Chad's News

I’ve read horror stories of elderly people who’ve paid thousands of dollars to rent their phones from the phone company (dating from the breakup of AT&T back in the 1980s). Well, it appears that AOL is making money from a similar situation. According to an article in The New Yorker (subscription required) by Ken Auletta, 75 percent of AOL subscribers are paying a $25/month dial-up fee despite the fact that they have DSL or cable internet. If correct, these overpayments add up to $1 billion each year. And as with the phone rentals mentioned above, these customers tend to be elderly.

Link: http://www.pcmag.com/…
(topic via Slashdot)

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we use OpenDNS and have previously written about using Google’s DNS resolver instead of the one provided by your ISP. Google and OpenDNS are recommended because of their reliability, speed, and features, but it may not always be advantageous to use them. Akamai is a content delivery company with web servers around the world. They deliver content for their customers using algorithms to determine which Akamai server is physically closest to the location of the person downloading the material. This significantly speeds up the delivery and also balances the load across multiple sources. But it appears that one of the ways Akamai determines your physical location is via the DNS resolver that you’re using. And as the linked article explains, this creates bottlenecks for OpenDNS and Google DNS. By switching back to his ISP’s DNS resolver, the author was able to shorten a 2+ hour iTunes video download into less than 20 seconds.

Link: http://joemaller.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Regular Chad’s News readers already know that the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority has been close to running out of IP address blocks. Well, it’s finally happened. As of February 3rd, the last free Class A blocks were allocated to the Regional Internet Registries. It will take at least a few months for the RIRs to run dry, but it will happen.

This doesn’t mean that the internet will suddenly come crashing down or that people will not be able to connect. There are workarounds for the lack of IP addresses, and the long-term solution, switching to IPv6, has been around for years. Network engineers have long known this day was coming, but have been putting it off because it takes time and money to upgrade. Now that we’re close to running out of IP addresses, however, the need is more pressing and we may see more action.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Microsoft appears to be abandoning its Silverlight technology in favor of HTML5. Silverlight was Redmond’s attempt to compete with Adobe Flash. All is not lost, however, as it still appears that Silverlight will remain a platform of choice for developing apps on Windows Phone 7 devices.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

The World Wide Web was originally designed to be state-less. That is, information is not remembered between visits to various web pages, or even to the same web page. Today, of course, that is not the case, and the main mechanism for communicating between visits is the cookie, also known as a browser cookie or an HTTP cookie. Cookies contain a small amount of text data that your browser stores and sends back to the web server whenever you request a web page from that server. This permits many things, such as keeping you logged in, remembering your settings, or tracking which items you’ve looked at in an online store.

As a web developer, I know that the rules governing HTTP cookies are pretty loose. There have been some efforts to make a concrete standard, but nothing has been formally approved, and the existing IETF RFCs are taken as suggestions by browser manufacturers rather than rules. I didn’t know just how bad it was, however, until I read the linked article. Cookies were defined in a haphazard manner and have stayed that way ever since. Each browser implements cookies in a slightly different manner, and don’t even ask me about the limits on the size of individual cookies, the number of cookies per domain, the total number of cookies, and the total size of all cookies combined. The linked article says, “there is simply no accurate, official account of cookie behavior in modern browsers.” As a web developer, unfortunately, you have to go with the lowest common denominator when working with cookies. Definitely not the way to specify such an important part of the internet.

Link: http://lcamtuf.blogspot.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Many past efforts to promote cloud computing have failed miserably, but it’s become more popular over the last few years, even here at Chad’s News. The linked articles detail two more steps in the long road towards universal acceptance. The first is Neverware, a way to run a powerful Windows system from a low-end computer. The second is Google’s cloud print, which allows a user to print a document from portable devices such as smartphones.

Thanks to Josh for the cloud print link.

Link #1 (Neverware): http://www.observer.com/…
(via Kim Komando)

Link #2 (cloud print): http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/…
(via MacRumors.com)

As the world comes closer to running out of IP addresses, we’re going to hear more about IPv6 which has more than 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible addresses (versus the piddly 4.3 billion currently allowed by IPv4). TechRepublic explains 10 things you might not know about IPv6 addressing, including just what ::1 means.

Link: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/…

In this age of Twitter and its 140-character limit on tweets, the most important aspect of URL shorteners is how many characters they use up. But don’t forget to take into account the likelihood of the site staying in business. Libya is the home of the .ly top-level domain, and is the parent of the highly-popular bit.ly URL shortener and others. These domains, however, fall under Libyan law which is based on Islamic law and is more restrictive than the United States concerning what’s objectionable. Take the case of vb.ly, an adult-friendly shortening service shut down by Libyan authorities because its home page included a picture of co-founder Violet Blue, scantily-clad and holding a bottle in her hand. The linked article has more details.

Here at the Chad’s News network command center, we always go with tinyurl.com because it’s a fairly safe bet.

Link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/…
(via Slashdot)

You don’t have to be a hard-core geek to know how some websites use cookies to identify your computer and track your internet browsing habits. But it’s just too easy to disable and/or delete browser cookies, so the organizations involved have been looking for better methods. The goal is to save information across page visits and browser sessions, and there are quite a few ways to accomplish this. Flash cookies use the local storage capabilities of the Adobe Flash Player. These have given rise to zombie cookies, where a deleted browser cookie is recreated from the Flash cookie. HTML 5 has a client-side database storage capability that makes me wonder just what they were thinking when they developed the standard. And finally there’s the Evercookie, which uses every trick in the book and is quite hard to remove. My favorite is how it encodes the cookie data as an image file, which is stored in the browser’s cache to be later read back and decoded.

Update: Ars Technica tells us that it’s technically possible to kill the Evercookie.

For those who value their online privacy, the linked article has tips on how to delete your online presence.

Link: http://www.wikihow.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

One of the things I dislike about Google Reader is that it takes up a lot of space with nonessential items. Until recently, I used the “minimalistic” skin in the Better GReader Firefox extension to make the most use of my screen space. But now Google has built in a similar feature. I’ve been using it for about a month or so, and the verdict’s still out on which version I prefer.

Link: http://googlereader.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Google recently unveiled a new feature for its search engine: search results are displayed as you type. The expectation that it will accurately predict what it is you’re typing and display the appropriate results well before you finish, thus saving two to five seconds per search. Here at Chad’s News, however, we must be typing too fast, because we find the rapidly changing screen text to be very annoying. This is one feature that got disabled immediately.

Note that this behavior is different than the old Google, where it displayed suggested search strings—you actually get the search results as you type.

Link: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Ars Technica)