Archive for: December 2007

Chris Beard of Mozilla Labs announced a new project for “deeper integration of the browser with online services.” The goals include:

provide a basic set of optional Mozilla-hosted online services
ensure that it is easy for …

Google has launched a new student Fellowship Program that will provide opportunity for students interested in Internet and tech policy to advance their studies through summer work at public interest organizations.

While other big cities’ municipal Wi-Fi plans are foundering, that of Minneapolis appears to be succeeding. With 30% of the city covered already, the provider US Internet expects to complete it’s network by February, and be breaking even shortly after based on the current 5% subscriber take-up rate.

Fortune reports on chatbots used in online stores to talk potential customers out of abandoning their virtual shopping carts. “…A startup called UpSellit is … using live chat to act as a sales assistant …. but here’s UpSellit’s twist: …

Tony D’Agata, vice president of federal sales for Sprint told InternetNews.com that Sprint is ramping up some specific IPv6 offerings that are expected to be ready in the second quarter of 2008.

“We are IPv6 enabling our network and actively pursing putting IPv6 on our peerless IP network,” D’Agata said. “We also have plans to implement IPv6 on other assets.”

ISOC-NY’s global parent The Internet Society (ISOC) has launched a new look for its web site.

This new look for the ISOC site is just the first step in a number of upgrades and additions to the site planned for the coming year.

In a new interview with Network World, Jim Bound, Chair of the North American IPv6 Task Force, talks about the status of IPv6 adoption in the United States. A federal mandate – that agencies switch to an IPv6 backbone by June 2008 – looms.

Jim notes that the current IPv4 address space will be exhausted by 2010, give or take a year. He predicts a last minute stampede.

The Computer History Museum has inaugurated a channel on YouTube featuring full length versions of their lectures and documentary programs. Of particular interest is ‘Internet Milestone – 30th Anniversary 3-Network …

Network engineer Richard Bennett’s new article for The Register: Dismantling a Religion: The EFF’s Faith-Based Internet explores the difference between the way the EFF wants to see the the Internet managed and current discussions under way in the IETF.

Bottom line: the Internet has never had a user-based fairness system, and it needs one. All networks need one.

The anonymous blogger in question was a hospital employee in Paris, Texas who dished conditions at his workplace. Quoting from Public Citizen: “the requirement of presenting evidence provides an important measure of protection for employee whistleblowers and other anonymous critics …

Vint Cerf speaking in Zürich, Switzerland on 22 November (video: 82 mins)

An analysis of Internet traffic by German Internet traffic management systems provider ipoque has found that Skype accounts for 95 percent of all VoIP traffic on the net in a large part of the World, but P2P is the dominant consumer of bandwidth, accounting for over 90 percent of Internet bandwidth during the night.

An article -The Team That Put the Net in Orbit – in today’s NY Times notes the recent 20th anniversary of the launch of NSFnet, a precursor to the Internet. Originally constructed to tie together the nation’s five supercomputer centers, by the time the academic network was shut down in 1996, it connected 6.6 million host computers and extended to 93 countries.

A critical decision was to adopt the then as unproven TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP served as a vital lingua franca between previously incompatible computer networks.

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has filed a lawsuit in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against Verizon on behalf of open source software developer BusyBox.

The suit alleges that Verizon has infringed on BusyBox’s copyrights in distributing the Actiontec MI424WR wireless routers to Verizon’s FiOS broadband customers.

BusyBox is a collection of Unix utilities optimized for size, and which are most commonly used in embedded environments. The SFLC claims that the Actiontec router includes BusyBox code, which under the GPL means that Verizon is obligated to distribute source code with the router. The suit charges that the company fails to do this.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is putting out the call for fellowship program applications for its 32nd International Public Meeting to be held in Paris from 22-27 June 2008.

“The fellowship program plays a key role in making sure that global voices are heard at the ICANN meeting and in our various public forums,” said Theresa Swinehart, ICANN’s Vice President, Global and Strategic Partnerships.