Internet

Washington Post wrote: TEHRAN — Whenever an Iranian blogger, connects to the Internet from his office, they switches on a special connection that for years would bypass the Islamic republic’s increasingly effective firewall. But recently the software, which allowed them to go online through portals elsewhere in the world, stopped working. When it sporadically returns, speeds are so excruciatingly slow that sites such as Facebook become unusable. [SNIP] Many fear that the disabling of the software used to bypass the state-run firewall heralds the coming of what authorities have labeled the National Internet. The government’s technology officials have announced the construction of a domestic Internet network comparable to an office intranet, which would block many popular sites. They have hinted the National Internet can be launched at any time, and have said it will gradually start working over the coming three years. ...

Protect the Internet Help us stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation Mozilla: On November 16th, Congress holds hearings on the first American Internet censorship system. This bill can pass. If it does, the Internet and free speech will never be the same. Join us to stop this bill. Why? A few infringing links are enough to justify censoring an entire site, blocking good content along with the bad. ...

Mashable: The porn industry is rumored to win a major battle this week with the possible approval of the .xxx domain. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which doles out the .com, .net and .biz suffixes for website URLs, could approve the domain name on Friday, according to Politico. The report goes on to say that such domains would be available for purchase this summer. ...

Last quarter was the first time ever that US pay-for TV subscription rates declined, and in Q3 2010, cable lost over 518,300 subscribers in total, according to GigaOm. Four of the five biggest cable companies lost customers: Comcast had more than half of the losses at 275,000, Time Warner took a 155,000 subscriber hit, Charter Communications lost 63,800, and Cablevision waved goodbye to 24,500 customers. The third largest cable provider, Cox Communications, is privately held and therefore doesn’t have to announce its subscriber numbers publicly. The number is thus likely even bigger if we could include Cox plus all the smaller cable companies. ...

Browser Total Market Share Microsoft Internet Explorer 59.26% Firefox 22.82% Chrome 8.47% Safari 5.33% Opera 2.28% Opera Mini 0.95% Netscape 0.63% Konqueror 0.06% Flock 0.05% ACCESS NetFront 0.05% Playstation 0.03% Mozilla 0.03% Obigo 0.01% Danger Web Browser 0.00% Microsoft Pocket Internet Explorer 0.00% Blazer 0.00% WebTV 0.00% BlackBerry 0.00% ANT Galio 0.00% Lotus Notes 0.00% iCab 0.00% MaxThon 0.00%

Nepali mobile network operator Ncell has installed the first 3G base station at the summit of Mount Everest, giving visitors, climbers and people living in the Khumbu Valley the ability to make calls and wirelessly connect to the Internet. To test out the new facility, Ncell also made the world’s highest video call at 17,388 feet. So far, visitors of Mount Everest had to depend on satellite phones to make calls, but now they can do so through a standard GSM, 3G-enabled network. “The coverage of the network will reach up to the peak of the Everest,” Ncell Nepal chief Pasi Koistinen said to reporters in Kathmandu on Thursday. ...

The Internet is growing fast, but Google is growing even faster. According to online security company Arbor Networks, Google now represents an average 6.4% of all Internet traffic. This is a new record for Google, as it gained more than 1% of all Internet traffic share since January. Now, only one global ISP handles more traffic, and a lot of that traffic is – unsurprisingly – Google’s traffic. ...

Paul Mah, on the ITBusiness Edge blog, reported on GFI’s September survey of web filtering practices in small and medium businesses and got some interesting feedback from readers. Web filtering is put in place primarily to improve network security, but another big reason is to stop the loss of productivity, he said. Employees however can be offended by the implied lack of trust. One of Mah’s readers said he dutifully “practices self-censorship to enhance personal productivity.” Another, however, asked: “What makes you think your employees are productive now? A slacker will always find a way to slack around.” ...

If the internet is feeling a little more crowded these days, there’s good reason. According to a report out Tuesday, there will be 2 billion Web dwellers by the end of this year. The number of internet users worldwide has doubled in the past five years according to the report, from the International Telecommunication Union. Much of the big number can be attributed to internet growth in developing countries. The report said 162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will live in those countries, where Web access is still growing. ...