Common Paradox Tech Blog

The Internet is a good thing, unless the Internet is a bad thing. For open societies, the Internet helps to establish and expand social networks, provide a free-flow of information, and engage in new found economic opportunities. For less open societies, these benefits are seen more as a negative than a positive. Says Reporters Without Borders, some 60 countries are having issues with an unfettered Internet, with China and Iran topping that list.

Reporters Without Borders are advocates of an uncensored Internet. According to its report for 2009 activity about twice as many countries are now practicing some form of Internet censorship than in 2008. An expected rouges gallery leads the list: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam. Reporters Without Borders say countries appear on their list because they repress or restrict Internet content, or because they harass or punish people who express themselves online. (China being the worst offender, with 72 people in jail for speaking too freely online.)

Besides the usual suspects, Reporters Without Borders has two democratic countries on a “watch list”: Australia, because of a proposed Internet filtering system, and South Korea, which has been instituting laws that restrict Internet users.

Image Credit: lancewebel/Flickr

Exactly 25 years ago, computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc, registered the first .com web domain ever: symbolics.com. By today’s design standards, and considering how websites looked back in the late ’80s and early ’90s, it’s quite decent, although a bit short on content.

However, its content and even the (now defunct) company that registered it are far less important than the boom it ignited: In 1997, one million .com web domains were registered, and in 2000 the .com bubble peaked, resulting in an inevitable meltdown.

And while the .com crash proved that a well-chosen name isn’t enough for a successful company, .coms still play a very important part of our online lives. Despite many other top-level domains available, .com is still the most coveted TLD — the one that many people still associate with the world wide web in general. Right now, about 668,000 .com sites are registered every month; quite a jump from the six web domains registered in 1985, don’t you think?

Tags: dotcom, internet, trending, web

suraj.sun tips a report up at CNet which begins:
“Browser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic but very important element of cloud computing. That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB. Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it’s won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today. ‘Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability,’ said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla. … Microsoft publicly endorsed Indexed DB on its IE blog: ‘Together with Mozilla, we’re excited about a new design for local storage called Indexed DB. We think this is a great solution for the Web,’ said program manager Adrian Bateman.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Though the last we heard, Google was nearing a compromise that would allow them to stop censoring their Google.cn results, the Financial Times is reporting that they are almost certainly going to close their Chinese search engine. Since their initial ultimatum in January, Google and China have traded vague statements about reaching a compromise, but, unsurprisingly, talks haven’t produced a mutually agreeable solution. [Financial Times] More »