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Happy birthday Firefox

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One year later, Firefox turns into a baby with 11.51% market share.

Update: these guys are serious about changing from IE to Firefox

Network neutrality II

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The discussion continues, and it reached the Committee on Energy and Commerce in the US.

I'm really interested in this issue, since I work in an ISP, being a free Internet advocate, so you can imagine the duality I'm feeling these days.

Shaw Cable, a Canadian company, is limiting P2P bandwidth using technology from Ellacoya, so we can now say it already started. The technology is out there, and telcos are ready to start using it in large scale. This is a very important question, that goes from freedom to innovation, trough economics and technology.

I understand the economics of launching a broadband network, but I also understand (and agree) with Vint Cerf words. I'm waiting, and listening to the live hearing webcast.

Update: this issue has been digged

Security toons

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8 years ago I gave my first presentation on network security. It's a hard topic, and the worst parts were explaining how cryptography works, and explaining software bugs as the buffer overflow or a race condition. Meanwhile, Wired as made an amazing job explaining the formers with an animation. You don't get the cryptography how to (guess prime numbers theory is really hard to draw) but instead you can have a glance at some moments of really bad software.

Update: NSA's site for CryptoKids.

Feed fishing

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Due to the lack of time, today's menu is about grilled feeds:

  • Microsoft keeps surprising, and is offering Visual Studio and SQL Server. It's free, even for comercial usage, but it's only a Express Edition;
  • An excelent how-to implement your own helpdesk company, using UltraVNC and some webservices. Requires heavy geekary;
  • Joined the Morfik Pioneers program. A very interesting application that will allow building web applications (AJAX) with a graphical user interface;
  • Finnaly, follow-me phoning, or how to implement bluetooth proximity detection with Asterisk.

The future is sooner than we expected

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Three news worth notice:

  • The newest player to arrive at the webOS arena is Microsoft. The old giant unveiled is web strategy, launching is Live program: a personalizable website, with a lot of Ajax and a cool concept, Windows Gadgets; a new webmail application, which mimics Outlook in a browser (have to see this working); a new messenger, with VoIP integrated and ability to call for any fixed line in world; and Office Live, which is not an online version of Office, but a set of free, ad supported, productivity business tools;
  • Sun announces services to convert Microsoft Office docs to Open Office compatible format. There is nothing special with this announcement, Sun is following the OpenOffice path. The thing is, this is a service to be offer by Sun Grid Utility, which is Sun's vision of the future, "the network is the computer". Or in other words, applications will be web based, all you need on your side is a browser and a web server running in our PC for local access to information, as stated by Jason Kottke;
  • Google has filed a patent to serve search results based on user profiles. That means that Google will start to work on all the information they have about us, like what are we searching for, what are the websites we visit most, and what are our social networks. It's a good idea to have Google showing me the links I care most, but this arise a lot of privacy concerns. For a peek on where this could lead us, watch epic.