One less news app: Did BBC's iPad support threaten the EU's 'Digital Agenda?'
Either the news media is convinced that Apple's forthcoming iPad is the vehicle for delivering news publishing out of its funk, or it's convinced that Apple is conspiring to circumvent the natural course of news with its own walled garden platform. In any event, in the portion of the universe where the two parties are evidently not in bed with one another, the BBC reports that it has been forced to indefinitely postpone the rollout of its iPhone/iPod touch/iPad newsreader app, after the EU's trade group for newspapers complained it could pre-empt their plans to migrate online.
Today, the BBC Trust, which sets policy for the Corporation and serves as its board of directors, put a hold on next month's planned release of the BBC news reader, which would have been distributed for free. The BBC is sustained by UK citizens who pay regular license fees, so on paper, the reason for the delay is to determine whether free distribution of the app goes against its mandate.
But BBC News didn't muzzle its own impression of the Trust's intent. In its report this afternoon, it noted the Trust's citation of "representations from industry" as contributing to its postponement decision.
Adobe tweaks the Web apps business model with paid collaboration
The puzzle for software companies as they adopt Web services is how to make them profitable. Anyone who tries the ad-supported model 1) plays against Google on its home turf; 2) risks working against application efficiency; 3) could raise the ire of users. And anyone who tries offering subscription to storage space 1) could easily be outdone by the first vendor to give away all its space for free; 2) faces an uphill value proposition against cheap local storage, and free synchronization such as Windows Live Sync solving the mobility problem.
Over the past several months, we've seen Adobe playing up collaboration as a key feature of its Acrobat.com service, even over portability -- the element that's most often associated with Adobe. Today, we have confirmation as to why: Inaugurating a potentially lucrative subscription strategy, Adobe hopes consumers will be willing to use Web apps such as Buzzword for free, while paying monthly for the capability to share documents.
With three months to go to DNSSEC, someone's fudging root zone records
One of the extraordinary truths about the Internet as a mechanism is that the databases that enable every IP address to be resolved, are maintained and published by a very small number of organizations acting as a cooperative. The health of the entire network depends on these groups' vigilance. One of these groups is Autonomica AB, a division of the Swedish ISP Netnod. It operates the "I" root server, which in recent weeks has been the apparent victim of a kind of spoofing attack that's been harmless thus far, but could conceivably demonstrate the capability of one rogue element to pollute the entire Internet.
Thanks to the current state of affairs, some are now suspecting a China-based culprit. But as we all know with the Internet, just because a malicious server resides in one country doesn't mean its malicious operator works there as well.
Safari WebKit beta closing the gap against Chrome 4, Opera a very close second
In the latest check of progress in the development of the major Web browsers for Windows, the brand that helped Betanews launch its regular browser performance tests appears to be making a comeback effort: With each new daily build, the WebKit browser engine -- running in Apple's Safari 4.0.5 chassis -- gains computational speed that it was sorely lacking.
Safari already leads Google Chrome in the rendering department, and posts scalability scores comparable to Opera 10.51, in Betanews' Windows 7 Relative Performance Index suite. In this morning's round of tests using WebKit daily build 56417 on Windows 7, Safari scored a very respectable 20.27, coming up just behind the latest stable Chrome 4.1 at 21.22.
GAO: More security training leads to less compliance, including Los Alamos, NASA
A US Government Accounting Office report released yesterday (PDF available here) reveals an astonishing and counter-intuitive trend: Government agencies' compliance with directives intended to improve information security has declined in inverse proportion to the amount of training they receive.
In a report to the House Government Management Subcommittee yesterday, the GAO cited increased awareness of the provisions of the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), due to increased awareness training among the 24 federal agencies tested: 91% of employees in those agencies received testing in fiscal 2009, up 3% from the previous year. But specifically in light of increased exposure to the Gumblar Trojan and the Conficker worm, at least 17 of those agencies were reported to have enacted deficient responses to these increasing threats, including essentially assigning the entire job of security to just one person -- against FISMA's mandate.
Has SSL become pointless? Researchers suspect state-sponsored CA forgery
The most powerful deterrent against the use of man-in-the-middle attacks against SSL/TLS-encrypted connections may be how much easier it may be to simply attack from the endpoint. Certainly "man-in-the-middle" sounds more sophisticated, and as a pair of well-known academic researchers are preparing to report, the phrase has actually become a "starburst" marketing point for the sale of digital surveillance equipment to government agencies.
But perhaps the most serious defect in the SSL system, allege Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian and Mozilla security contributor Sid Stamm, lies in the ability of government agencies (or individuals acting in the name of government agencies) to acquire false intermediate certificates for SSL encrypted trust connections. Those certificates could enable them to, in turn, sign and authenticate Web site SSL certificates that purport to be legitimate collectors of personal information, such as banks.
Verizon: Current telecom law is 'irrelevant' to the modern Internet
"Thanks to the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission, we now have a National Broadband Plan, which lays out a vision for a vibrant broadband and Internet marketplace," began Verizon Executive Vice President for Public Affairs Tom Tauke, in a speech to the Washington think tank New Democrat Network yesterday. But that's where the perfunctory appreciation stopped: "In my view, the current statute is badly out of date. Now is the time to focus on updating the law affecting the Internet. To fulfill broadband's potential it's time for Congress to take a fresh look at our nation's communications policy framework."
It was an important speech not only for who was speaking, but where it was spoken: NDN is perhaps the furthest thing from a libertarian free-enterprise institute. It's a group of active Democrats who are celebrating the passage of step one of health care reform, and who believe that federal policy reform can reset and reinvigorate the public agenda, on issues including broadband buildout and human rights. Verizon cozying up to NDN would be like allying itself with Google...but then again, it has allied itself with Google.
Betanews Relative Performance Index for browsers 3.0: How it works and why
The Betanews test suite for Windows-based Web browsers is a set of tools for measuring the performance, compliance, and scalability of the processing component of browsers, particularly their JavaScript engines and CSS renderers. Our suite does not test the act of loading pages over the Internet, or anything else that is directly dependent on the speed of the network.
But what is it measuring, really? The suite is measuring the browser's capability to perform instructions and produce results. In the early days of microcomputing, computers (before we called them PCs) came with interpreters that processed instructions and produced results. Today, browsers are the virtual equivalent of Apple IIs and TRS-80s -- they process instructions, and produce results. Many folks think they're just using browsers to view blog pages and check the scores. And then I catch them watching Hulu or playing a game on Facebook or doing something silly on Miniclip, and surprise, they're not just reading the paper online anymore. More and more, a browser is a virtual computer.
Google's Hong Kong move leads to censorship, followed closely by opportunism
What, exactly, would one be blocked from seeing now that the "Great Firewall of China," as it's been dubbed, separates citizens of mainland China from Google? This morning, Betanews used a fabulous Firefox 3.0 add-in tool called ChinaChannel, created by independent developers in Hong Kong, to set up a proxy connection using a China IP address, so we could peruse Google as though we were in China itself. Then using an ordinary copy of Opera 10.51 on the other side, we browsed Google.com.hk -- the server to which Google is now redirecting Google.cn requests -- using our regular US-based connection.
We've used this tool in the past, and we had an easier time obtaining a proxy connection with a China-based proxy. At first this morning, we found proxy servers were frequently denying connection requests, although repeated requests often got through after 10 or more tries. However, sometimes our connection only lasted as long as a minute.
Adobe to launch Creative Suite 5 April 12
A spokesperson for Adobe told Betanews this afternoon that on the morning of April 12 at 11:00 a.m. EDT, the company will hold a global online launch event for all of the components of its Creative Suite 5.
Among the most anticipated new components -- or as Adobe tends to present them in its periodic table, "elements" -- is a vastly improved HD video rendering engine called Mercury. Unlike other manufacturers, Adobe tends to retain the cool names for its products and platforms even after public release. Mercury will utilize the graphics processing power of video cards to expedite the decoding and playback of HD-encoded formats, especially for the Premiere Pro editor.
Google.cn redirection sets the stage for long-term standoff with China
Searching for a defining principle in the war of words between Google and the Chinese government, even after Google's move yesterday to redirect search traffic from the .CN domain to its uncensored .HK address, may be about as fruitless as filtering high prose from a cable TV political pundit show. In a bizarre demonstration of what's being called "openness," China's state-run news service responded to Google's move yesterday first with a "nudity" slide show (news photos over the years with naughty bits included), cushioning some op-eds designed to characterize Google as out-of-step not only with China's progress, but with America's.
Conforming with state laws governing expression, argues a Xinhua op-ed late yesterday, is just one of the globalization trends that many enterprises and business ventures must embrace when entering new territories. Why can't Google, Xinhua asks, be more like KFC?
Without native apps for Windows Phone 7, Mozilla cancels Fennec for WM6 also
Microsoft's choice not to provide a migration path for mobile apps developers to move their native code from Windows Mobile 6.5 to Windows Phone 7 (with one notable exception), has claimed its biggest casualty to date: Mozilla, whose Firefox Mobile project, codenamed "Fennec," appeared to be the most promising alternative browser to IE Mobile, will discontinue development for all Microsoft handset platforms including Windows Mobile 6.5. This announcement was made yesterday by Mozilla mobile project leader Stuart Parmenter.
It wasn't so much a decision on Mozilla's part, Parmenter noted yesterday, as a reluctant acceptance of the fact that it can't be done.
Can Google get away with this? Redirects .CN users to uncensored .HK domain
Chinese citizens and government ministers expecting for Google to take a stand today on the continued censorship of its search results, may have been surprised by the company's decision to split the difference: This afternoon, it began redirecting Google.cn traffic to Google.com.hk, rather than pull out its business interests from China. Hong Kong is a special administrative district of China.
In a blog post this afternoon, Google's Chief Legal Officer David Drummond defended the twist -- not exactly a "move" per se -- as perfectly legal, if potentially unacceptable by China's government. "We want as many people in the world as possible to have access to our services, including users in mainland China," Drummond wrote, "yet the Chinese government has been crystal clear throughout our discussions that self-censorship is a non-negotiable legal requirement. We believe this new approach of providing uncensored search in simplified Chinese from Google.com.hk is a sensible solution to the challenges we've faced -- it's entirely legal and will meaningfully increase access to information for people in China. We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services."
IE9 Tech Preview beats latest Firefox alpha, as Chrome 5 clobbers King Opera
How long ago would you have thought it absolutely impossible for the slowest Windows Web browser currently under development to be coming...from Mozilla? Granted, the Internet Explorer 9 Tech Preview isn't a real browser (typically, these things need their own address bars and Back buttons). But unless Mozilla gets its JaegerMonkeys in a row in time for Microsoft to debut IE9 with real features like buttons, the number two reason users cite for switching from Internet Explorer...will be wiped off the map.
In the most sophisticated system of browser tests ever developed -- reconstructed by Betanews in anticipation of the IE9 preview last week -- IE9 in Windows 7 registered a comprehensive index score of 13.17, representing over 13 times the performance of IE7 in Vista SP2. By comparison, IE8 in Windows 7 scored a mere 2.20, representing about six times the performance of Microsoft's current production browser. That's down from our preliminary estimate from last week, but still a very commendable performance gain. Typically, when developers add real features to their browser projects, that tends to slow down overall JavaScript performance. But that doesn't mean Microsoft won't continue to compensate as they improve their own new JavaScript engine, code-named "Chakra."
It's not flat if you tilt it 45 degrees: IE usage share in EU remains steady
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share
Amid reports that Internet Explorer's usage share in Europe is "falling faster than a team of skydiving elephants," an examination of the source of the data being cited reveals the possibility of a separate universe with weightless elephants and an IP address. The latest live statistics from global Web analytics firm StatCounter shows the continuing "weekend dip," where IE usage drops and Firefox usage peaks, as solely responsible for the latest round of victory claims from at least one supporter of Europe's browser choice screen for Windows users.
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