Many of the worst problems on the Internet are probably unsolvable, at least as a practical matter. One of the favorite models to imagine our way out of this ordeal is to start over with a new and more "secure" Internet. Sadly, this is an even less practical idea than fixing the one we have.

The latest to dare to imagine this dream is U.S. Cyber Command chief Gen. Keith Alexander who wants a ".secure" network for critical infrastructure: ".secure would require visitors to use certified credentials for entry and would do away with users' Fourth Amendment rights to privacy. Network operators in the financial sector, for example, would be authorized to scan account holders' traffic content for signs of trouble. The current Internet setup would remain intact for people who prefer to stay anonymous on the Web".

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The withering newspaper and magazine industries began to gravitate toward Apple's iPad as a possible anchor publishing outlet last year, but a pair of Philadelphia newspapers are taking a different approach and bundling cheap Android tablets with a subscription.

Last year, Conde Nast's Wired showed off an impressive iPad-optimized version of its magazine, and News Corp released The Daily, a subscription magazine designed from scratch for consumption on the iPad. These major ventures didn't simply re-format existent content for the iPad, but rather designed their content around the tablet itself.

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The first e-reader to be integrated with the Google eBooks platform will be the iriver Story HD, and it will be available across the United States on July 17, Google announced Monday.

Google eBooks launched last December and included a browser-based e-bookstore, and reader apps for Android and iOS as well as JavaScript-supportive Web browsers. Because Google utilized Adobe's e-book publishing platform, books purchased through Google's bookstore could be read on the long list of devices that support it.

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I should have followed Vic Gundotra, Google senior vice president of engineering, sooner on G+. Otherwise I wouldn't have missed his post about yesterday's Google+ glitch. One of the servers supporting the service ran out of disk space! He apologies for the resulting "spam".

"For about 80 minutes we ran out of disk space on the service that keeps track of notifications", Gundotra writes. "Hence our system continued to try sending notifications. Over, and over again. Yikes. We didn't expect to hit these high thresholds so quickly, but we should have".

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First in a series. I discovered a great way to waste a summer Saturday morning. Yesterday, I made the first steps to giving up cable -- OK, IPTV in my case -- and, whoa, it didn't go well. I planned to go completely cable-free, adopting over-the-air HD broadcasts and online streaming from Amazon, Hulu Plus and Netflix. But moving to TiVo and antenna started painfully.

More people are making the same move. Since 2008, 1 million US households cut cable's cord and switched to over-the-air broadcasts and online streaming, says Convergence Consultancy Group, which expects the number to reach 2 million by year's end. That's a small percentage of households, but it will double the number this year gained in the previous two.

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This weekend, I am embarking on a bold experiment, replacing another one started in April. I attempted to go Google-free and, as explained a few days ago, failed. What's that cliché? If you can't beat them, join them. So now I'm going all Google, or as nearly as humanly possible.

The goal is simple: Replace the majority of digital lifestyle products and services I now use with those provided by Google or enabled by them. In process, I'll be looking to answer a simple question: What is the Google lifestyle? Timing is impeccable. Google is undergoing a massive makeover that probably isn't coincidental to cofounder Larry Page becoming CEO (again). That lifestyle is changing, too.

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Never fails to amaze us how much effort web browser development teams are investing to bring us the latest and best browser. Where's the end goal? You can understand Google pushing significant resources in to Chrome, as it's part of the new Chrome OS. But why are Opera and Firefox so keen to be seen to develop and release new versions of their browsers more quickly than ever?

This week has seen a plethora of new or updated web browsers from Mozilla and Opera. Earlier this week, Firefox 6 beta was launched to the general public. Firefox Aurora is now 7.0a2, whilst Firefox 8 moved in to the Nightly channel. And there are almost no differences between 7.0a2 and 8.0a1. On top of this, Opera 12 made it's very fist public bow in the form of a pre-alpha. Since when did any developer release an alpha, never mind a pre-alpha, to the general public? It's up there on the Opera website for anyone to download. You can test Opera 12 "Next" alongside the regular Opera 11.50, if you're keen to see the latest developments. Maxthon 3.1.3.1000 was also released this week, which is a browser based on the engine that powers Internet Explorer.

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I'm not the first to ask that question, but there's good reason to pose it again. Media tablet shipments plummeted 28 percent sequentially during first quarter, says IDC. Even iPad missed earlier expectations.

The analyst firm released the data today, expressing some surprise for the sudden slowdown and offering little explanation. Merely 7.2 million tablets shipped in Q1. Apple shipped 4.94 million tablets, according to its quarterly earnings report, putting iPad's share at about 69 percent, by extrapolation. However, IDC's number is lower, with Android tablet share stated at 34 percent. The analyst firm described first-quarter iPad shipments as "below expectations".

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AbiSource  has announced the release of a developmental version of its popular and free cross-platform word processing application, AbiWord. Version 2.9.1 represents the first glimpse of AbiWord's journey towards a major new stable release, which is set to be version 3.0.

AbiWord 2.9.1 includes a number of notable new features, including full Unicode support in Windows (accompanied by improved localization), support for paragraph borders and shading, and an experimental EPUB plug-in, enabling users to create eBooks from existing documents in AbiWord quickly and easily.

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Opera has updated its Opera Next browser, which contains the latest developmental (and unstable) build of Opera to version 12.00. This is a pre-alpha release, and contains only a series of minor bug fixes and stability improvements, with "juicy and fresh stuff" promised for future releases.

Opera Next 12, codenamed "Wahoo" after the fish, is designed to be installed alongside the latest stable version of Opera, currently version 11.50. Opera 11.50 was released eight days ago, and has been downloaded more than 32 million times according to Opera.

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Something startling happened today. Either someone in Apple's PR department royally screwed up, or the landscape of iOS device users is dramatically different than I or many other people thought.

Last month, during the event announcing iOS 5, Scott Forstall, Apple senior vice president of iOS software, said: "For our stores we have more than 225 million accounts, all with credit cards and one-click purchasing". Forstall also said that Apple had sold 200 million iOS devices.

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New data suggests that the "freemium" mobile game model is becoming increasingly popular, with two-thirds of all revenue among the top 100 games in the iTunes App Store coming from such games. This is a marked increase from January, when only 39 percent of revenue came from such sources.

Free-to-play or freemium games work like this. Instead of charging for the game up front, it is given away for free. The developer makes its money by extending or enhancing game play through in-app purchases, but they are not necessarily required to play the game itself.

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A personal experience of mine makes me wonder about Google Apps and Google's ability to support it properly. I try to minimize complaining about my own vendors, but this incident was handled badly.

I had to pull rank to get an answer.

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"Modern" is not a word I would have ever used to describe how YouTube looks. The user interface remains dated, even after several refinements. But that may change, and quite dramatically. Google is in process of changing YouTube's look and feel in startling and refreshing ways. How this new experience comes to market depends in part on how users respond to it.

Today, as part of the ongoing TestTube project, Google opened "Cosmic Panda", which is described as "a new experimental experience for videos, playlists and channels". Hot damn, this thing is smokin'! My initial reaction is simply "Wow!"

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In a move sure to rankle opponents of the entertainment industry's anti-piracy efforts, leading ISPs and the movie studios and record labels announced a voluntary deal to begin monitoring ISP accounts for possible piracy. Piraters would be subject to a series of "alerts," each increasingly threatening in tone.

The first alert would simply be to inform a user that their account may have been used for copyright infringement, and what the consequences are for getting caught and where to find legal material. These warnings would get more stern in tone until the sixth alert, where the user would find his or her Internet connection slowed or disrupted until the problem is addressed.

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