Internet topics
Gopher still lives
Unless you were using the Internet before the World Wide Web came along, you probably never heard of the Gopher protocol or the search facilities called Archie and Veronica. I didn’t realize that Gopher still lived until I saw an Ars Technica post, The Web may have won, but Gopher tunnels on. It brought me [...]
Google developing new protocol to speed up the Web
I have often thought that it is quite remarkable how well the methods have held up that were instituted at the beginning of the Web. Here we are, years later, and we are still basically using the initial designs.
However, the enormous increase in Internet traffic means that some of the old methods need updating. [...]
Is the Internet killing story telling?
Writing at the the Times (UK), Ben Macintyre bemoans the effect of the Internet’s communication methods on our attention span and our ability to concentrate. He says that the constant flow of small snippets of information is changing our capacity to stick with anything for long and that narratives are disappearing in an online blizzard [...]
Google in favor of different password scheme
Having a multitude of passwords for all our different Web activities is a hassle and many people go the unsafe route of one or two passwords for everything. Google is advocating a method it calls “hybrid onboarding”:
Does anyone actually like passwords? Most people can’t stand them because they end up having to keep track of [...]
More bad news on infected sites
The number of Web sites hosting dangerous links and scripts keeps growing. ZDNet reports:
More than 640,000 websites and about 5.8 million pages are infected with malware, according to Dasient, which was founded by former Googlers to offer services to help websites stay malware-free and off blacklists.
RIP GeoCities
I have never understood the management of Yahoo. It seems to be a company that is less than the sum of its parts. It has always had a collection of nice Web features and applications but they never seem to get connected to one another. And Yahoo never seems to do much to develop their [...]
Internet language change
Showing its roots in America and Western Europe, the Internet still has an address system based on a Latin alphabet. As the Internet has become truly world wide, a need for the ability to have addresses in other language forms has developed and ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has proposed that [...]
The Internet makes you smarter?
There are many who cry that the Internet is dumbing us all down. Now comes a study that says the contrary, at least for an older age group. Actually, it is not the content of the Internet but the intellectual activity of searching on the Internet that is supposed to sharpen us up:
Could it be [...]
The first real browser
The Web is so much a part of our lives today that it is hard to remember that not long ago we managed without it. One thing that was instrumental in the development of the Web was the Netscape browser. It was just 15 years ago that this first example of a popular browser was [...]
How to tell if an Internet address is a phish
Did you ever wonder what the different parts of an Internet address or URL actually signified? Some years ago I wrote an article over at my education site that explained what each of the various pieces of an URL meant. I also mentioned how rarely used portions of a standard URL could be used to [...]
How a browser works
Having established that the general public knows little or less about browsers, Google seems to have decided that the only way that it can get average people to try the Chrome browser is to give a very basic explanation of browsers. Readers of this blog won’t need it but this video might help someone you [...]