The Most Important Internet News of 2008
There have been several major internet-related news articles that have taken the world by storm yet seem fairly unknown to most. What is the biggest issue at hand, and what that threatens to destroy everything we have come to love? It’s net neutrality and its very damn serious…
iPower seems to be believe that the internet (as we know it today) will be destroyed before the year 2012, when ISPs will control content distribution:
Bell Canada and TELUS (formerly owned by Verizon) employees officially confirm that by 2012 ISP’s all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit.
Another item of particular importance is the news from iCANN, where the Inquisitr mentions rumours regarding the fact that the TLDs )Top Level Domains) will soon be open to registration from anyone with a business model or the rights to the name:
The Internet’s regulating organization has just approved a proposal to create an unlimited number of customized top-level domains. That means URLs will no longer be restricted to .com, .net, or .us-style suffixes; instead, anyone can apply to have any letter combination become a reality.
Snagging a new name won’t be a simple procedure, however: ICANN will first require proof of a “business plan and technical capacity,” meaning you have to have thousands of dollars of server and router-type equipment to get through. A thorough review process will then make sure the suffix is not offensive and does not infringe on anyone’s intellectual property.
The change will go into effect next year, with registration opening in April and the first new names going live toward the end of the year. Once approved, nearly anything could be possible — .microsoft, .mcdonalds, .tech — you name it.
The BBC later confirmed these (and other) rumours:
The net’s regulator, Icann, voted unanimously to relax the strict rules on so-called “top-level” domain names, such as .com or .uk.
The decision means that companies could turn brands into web addresses, while individuals could use their names.
A second proposal, to introduce domain names written in Asian, Arabic or other scripts, was also approved.
If these facts were not worrying enough, Read / Write Web reports on another up-coming mass-pc-crash:
In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the “2038 bug,” arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.
And in following on from the articles where we discussed the arrest of bloggers, Profy has been keeping track of things, and now reports a total of over 64 global arrests that they know about:
The BBC has an interesting article today based on a report out of the University of Washington. The report notes that 64 people have been arrested since 2003 due to blogging activities, which doesn’t sound like a very large number, does it? However, three times as many people were arrested last year than were in 2006, which may imply that blogger arrests are on the rise.
The report indicates that the majority of blogger arrests take place in Egypt, China, and Iran, but they certainly don’t have a monopoly on official repercussions for using blogs and other forms of social media as a form of expression and protest; just a week and a half ago, the Moldovan government seized the computers of 12 “young people” who posted criticism of the ruling party of the Republic of Moldova online.
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