An article reports that today Firefox announced that it had reached a milestone of 500 million downloads of the open-source browser. I think that’s great. I love the whole open-source ethos but I am in a quandary, can you make any money from open-source software? Not that I’m a money hungry tycoon, but Microsoft are about to release IE8 beta and undoubtedly they will have copied the very useful features from Firefox. Tabbed browsing for example? A separate search box with customisable engines? Good ideas, but I can’t help but feel Firefox are getting ripped off.
I know how tempting it is to set up a fake Facebook page and then message your friends with all kinds of abuse or stalker-like behaviour, but have you ever stopped to think what the ramifications could be?
Well a Moroccan computer engineer certainly didn’t, although he did sign up to Facebook as Prince Moulay Rachid, younger brother of King Mohammed VI. I don’t think the guy was ever expecting to get caught and if he did I suppose he thought he would just get a slap on the wrist from Facebook and not be allowed to play with the other kids.
Far from it, this guy has been sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to pay $1,300. I think that’s a little extreme myself but hey, now I’m not going to sign up to Facebook pretending to be the queen as originally planned!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7258950.stm
A planned meeting by the FCC has been announced to tackle the problem of ‘traffic shaping’ – the process of ISP’s dictating access to certain websites, services (such as peer-2-peer) and bandwidth – which is apparently in violation of the ‘net neutrality’ policy employed by the FCC.
“The issue of net neutrality has come to the fore mainly as a result of Comcast, which is under investigation by the FCC for sabotaging peer-to-peer traffic such as BitTorrent downloads.”
Original Article Here
Reading this article on El Reg, it made me chuckle. The overall weight of it seems to be that a court judge has ordered a site to be taken down because of nefarious content (no surprise there) and in response to that, the site remains up (no surprise there either).
What is surprising is the details of the hosting provider enabling the site to remain up. It’s something called ‘bulletproof hosting’ – The servers are maintained at numerous undisclosed locations, they use military grade encryption on sources and they keep none of their own logs… Oh and it was started by the same people who set-up ‘The Pirate Bay’!
Original Article Here
Hello World!
This is a very apt phrase at the moment as I have been learning php and the first thing it was used for is to echo “Hello World!”. It is also appropriate as I have managed (after much tweaking) to use WordPress and my own domain to host my own blog… so to anyone who is reading this – Please see above!
Here’s one more reason not to go with ADSL. I thought Tiscali were a great ISP but it turns out they’re the same as all the rest.
The part I’m worried about is “…Tiscali has indicated it wants to place a full block on peer-to-peer applications…”
They say “…at peak times during the evening.” but if the infrastructure is there, undoubtedly they’ll use it regardless with excuses such as “we need to conserve bandwidth”.
Wise up guys… just be a grown up and go FIBRE yourselves!
P.S – Virgin planning to up their XL speed (which I’m on :D) to 50MB/S
