At the end of the day, Google's Davidson says that his biggest worry is not for Google but for the prospect of bringing fresh innovation to the Internet. After all, if worse comes to worst, Google can pay AT&T or BellSouth to maintain its role as the Internet's dominant search engine. But the bright young start-up with the next big innovative idea won't have that option.

This is exactly my concern.

Who really gets hurt by 'prioritization' of the Internet

Bill Smith, chief technology officer at BellSouth justified charging content companies by saying they are using the telco's network without paying for it.

"Higher usage for broadband services drives more costs that we have to recover," he said in a telephone interview.

WTF? Bellsouth's users are requesting the content. The content providers are already paying for their outgoing bandwidth. Smith wants to charge content providers for the bandwidth their content uses inside someone else's network!. This is ridiculous.

He suggested that Apple Computer might be asked to pay a nickel or a dime to insure the complete and rapid transmission of a song via the Internet, which is being used for more and more content-intensive purposes.

Smith: Thats a nice looking music store you have there. Nice and pretty. Be a shame someone reduced your traffic to a trickle wouldn't it? Now I'm not saying that will happen, I'm just saying you should pay us to keep an eye on it for you. Real neighborly like.

Smith basically saying there are a lot of interesting and popular services on the Internet. So popular that BellSouth's users want them. These services do require larger amounts of bandwidth than say web browsing. Because BellSouth doesn't want their users to go to another ISP, BellSouth won't block access to the services. Instead, they will just charge the owners of the interesting services. If you don't pay your service might not function properly on BellSouth's network.

This is so fucking silly.

BellSouth wants new Net fees

Apple's shares yesterday closed at $80.86 on the day CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first-ever Macintosh computers based on Intel microprocessors.

Astute Register readers will immediately recognise that number: the 8086 was, of course, Intel's first 16-bit, x86 processor. It shipped in 1978, the year after Apple was founded. It contained 29,000 transistors and clocked a massive 5MHz. That's 5MHz, not G5MHz, of course.

That cool, like the guy who wagered $1337 on Jepardy. However the 8086 operated at 4.77Mhz, not 5Mhz.

Apple stock price: $80.86

Suddenly, everybody can (and, really, must) advertise on TV, because it'll be so specific...and so dynamic. If you start shopping for a new WiFi access point in the morning, Google will know, and that night when you watch Two and a Half Men, your ads will be from D-Link, Linksys and Belkin. And, further, they'll know that an intelligent buyer lives at your IP, so your ads won't show you a hot model demonstrating how they're plug-and-play, but will instead feature a quick recommendation from the SveaSoft guy about which AP's the best one for hotrodding.

This can be taken two ways: one is technical, one is quite funny.

The humor of Cringley

If a company running a country code top-level domain refuses to agree to hand over any information or data held by it to the government, either legally, illegally or extra-legally, secretly or not, the government can simply replace the company with a government-run agency. If it refuses to shut down a website, or to redirect it elsewhere, the government can simply replace it with a government-run agency.

It is a nuclear option, but neverthless a nuclear option that didn't exist prior to July. It will also never have to be used - the threat of its use will see any company wanting to keep hold of its livelihood agree to government demands.

Of course this would never happen. Except it has already. Within months of the government-run "Association of Kazakh IT Companies" getting control of Kazakhstan's internet domain, it shut down the website of British comic Sacha Baron Cohen (best known as Ali G). The site at www.borat.kz featured another of Cohen's comic creations, Borat Sagdiyev, a Kazakh journalist. It was removed from the Internet.

Why? The president of the organisation said it was so the comic "can't bad-mouth Kazakhstan under the .kz domain name". If you want an example of government-owned and run censorship on the internet, you'll be hard pushed to find a clearer example.

My heads been under a rock the past few months. I knew some TLD shit was going down, but didn't really know what it was about until now. Damn!

ICANN and ccTDLs: For great justice?

Ethanol Demagogue wrote:

Enter Google, the hip, incredibly profitable corporation whose motto is "Do No Evil." Google doesn't like the copyright laws as they have existed for centuries. Google wants the rights to store all the books in the world in its Google Library program, and the company doesn't want to pay for that right.

Copyright? No problem. Google cites "fair use," but it isn't using 400 words; it plans to digitize whole libraries and make them available piece by piece. Google is formidable. Google has brilliant public relations people and clever lawyers and connections in important places.

I'm not getting the controversy here, hasn't Amazon been doing this for awhile now?

Amazon doesn't make the entire book available for you to read, for free, online.

I agree that copyright laws in the country are ridicules but this the wrong way to fight it. First Google should partner with the Project Gutenberg and index all their books. These are already in the public domain. Second, Google should lobby for expanding "fair-use" of works not in the public domain, perhaps for non-commerical or academic work. Google books could have a disclaimer about appropriate usage. Perhaps it should be rate limited to 25 books a day unless you register a .edu email address or something.

I support what Google is trying to do but Google will lose its "No Do Evil" status if blatantly violates statues even if those statues are stupid.

RE: Newsday.com: Just Google 'thou shalt not steal'

This package provides a complete http client library. It currently implements most of the relevant parts of the HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 protocols, including the request methods HEAD, GET, POST and PUT, and automatic handling of authorization, redirection requests, and cookies. Furthermore the included Codecs class contains coders and decoders for the base64, quoted-printable, URL-encoding, chunked and the multipart/form-data encodings. The whole thing is free, and licenced under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)

I want to fly to Switzerland and kiss this guy! His project saved me easily a month on the tools I am releasing at Shmoocon!

Full HTTP library in Java

This document provides both technical information and some background and insight into what search engine indexing robots should expect to encounter . Technically, the problems arise from misunderstandings and exploitation of anomalies by HTML creators (direct tagging, WYSIWYG and automated systems), and the tendency of browser applications to be very forgiving in their interpretation of pages and links. Therefore, it's impossible to simply read the HTML and HTTP specifications and follow the rules there -- the real world is much messier than that.

I wish I had found this about 4 months ago! Easily the best checklist of the various issues and practical solutions you will face when writing a web crawler.

Indexing Robot Crawler Checklist

Part-press part technical article about implementing massive web crawlers in Java

Become.com's Web Crawler: A Massively Scaled Java Technology Application

So you think you're good enough to break the protection?

You want to see how good you are in reversing applications?

And you want to do it the legal way?

Then you're at the right place!

Awesome! I think I try some tonight after work.

crackmes.de: Tools for practicing reverse engineering