, so it won’t kill you to read the whole thing.

The basic thesis, nearest I can tell, is that the Internet has taken over our lives; that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Is it harmful to spend 20+ hours playing an online video game at the expense of “real life” contact, or at the expense of school or work? Yeah, probably. But, as the Internet, and computers in general, move away from a work/school-only phenomenon and converge with our lesser activities (entertainment and the like) we become susceptible to, well, losing ourselves in it. That is, “Man alive, I’m been here three hours, and all I’ve been doing is looking up old Ric Flair promos on YouTube, and then doing the related Wikipedia shuffle. I went from looking up Starrcade to the concept of sovereignty in just a few clicks! And I have articles to write, (and Dream 12 to watch)!”

Yes, the essay is a little hinky.

The question becomes how to properly allocate your time online between the pointless and the slightly less pointless. Do you download an application that kicks you offline, and keeps you there? Do you study/work from a place that has zero Internet access? Or do you embrace the fact that, well, this is how we do things from now on: working right alongside 18 tabs about the history of Nintendo and the Monday Night Wars?

The beauty of the Drudge Report right now is that Mr. Drudge is working against his very interests. He’s got some ridiculous headline right now, JULIUS AT FCC WANTS TO ‘REGULATE’ INTERNET, that’s meant to wile up his easily excitable readership. What’s going on is that the FCC has moved one step closer to bringin Net Neutrality to fruition, and has invited the public to weigh in until January 14.

Here’s my problem with the Drudge presentation: he’s using the word “regulation” to scare up opposition to Net Neutrality. Here’s a quick scenario that I pulled out of thin air the site would do well to consider:

My name is Mr Smith. I run a really big ISP in the United States. You know who I don’t like? That damn Drudge Report guy. He’s always talking smack about my company. So what I’m going to do is, now that there’s no Net Neutrality to get in the way, I’m go to either block access to his Web site, or just slow it down so that it’s practically unusable. Now Drudge gets no traffic from my subscribers, and his business suffers. Meanwhile, I’ve gone ahead and partnered with TechCrunch, and have rigged it in such a way that all of my subscribers can access the site REALLY CRAZY FAST, and there’s no ads. My subscribers now go to TechCrunch all the time. It’s a free market, right: I hate Drudge, so I’m gonna block his site. Now, of course, my subscribers are free to go somewhere else if they want to visit Drudge, but considering how little competition there is in broadband, have fun paying for a dial-up connection in 2010; I own all the fiber optic cable in this city!

That’s a gigantic oversimplification, yes, but it illustrates my basic point: Drudge here is so off the mark that he’s putting his own business at risk.

Not smart, sir.