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Preview Pane, which is now available in Gmail Labs, allows users to simultaneously preview parts of an email while reading or replying to others. Users of Gmail for iPad or Android will instantly recognize the interface — its design is directly inspired by the email service’s mobile web apps.

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Mozilla delivered two things today: Firefox 5 for personal computers and Android phones, and the promise to deliver the browser just a few months after its predecessor.

The organization, once the leading challenger to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, faces new challenges--notably Google's Chrome, new versions of which arrive every 6 weeks. Adopting a similar philosophy, Firefox now revs on a three-month cycle, and today Mozilla met its first deadline.

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The company plans to announce tomorrow that it's expanding its Xfinity Home Security service. Last year the company began testing the service in Houston. Now it's adding six more cities. Additional cities that will get the new service include parts of Philadelphia; Portland, Ore.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Sarasota/Naples, Fla.; Chattanooga, Tenn.; and Nashville.

The Xfinity Home Security service offers traditional home security features, such as police and fire alarm protection with 24-hour monitoring. It also offers some home automation functions, such as the ability to adjust thermostats and lights remotely. And when people are not home, they can also watch live video streams from wireless cameras that are positioned in and around their home.

The technology behind the system is slightly different from traditional home security systems from companies, such as ADT. The Comcast Xfinity Home Security system works over a broadband connection rather than a phone connection. And as a result it's able to offer the video service and remote management. The company uses cellular networks as a back up to the broadband connectivity to ensure uptime.

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When it comes to love, timing is everything. The same holds for sex, too. So the Breakup Notifier's eagle eyes and instant digits could help you ensnare the love of your life. Or at least your week.

Yes, it does feel a little like stalking. But in a good way. You don't want to miss your chance. Surely, all is fair in love and war. And, when it comes to love, it's always a war.

According to the New York Daily News, Loewenhertz created the app after he eavesdropped on a chat between his fiancee and her mother.

This is not always a wise thing to do. However, in this case, it was his fiancee's sister who needed a date, and, like fine members of the family, mother and sister wondered who might be available to fill that void.

Loewenhertz asked, jokingly of course, whether she'd like to know when he might become available. And one of the world's great ideas was born.

At the moment, the app is free. But it surely won't be for long. With love, you always have to pay.

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Likely by the end of 2011, the W3C will issue a second last-call version and begin a second round of refinements.

In the second quarter of 2012, a new phase begins, in which "implementors" of the specification--browser makers, essentially--provide feedback. During this phase, the W3C concentrates on a suite of thousands of tests to see if implementations of HTML5 really do get the same results when interpreting a Web page's code.

The culmination of this phase is a "candidate recommendation" of the HTML5 spec and at least two "interoperable implementations"--in other words, two different browsers that produce the same results on the test cases. The implementors' feedback is scheduled for completion by the first quarter of 2014.

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It's hard to predict how long it will be before these eventual customers of IPv4 addresses will be unable to get them easily.

"The rate of further regional assignment will depend on regional demand, which is accelerating faster in some parts of the world (Asia/Pacific) than others (Africa)," said Alain Durand, director of software engineering at network equipment maker Juniper Networks. "Some service providers may exhaust their IPv4 addresses within 3 to 6 months, while others will exhaust them perhaps over a longer period, depending on the rate at which they are allocated."

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The revised version includes new language saying that the federal government's designation of vital Internet or other computer systems "shall not be subject to judicial review." Another addition expanded the definition of critical infrastructure to include "provider of information technology," and a third authorized the submission of "classified" reports on security vulnerabilities. ...

Lieberman, who recently announced he would not seek re-election in 2012, said last year that enactment of his bill needed to be a top congressional priority. "For all of its 'user-friendly' allure, the Internet can also be a dangerous place with electronic pipelines that run directly into everything from our personal bank accounts to key infrastructure to government and industrial secrets," he said.

Civil libertarians and some industry representatives have repeatedly raised concerns about the various proposals to give the executive branch such broad emergency power. On the other hand, as Lieberman and Collins have highlighted before, some companies, including Microsoft, Verizon, and EMC Corporation, have said positive things about the initial version of the bill.

But last month's rewrite that bans courts from reviewing executive branch decrees has given companies new reason to worry. "Judicial review is our main concern," said Steve DelBianco, director of the NetChoice coalition, which includes eBay, Oracle, Verisign, and Yahoo as members. "A designation of critical information infrastructure brings with it huge obligations for upgrades and compliance."

In some cases, DelBianco said, a company may have a "good-faith disagreement" with the government's ruling and would want to seek court review. "The country we're seeking to protect is a country that respects the right of any individual to have their day in court," he said. "Yet this bill would deny that day in court to the owner of infrastructure."

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Here's how it works. Simply take any Starbucks gift card you've ever received - or get a new one at any Starbucks store - and then register that card online. That card then becomes your primary source of payment for all your Starbucks transactions. Online, you can use a credit card to refill your Starbucks card. You can even have it set to auto-refill after it dips below a certain amount. Then, download the Starbucks iPhone app. When you go to your neighborhood Starbucks, simply load the app, click "touch to pay," and then scan the phone at a custom scanner at the register. The purchase will be deducted from your Starbucks gift card.

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Facebook has raised 500 million euros from US investment bank Goldman Sachs and a Russian investor that values the popular social networking site at 50 billion dollars, the New York Times reported on Monday.

The investment puts the value of Facebook at higher than fellow Internet companies eBay and Yahoo!, as well as media company Time Warner, the newspaper said citing sources familiar with the deal.

The funds will give Facebook added resources to develop new resources, make acquisitions and lure away top employees as it increasingly competes more directly with Internet search giant Google.

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Geneva, 19 October 2010 — ITU’s latest statistics published today in The World in 2010: ICT facts and figures reveal that the number of Internet users worldwide doubled in the past five years and will surpass the two billion mark in 2010. The number of people having access to the Internet at home has increased from 1.4 billion in 2009 to almost 1.6 billion in 2010. The new data were released on the eve of World Statistics Day, which will be celebrated worldwide on 20 October 2010.

162 million of the 226 million new Internet users in 2010 will be from developing countries, where Internet users grow at a higher rate. By the end of 2010, 71% of the population in developed countries will be online compared to 21% of the population in developing countries. While in developed countries 65% of people have access to the Internet at home, this is the case for only 13.5% of people in developing countries where Internet access in schools, at work and public locations is critical. Regional differences are significant: 65% of Europeans are on the Internet, compared to only 9.6% of Africans.

With the rapidly increasing high-bandwidth content and applications on the Internet, there is a growing demand for higher-speed broadband connections.

ITU considers broadband as a catalyst for growth. Recently, ITU and UNESCO launched the Broadband Commission for Digital Development that aims to promote the adoption of broadband-friendly practices and policies worldwide. ITU Secretary-General Hamadoun Touré says, “Broadband is the next tipping point, the next truly transformational technology. It can generate jobs, drive growth and productivity, and underpin long-term economic competitiveness. It is also the most powerful tool that we have at our disposal in our race to meet the Millennium Development Goals, the deadline for which is now just five years away.”

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“We are writing this letter to inform you that a very targeted malicious attack took place on our network this morning at 6AM EST. As a result, most of our server operating systems have been corrupted resulting in the current downtime,” the company wrote to the affected customers a few hours ago.

“We have access to all backups and have already figured out a strategy for bringing your servers back up, and have all hands on deck working to restore service,” Reality Check Network President Moisey Uretsky added.

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“It was the result of an ex-employee who was with us for three years as a result he had intimate knowledge of our systems which is why the effects are so large,” Uretsky wrote.

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Earlier this morning rumor had it that Best Buy was getting—and selling—the new Sony Internet TVs as early as today. An anonymous tipster sent us some pics confirming that this could indeed be the case.

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As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

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Under the new arrangement, "hundreds" of "Saturday Night Live" episodes from the past 35 years, as well as "day-after broadcast" of the show's next three seasons, will be available on Netflix Instant Streaming. NBC is also offering every previous-season episode of "30 Rock," "The Office," and "Law & Order: SVU." Earlier seasons of those shows already on Netflix will still be available. All episodes of the venerable SyFy series "Battlestar Galactica" will also be available on the service. NBC Universal and Netflix said that "Monk" and "Friday Night Lights," among many other shows, will also be included in the expanded relationship between the companies.

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In the physical world, I associate the dynamics of a natural ecosystem with two important concepts: first, the presence of some set of biological laws such as natural selection, that second, leads to a balance or equilibrium state so that even when there is a disturbance these natural operations and laws bring the ecosystem back to a equilibrium state (maybe different than before, but an equilibrium).

Applying this concept to the online ecosystem could lead us to accept the idea that the Internet is self-regulating and there is some natural order that will always emerge no matter how the system may be disturbed. From this concept some argue that policymakers should just leave the Internet alone.

In fact, "leaving the Internet alone" has been the nation’s Internet policy since the Internet was first commercialized in the mid-1990s. The primary government imperative then was just to get out of the way to encourage its growth. And the policy set forth in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was: "to preserve the vibrant and competitive free market that presently exists for the Internet and other interactive computer services, unfettered by Federal or State regulation."

This was the right policy for the United States in the early stages of the Internet, and the right message to send to the rest of the world. But that was then and this is now.

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• If users do not trust that their credit card numbers and private information are safe on the Internet, they won’t use it.
• If content providers do not trust that their content will be protected, they will threaten to stop putting it online.
• If large enterprises don’t have confidence that their network will not be breached over the Internet, they will disconnect their network and limit access to business partners and customers.
• If foreign governments do not trust the Internet governance systems, they will threaten to balkanize the Domain Name System which will jeopardize the worldwide reach of the Internet.

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• Privacy policy. Here’s the question: How can we enable the development of innovative new services and applications that will make intensive use of personal information but at same time protect users against harm and unwanted intrusion into their privacy? We are launching a series of listening sessions this spring with industry, advocates and academics in the field, and will follow up with a notice of inquiry and public outreach events.
• Child protection and Freedom of Expression: As more children go online, how do we ensure proper targeting of law enforcement resources against serious crime while remembering that most important line of defense against harmful content is the well- informed and engaged parent or teacher? Later this year, the Online Safety Technology Working Group, created by Congress and convened by NTIA, will issue a report on the state of the art in child protection strategies online.
• Cybersecurity: How do we meet the security challenge posed by the global Internet which will require increased law enforcement and private sector technology innovation yet respect citizen privacy and protect civil liberties. We’re participating in a Commerce Department cybersecurity initiative that will address these issues, particularly as they relate to improving the preparedness of industry for cyber attacks.
• Copyright protection: How do we protect against illegal piracy of copyrighted works and intellectual property on the Internet while preserving the rights of users to access lawful content? NTIA and our sister agency at the Department of Commerce, the US Patent and Trademark Office, are beginning a comprehensive consultation process that will help the Administration develop a forward-looking set of policies to address online copyright infringement in a balanced, Internet-savvy manner.
• Internet Governance: In our role administering the Federal government’s relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), how do we ensure that ICANN serves the public interest and conducts its activities with the openness and transparency that the global Internet community demands? Last fall, NTIA and ICANN set forth a framework for technical coordination of the naming and numbering system and I am looking forward to soon participating in the first of the administrative reviews to ensure that these commitments are carried out in full.

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Sixty five percent of adults feel they cannot live without Internet access, and even more - 71 percent - responded that it is important or very important to have Internet-enabled devices that can provide them with real-time updates on important issues including the state of the economy.

When asked to rate certain discretionary items on a scale of 1 (completely expendable) to 5 (cannot live without it), having Internet access ranks highest among the items listed, with 65 percent of U.S. adults reporting they cannot live without it. The following items and activities were ranked below Internet access in importance: cable television subscriptions (39 percent); dining out (20 percent); shopping for clothes (18 percent); and, gym membership (10 percent).

This confirmed what I personally believed to be true - that the Internet is essential, maybe even indispensible, especially during the current economic situation we're facing. But what really surprised me here was just how essential the Internet has become. More than half ranked the Internet as completely expendable over things like cable TV, dining out and even gym memberships! If asked, I suppose I'd also make the same choices.

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As part of the upgrade, all Fios customers will now have access to download speeds of 50 megabits per second and uploads of 20 Mbps for about $140 a month. The company is also offering its symmetrical 20 Mbps download and 20 Mbps upload service to all Fios customers for $65 a month.

Verizon had already been offering these speeds in certain markets such as Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York. But now the service will be expanded to Verizon's entire Fios customer base, which is spread throughout its 16-state territory. Previously Fios in these states, such as Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia, topped out at 30Mbps/15Mbps and 15Mbps/15Mbps.

Verizon will also upgrade its mid tier offering increasing speeds from 15Mbps/2Mbps to 20Mbps/5Mbps. And the low end service will increase from 5Mbps/2Mbps to 10Mbps/2Mbps.

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Lawmakers are seeking to address cyberbullying with new legislation because there's currently no specific law on the books that deals with it. A fairly new federal cyberstalking law might address such acts, according to Aftab, but no one has been prosecuted under it yet. The proposed federal law would make it illegal to use electronic means to "coerce, intimidate, harass or cause other substantial emotional distress."

When signed, the Missouri state law will update existing regulations on harassment and stalking to include instances of those acts over the Internet, text message, or other electronic device. It will make cyberbullying punishable by up to four years in jail.

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The size of the average web page has more than tripled since 2003. From 2003 to 2008 the average web page grew from 93.7K to over 312K (see Figure 1), some 233% (Domenech et al. 2007, Flinn & Betcher 2008). During the same five-year period, the number of objects in the average web page nearly doubled from 25.7 to 49.9 objects per page. Longer term statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has increased by 22 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by 21.7 times.

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Recently, it has been observed that Comcast is disrupting TCP connections using forged TCP reset (RST) packets [1]. These reset packets were originally targeted at TCP connections associated with the BitTorrent file-sharing protocol. However, Comcast has stated that they are transitioning to a more "protocol neutral" traffic shaping approach [2]. We have recently observed this shift in policy, and have collected network traffic traces to demonstrate the behavior of their traffic shaping. In particular, we are able (during peak usage times) to synthetically generate a relatively large number of TCP reset packets aimed at any new TCP connection regardless of the application-level protocol. Surprisingly, this traffic shaping even disrupts normal web browsing and e-mail applications. Specifically, we observe two different types of packet forgery and packets being discarded.

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Bruce Tonkin recused himself from the discussion and dropped off the call during the discussion of items 5 & 6 due to potential conflict of interest. Kurt Pritz indicated that tasting is a practice that has grown over the years and that many recent discussions and writings demonstrate that the Board is already well versed on the related issues. Kurt indicated that ICANN has collected some information that a few parties have taken the practice to its logical conclusion, and operate exclusively on this model - deleting as much as 95.5% of names registered within the five-day grace period. Others exercise degrees of restraint. There are a spread percentage of names deleted in the grace period across all registrars that ranges from 0% to 99.5%. ICANN has had many discussions and consultations on this issue. It was proposed that ICANN charged a transaction fee on add-grace deletes in the 2004-2005 budget but there was substantial criticism that such a fee would be de-facto policy making by ICANN staff. Recently the GNSO voted to recommend that staff take action to change its transaction fee to change in for tasting deletes. If ICANN changed transaction fee in this manner, most think practice would cease. The vote represents Supporting Organization policy support for alternative budget.

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A surge of e-commerce traffic on Thanksgiving night and all day Friday apparently caught several retail giants by surprise, with Lowe's, Macy's and Victoria's Secret especially hard hit. But they were far from the exception, as almost a third of leading retailers suffered significant slowdowns on Black Friday, according to statistics released this weekend by Keynote Competitive Research, a firm that tracks Web site performance.

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But the truth is that blanketing cities with Wi-Fi signals is not inherently a bad idea. Even though some projects have stalled or failed outright, there have also been several success stories. Cities such as Minneapolis, Minn.; Houston, Texas; Burbank, Calif.; and Tucson, Ariz., are moving forward and seeing early signs of success.

One of the common threads weaved through each of these deployments is that all of these cities have committed to using the Wi-Fi networks for their own purposes whether it be to provide remote access for mobile city workers, automate meter reading, control traffic congestion or enhance public safety.

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Mr. Roberts isn't the only networking pioneer dissatisfied with earlier achievements. Len Bosack, the 55-year-old co-founder and former chief technology officer of networking giant Cisco Systems Inc., helped commercialize routers, the core piece of networking equipment that allows computers to communicate with one another. Yet he now terms such gear "less and less adequate" for today's Internet needs. Last month, his company, XKL LLC, unveiled a system that allows businesses to connect to underground cables that have nearly 100 times the capacity of current telecommunications pipes. The actions of Messrs. Bosack and Roberts fuel the growing debate over whether the Internet's current infrastructure is sufficient to handle the explosion of bandwidth-hungry services such as Internet telephony and video. In a recent report, Cisco calculated that monthly Internet traffic in North America will increase 264% by 2011 to more than 7.8 million terabytes, or the equivalent of 40 trillion email messages. If such Internet traffic continues increasing, many believe networks could crash or at least slow to a crawl.

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The software maker is announcing Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing--but not editing--Office documents online. (It's existing Office Live efforts will be rebranded as Office Live Small Business.) It's not quite ready--starting Monday customers will be able to put in their name to be part of a beta testing program expected to begin later this year. Still, the effort is a recognition that competition is heating up in the productivity arena, an area that large rivals had basically ceded to Microsoft a few years ago. In addition to Google's effort, which as of earlier this month also includes presentation software, IBM announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability.