Streaming takes over internet

The Sandvine report on the first half of 2013 reports 40% of the fixed access downstream traffic entertainment streaming. YouTube accounts for half of this traffic.

In the US, entertainment already takes up 70% of fixed downstream traffic. Here, half of the entertainment downstream traffic is NetFlix, while YouTube accounts for another 25% of entertainment traffic.

1st Web Site

Here's the original CERN website (11/1992).

PROTECT IP: new US website blocking bill

The PROTECT IP act, a new US law proposal, will greatly extend last year's COICA internet censorship proposal:

• PROTECT IP is targeted at infringement of rights, so it is targeted at distribution of copyrighted material and counterfeited articles.
• As such there does not seem to be a problem with that, but it remains to be seen how easily this can be stretched. It might be sufficient to find one non compliant item on a site to take action against the entire site. In the past single clips have caused actions against the entire YouTube site.
• PROTECT IP will no longer try to seize domain names, instead it will target intermediate, servicing sites.
• This makes it easier to target sites outside the US.
• Plaintiffs can by simple court order, take direct against revenue sources for these sites (payment clearing and advertisers).
• The site does not have to be notified to be able to defend itself.
• The site is notified when action is taken against them starts, if they have an address in the US.
• There is a procedure to fight the order afterwards.
• If plaintiff completes a procedure at the Department Of Justice that declares that a site is infringing rights, it can also order the site to be removed from search engine results and ISP hosting.
• This is a tactic that is copied from the Great Chinese Firewall.
• PROTECT IP encourages intermediate sites to do self censorship. If Google or Visa stop doing business with a site because they think it is not kosher, they are protected by law
• We have seen such actions by payment providers against WikiLeaks, without any legal order to do so.
• Arbitrary business boycotts will now be legal.
  

Full text and petition against the act.

Internet map

Google scribe

This is the ultimate blog entry: Written by the tool on topic. Put Scribe in your toolbar and it will autocomplete web forms.
Superb toy, at first glance it seems a bit too eager though, when positioned in the middle of a sentence, it tends to add stuff without asking.

Stopkinderporno.com blocked

Because kinderporno.com published information that is a violation of privacy regulations, the Belgian department of justice ordered the site to be blocked by Belgian providers.
Internet had the promise of guaranteeing free speech.
Governments that do not allow free speech (China, Iran...) selectively block access to internet sites abroad.
A site is blocked now for a reason on which a majority agrees (74% on an objective site like destandaard.be).
But this is a dangerous precedent for blocking free speech whenever the law(yers) feel like it.
They should fight the sites themselves with legal means, instead of breaking internet communication. Even if that battle is hard.

hiking sites

About a year ago a coleague at Uniway told me about geocaching.
Geocaching is a game, where you have to find hidden objects (caches) based on GPS coordinates and hints.
A great way to have an entertaining and beautiful walk in an area you don't know.
With our friends we did a cache related to the flooding of the Yzer estuary in World War I.

This weekend I stumbled upon routeyou, another nice walking site. They have got plenty of descriptions of hikes and bike trips. Here's an example walk.

web whiteboard

Dabbleboard is an intuitive flash alternative if you do not have a whiteboard or when you're teleconferencing.
It is transforming your mousedrawings to basic shapes, supports shape libraries and saving and interactively sharing your drawings.

Google Chrome Gears

Nice take on the Google Chrome browser by The Register:
Chrome is just a trojan to push the Google Gears browser plugin to the desktop.
Gears is a platform to build featurefull, fast applications, running in separate threads (exactly the Chrome features). The applications have access to a local database and can also run offline.

Google chrome

Google recently launched its own web browser: Chrome.
At first sight this is a frontal attack on Firefox and resembles Micorsoft's monopolistic behaviour.
The browser has a minimalistic non-spectacular look. Most important features seems to be speedy javascript and multithreading.
I hope this browser acts as a lab for things that can mature into Firefox, much like the hotjava browser did.
To be watched with caution.

Browser plugins most popular point of attack

We could have expected it. According to a recent ISS (IBM now) X-Force study, all these nifty browser plugins, have become the biggest point of attack for hackers.
The major source of vulnerabilities is the browser:

And the most important source of vulnerabilities within the browser are plugins:

Surprisingly only exploits for internet exploder active-X plugins have been reported, while I thought the firefox plugins were the most popular.
Maybe their vulnerabilities don't get reported because most are small projects run by individual freeware contributors? There is a list with officially recommended add-ons, but these recommendations are probably more related to stability than to security.
Maybe they don't count extension exploits?

Favourite Firefox extensions

Nicest thing about firefox these days are its extensions.
Internet explorer is also jumping on the bandwagon but somehow this seems to pollute the field with all kinds of nagware.
Anyway, here are some of my favourites

• Adblock

Filter out ads to make you pages lighter and more zen. And you can subscribe to filter sets, filtering out the common ones (I got one for belgian/dutch sites).

• IE tab

Lets you render firefox tabs using internet explorer (on windows), so you can browse pages that don't follow standards (e.g. Sharepoint)

• printpdf

Convert a web page to a pdf. Usefull if you want to send a html report page or such to someone.

• search buttons
• SearchWP: Convert search words in the search box into buttons that let you immediatly search in the web page you found. Great, with a drawback: you have to take care to click next to the buttons when you want to modify the searchbox.
• Searchbox Sync: Update your search box (left top) with search terms entered on search engine pages like google etc. By the same author as SearchWP and a great match.

• mousegestures.

No need to move to the menu's or keyboard anymore,
use the mouse to command your browser.


This one takes you forward in your browsing history. Press right mouse button, move left. As you see it highlights the command you draw.




This one does the same, but only by clicking. Keep left button pressed and press right. Obviously right button, then left takes you back



There's a standard set of actions and you can import your preferred actions from sets made by enthousiasts (plugins of the plugin), or add your own. I added this one from the gesture exchange site:



This mod opens my current page in a new tab. Handy when you want to "branch off" while browsing and still keep the main flow available.