JetLib News

sanermind writes “Sensing Senators don’t have the stomach to try and pass a stand-alone bill in broad daylight that would give the President the power to shut down the Internet in a national emergency, the Senate is considering attaching the Internet Kill Switch bill as a rider to other legislation that would have bi-partisan support.”

Source: Senate Trying To Slip Internet Kill Switch Past Us

Meshach writes “In Canada there has been a regulatory decision rendered by the CRTC ordering ISPs to provide the same speed to resellers as they do for their own customers. ‘Smaller internet providers such as Teksavvy and Execulink had argued that without requirements to offer matching speeds, the big companies would put them out of business. Bell and Telus are selling internet connections of up to 25 and 15 megabits per second respectively over newer fibre-based networks, but smaller providers can typically offer speeds of no more than five megabits per second over older copper-based infrastructure. After holding a public hearing earlier this year, the CRTC now says it will allow phone companies to charge smaller providers an extra 10-per-cent mark-up to use their newer infrastructure in order to recoup the costs of their investments. The regulator also said it would require cable companies to modify their existing internet access services to make it easier for smaller, “alternative” providers to connect to them.’”

Source: CTRC Orders Big ISPs To Provide Matching Speeds For Resellers

An anonymous reader writes “Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission’s Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking.”

Source: Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile

alphadogg writes with this excerpt from Network World about an experiment gone wrong which affected a big chunk of internet traffic yesterday morning: “It was kicked off when RIPE NCC (Reseaux IP Europeens Network Coordination Centre) and Duke ran an experiment that involved the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) — used by routers to know where to send their traffic on the Internet. RIPE started announcing BGP routes that were configured a little differently from normal because they used an experimental data format. RIPE’s data was soon passed from router to router on the Internet, and within minutes it became clear that this was causing problems. … [f]or a brief period Friday morning, about 1 percent of all the Internet’s traffic was affected by the snafu, as routers could not properly process the BGP routes they were being sent.”

Source: Duke Research Experiment Disrupts Internet Traffic

Ant writes “BBC News reports on how the internet is changing language. What was once understandable only to the tech savvy has become common. From the article: ‘To Google’ has become a universally understood verb and many countries are developing their own internet slang. But is the web changing language and is everyone up to speed?’”

Source: How the Internet Is Changing Language

alphadogg writes “Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.”

Source: Five Billionth Device About To Plug Into Internet

An anonymous reader writes “Software giant Microsoft’s internet explorer turned 15 years on Monday. The company recently said it would launch the internet explorer 9 public beta version on September 15, 2010. The software giant launched the first version of the browser internet explorer 1 on August 16, 1995. It was a revised version of Spyglass Mosaic, which Microsoft had licensed from Spyglass Inc.”

Source: Internet Explorer Turns 15

paxcoder writes “You have been informed about Diaspora, a (to-be) distributed free social network. What you may not have known is that it was inspired by an excellent talk by Eben Moglen called ‘Freedom in the Cloud.’ But it doesn’t stop there. At Debconf 10 this month, Moglen went further, and shared his vision of a free, private, and secure Net architecture relying on (‘for lack of a better term’) freedom boxes — low-price, ultra-small, plug it into the wall personal servers. He believes they will catch on since they will eventually cost less than a router, provide more functionality and freedom to the user, and even help your friends bypass any censorship by encrypting and routing their traffic. Since hardware is being taken care of, we are called to assemble the software stack. The title of this sequel talk is How we can be the Silver Lining of the Cloud.”

Source: Eben Moglen Calls To Free the Cloud

eldavojohn writes “Last week, a game consultant named David J Edery gave his two cents on why free-to-play (F2P) game models aren’t as prolific in the West as they seem to be in the East. Aside from a few unprovable cultural divides, he makes some interesting claims concerning conversion rates of non-paying players to paying players. Some customers pay hundreds for functional items and only a dollar on aesthetic items while other users might be the complete opposite. He also notes that converting a non-paying newbie into a paying customer is not the same as converting a non-paying salty dog. He defines ‘aggressive monetization’ to mean how much money will advance you ‘unfairly’ in the game. He focuses on two classes of items: those that provide performance-neutral aesthetics and those that provide performance enhancing or functional advancements. He claims to have access to ARPPU (‘average revenue per paying user’ per month) rates among several game developers and states that ‘more aggressive monetization model and a loyal, niche userbase can hope to generate $50 per paying user per month, on average,’ while ‘a F2P game that limits itself to flat subscription revenue and/or non-functional items is generally more likely to fall somewhere between $5 and $10 per paying user per month.’ Like any good consultant, he also gives ethics a footnote in an otherwise verbose post on monetizing free to play games. Has anyone here had experience pricing items and content in free-to-play games?”

Source: Monetizing Free-To-Play Gaming Models

An anonymous reader writes “Life is about to become more difficult for countries trying to censor access to foreign websites. A system dubbed Collage will allow users in these countries to download stories from blocked sites while visiting seemingly uncontroversial sites such as Flickr.” For visual learners: this earlier story at GigaOM explains the system with a diagram.

Source: Getting Around Web Censors With Flickr