Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we?re in 2011, in an era of modern web standards, it?s time to say goodbye.
Microsoft created a website that is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.
Chcek out Microsoft?s IE6 Countdown website
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Exactly twelve months from the first Platform Preview of IE9, on Monday March 14th we will celebrate the developers and designers who are making a more beautiful web for all of us. We will release the final version of Internet Explorer 9 for download beginning at 9 p.m. Pacific.
IE9 RTW Due Date, A Big Thank You, MIX11, and a Unicorn Named Frank Charles Channel 9
Turning bedbugs' own pheromones against them.
Bed bugs are the scourge of New York, and of other cities as well. And yet, for a number of reasons, the long-awaited War on Bedbugs has yet to arrive. Since they don't actually spread disease (though they have on occasion provoked an allergic reaction), they're not a priority for American research dollars. Being one of the lone U.S. scientists who sets out to study the creatures hasn't traditionally been pleasant; one researcher let a colony feed on him for 30 years, while another used condoms filled with rabbit blood, until university auditors became suspicious, according to the New York Times. It's gotten to the point where some researchers suggest the best we can do is "psychologically reappraise" bedbugs--essentially will outselves to view them as being less scary and repulsive.
That's cold comfort for anyone who's got voracious, unwanted visitors living in their mattress. Which is why today's news from Lund University and Mid Sweden University presents a glimmer of hope. Bedbug infestations are on the rise in Sweden, too, apparently--both common bedbugs and exotic "tropical" bedbugs that hitch rides back to Scandinavia in the luggage and clothing of Swedish vacationers.
A team of researchers "identified and quantified a type of smell that bed bugs produce, known as alarm pheromones." "Nymph" bedbugs in particular--ones not yet fully grown--produce a smell that both adults and other nymphs find repugnant. The researchers hope that the repulsive "alarm pheromones" might be harnessed to help control bedbugs. It's not that the pheromones themselves would be sufficient to convince bedbugs to move out. Rather, skillful use of the pheromones would increase the mobility of the bedbugs and "therefore increase the effectiveness of drying agents to kill them"--something like smoking a critter out of its hole before catching it.
How long till we reap the fruits of this bedbug-fighting innovation? We've reached out to the scientists to find out. So far, they've only said that "this type of possible environmentally friendly control method requires greater understanding of how bed bugs' pheromone system works."
[Image: Flickr user oldmaison]
[Top Feat image by Piotr Naskrecki]
Related: This is Why the Orkin Man Can't Kill Bedbugs (And What Can)
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During a Redmond event with its top advertising clients, Microsoft unveiled the latest iteration of its online advertising exchange system.
It's now connected to the real-time bidding platform of AppNexus, a New York-based company led by veterans of Google's Doubleclick and Yahoo's Right Media. Microsoft's an investor in the company that's serving some 4 billion ads a day.
Chief Executive Steve Ballmer and leaders of Microsoft's ad business made the announcement during Imagine, a conference with ad agency and brand advertising representatives at the company's on-campus conference center this week.
Ballmer talked about how the company's pushing forward on the "commercial glue in the form of great advertising technology" that connects mobile, search, Xbox and other platforms used by millions of people.
Microsoft Advertising Exchange's integration with the AppNexus ad exchange is now complete in the U.S., handling "non-guaranteed inventory" for Windows Live.
It will be handling non-guaranteed MSN inventory in a few weeks and international markets "very soon," according to a blog post by Rik van der Kooi, vice president of advertiser and publisher solutions.
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Today, the Home Server engineering team signed off the release version of WHS 2011. An exciting milestone which now starts the process to make it available for purchase.
Affordable and easy-to-use, Windows Home Server 2011 is the ideal solution to help families keep their important digital files and data automatically backed up, organized, and accessible from virtually anywhere.
To help with questions we hear during this time of the product release cycle, I have provided further guidance below. If you have a specific question, please feel free to post in comments, on our WHS forum.
During this time we would also like to thank all our MVP?s, partners and customers that have helped us get to this point. We look forward to sharing more information with you over the coming weeks.
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A new Harvard University study details how American and Canadian companies provided Internet filtering and monitoring software to the Iranian government, Mubarak's Egypt and other repressive states. It's still going on.
Internet users in Egypt and Libya found themselves disconnected from the outside world thanks to ?kill switches? that shut off network connections during civil unrest. The tech was made in the U.S.A., according to a new report.
Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society is alleging, via the OpenNet Initiative, that government censorship of the Internet in the Middle East and North Africa depends primarily on American and Canadian technology. McAfee, Netsweeper and Websense are all accused by the report of selling censorware to the governments of Iran, Yemen, Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia and others.
In one case, software funded by the United States government was revealed to have been used for Internet censorship. According to the Berkman Center, Syrian ISPs Inet, Teranet, and Zad all use the popular Squid software to block users from viewing politically sensitive and pornographic websites. Squid is designed as a web caching aide, but the Syrians appear to have repurposed the software to censor objectionable websites. Squid is GNU freeware and was funded by American taxpayers via the National Science Foundation.
According to report authors Helmi Noman and Jillian C. York, North American companies are determining which sites Arab internet users can't access:
At least nine Middle Eastern and North African state censors use Western-built technologies to impede access to online content. ISPs in Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Yemen, Sudan, and Tunisia use the Western-built automated filtering solutions to block mass content, such as websites that provide skeptical views of Islam, secular and atheist discourse, sex, GLBT, dating services, and proxy and anonymity tools. These lists of sites are maintained by the Western company vendors. The ISPs also use these tools to add their own selected URLs to the companies? black lists.At least three national ISPs--Qatar?s Qtel, UAE?s du, and Yemen?s YemenNet--currently employ the Canadian-made commercial filter Netsweeper. Netsweeper Inc. does not seem to take issue with governments implementing political and religious censorship using their tools, and acknowledges working with telecom operators in Qatar, UAE, Yemen, India, and Canada. The company says its product can be used to block inappropriate content to meet government rules and regulations ?based on social, religious or political ideals.
Netsweeper, of course, is not the only company marketing censorship equipment to Middle Eastern governments and ISPs. Internet providers in the United Arab Emirates rely on McAfee's SmartFilter technology, which can block a variety of categories include ?anonymizers,? ?historical revisionism,? and ?provocative attire.? A full list of website genres that can be blocked by McAfee, provided by the Berkman Center, is reproduced below.
Saudi Arabia, by comparison, relies on the products of the lesser known American firm Blue Coat to block access to websites through the country's primary Internet gateway.
The Iranian government, according to the report, relies primarily on McAfee's SmartFilter to maintain their internet censorship regime. Government authorities confirmed in 2009 that SmartFilter was being used to block access to objectionable websites including Twitter and the BBC. SmartFilter is also used by ISPs in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Oman, and Tunisia to one degree or another.
According to McAfee's press materials, the URLs of websites to censor come through a variety of research methods:
The categorization of a particular URL is a defined process using objective standards and definitions. To gather and rate potential websites, McAfee uses various technologies, artificial intelligence techniques, such as link crawlers, security forensics, honey pot networks, sophisticated auto-rating tools, and customer logs.This past February, Co.Design published an illustrated guide to Internet censorship around the world.
Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing, also provided deep packet inspection services to the Egyptian government--a fact not mentioned by the Harvard University report. The deep packet inspection suite Narus sold to the Mubarak government aided secret police in tracking the IP addresses, Skype calls and personal information of dissidents.
[Images of Qatari censorship error message and of blockware obtained via OpenNet Initative]
Related: Israel and Palestine Flip Mideast Protest Script, Govern via Facebook
For more stories like this, follow @fastcompany on Twitter. Email Neal Ungerleider, the author of this article, here.
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