Deep packet inspection or web crawlers had nothing to do with the Egyptian Internet shutdown, but Free Press rarely lets facts get in the way of exploiting a good crisis to call for government hearings. Ironically, it was Free Press asking the FCC to regulate Internet speech for decency.

Facebook’s new full SSL feature finally works three years after it became widely known that Facebook user accounts were easily hijacked. Unfortunately, their update still won’t fully protect Facebook users because Facebook forgot to deploy HTTPS authentication on the user login page.

Why all the “Net Neutrality” screaming about Verizon throttling 5% of the heaviest users? Even under the strictest Net Neutrality rules, a fair sharing throttling scheme is reasonable and legal. For wireless networks, it’s the only way to keep the network operational for everyone.

Google accused Microsoft of copying its Google search data as a ranking factor in Microsoft’s Bing search engine, but this is strange coming from Google since it routinely uses public web data gathered from the world’s websites.  For example, Google YouTube uses Amazon’s recommendation rankings.

Monday brought some bad news for Intel when it was announced that their latest product codenamed “Sandy Bridge” had a flaw in its chipsets.  Sandy Bridge is the code name for Intel’s latest microprocessor or CPU and the chipset called “Cougar Point” is the accompanying set of chips that provider peripheral functionality such as storage, and it’s located [...]

The new report commissioned by European broadband providers speaks of an impending crisis if content providers don’t pay up while the content providers continue to propagate the myth that all websites should run at the same speed regardless of what they pay. But both sides are being ridiculous and their alarmism could lead to nasty political outcomes that they will both regret.

Netflix published their ISP performance metrics that managed to fool the media into reporting the data as some kind of broadband performance metric. But the results probably reflect Netflix’s inadequacies rather than the ISPs’ because the numbers are probably related to the amount of peering bandwidth that Netflix purchased from the ISPs.

Netflix and its CDN partners want the media and the government to pressure and force consumers to subsidize Netflix to the tune of thousands of Gbps of free bandwidth. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is misleading all of us when he says that Netflix already pays their share of the bandwidth costs and that they deserve free server capacity.

Facebook announced that they’ve finally added secure web browsing for Facebook 2 months after the release of the Firesheep tool that made it trivially easy to hack Facebook accounts.  That prompted me to give them an “F” in security which was widely cited in the media.  But there are some major problems with this update [...]

Barry Collins of PCPro UK claimed that “ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don’t pay them first” and set off some predictable outrage against the ISPs. But Collins’ article is a perfect example of scaremongering because its thesis wasn’t even supported by his own evidence gathered for the article, and some of the quotations seem to have been misinterpreted to throw gas on the fire against ISPs.