While reading an interesting post, I can across a link to the Fail Blog. It’s totally hilarious! Thanks for existing fail blog.
Monthly Archive for June, 2008
Canadian Byron Ng has found the security hole in the link between Yahoo and MySpace. Ng managed to grab Paris Hilton’s private photos off her MySpace page due to a weakness in their security model. Check out his instructions here. The blog ValleyWag detailed the exploit and posted a few of Hilton’s private images in this post. The security hole is fairly interesting. It’s not clear how long it will take Yahoo and MySpace to plug it. But it does bring up larger questions of how secure any data portability will be moving forward.
Safari is getting a new JavaScript engine, thank god! Having suffered through some of the quirks of Safari, I am happy they are moving on. Maybe the new Squirrelfish engine will be more inline with Firefox or the dreaded Internet Explorer and eliminate some of the Safari specific workarounds (read: hacks) that have been added into so much of the front end code.
If we are all really, really lucky, maybe Safari/Webkit will get a new CSS engine too. Oh, happy days.
Yesterday Techmeme featured an article on metered internet usage. The headline definitely caught my attention and I was immediately concerned about the future of the web. The majority of websites rely on advertisements to pay their bills. If a metered internet exists, similar to the days of dial-up, won’t the web suffer? Behemoth sites such as Yahoo, Google and AOL depend on page views to judge the growth and strength of their products. If people suddenly have to be concerned about exceeding their monthly bandwidth, they may start being more judicious with their clicks.
I consider myself a ‘power user’ I am on the ‘net between 8 and 15 hours a day. While the majority of consumption takes place at work, I also have access to the web on my phone and in my apartment. And although I don’t download amazingly large files, I have been considering moving towards ‘net powered video consumption devices such as Apple TV and the recently announced Netflix player. High quality videos from services such as iTunes of Netflix could quickly put even the most average user past their monthly cap.
Cable companies argue that they need the limits to reign in heavy users and pay for much needed infrastructure costs. While I do advocate for infrastructure improvements, I don’t believe for a minute that Time Warner and others don’t have the cash. In 2005, Time Warner Cable accounted for 43% of the profits Time Warner earned. The growth and strength of the cable company led Time Warner to file an IPO. According to the International Herald Tribune, Time Warner Cable sought to raise $7 Billion, not exactly pocket change. And although the cable company received none of the cash raised by their IPO, they did become an independent company, and they continue to thrive and expand. In fact, in the beginning of May Time Warner announced it planned to completely spin off Time Warner Cable, though exact terms of the deal are still unknown.
In the metered internet article, author Peter Svensson, cited metered internet usage is common overseas, but failed to say where or source this claim. While this may be true, America is the country that uses the largest portion of the web and provides many of the most popular internet destinations. Including, YouTube, Google, Facebook and more. Internet innovation thrives in the U.S. for many reasons and unlimited usage only aids this growth.
As blogger Jeff Jarvis stated on BuzzMachine in January of this year, the internet exploded when flat rate internet usage was introduced. Is Time Warner trying to reverse the trend that thankfully ended over a decade ago? We can only hope Time Warner’s test in Beaumont, Texas turns out to be a total failure, and the concept of a metered internet is laid to rest for another 10 years or more.
