Archive for: November 2007

Under pressure from moveon.org and others Facebook has changed it’s controversial Beacon feature, where outside purchases were published in a user’s news feed, to ‘opt-in’ rather than ‘opt out’.

This is a call for nominations for election to the Board of Trustees of theInternet Society (ISOC). The Board of Trustees is ultimately responsible for all aspects of the Internet Society, as outlined in the ISOC by-laws which can be found at: http://www.isoc.org/isoc/general/trustees/bylaws.shtml

In an Internet Week article columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid.

The Web Video Summit is designed to be the hub of the Video Internet. It will bring together the new pioneers of this exploding industry. They will explain what you need to know about shooting, editing, encoding, distributing and promoting Internet videos.

In an interesting dial-up to broadband conversion strategy move, AT&T is raising the cost of its dial-up Internet service above its broadband DSL service.

In a proposal designed to increase broadband in rural and high-cost areas, the $7 billion Universal Service Fund would be split into three new pools with $300 million annually dedicated to high-speed networks. The other two pools would be used for wireless services and traditional telephone service.

The cable’s industry largest trade group is opposed to rules that would require Internet Service Providers to forward email to the new email address of a former customer for a period of six months. The National Cable & Telecommunications Association said such rules were unnecessary, expensive, and beyond the regulatory authority of the Federal Communications Commission to impose.

The User Centric Internet (UCI) is a new ISOC Public Policy program designed to reassert, in debates and discussions related to the future of the Internet, the importance of the design values and fundamental principles that have underpinned the Internet’s success.

The Internet Society believes that principles such as openness, user choice and control, edge based intelligence, etc., are central to a thriving Internet and, we believe, will be so for the foreseeable future. In focusing on user-centricity the Internet Society is seeking to ensure that the primacy of the user is not forgotten when it comes to new architectures, commercial offerings and policy making.

Despite EarthLink’s exit from the market, municipal wireless is alive and well in the U.S., mostly in small-to-midsize cities, and it’s beginning to spread to Europe, said Esme Vos, founder of MuniWireless. Vos said the predominant economic model today is for the municipality to guarantee a minimum annual contract for municipal services to provide an economic anchor for the network. It then can sell excess connectivity to businesses and private individuals.

Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) plans to introduce legislation in December to set the stage for congressional debate in 2008 on the ability of telecommunications companies to restrict content carried over their wireline and wireless high-speed Internet networks. His network neutrality measure would be part of a multi-pronged effort to shift the issue back into the spotlight. It is expected to include hearings in both chambers.

Revised papers of the technical standards that define the implementation of IDNs — the standards are called IDNA — were recently released via the IETF editors. These revisions are an important step toward the delegation of IDN top-level domains.

An article in the current Wired, not online, interviews Universal Records CEO Doug Morris. Doug reveals to just what extent the major record labels exhibited ostrich-like behavior when confronted with napster etc.  in the late 90′s.

InStat predicts that within the next three years more than 16 million US households will use their broadband service more than they use their TV sets. Up to 30% of viewers will drop subscription TV and use the Internet for watching TV. More than 40% say they aren’t getting enough international news and information from their current TV service, despite having hundreds of channels to choose from.

The ITU botnet toolkit is an ITU-D effort to bring together different groups, different sets of best practices and different existing efforts in botnet mitigation and general spam / cybersecurity work that focuses on botnet mitigation, and create a practical implementation of these focused on developing countries.

Giant Global Graph is a new term coined by Tim Berners Lee in an essay on his blog that redefines the semantic web concept. Inspired by the profusion of social networking sites, he contemplates protocols that enable relationships to transcend the document layer, and thus the network.