Right Science Technology and Health

It’s here! The first beta of Firefox 4 has arrived and it brings a shiny new interface for all to enjoy. Mozilla just opened the flood gates for testers to go nuts, they also released a huge list of changes to go with the beta build.

If you are interested in testing it out yourself then head on over to the Firefox 4 beta download page on the Mozilla site and jump in. One of the first immediate changes you can see to the interface is that they have moved the tabs to the top of the window. According to the notes this change is only available on Windows at the moment, but OSX and Linux will be getting this soon as well. So if you try the Firefox 4 beta download on those platforms the theme will be the same as 3.0 for now.

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As far as rumors go, Hulu’s subscription service has been a long time coming. Today they finally announced they are bringing streaming support to devices without Flash capability by paying a monthly subscription fee of $9.99 a month. Hulu Plus invites are required at the moment to preview the new service, and the app for iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone has just been approved by Apple.

They will also be supporting for a range of TVs and Blu-ray players from Samsung, Sony, and Vizio. There are also plans for PS3 and 360 support, allowing Hulu to be streamed to the living room. All of this for only $9.99 a month, and sadly you will still get advertisements.

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At Google’s I/O conference today the company announced a new open source video format that rivals H.264 for web video called WebM. Many opponents of H.264 have long argued the fact that it is too closed and could require licensing fees to use in the future. This even caused a rift in deciding a standard video component for HTML5 for web browsers. Apple sided with H.264 while others sought out an open source alternative. With Google’s WebM project they hope to solve this problem by using the VP8 codec for web video. The new format is targeted at low power mobile devices, clearly intended to replace the need for H.264 on phones.

To help launch the new project they announced immediate support in future builds of Firefox and Google Chrome. YouTube has also added integration to support WebM. Both Opera and even Internet Explorer 9 have confirmed playback support in the future. Adobe has pledged Flash player support of the codec as well, making it very easy for companies to start using it right away. The one company that still has not said anything regarding the new project is Apple.

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Today the FCC announced it’s plans for a “third way” to regulate internet access, essentially reclassifying ISPs and their right to control the service they provide their customers. Recently Comcast won a court decision regarding their ability to filter BitTorrent users on their network. The court sided with Comcast because the FCC did not have the right to impose restrictions under the current classification of ISPs. This was a serious blow to net neutrality efforts, but as many people predicted, it would not be the end of the battle. Currently internet service is a Title I classification under the Telecommunications Act, essentially preventing the FCC from having the authority to regulate them.

Under the new plans outlined today, the FCC seeks to reclassify internet providers as a Title II service, in other words they would treat them the same way as landline phone providers. However, they aren’t looking to make them classified as a full Title II, but rather have them be more of a hybrid classification which does not force them to open their networks to other competitors. Under the new “third way” plan, ISPs would be subject to Title II regulations for the transmission of data, but would remain under Title I regulations for actual information transmitted in said data.

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Sigh. The idea has been out there for a long time, but now it’s almost certain that Hulu is going to be going to a subscription service of some kind in the very near future (May 24th by some reports).

The new subscription service would still allow users to view the 5 most recent episodes of the many shows that you can watch on Hulu. However, if you want to watch anything older you would have to subscribe to what they call Hulu Plus. Theoretically this would allow you to access a wider, more comprehensive collection of television shows, which is a good thing. On the other hand Hulu isn’t really “free” right now. Every show I watch has commercials in it. Yeah, it’s not as much as on network television, but it’s still there. Why would I want to pay more on top of that for content I’m already getting through my satellite?

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Not a great day for Google Docs to fail, but it seems that it has gone down pretty hard. The real news is Facebook and Microsoft are teaming up to bring a social element to Office documents by introducing Docs.com This online version of Office will integrate with many of the social features of Facebook and it sounds like a pretty interesting idea. My brother and I are currently collaborating to write a book together and we use Google Docs, but it’s pretty basic, so I’m interested to see where this goes.

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Surprising news today, social networking website Twitter has just acquired Tweetie, the popular Twitter application found on the iPhone and iPod Touch by Atebits. In his last blog entry for Atebits, creator Loren Brichter explains that he will be joining Twitter’s mobile team and will continue to work on the future of Tweetie. He also mentions that Tweetie will be renamed, bringing the official Twitter app to the iPhone and iPad for free. While there is no specific plans announced yet for what the future holds, this is fantastic news for Twitter users on the iPhone.

According to Twitter founder Evan Williams, they want users to be able to search for Twitter on the App Store to find the official app and download it free. Not only does this allow them to do that, it also reduces the amount of work required to launch their own official Twitter app. The latest version of Tweetie for the iPhone already includes all the latest Twitter features, and even includes support for location-based services like Foursquare. In a related move, they also announced the official Twitter for BlackBerry app earlier today. It appears that Twitter has big plans for the mobile space and there is a lot more come after today’s announcement. I wonder what other Twitter app developers will think of this news.

It appears that Adobe has decided to speak openly about the potential harm devices that don’t allow Flash, such as the iPhone or iPad, can do to their business. In a filing with the SEC today, Adobe warns that stifling from other companies, such as Apple, harms Adobe’s goal of making it easy to create content for a large number of platforms at the same time. Adobe’s products such as Flash allow content to run on a number of platforms without the need to rewrite it for each one. When companies like Apple are banning Adobe from their products, the biggest risk factor they cite is sales.

“To the extent new releases of operating systems or other third-party products, platforms or devices, such as the Apple iPhone or iPad, make it more difficult for our products to perform, and our customers are persuaded to use alternative technologies, our business could be harmed,”

Perhaps the most interesting part of this filing is it comes only one day after Apple revealed it’s new iPhone OS 4 SDK agreement which appears to ban the use of Flash compilers used to create fully functioning iPhone apps. The compilers allow content to be packaged and sold on the App Store, but with the new SDK agreement, that method might no longer be possible.

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Many moons ago I came across this strange thing called bit-torrents. I quickly found that bit-torrents allowed anyone to find anything on the Internet (not that I ever used it for nefarious purposes ). One of the best sites that ever came along was The Pirate Bay. It quickly became won of the largest bittorrent sites on the Internet with a reported 25 million peers in it’s hay day.

As many know the rise and fall of The Pirate Bay has been a long one, including many legal battles that finally caught up to the folks in Sweden who ran the site. However, The Pirate Bay is not dead just yet. While it is true that the bittorrent will no longer be active that is because they are switching to a new trackerless solution called DHT. The crew recently posted the following:

“Now that the decentralized system for finding peers is so well developed, TPB has decided that there is no need to run a tracker anymore, so it will remain down! It’s the end of an era, but the era is no longer up2date. We have put a server in a museum already, and now the tracking can be put there as well.”

The DHT system is much more decentralized and harder to track who is downloading what. It also means that when a tracker goes down the entire site won’t get hit.

The future of TPB is unclear. They have appealed their copyright infringement case and the appeal has been postponed until next summer. So, at least for the mean time, TPB is still around. Smoke em if you got’em.

Hotmail Down!

It has not been a good week for e-mail. Earlier this week gmail was down for about 2 days, off and on. This caused numerous problems for businesses and people who rely on their e-mail service for their every day communications. It seems that Google isn’t the only one who is facing e-mail challenges though. Reports are that Microsoft’s Hotmail has come down today.

MSN Hotmail has 40 million active members, which, as you can imagine, could cause some major issues for users. Some have claimed that the latest hotmail outage has caused them to be without email for as much as 4 days! Apparently MSN has had a rough time keeping up with demand and there have been frequent complaints about outages and loss of service recently.

According to CNET, a Microsoft customer service representative has confirmed the outage (gee thanks) and blamed a faulty server for their problems. Hotmail has recently been bleeding customers and more and more people decide to switch the gmail as the main provider for their free, web-based e-mail. I’ve just recently made that switch and thus far I’ve been very impressed with the service and storage that gmail does offer. We’ll keep you updated as we hear more about the Hotmail outage and when it is restored, until then, try gmail