ICANN: 'Domain tasting' practice declined to near-zero in April
Perhaps you've noticed this yourself: Whenever you mis-type a URL with a name that's maybe one letter off from the proper one, you no longer get directed to a site with a zillion ads that masquerades as the real one that you've never seen before, and that you may never see again. While the practice of cybersquatting hasn't necessarily subsided, the Web had been suffering from a plague of domain tasters -- sites that set up shop on sound-alike URLs for five days at a time, or even less, knowing they could revoke their URL registrations within that "add grace period" (AGP) without paying a fee.
In the meantime, these domain testers could reap the rewards of serving up dozens of cheap pop-under ads, and maybe even planting a few bots in the process. It was getting so bad that the number of misappropriated URLs cancelled within ICANN's five-day AGP, for one month in early 2007, approached 50 million. And as few as ten registrants were responsible for the lion's share of those one-off names.
Lower profile XP Mode (N) for Windows 7 omits Media Player 9
Download Windows XP Mode (N) Release Candidate for Windows 7 from Fileforum now.
In a move which could very rapidly multiply the number of total users of Windows XP N way beyond the paltry number of users, mostly in Europe, who invested in the product in 2005, Microsoft this morning quietly released a separate version of the release candidate for its XP Mode virtualization system for Windows 7. This version creates a virtual envelope for Windows XP N, the version Microsoft created without Media Player 9 pre-installed, to appease the European Commission.
Maybe frequency is important: AMD raises Phenom II ceiling to 3.4 GHz
Starting today, AMD is marketing a stepped-up version of its Dragon platform's top-of-the-line processor, the Phenom II X4 model 965, for a price of $245 in 1,000-unit quantities (the "tray" price, street prices may be a little higher). The "stepped-up" part of the bargain involves a feature that just two years ago, AMD's marketing team was saying didn't really matter anymore: frequency.
It's a clear sign of AMD's renewed confidence in its own architecture that it now offers a consumer-grade desktop CPU clocked at 3.4 GHz. During those bleak days of the company's under-performing Barcelona architecture, it tried hard to play down its unwillingness to break the 3.0 GHz barrier. For a company that's famous for being very straight with its customers, these explanations of why higher performance isn't the number one item on their wants list sounded like raising the white flag, in the midst of stiff competition from Intel's Core 2.
Safari 4.0.3 speed gains hobbled by unexplained poor AJAX performance
Download Apple Safari for Windows 4.0.3 from Fileforum now.
The latest security update to Apple's Safari 4 browser for Windows includes impressive speed gains in many departments, including page rendering -- gains the one-time speed champion desperately needs to remain competitive against Google Chrome 3. But a surprisingly poor performance score in one department -- declarations of AJAX objects on one of the tests in Betanews' benchmark suite -- is preventing the latest production version of Apple's browser from decidedly overpowering the latest production edition of Google's.
Judge invokes DMCA in upholding ban on RealDVD
The technology used to thwart DVD ripping software such as Slysoft's AnyDVD includes mechanisms that place intentional errors and even false logic, such as navigation menus that lead nowhere, on studios' DVDs. Ordinary DVD players would ignore this false information, but rippers may copy it and, in producing better images of it in the copy, produce DVDs with errors that ordinary players would not ignore. It's this technology which RealNetworks engineers actively worked to overcome, in their creation of a system enabling owners of DVD movies to create archival backups of their collections onto hard disk drives.
Yesterday, US District Court Judge Marilyn Hall Patel ruled that this act -- the creation of error-correcting code that does not discriminate between accidental errors such as scratches, and intentional errors used for copy protection -- is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This in her decision yesterday which upholds a lower court ban on the sale of RealDVD, and future Real products based on that product, imposed last October.
Web cookies elevated to a US government privacy firestorm
The principal architecture of HTTP, the transfer protocol for the Web, is by definition sessionless. That means that once a browser has completed loading a page from a server, the communication between the server and the browser is broken. So any illusion of a connection between the browser's user and the server is produced by the server creating a record of the session that inevitably terminates, and referring to that record later. The only decision a Web publisher has to make is where to store those records -- on a local database, or using remote cookies stored on the client.
For most publishers, that decision takes less than two seconds to make -- cookies are practically ubiquitous among Web sites. But for the United States Government, storing any record about a person using a government service is a privacy concern; and the decision of storing and retrieving government-generated data on a citizen's private computer raises the irresistible specter of conspiracy.
Google's next search engine: What's the difference?
Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it's describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling "Caffeine," although perhaps intentionally, it isn't yet explaining just what the differences are.
In Betanews' initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google's current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.
Microsoft may not kill IE6 until at least 2014
Of the three most recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer, the one used by more individuals and businesses worldwide, according to recent analytics, is the oldest: IE6, which is notorious for interpreting Web pages in the manner that seemed most convenient to Microsoft at the time. Many Web sites anxious to support newer and more efficient rendering standards remain reluctant to drop support for IE6 rendering entirely, simply because it may still be in use by as much as one-third of the Web-browsing public.
Now that the movement by Web architects to engineer a collective dumping of IE6 has generated its own Web site, the move is on to spur Microsoft itself to join in. After all, the success of IE8 could depend on businesses' willingness to dump IE6. But in a plea to Web architects to understand the difficulties those businesses face in dumping any old software and adopting any new ones (and avoiding Firefox in the process), Microsoft IE8 product manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote for his team's blog that Microsoft simply cannot drop support for IE6 while support for the operating system that delivered it -- Windows XP -- continues.
Firefox 3.6 needs more, better features to compete against Chrome 3
Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 code-name "Namoroka" for Windows from Fileforum now.
Last April, Mozilla gave the first public indication of the feature set it was planning for the version of Firefox that could be released in the fall of this year. Among them were the following: a thumbnail preview mode for tab switching using Ctrl+Tab; an integrated, if limited, version of the Ubiquity command line tool; live theme changes without reboots; a new and more fully loaded "New Tab" feature; a complete status window that answers to the URL about:me; and integration of the desktop Web application platform Prism.
Breakthrough in Intel/Nvidia licensing standoff for i7, i5 CPUs
In a statement this morning that included a blessing from an Intel vice president, GPU maker Nvidia announced it has been licensed by Intel, along with other leading motherboard manufacturers, to produce its GPU-stacking SLI technology for motherboards that include Intel's Lynnfield generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs using Nehalem microarchitecture, with Intel's P55 Express chipset.
It's great news for system builders who had been concerned about whether a recent legal standoff between Nvidia and Intel would render it impossible (or at least, unsanctioned) for them to build performance gaming systems with the latest Intel 45 nm CPUs, plus multiple Nvidia GPUs. Simply being blockaded from doing so at the legal level would be perceived as a watershed moment for rival ATI, which wouldn't be good news for Intel either since ATI is now wholly owned by arch-rival AMD.
Microsoft exits the ad agency business with Razorfish sale
Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.
In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.
Windows XP SP3 runs browsers 13% faster than Windows 7 RTM
In a set of comprehensive Windows Web browser performance tests conducted by Betanews on August 7 -- our first test of browsers running on the final Windows 7 RTM Build 7600 distributed by Microsoft yesterday -- the five major families of browsers tended to run 13% faster on Windows XP Service Pack 3 than on Windows 7, and 29% faster than on Windows Vista Service Pack 2.
That reflects a decline in the speed gap between XP and Win7 of about 1%, from tests conducted comparing XP-based browsers to those running on Windows 7 Release Candidate Build 7100. Some browsers are faster in Windows 7 RTM, although Mozilla Firefox 3.5.2 ran just a tick slower.
Owner of Office.com trades its URL to Microsoft, perhaps for Outlook features
Since at least 1999, the lucrative Web URL Office.com has been registered to someone other than Microsoft, the company most closely associated with that term with regards to software. Most recently, Office.com wasn't owned by any cybersquatter, but by ContactOffice Group -- a very legitimate Belgian company which used the URL to establish a virtual e-mail client accessible through desktop and mobile Web browsers.
Late last June, Office.com's clients received e-mails from ContactOffice notifying them that their accounts will be moved to the contactoffice.com domain at the end of July. There's only one really good reason why a company would move from a ubiquitous trademark to an arguably more obscure one; and today, the logic behind that reason was confirmed by the Internet's string of WHOIS databases: Microsoft is now the official owner of the Office.com domain.
It's Congress vs. ICANN in the battle for Internet authority
The current three-year working arrangement between the US Dept. of Commerce and the institution that maintains the Internet's top-level domain structure, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), expires at the end of this September. With the Internet being perceived as more of an international platform than an American one, support is growing among overseas legislators including the European Commission for the US Government to let lapse the term of its oversight role, and let ICANN be answerable to an international agency.
In very clear, and perhaps not-so-diplomatically phrased, statement last June, new ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom voiced his support for such a move. Although ICANN's partnerships with the DoC and private firm VeriSign were instrumental in moving past square one on a project to sign and secure the Internet's root zone addresses, Beckstrom said such partnerships could continue anyway if ICANN were answerable to an oversight board made up of its multitude of international stakeholders.
Windows 7 RTM still available via MSDN/TechNet despite heavy traffic
Right on schedule Thursday morning, what can probably be described as the "latest final edition" of Build 7600 of Windows 7 was made available to subscribers to Microsoft's MSDN and TechNet services for developers and admins. This will enable them to begin the process of finalizing upgrades to applications and to the systems using them, prior to the general availability date for the operating system, which remains set for October 22.
Absent from this morning's distribution, though not surprisingly, was any hint of "Windows 7 E," the browserless build of the OS that had been slated for distribution exclusively in Europe in the event that the European Commission had not reached a decision on the company's browser selection proposal. Last month, Microsoft presented a formal proposal to the EC that modeled a Web-based selection system for installing default browsers, one which presented Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome, and Opera alongside Internet Explorer 8, in a menu that all European Windows users would see -- not just those with Windows 7.
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