InfoQ Homepage Internet Content on InfoQ
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Allegations of a Backdoor in OpenBSD Are Not Confirmed
Some allegations regarding backdoors implemented at FBI’s request in OpenBSD’s IPsec stack were made earlier this month. After auditing the code, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD, has concluded that there are no such threats in the open source operating system.
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HTML5 Labs–A Website for Prototyping New Web Technologies
Microsoft has decided not to include emerging web technologies still under development in IE9, providing instead HTML5 Labs, a website for testing prototype technologies such as IndexedDB and WebSockets.
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Google WebP - Creating Smaller Images for Faster Pages
Google wants to shrink images transferred over the Internet by proposing a new lossy format called WebP. They claim they have achieved 39% reduction in image byte size leading to speedier page load.
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H.264 to Remain Free for Internet Video
The MPEG LA, who hold the patent pool on the MPEG H.264 video format, have recently extended their pledge for free web-based video to last for the lifetime of the license. In a Press Release (pdf) yesterday, they confirmed the continuation of the free license, which had been due to expire in December 2015. But what does this mean for HTML5 browsers?
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Google Wants a New Widely-Adopted Video Standard Based on the VP8 Codec [Updated]
Google has open-sourced WebM, a royalty free media file format for compressing and encoding video. While this is good news for many industry players which have shown their support for the new standard, some of the questions which have been raised so far have included concerns around licensing and code quality.
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Microsoft Tips the Scale in Favor of HTML 5 and H.264
Dean Hachamovitch, General Manager for Internet Explorer at Microsoft, has announced that IE9 will use only the H.264 standard to play HTML 5 video. Microsoft seems to have become very committed to HTML 5, while Flash loses even more ground. The announcement came the same day Steve Jobs detailed why Apple does not accept Flash on iPhone and iPad.
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Doing WebGL Rendering on Windows with ANGLE
Google uses WebGL to natively render 3D graphics inside Chrome. The problem is that WebGL relies on OpenGL 2.0, and not all Windows systems have its drivers installed. The ANGLE (Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine) project is intended as a thin layer between WebGL and DirectX, enabling Chrome to do 3D on any Windows system.
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Debate: Is the Internet Splintering in Pieces?
The Internet has been considered the medium that unites people all over the world facilitating communication, exchange of ideas and easing the access to information. Some consider that the Internet is departing from its original purpose due to the proliferation of devices which make porting of documents to various platforms difficult.
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HTML5, H.264 and Flash roundup
Last week, InfoQ published a piece on YouTube offering HTML5 beta for its videos, in H.264 format. Shortly thereafter, Vimeo announced an HTML5 beta as well, also using H.264 as the video codec. However, Mozilla has come out against using H.264, whilst the recent iPad launch has focussed on the H.264 hardware decoding. Has Flash finally met its match?
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ECMAScript 5 released
ECMAScript 5 was released this week (pdf), generally known as JavaScript, bringing advances to the basic libraries whilst introducing stricter runtime modes to aid with identifying and removing common coding errors.
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8.8.8.8, A DNS Number for Faster Browsing
Google is offering two DNS servers for public use, namely 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4, in an attempt to further speed up browsing.
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Google Works on a Protocol Intended to Replace HTTP
Google proposes SPDY, a new application protocol running on top of SSL, a protocol to replace HTTP which is considered to introduce latencies. They have already created a prototype with a web server and an enhanced Chrome browser that supposedly loads web pages twice as fast.
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Intalio acquires Webtide, makers of Jetty
Intalio, Inc., the Enterprise Cloud Company, announced the acquisition of Webtide, the team behind the Jetty open source Java application server. Jetty is currently used on millions of web servers, and powers products such as Cisco SESM, Google AppEngine, Google GWT, HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli NetView, Oracle WebLogic Business Connect, Sybase EAServer, and Yahoo! Zimbra.
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Google Calls for a Joint Effort to Speed Up the Internet
After open sourcing Page Speed a few weeks ago, Google has launched a web site in an attempt to find ways and push the speed up process of the entire Internet. Google shares research data, web site speed optimization tutorials, recorded presentations, links to lots of performance optimization tools, and a discussion group inviting everyone to share ideas on how to make the web faster.
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Opera Unite Gives the Power Back to the People
Opera Software, which promised to revolutionize the Internet, has just released the latest version of their browser, Opera 10 Beta 1, incorporating a server technology called Opera Unite allowing users to directly connect to each other to share data and communicate without an intermediary running the necessary services for them.