Over at WatchMouse, you’ll find a rundown comparing 14 popular options including goo.gl, tr.im, bit.ly, and the other usual suspects. The bottom line: URL shorteners amplify the suckiness of your Internet experience. To be more specific, availability isn’t always great (snurl and tr.im both fell below 99%) and delays are standard fare. We’re talking sub-1 second mostly, except for Facebook’s fb.me which can add two full seconds to load times. And dangit, I don’t have high speed Internet so I can wait an extra two seconds.

Google fares the best, with goo.gl registering the shortest added time (at somewhere around 400ms) and 100% uptime. Not surprising, really, since they run their own DNS servers.

And now, Yahoo! News reports that Google is pulling out of China. Might be a bit of a biased source, don’t you think? But the information originated with the Financial Times, so there might be something to it. Still, as long as it doesn’t come directly from Google, I wouldn’t necessarily believe it.

Along with the usual Web 2.0-esque streamlining (rounded corners everywhere, I bet), Digg will become faster, more responsive and instant. Users will now be able to submit pages and Digg other submissions even if they’re not logged in. This fundamental change, according to Adelson, will see the number of daily submissions climb from a meager 20,000 to millions per day — “can you handle that much content?” gloated the proud CEO, no doubt throwing his head back to emit a maniacal cackle.

To accompany the new site, Digg is also dropping its old MySQL back-end in favour of a new, ‘very, very fast’ infrastructure.

Dubbed ‘Digg 2.0′ by CNET, there’s no sign of when the new version will be rolled out to the general public, but there is a holding page at ‘new.digg.com’, where you can enter an email address — presumably to join an open beta, when and if it comes.

Fortunately, like the Rickroll, the botnet was a benign experiment by two researchers at TippingPoint Digital Vaccine Labs; a proof of concept, just to see how easy it would be. No one was harmed in the process, and the jailbroken devices were ultimately left unscathed. Those that downloaded the app — WeatherFist (seriously, that’s one awful name) — probably don’t even know that they were exploited!

Considering that the proposed botnet relied on jailbroken devices and unmoderated app stores, the security community has been left wondering why the two researchers at TippingPoint created it. After all, if you’re not going to exploit something in a strange and peculiar way, why bother to exploit it at all? You don’t hack a device purely because you can.

It’s quite clear, however, that you should exercise care when downloading content from third-party app stores onto your jailbroken devices. If a malicious botnet does emerge, a) you might rack up a large data transfer bill, and b) most people store sensitive information on their phones!

[via Sophos' Graham Cluely]
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On a brighter note, they used the Google Trike to capture images of some tourist attractions such as Stonehenge and Loch Ness. I really wish they would have kept it at that, though.

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The BBC survey also has some other interesting findings: unsurprisingly, Nigerians and South Koreans believe the Internet should not be regulated by the government under any circumstances — while in the UK, 55% believe that some regulation is necessary. The urge towards nationwide unregulated Internet access was strongest in South Korea, where 96% of those surveyed think Internet access is a fundamental right (Starcraft junkies!) — while in Japan, Russia and Mexico, 75% said they ‘could not cope without Internet access’.

I wasn’t going to react, but then I also heard the news that Vegans are about to be protected by the Equality Bill here in the United Kingdom. Basically, just like religion, Veganism is being classified as a ‘belief’. Cool huh? Anyway, that got me thinking about rights — inalienable, from-birth, thou-shalt-prise-from-my-cold-dead-hands rights. Is Internet access really something that we should expect, without taxation, without anything in return? We’re not talking about ‘world peace’ or some kind of intangible: we’re talking about a network that is actively expanded and maintained.

‘A fundamental right’ is too strong a term. Breathing air is a human right, but Internet access? Speaking your mind to those that are near you is one thing, but the right to rant like a headless chicken into the infinite ever-reverberating space of the Internet? I don’t buy it.
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I hinted that, with Office 2010, Microsoft would be moving the focus of its development towards the cloud, but I had no idea they were quite so involved! As of today, around 75% of its employees are working on cloud-related projects. “A year from now that will be 90 percent,” says CEO Steve Ballmer. According to its Wiki page Microsoft currently has 93,000 employees… yikes.

That’s a lot of man hours going into cloud computing, and Microsoft must surely be dwarfing any and all of its competitors’ efforts. Perhaps that’s why Ballmer went on to say they are “betting our company” on the cloud — though with almost $80 billion in assets, I dare say they can afford a mistake or two during their initial foray into the cloud.

PaidContent has a great break-down of Ballmer’s (epic) University of Washington speech. In short: more tailored surfing/search experiences (a la Google); privacy remains a big concern; and, citing the new Windows Phone 7, Ballmer suggests that the device you use to access a service is perhaps more important than the browser itself.

There’s also a neat Microsoft Cloud Services website too, which I haven’t seen before! (Warning, it has a noisy auto-playing video, grr…)
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A lot has been going on in the world of browsers this week. As expected, the Browser Choice ballot has shaken things up, but we’ll have to wait until the end of March to see how the landscape of the browser war pans out. (Opera downloads might’ve tripled, but if you multiply two by three, you still only have six).

One thing seems certain though: Firefox is losing its market share. In at trend that started at the end of 2009, Firefox continues to lose ground to Google’s lightning-fast debutant Chrome. It varies from report to report, but Chrome (now at almost 7% market share!) is definitely picking up points from both Firefox and IE 6 and 7. Will the Browser Choice ballot bolster Firefox’s figures in March? I don’t see that happening.

Meanwhile, Ars is speculating on whether Firefox will ever hit 25% (as measured by Net Applications). It’s hard to put your finger on it, but it definitely feels like Firefox is lagging behind Chrome in terms of new features and development speed. Looking back at 2009, was Personas the only major release from the offices of Mozilla’s Firefox?

Things are looking up though, for the Fox. 2010 will bring out-of-process plug-ins, and presumably per-tab processes too. But is it too little too late? Is Firefox fighting a rearguard action? While Mozilla tries to catch up after a languid 2009, Chrome and Internet Explorer can push even further ahead. Chrome, as much as it pains me, and despite its relative nascence, is better than Firefox in almost every way. While I’m sure Firefox will make some gains in 2010, Chrome can push its advantage and out-maneuver Firefox. I’ve always wondered what a heated competition in an open-source environment would look like, and we’re about to find out!

(SunSpider test results; lower is better)

And all the while, up in Redmond, while everyone has their back turned to watch the Chrome vs. Firefox fracas, Internet Explorer 9 is in development. Three months ago they gave us a sneak-peak at what to expect with IE9 but since then… nothing, not one smidgeon of news. But I think that’s about to change: there’s a rumor going around that an IE9 beta will appear at the MIX 2010 conference, on March 15th. IE9 looks like it’s going to put pressure on both Firefox and Chrome’s feature set, and excel at both rendering speed and accuracy. With Microsoft’s redoubled effort on cloud-related projects, you can be damn sure that IE9 will also feature an awesome JavaScript engine. (Incidentally, Office 2010’s web apps are only going to be compatible with IE, Firefox and Safari…!)

Still, as I mentioned, Mozilla is set to bring some rich features to its browser in 2010. Just this week GPU acceleration with Direct2D made an appearance in the 3.7 alpha nightly builds. In general, rendering/scrolling speed will increase, but you’ll also notice much prettier anti-aliased fonts (check the image above for an example). Even Mozilla’s own Asa Dotzler seems surprisingly impressed by the rendering of fonts with Direct2D…!

Considering Direct2D integration is one of IE9’s more impressive new features, it would be grand if Mozilla keep up the pace and beat Microsoft at their own game. I have a sneaking suspicion that IE9 will be out before FF3.7/4.0 though!
In other performance-related news, Firefox’s borrowed-from-Chrome out-of-process plug-ins finally appeared in the alpha nightly builds. Some commenters suggested the implementation is a little buggy (oh the irony of a crash-proofing technology causing crashes!), but I’m sure it’ll soon be working properly. Per-tab processes that utilize our multi-core processors (that’s what makes Chrome so quick!) aren’t coming any time soon, though: they’re not even on the Firefox 3.7 roadmap! Details of Firefox’s new JavaScript just-in-time (JIT) compiler, JägerMonkey (yes, umlaut and all), were also revealed this week. While it’s not yet hit the nightly alpha builds, Firefox could see significant performance boosts of up to 30 or 40%.

It’s not quite per-tab processes, nor have Firefox add-ons been shifted into their own processes, but… so what?! This is still a major advance and a great sign of what Mozilla has up its sleeve.

We shouldn’t forget that this is actually a developer preview of Gecko 1.9.3, the rendering engine that’ll be used in Firefox 3.7. This build not only included out-of-process plugins though: JavaScript and HTML5 performance has also been boosted. Some features aimed specifically at developers have also been pushed in, such as WebGL!

[FF 3.7a2: Windows download link / Mac download link]
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As Paper Rater so eloquently states in HUGE type, it’s a free grammar and spelling check, with plagiarism detection thrown in for good measure.

It’s actually an interesting study in graphic design: Look at that screenshot. Would you rely on such a website for editing an important academic paper, a newspaper article, or any other important text? At first glance, I sure wouldn’t. That “Use now FREE!” button just screams “TACKY”. And that’s really too bad, because when I finally overcame my distaste and gave the site a spin anyway, I found a surprisingly comprehensive grammar and style editor.

I tested the site with a 3,600-word text on electrical engineering. I found it interesting that the site would not accept short text. When at first I tried submitting one or two paragraphs, it simply let me know that the text is too short for analyzing. I actually like that, because it makes me feel the analysis is more thorough.

The site gave me extensive recommendations for the text, and analyzed word usage and sentence structure. I documented the process with a bunch of screenshots, which you can find after the jump.

After you paste in your text (which I cannot show you here), you select the type of document you’re submitting. I guess it uses different parameters for different writing types, which, again, makes me feel it’s thorough.

After it runs through your text, you get a pane with different aspects of your writing you can click and get concise reports for:


This is the originality detection. Yay, my text wasn’t plagiarized!


The Style report is much more comprehensive. You actually need to know how to read it (“so what if I have 171 ‘to be’ verbs?”). The report contains some explanations, but this is where a proper usage guide can come in handy.


This is a sample for an alert my paper got. Apparently, the vocabulary was a bit thin. I wasn’t offended because I didn’t write it myself. I’m guessing that “Vocab Builder” is a thesaurus, but I didn’t test it myself.