A Boost for the Quantum Internet

 A Boost for the Quantum Internet

Universitat Innsbruck (Austria)

May 23, 2023

Researchers at Austria's University of Innsbruck transmitted quantum information with a quantum repeater node operating at telecommunication networks' standard frequency. The repeater node features two calcium ions contained in an ion trap within an optical resonator, and single-photon conversion to the standard telecom wavelength. The researchers were able to transmit quantum information over a 50-kilometer (31-mile)-long optical fiber, with the quantum repeater positioned halfway between the transmission and reception points. The researchers said they already have calculated the design upgrades that will be required to transfer data across distances of 800 kilometers (nearly 500 miles).  ....'

The 26 Words that Created the Internet

Recall having this being pointed out to us when we started advertising online.  Plan to buy. 

JEFF KOSSEFF

Important book,  Supreme Court today arguing on today on  related work.  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.   Ordering capability at  the link.    Plus new book also mentioned below.

See Book:   'The 26 Words that Created the Internet'

Jeff Kosseff is an associate professor of cybersecurity law in the United States Naval Academy’s Cyber Science Department. He is the author of four books and more than 20 academic journal articles.  

In fall 2023, Johns Hopkins University Press will publish his latest book, Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation, which examines and defends legal protections for false speech. In 2019, he was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, to support his 2022 book The United States of Anonymous: How the First Amendment Shaped Online Speech. His 2019 book, The Twenty-Six Words That Created the Internet, traced the history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. He also is the author of Cybersecurity Law, a textbook and treatise whose third edition was published by Wiley in 2022.  

His articles have appeared in Iowa Law Review, Illinois Law Review, Wake Forest Law Review, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Computer Law & Security Review, and other law reviews and technology law journals. His research interests include cybersecurity regulation, online intermediary liability, and the law of armed conflict as applied to cyberspace.

Jeff practiced cybersecurity, privacy, and First Amendment law at Covington & Burling, and clerked for Judge Milan D. Smith, Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and Judge Leonie M. Brinkema of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Before becoming a lawyer, he was a technology and political journalist for The Oregonian and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting and recipient of the George Polk Award for national reporting.  

He received a J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and a B.A. and M.P.P. from the University of Michigan.   .... '   (Much more at the link) x

Vint Cerf on the Internet

Vint Cerf comments on the direction of the Internet

Vint Cerf Helped Create the Internet on the Back of an Envelope. Now He's Calling for More Critical Thinking About How We Use It

The Wall Street Journal, Emily Bobrow, December 16, 2022

Google Chief Internet Evangelist and 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award co-recipient Vint Cerf helped invent the Internet but acknowledges its downsides, including its use for spreading misinformation and disinformation. Cerf says addressing this "propagation problem" requires Google and similar companies to better "understand how these mechanisms influence the way people behave." He observes that although commercialization has broadened the Internet's scope, feedback algorithms appear to be directing people toward "more divisive and extreme stuff." Cerf urges more critical thinking to rein in the Internet's sociological and psychological effects, while businesses must make better efforts to contain online trolling, lying, bullying, and surveillance.

Full Article May Require Paid Registration  ... 

End Of Internet?

Legal thoughts,  reasonable?

ACM OPINION

Is This the Beginning of the End of the Internet?

By The Atlantic, October 4, 2022

The Texas law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against social media platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint.

Occasionally, something happens that is so blatantly and obviously misguided that trying to explain it rationally makes you sound ridiculous. Such is the case with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals's recent ruling in NetChoice v. Paxton. Earlier this month, the court upheld a preposterous Texas law stating that online platforms with more than 50 million monthly active users in the United States no longer have First Amendment rights regarding their editorial decisions. Put another way, the law tells big social-media companies that they can't moderate the content on their platforms. YouTube purging terrorist-recruitment videos? Illegal. Twitter removing a violent cell of neo-Nazis harassing people with death threats? Sorry, that's censorship, according to Andy Oldham, a judge of the United States Court of Appeals and the former general counsel to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn't merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, "the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I've ever read." It's also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.  ... ' 

From The Atlantic    

Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s

Seeing it all?

Lost Something? Search 91.7 Million Files from the '80s, '90s, 2000s By Ars Technica, October 21, 2022

The files on Discmaster come from the Internet Archive, uploaded by thousands of people over the years.

A new website allows users to sift through 91.7 million computer files from CD-ROM releases and floppy discs dating back to the 1980s.  Hosted by tech archivist Jason Scott, the Discmaster site is the work of a group of anonymous programmers and features images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and more from the Internet Archive.

Discmaster allows users to search by file type, format, source, file size, file date, and other criteria.

Said Scott, "The value proposition is the value proposition of any freely accessible research database." Much of the file format conversion is performed on the back end, to make the vintage files more accessible.

From Ars Technica

View Full Article    

An Interplanetary File System

 Idea is new to me.

Why the Internet Needs the Interplanetary File System

Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient

Yiannis Psaris, Jorge Soars, Dav\vd Dia

WHEN THE COVID-19 pandemic erupted in early 2020, the world made an unprecedented shift to remote work. As a precaution, some Internet providers scaled back service levels temporarily, although that probably wasn’t necessary for countries in Asia, Europe, and North America, which were generally able to cope with the surge in demand caused by people teleworking (and binge-watching Netflix). That’s because most of their networks were overprovisioned, with more capacity than they usually need. But in countries without the same level of investment in network infrastructure, the picture was less rosy: Internet service providers (ISPs) in South Africa and Venezuela, for instance, reported significant strain.

But is overprovisioning the only way to ensure resilience? We don’t think so. To understand the alternative approach we’re championing, though, you first need to recall how the Internet works.

The core protocol of the Internet, aptly named the Internet Protocol (IP), defines an addressing scheme that computers use to communicate with one another. This scheme assigns addresses to specific devices—people’s computers as well as servers—and uses those addresses to send data between them as needed.

It’s a model that works well for sending unique information from one point to another, say, your bank statement or a letter from a loved one. This approach made sense when the Internet was used mainly to deliver different content to different people. But this design is not well suited for the mass consumption of static content, such as movies or TV shows.

The reality today is that the Internet is more often used to send exactly the same thing to many people, and it’s doing a huge amount of that now, much of which is in the form of video. The demands grow even higher as our screens obtain ever-increasing resolutions, with 4K video already in widespread use and 8K on the horizon.

The content delivery networks (CDNs) used by streaming services such as Netflix help address the problem by temporarily storing content close to, or even inside, many ISPs. But this strategy relies on ISPs and CDNs being able to make deals and deploy the required infrastructure. And it can still leave the edges of the network having to handle more traffic than actually needs to flow.

The real problem is not so much the volume of content being passed around—it’s how it is being delivered, from a central source to many different far-away users, even when those users are located right next to one another.

This diagram depicts the information in a database table with two columns: Node and Content. The diagram also shows nodes in the network that query the database to find the location of files they are seeking.One scheme used by peer-to-peer systems to determine the location of a file is to keep that information in a centralized database. Napster, the first large-scale peer-to-peer content-delivery system, used this approach.CARL DE TORRES

A more efficient distribution scheme in that case would be for the data to be served to your device from your neighbor’s device in a direct peer-to-peer manner. But how would your device even know whom to ask? Welcome to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

The InterPlanetary File System gets its name because, in theory, it could be extended to share data even between computers on different planets of the solar system. For now, though, we’re focused on rolling it out for just Earth!

The key to IPFS is what’s called content addressing. Instead of asking a particular provider, “Please send me this file,” your machine asks the network, “Who can send me this file?” It starts by querying peers: other computers in the user’s vicinity, others in the same house or office, others in the same neighborhood, others in the same city—expanding progressively outward to globally distant locations, if need be, until the system finds a copy of what you’re looking for.

These queries are made using IPFS, an alternative to the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which powers the World Wide Web. Building on the principles of peer-to-peer networking and content-based addressing, IPFS allows for a decentralized and distributed network for data storage and delivery.

The benefits of IPFS include faster and more-efficient distribution of content. But they don’t stop there. IPFS can also improve security with content-integrity checking so that data cannot be tampered with by intermediary actors. And with IPFS, the network can continue operating even if the connection to the originating server is cut or if the service that initially provided the content is experiencing an outage—particularly important in places with networks that work only intermittently. IPFS also offers resistance to censorship. ... '

Internet Law and Moderation Transparency

 Happened on the Stanford Cyberlaw Center, and notably Transparency laws.  Here an excerpt, which leads to more  ...  Had not taken a look there for some time.   Note the mention and criticism of Facebook's rules.   Worth covering.

The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School is a leader in the study of the law and policy around the Internet and other emerging technologies.

State abuse of Transparency Laws and How to Stop it  By Daphne Keller on September 19, 2022 at 3:49 pm

Around the world, new laws are requiring improved transparency from major Internet platforms about their content moderation. This is generally a very positive development. But it also raises important questions about what kinds of disclosures we expect from platforms -- and what kinds of enforcement we expect from governments. This post uses five concrete examples to illustrate the complexity of these disclosures. The examples also illustrate what I think is a very real risk: that state enforcers may abuse transparency laws, using them to reshape platforms’ actual policies. That is a threat not only to platforms’ editorial and speech rights, but to the rights of all their users. I think it should be possible to mitigate this risk. But we can only do so if we recognize it.  

I have written before about the complexity of counting content moderation actions for aggregate transparency reports. This post addresses the seemingly simpler task of describing speech policies or enforcement decisions. This is also complicated, in ways that should come as no surprise to lawyers, parents of young children, or anyone else who has tried to explain and apply rules to disputatious parties. The degree of detail that platforms could include in their explanations is vast -- perhaps not as infinite as the diversity of human misbehavior on the Internet, but the two are certainly correlated. Facebook’s rules, for example, run to over a hundred pages   , but are widely criticized as insufficiently clear or detailed.  ... ' 

Advanced Quantum Computer Made Available To The Public For First Time

 Mentioned here previously, more detail accessible here

 Advanced Quantum Computer Made Available To The Public For First Time   By Admin On Jun 5, 2022 in Govirall

A computer capable of quantum supremacy — proving supremacy over conventional machines — is the first computer anyone can use over the internet

A quantum computer that encodes information with pulses of light accomplishes a task in 36 microseconds that would take the best supercomputers at least 9,000 years to complete. The researchers behind the machine also connected it to the internet allowing others to program it for their own use – For the first time such a powerful quantum computer has been made available to the public.

Quantum computers rely on the strange properties of quantum mechanics to theoretically perform certain calculations faster than conventional computers. A long-term goal in the field of quantum supremacy or quantum supremacy is to demonstrate that quantum computers can Actually beats normal machines. Google pioneered doing so in 2019 with its Sycamore processor which can solve problems involving sampling random numbers that are largely impossible with classical machines.

Now Jonathan Lavoie of Xanadu Quantum Technologies in Toronto Canada and his colleagues have built a quantum computer called Borealis that uses particles of light or photons traversing a series of fiber-optic loops to solve a problem called boson sampling . This involves measuring Properties of a large group of entangled or quantum connected photons separated by a beam splitter.

Boson sampling is a daunting task for ordinary computers because the computational complexity rises dramatically as the number of photons increases. Borealis essentially calculates the answer by directly measuring the behavior of up to 216 entangled photons.

Solving this question isn’t particularly useful beyond determining that quantum supremacy has been achieved but it’s an important test. “By demonstrating these results using Borealis we have validated key technologies required for future quantum computers” the way.

Borealis is the second device to demonstrate quantum superiority in boson sampling. The first is a machine called Jiuzhang created by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). It first showed quantum superiority with 76 photons in 2020 then again with an improved version 113 photons are used in 2021. Last year the USTC team also demonstrated quantum superiority in the random number sampling problem with a machine called Zu Chongzhi.

More power

Peter Knight of Imperial College London said Borealis was an advance on Chapter Nine because it was a more powerful system capable of computing more photons and had a simplified architecture. “We all think the Chinese experiment is a stunt but we can’t Seeing it goes even further because there’s a limit to how much you can cram into an optical table,” he said.

Compared to Borealis Jiuzhang uses more beam splitters to send entangled photons in many different directions. But Borealis took a different approach using a fiber optic ring to delay the passage of some photons relative to others – separating them in time instead of space.

Another benefit of the stripped design is that the computer is easier to control so it can also be reprogrammed remotely letting people run it with their own settings. “Borealis is the first machine with quantum computing benefits that anyone can use Internet connection,” Lavoie said.  ... ' 

Bruce Schneier on the Broken Internet

Good piece worth reading by Bruce Schneier: 

" ..Back in November 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, ... gave a virtual talk at the International Symposium on Technology and Society: “The Story of the Internet and How it Broke Bad: A Call for Public-Interest Technologists.”    ....'

Preserving the Internet?

 Well put. 

Preserving the Internet, By Vinton G. Cerf

Communications of the ACM, April 2022, Vol. 65 No. 4, Page 5    10.1145/3522782

Google Vice President and Chief Internet Evangelist Vinton G. Cerf 

The Internet has become a global, complex, layered, and increasingly indispensable ecosystem. For purposes of this column, "Internet" includes the underlying digital transport infrastructure including subsea and land-based fiber and cable, orbiting satellites, the networks of routers, the Domain Name System, datacenters and their networks, edge devices of all kinds (laptops, desktops, pads, smartphones, Internet-enabled devices, and sensors), the World Wide Web, content distribution systems and, for all I know, the kitchen sink. Adding to that are all the institutions associated with implementing, operating, standardizing, and regulating various aspects of this multifaceted construct. Not to be forgotten are all the organizations and individuals utilizing the Internet in their daily activities. Such a comprehensive definition explains why governments of the world have interest in and concerns about the Internet.

The grand collaboration that allows the Internet to work has delivered countless benefits to all the interested parties. It is a generative infrastructure that invites innovation in all dimensions: applications, enabled and enabling devices, new communication technology, business models, social networking, financial services, political engagement, scientific discovery, and much more. It has put amplifying power into the hands of countries, corporations, and consumers unlike anything in the past. By implication, this system is equally available for beneficial and harmful purposes as is often the case with infrastructure open to public use. How can we preserve its beneficial uses and diminish unwanted harmful abuse?  .... ' 

Vinton G. Cerf is vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google. He served as ACM president from 2012–2014.

Internet Break-Up?

Now seen it suggested in a number of places.  An Internet breakup imminent? Implications for both 'sides'.  In the BBC. 

Russia-Ukraine: Is internet on verge of break-up?   By Jane Wakefield, Technology reporter

The world, both physical and digital, finds itself in unprecedented times as the conflict in Ukraine rages.

Corporate giants such as Meta, Google and Apple, who have always framed themselves as neutral tech firms, are now pinning their political colours to the mast - banning products in Russia in response to its invasion.

Meanwhile the internet itself is changing for Russian users - with Twitter and Facebook blocked, TikTok not allowing Russian users to post, and the police reportedly stopping people in the streets to look at what they are viewing on their phones.

Now there are questions about whether the conflict may not just alter the world's geography, but fundamentally change the nature of the global internet.... ' 

Can a Free Internet Survive?

What steps, what cost, what limits?

Can a Free Internet Survive?,  By Samuel Greengard, Commissioned by CACM Staff, November 23, 2021

In the beginning, Internet pioneers dreamed of creating an open framework for global communication and interaction. It would be a place where free thinking and information could flourish. Over the last half century, despite a few potholes and speedbumps, the Internet has largely lived up to that promise.

However, there's evidence that attitudes and values are shifting. Governments around the world are taking steps to limit access to information, or even shut it down using tactics like site blocking, URL throttling, restricting mobile data, and regulatory and legal threats.

"This is in the face of governments, business and industry, and popular movements responding to perceived threats to dominant institutions and traditional sources of information," observes William H. Dutton, Emeritus Professor at the University of Southern California and co-author of the UNESCO report   Freedom of Connection, Freedom of Expression.

Washington D.C.-based democracy advocacy group Freedom House reported in 2021 that Internet freedom declined for the fifth year in a row in the U.S. and the 11th consecutive year internationally. Officials in at least 20 countries suspended Internet access, and 20 regimes blocked access to social media platforms, the report noted.

Bending Light for a Cheaper Internet

Who Can Bend Light for a Cheaper Internet?

By MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory  in CACM

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed a system that can maintain network connections when optical fibers break by reconfiguring optical transmissions from damaged fibers to healthy ones.

The ARROW system plans for potential fiber cuts in advance using an online algorithm that accounts for real-time Internet traffic demands.

Simulations revealed that ARROW could carry up to 2.4 times more traffic without deploying new fibers, and while maintaining high network reliability.

MIT's Zhizhen Zhong said, "With ARROW, some failures can be eliminated or partially restored, and this changes the way we think about network management and traffic engineering, opening up opportunities for rethinking traffic engineering systems, risk assessment systems, and emerging applications, too."

The researchers are working with Facebook to deploy ARROW in real-world wide-area networks.

From MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

View Full Article 

How did the Pandemic Change Internet Traffic?

And how might that change in future pandemics?    Implications? Could we detect events that effect the internet this way?   Look at the Internet and the Pandemic as two experiments that have escaped into the wild.   Can we model that usefully?    Lots of data gathered, what does it mean.

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS

Technical Perspective: Tracking Pandemic-Driven Internet Traffic  By Jennifer Rexford

Communications of the ACM, July 2021, Vol. 64 No. 7, Page 100  10.1145/3465173

The Internet is a research experiment that "escaped from the lab" to become a critical global communications infrastructure during our lifetimes. Over the past year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Internet has supported friends and families staying in touch and supporting each other, remote work and learning, and the global collaboration of experts designing much-needed treatments and vaccines. As challenging as the past year (and more) has been, the Internet has made it possible for many important aspects of life, work, and culture to continue.

In March 2020, the Internet suddenly became a lifeline for people all over the world. Designed to withstand failures, attacks, and fluctuations in traffic, the Internet proved up to the task. Almost overnight, demand for Internet services grew dramatically, and shifted in both time and space. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) had network designs with spare capacity, deployed more bandwidth in critical locations, and relaxed bandwidth caps on low-income households. The Internet protocols, designed to adapt to changing conditions, were able to deliver reasonable service to many users by sharing the available resources dynamically. ... 

Impact of the Waves of COVID on Internet Traffic

 Quite an interesting piece on how changes in external context can change the ebb and flow of the internet.    And an attempt to make sense of the numbers.   Useful for future planning and redesign.  And more consideration of how the Internet is now a real part of our key infrastructure.  And determination of the nature of normal. Reading. 

A Year in Lockdown: How the Waves of COVID-19 Impact Internet Traffic  in CACM

By Anja Feldmann, Oliver Gasser, Franziska Lichtblau, Enric Pujol, Ingmar Poese, Christoph Dietzel, Daniel Wagner, Matthias Wichtlhuber, Juan Tapiador, Narseo Vallina-Rodriguez, Oliver Hohlfeld, Georgios Smaragdakis

Communications of the ACM, July 2021, Vol. 64 No. 7, Pages 101-108 10.1145/3465212

In March 2020, the World Health Organization declared the Corona Virus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak a global pandemic. As a result, billions of people were either encouraged or forced by their governments to stay home to reduce the spread of the virus. This caused many to turn to the Internet for work, education, social interaction, and entertainment. With the Internet demand rising at an unprecedented rate, the question of whether the Internet could sustain this additional load emerged. To answer this question, this paper will review the impact of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic on Internet traffic in order to analyze its performance. In order to keep our study broad, we collect and analyze Internet traffic data from multiple locations at the core and edge of the Internet. From this, we characterize how traffic and application demands change, to describe the "new normal," and explain how the Internet reacted during these unprecedented times .....' 

Diagnosing Windows Internet Connections

I am sure you have all run into this. Just did and played with the router and wifi box for some time.  Then found it very helpful. But the internet diagnosis capability, which runs forever, does not execute these or suggest that you do?  Seems the 'skill' needs to improved.

Best Windows 10 commands to diagnose your Internet connection  By Lawrence Abrams in BleepingComputer

Diagnosing an Internet connection in Windows can be a frustrating experience. To help with this, we have outlined six Windows 10 commands that you can use to troubleshoot your Internet connection and help determine why you cannot reach a website.

All of the commands we list below require you to execute them via the Windows 10 command prompt.... " 

Accenture: Get a Secure, Trustworthy Internet

Good, considerable piece by Accenture, pointed to below.   Who we worked with in the past.  Have been of late become involved in related efforts and find some their points key.   As has been reported here.   How do we secure the digital internet, and make people trust it for all tasks,  large and small, personal and commercial?   We are slipping here and need to get a better handle on the risks,  included losing our hold.   Else what?  

Securing the foundations

The benefits of a secure, trustworthy Internet economy are clear.

CEOs have an opportunity to drive meaningful change today and develop a foundation of trust for tomorrow’s digital economy. Unfortunately, just one attack is all it takes to damage an organization.

The actions of CEOs—driving above ground and influencing below ground—matter. By joining forces with other CEOs, public sector leaders and regulators, they can develop much-needed guidelines and oversight mechanisms. By protecting their own organization and extending protection through its value chain, they will safeguard the business ecosystem. By embracing and developing technologies that can advance their businesses and enhance digital safety, CEO engagement can drive a trust turnaround for the Internet and secure the future of the digital economy. ... " 

SpaceX vs Kuiper on Internet Delivery

Been following SpaceX for some time, and is use of multiple satellites to fill remote areas with high speed internet service.   Now in limited test.   And considering Amazon's competitive Kuiper, here is an outline of their current efforts.  How will this effect the current land based cable services that fill in internet services? 

Amazon’s Satellite Internet Antenna Pulls 400Mbps During Testing   By Ryan Whitwam in ExtremeTech

For years, satellite internet has been a last resort for people living in remote areas. SpaceX has made waves offering its new Starlink service to select regions with much higher speeds than traditional satellite connections — testers are reporting as much as 150Mbps down. Amazon thinks it can do better with its new antenna technology. The company says its prototype for satellite internet is managing 400 Mbps right now, but we don’t know when consumers will be able to put it to the test. 

You’ve probably heard from people stuck with satellite internet from companies like HughesNet and Viasat. Most likely, they were not happy with the multi-second latency and anemic speeds, but it’s better than nothing. That’s actually what SpaceX called its Starlink beta this year: Better Than Nothing. Starlink is currently limited to the northern US and southern Canada, and it requires a hefty $500 setup fee. That includes the company’s satellite dish, which connects to the network over the Ka wireless band.

Amazon’s upcoming Project Kuiper service will be similar to Starlink, but the company claims its prototype Ka phased-array antenna will give it the edge. Amazon’s goal is to reduce the size and cost of the hardware — after all, every customer will need one to access the Kuiper network. However, that’s difficult with Ka-band equipment, which needs more physical separation between transmission (27-30GHz) and reception (17-20GHz) hardware due to the wide range frequencies.   ... " 

NHS Signs Up for Tim Berners-Lee Pilot to Reinvent Web

 Becoming necessary, if only for security,  But the design needs to be carefully done to ensure freedom of speech.

NHS Signs Up for Tim Berners-Lee Pilot to Reinvent Web  (Paywall) 

From Financial Times   John Thornhill

The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is one of more than a dozen partners that have signed up for a pilot program of Inrupt, a company founded by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, to promote a new Web data architecture. Inrupt launched its first enterprise-ready social-inked data (Solid) servers, which Berners-Lee, recipient of the 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award, called a "huge milestone" in breaking down existing data silos and recreating more interconnected networks. Solid, co-developed by Berners-Lee and Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists, enables users to produce their own Pods (personal online data stores) in order to control and grant access to third-party applications. The NHS is running a pilot project that lets users store their personal medical data in their own Pods, upload additional information from other lifestyle apps, and share that data with doctors and care providers.  ... '

Google Expected to See Antitrust

Antitrust looms, what will the implications be?  Google does lots of very good work, don't what to see it reduced. 

Google Just Got Very Bad News and It Could Change the Way You Use the Internet The Department of Justice is expected to file its largest antitrust suit since Microsoft. Here's what it could mean for search, advertising, and Google Maps.
By Jason Aten in Inc

It isn't a secret that Google has been under investigation by the Department of Justice for over a year. Google even confirmed as much earlier this year, in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. This week it became clear that a case is likely to be brought sooner rather than later. Specifically, The New York Times is reporting that it could come in the next few weeks despite the objections of some of the investigators involved.  ... "