It sounds like a great idea. When it works, it really is quite wonderful. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that often for me.

I tested Chrome 27 on a Gateway DX4710 running Windows 7 SP1. This PC is powered by a 2.5-GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor and has 6GBs of RAM and an Intel GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) 3100 for graphics. It's hooked to the Internet via a Netgear Gigabit Ethernet switch, which, in turn, is hooked up to a 100Mbps (Megabit per second) cable Internet connection.

I also tried the new Web browser with Linux Mint 16 on my Dell XPS 8300. This desktop uses a 3.4GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor. It also has 8GBs of RAM, and an AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5770 graphic card.

On both systems I found Chrome voice-recognition (VR) to be hit and miss. The more common a term—Linux, Windows, iPad—the more likely it was to work successfully. When it came to less common words—HIPPA, Ubuntu, Foley--its guesses almost seemed random. Sometimes, as when it struggled with my uncommon last name, the results were more comical than practical. 

I also found that the servers backing Chrome VR were often overloaded. There were several times when the VR function stated that it was unable to continue because the PC wasn't connected to the Internet... even as multiple Chrome tabs were continuing to update their contents. In short, at this point, Chrome's VR is more of a nifty trick than a handy utility.

This new version of Chrome also includes multiple security fixes. It also now comes with the latest Adobe Flash player, 11.7, embedded within the browser. Like it or not, Adobe Flash is still far from dead.

Google has also tuned up its Chrome Instant, an optional search speed-up feature. The company claims that these changes will improve Chrome's ability to work out exactly what you're searching for as quickly as possible. From my purely subjective viewpoint this did appear to work.

The search giant also claimed that Chrome loads pages 5 percent faster. This is done by "preloading images sooner, more aggressive use of idle network time, dynamically changing resource priorities, reprioritization of pre-loaded resources, and reduced bandwidth contention among images." To my eye, this appeared to speed up load times on graphics heavy pages.

The real test of any Web browser in 2013 is how well it does on the standard Web-browser benchmarks. So, on my Windows 7 system, I set Chrome up against the latest versions of Internet Explorer 10 and Firefox 21. Here, as usual when it comes to Web browser benchmarks, Chrome did quite well.

For the first round, I ran the three browsers on SunSpider JavaScript 1.0, the latest version of the old Apple Webkit JavaScript benchmark. While it's not as well-regarded as it once was, it's still the best known Web browser benchmark. On SunSpider, where lower results are better, IE, with a score of 232.5-milliseconds beat Chrome and Firefox handily with a score of 232.5-milliseconds (ms) to Firefox's 303.9-ms and Chrome's 521.1-ms.

When it came to Google's own new JavaScript benchmark, Google's earlier V8 test suite, Chrome, unsurprisingly, beat the pants off its competition. On this test, where higher is better, Chrome won with a score of 10,177 to Firefox's 8,392, and IE's 3,758.

Moving along, I then tested Chrome and company on benchmark company Peacekeeper. Like the other benchmarks, this test measures JavaScript performance, but it also evaluates HTML5 performance. Many regard it as the best browser benchmark. On Peacekeeper, where higher is better, Chrome took first with a score of 2,453 to Firefox's 1,798, and IE's last place 1,514.

In Kraken, which is Mozilla/Firefox's benchmark, lower scores are better. Oddly enough, Chrome won here too. It took the blue ribbon with 2,922.3-ms over Firefox's 3,367.9-ms, and IE's dreadful 9,413.8-ms.

Last, but not least, I tested the trio on

The bottom line is that Chrome, which is available on all operating systems, is still the fastest Web browser around. However, its newest, biggest, feature, VR still isn't ready for prime-time.

• Chrome 27 fixes 14 flaws and enables spoken conversations with Google
• Firefox 21 release adds to Social API, closes security holes
• Microsoft delivers final version of IE 10 for Windows 7
• Google touts speech in new Chrome beta, releases API for devs
• Opera joins Chrome & Safari in using Webkit for Web-browsing

Users, who had been making Google Voice calls from inside Gmail, noticed after the introduction of the new Hangouts that this functionality has been removed. These Voice users were, to say the least, not happy. While you could—and still can—revert to the old style Google Chat from Hangout, users were still unable to make Google Voice calls from Gmail.

Nikhyl Singhal, Google's Director of Product Management for Real-Time Communications, quickly responded to the problem with Google's near-term future plans for adding Google Voice to Hangouts.

The Ultimate Google Voice How-to Guide

On Google+, Singhai wrote, “Today's version of Hangouts doesn't yet support outbound calls on the Web and in the Chrome extension, but we do support inbound calls to your Google Voice number. We're working hard on supporting both, and outbound/inbound calls will soon be available. In the meantime, you can continue using Google Talk in Gmail.”

Looking ahead, Singhai added, “Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning. Future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.”

That's all well and good, but Google Voice and Hangout users want more. In particular, users continue to want Google Voice availability outside of the United States; better texting/Short Message Service (SMS) integration; and better support for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS). That said, for now, they're happy with the promise that they'll be able to both get and make calls from Google Voice within Hangouts soon.

Related Stories:

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• Number portability does not require Google Voice
• Love and hate: The New Google+ lool

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Love and hate: the new Google+ look

Thank you, Google, for the new homework assignment: Hangouts vs Chat

And, this is the new Google+. It has two to three content columns, and an optional video/VoIP/instant messaging column on the right. If it reminds some of you of Pinterest or WebOS, that shouldn't be a surprise. The Pinterest look is clear and Google+ designers now include some of the old WebOS team. 

Google+ is now integrating your images even more closely into the system. Besides just collecting all your Google online photos into one interface, it also now includes automatic image fixig tools. With this move, Google is putting Facebook and Instragram on notice that they're playing in the photography space as well. 

Google+'s secret sause continues to be Google+ circles that gives you easy, precise control over who can see, and who can't see, any given post. 

If circles don't always work for you Google+ communities enable you to focus on talking about the issues that matter to you.  if you follow me, for example, you'll get Star Trek posts as well as Linux stories

If you want to adjust what's happening in Google+, you'll find all its features and controls in a drop-down right-hand menu bar. 

If you really can't stand the Google+ multiple columns, you can switch to a single column look. As you can see, however, it's not very attractive. 

Linus Torvalds, inventor of a little thing called Linux, points out that Google+ has one real weakness: It's current default font is awful. 

Hashtags, as any Twitter user knows, can be very useful. Trying to figure out the right hashtag can be a pain, so Google+, under the direction of the developer who came up with the notion for Twitter, has automated hashtag selection. You can still add them in by hand, but this new mode will make hashtags as important on Google+, if not more so, than they are on Twitter. 

In 2013, Google+ came into its own when it became the world's second most popular social network. That didn't stop Google however from announcing more than 41 major changes at Google I/O. These weren't small, under-the-hood changes. One, the shift from a single content column to Google Now style "cards" in two or three columns with large images that take up the entire width of the display, has totally transformed the interface.

Gallery: The brighter, more colorful Google+

Some people loved this change. Harry McCracken, noted technology journalist wrote in Time magazine, "The service, which was already pretty darn slick, is now among the most attractive and engaging web apps I’ve ever seen." The New Yorker's new technology associate editor Matt Buchanan wrote, "The mobile version of Plus, which has used cards for a few months, by contrast, feels ebullient and rich, like it was inspired by beautiful magazines, if magazines were also living, breathing entities."

So much for the adoration. Others, such as Chris Voss a social media expert and CEO of Strategix One Consulting, look at the new Google+ and see the image-oriented Pinterest social network. Not that's there's anything wrong with that. Still others find it far too busy and annoying.

Me? I found it distracting at first, but I'm getting to like it. If you can't stand it, you can shift back to a look that's something like the old interface. You do this by going to Google+ settings and scrolling down to the Accessibility radio box. There, check "Change the presentation of some pages to work better with screen readers and other assistive tools," and you'll have the new one column look. It is not, I repeat not, a real replacement for the old look.

There is, however, another problem: Google+'s fonts. As Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux and a Google+ user, put it, "This is the fuzziest font I have ever seen. Maybe it's the WOFF [Web Open Font Format] rasterizer in Chrome that could suck dead baby donkeys through a straw?" Torvalds is right. The fonts are ugly as sin. Hopefully Google will get them fixed soon.

The other major change is that .

Finally, in addition to Google+ Circles, where you select which people see which of your posts, and Google+ Communities, which are online groups set up for a specific interest, Google+ has now embraced Twitter's favorite topic organizing feature, the hashtag.

You, however, don't have to assign hashtags to a story. Google does it for you. So, for example, if I write a story about Linux, Google will automatically add a Linux hashtag to it. Users, for their part, can now browse related content by clicking on a post with a particular topic. Since it's often hard to know what hashtag to use--e.g. Linux, Ubuntu, open source?--having the system handle it for you if you don't want to do it manually is a nice feature. 

At first, I found the new Google+ interface to be more distracting than useful. That said, even as I was double-checking my facts as I wrote this story I found myself liking it more and more. If you're a long-time Google+ user, I urge you to give it a chance before writing it off. If you haven't used Google+ before, it's high-time you did.

Related Stories:

• I/O 2013: Google Plus getting 41 updates
• Facebook remains top social network, Google+, YouTube battle for second
• Google presses algorithm, cloud advantage vs. Apple, rivals
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Strongbox is the first use of DeadDrop technology. The New Yorker magazine will use it so that its readers can "communicate with our writers and editors with greater anonymity and security than afforded by conventional email". With the Department of Justice's questionable seizure of over two months of Associated Press phone records, the First Amendment's free speech right and its corollary, freedom of the press, is under attack. DeadDrop couldn't have been released at a better time.

Specifically:

DeadDrop is a server application intended to let news organizations and others set up an online drop box for sources. It's open-source software written by Aaron Swartz in consultation with a volunteer team of security experts. In addition to Aaron's code, the project includes installation scripts and set-up instructions both for the software, and for a hardened Ubuntu environment on which to run it.

DeadDrop was created with the goal of placing a secure drop box within reach of anyone with the need. But at this point, expertise is still required to safely deploy this software. And the software itself needs more work.

DeadDrop is free software: You can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the license, or (at your option) any later version.

The code is a Python application that accepts messages and documents from the web and GPG encrypts them for secure storage. Essentially, it's a more secure alternative to the "contact us" form found on a typical news site.

In operation, every source is given a unique "code name". The code name lets the source establish a relationship with the news organization without revealing her real identity or resorting to email. She can enter the code name on a future visit to read any messages sent back from the journalist — "Thanks for the Roswell photos! Got any more??" — or submit additional documents or messages under the same persistent, but anonymous, identifier.

The source is known by a different code name on the journalist's side. All of that source's submissions are grouped together into a "collection". Every time there's a new submission by that source, their collection is bumped to the top of the submission queue.

DeadDrop was designed to use three physical servers: A public-facing server, a second server for storage of messages and documents, and a third that does security monitoring of the first two. The New Yorker's public-facing server also has a USB dongle called an Entropy Key, plugged attached to generate a pool of random numbers for the crypto.

To use it, users need to first download and install software to access the Tor network. This is a combination of free software and internet-connected computers that help enable anonymity on the internet. Once you're on Tor, you'll need to go to the Strongbox website.

Once there, you will be assigned a randomly generated and unique code name, and you'll be able to post information to The New Yorker. If a writer or editor then wants to contact you about the information you have submitted, he or she will leave a message for you in Strongbox. These messages are the only way they will be able to reach you, and can only be accessed using your code name.

When you visit or use their public Strongbox server, The New Yorker and its parent company, Cond Nast, promise that it will not record your IP address or information about your browser, computer, or operating system, nor will they embed third-party content or deliver cookies to your browser.

The Strongbox servers themselves are under the physical control of The New Yorker and Cond Nast in a physically and logically segregated area at a secure datacenter, but they otherwise have no elements in common with Cond Nast, The New Yorker's publisher. As Amy Davidson, a New Yorker senior editor wrote, "Over the years, it has also become easier to trace [email] senders, even when they don’t want to be found. Strongbox addresses that. As it's set up, even we won't be able to figure out where files sent to us come from. If anyone asks us, we won’t be able to tell them."

Aaron would have been proud.

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That Facebook is number one, with its 1.11 billion members, is no surprise. EMarketer believes that just over half, 51 percent, of all internet users visit Facebook at least once a month. The company also stated that worldwide Facebook penetration will only continue to grow higher, reaching 60 percent of internet users by year's end.

Behind Facebook, things get more interesting. There are numerous companies fighting it out for second place, with Google+ out front at 26 percent of internet users. Google+!? Yes, Google+. As eMarketer stated, "In the US, Google+ gets limited attention, though its user base is growing. Worldwide, Google+ has been much more successful."

This analysis agrees with GlobalWebIndex's numbers. GlobalWebIndex found in January 2013 that Google+ had moved into second place, with approximately 343 million active users.

YouTube, which both analysis groups now consider a social network, is right behind Google+ with 25 percent. Combined, eMarketer concluded "that Google, which owns YouTube, is giving Facebook a run for its money in the global social network space".

Of the other major Western social networks, only Twitter, with 22 percent in fourth place, was above 20 percent. Twitter, by eMarketer's count, is growing quickly. "Between Q2 2012 and Q1 2013, active users of Twitter rose 42 percent globally."

The other most popular global social networks, those with more than 10 percent of the global social network market, are all regional Chinese networks. The top three, in order of popularity, after Twitter are Sina Weibo, at 21 percent; Qzone, at 21 percent; and Tencent, at 20 percent.

Of the other Western social networks, only LinkedIn, at 8 percent, and Pinterest, at 4 percent, broke into the top 15 global social network list. A better way of describing these networks isn't with the word "Western", but non-Chinese.

As eMarketer described the global social network market, "Chinese social networks garnered among the greatest percentage of users worldwide, a reflection of both the vastness of the social audience in China and the limited availability of foreign properties, like Facebook, in the country." At the same time, if you look at the countries with the greatest rate of growth in social networking, you'll find, in this order, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, the US, and Russia. Much of this new growth is being driven by smartphone and tablet users.

What all this means for business is if you're going to spend marketing dollars on social networks, the biggest bang for your buck in most countries will be from either Facebook or the Google+/YouTube pairing. Twitter would be your next choice. As for the other social networks, unless you're looking to the Chinese markets or want to reach business people on LinkedIn, they're far in the back.

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As Frank Frankovsky, chairman of OCP, said:

We are working together, in the open, to design and build smarter, more scalable, more efficient datacenter technologies — but we're still connecting them to the outside world using black-box switches that haven't been designed for deployment at scale, and don't allow consumers to modify or replace the software that runs on them.

With that in mind, we are today announcing a new project within OCP that will focus on developing a specification and a reference box for an open, OS-agnostic top-of-rack switch . Najam Ahmad, who runs the network engineering team at Facebook, has volunteered to lead the project, and a wide variety of organizations — including Big Switch Networks, Broadcom, Cumulus Networks, Facebook, Intel, Netronome, OpenDaylight, the Open Networking Foundation, and VMware — are already planning to participate. Work on the project will begin in earnest at the first-ever OCP Engineering Summit (http://www.opencompute.org/events/ocp-engineering-summit-mit/), being held at MIT on May 16.

It's our hope that an open, disaggregated switch will enable a faster pace of innovation in the development of networking hardware; help software-defined networking continue to evolve and flourish; and ultimately provide consumers of these technologies with the freedom they need to build infrastructures that are flexible, scalable, and efficient across the entire stack. This is a new kind of undertaking for OCP — starting a project with just an idea and a clean sheet of paper, instead of building on an existing design that's been contributed to the foundation — and we are excited to see how the project group delivers on our collective vision.

Of course, there's nothing new about open-source switches. Any Linux or BSD server can also serve as a switch. Vyatta, an open-source router project designed to handle speeds from DSL to 10Gbps, has been around for years. That last number is the telling one, though. Datacenters need network switches that can start with 10Gbps and move up from there.

What will such an open-source switch look like? We don't know yet. One of Linux's weaknesses is that its network stack isn't that fast, noted Adrian Cockcroft, director of architecture for Netflix's cloud systems, at Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco in April 2013.

That said, many high-speed switches today use BSD Unix as their basis. While many say that the OCP is starting with a "clean sheet of paper", the ultimate goal of the project seems to be to give datacenter administrators a "bare metal network switch". I think it's likely that BSD will lie at its heart. After all, why reinvent the wheel?

What I find especially interesting about this OCP move is that it's coming immediately after the Linux Foundation's move to unify most of the software-defined networking (SDN) powers under an open-source approach in the Open Daylight Foundation.

In the past, the major network hardware vendors would use open-source software for their black boxes; but, since they used BSD-licensed code, they didn't need to share their improvements. We now seem to be moving to a much more truly open-source-friendly network infrastructure world. The result should be better and cheaper high-end network gear for server farms and datacenters.

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The very first web browsers, such as Lynx, were character-based applications without a graphical user interface to be seen. It may look hopelessly primitive today, but in their time, 1991-1993, they were great. Unlike most of the other early browsers, Lynx, introduced in 1992, is still being maintained, and Unix and Linux shell users still use it today.

MacWWW (aka Samba)

Amusing enough, the first Mac web browser in 1993, MacWWW, aka Samba, was also a character-based web browser. It had a bad habit of crashing ... a lot. Today, it's perhaps the least well-known of the early browsers.

Viola

The very first graphical web browser was Viola, which was created in 1991. Heavily influenced by Apple HyperCard, this Unix X Window System browser was invented by Pei-Yuan Wei, a Taiwanese computer science student. He had been working on hyperlinks and the internet, and had he been a bit faster off the mark, he (and not Tim Berners-Lee) might have gone down in history as the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Mosaic

Mosaic was the first widely-popular graphical web browser. It was first available on Unix in 1993, but it was quickly ported to the Mac and Windows PC. It set both the look of the web browser today, and both Firefox and Internet Explorer can trace their roots to its original code. 

Cello

By 1993, people outside of the scientific community were learning about the web and they wanted to be able to use it from Windows PCs instead of Unix workstations. So it was that Tom Bruce developed the first web browser for Windows: Cello. Bruce did this in conjunction with his work on the Legal Information Institute (LII), the first legal information site on the web. 

Internet Explorer 1.0

Do you think Internet Explorer 1.0 looks a lot like Mosaic? Well, it should; it was actually a version of Mosaic that had been customized for Windows by a company named Spyglass. You see, at the start of the web, Bill Gates didn't think it would ever amount to much. By 1995, he'd realized the error of his ways and rushed IE into the then brand-new Windows 95.

Netscape

In the meantime, Mosaic's inventors had gone on to produce their own commercial web browser: Netscape, which was introduced in 1994. In its early years, Netscape was the dominant web browser. Microsoft, however, forced the company out of business in the late 90s. While Microsoft was eventually found guilty of anti-trust behavior, it came too late to save Netscape. 

Today, you turn on any device, and two seconds later, you're on the web. Before Mosaic, people who had access to the internet — if they were lucky, on V.32bis's speedy 28.8Kbps — used relatively difficult-to-use character-based interface programs, such as Lynx and WWW. Mosaic changed all that.

Say hello to the early days of web browsers

Mosaic, the creation of Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, wasn't the first graphical web browser. That honor goes to ViolaWWW. This browser, however, only worked on Unix workstations using the X Windows System. Cello was the first graphical web browser for Windows. Be that as it may, no one argues that Mosaic was the first truly popular web browser.

That's not to say that Mosaic was easy to use. It wasn't. In the early to mid 1990s, simply getting on the internet was still something of a black art. Windows, for example, didn't natively support the internet's fundamental protocol, TCP/IP, until Windows 95 appeared. If you wanted TCP/IP on Windows before that, you needed to use the arcane but absolutely vital Trumpet Winsocket program, and find an internet service provider (ISP).

It was worth it, though. In those early days, people were frantic to get on the web, and Mosaic, a freeware browser, was far more often than not the first browser they'd use. Andreessen and Bina, no fools they, saw the business possibilities on the web and took the Mosaic code base. In October 1994, they turned it into the first successful commercial web browser: Netscape.

Microsoft, which had been slow off the mark to realize how important the internet and the web would be, also used the Mosaic code base, via a company called Spyglass, to make the first version of Internet Explorer (IE). IE 1.0 was released in as an add-on to Windows 95 in the Microsoft Plus package in August 1995.

So it was that by the mid '90s, Mosaic had become the most popular web browser of the early internet years. Indeed, even now, while the program itself is an anachronism, you can still see how its basic design decisions have strongly improved today's web browsers such as Firefox, its most direct descendant, Chrome, and IE.

It may have been 20 years since Mosaic has been released, but we're still seeing its influence today.

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At the Linux Foundation's Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, Adrian Cockcroft, director of architecture for Netflix's cloud systems team, after first thanking everyone "for building the internet so we can fill it with movies", said that Netflix's Linux, FreeBSD, and open-source based services are "cloud native".

By this, Cockcroft meant that even with more than a billion video instances delivered every month over the internet, "there is no datacenter behind Netflix". Instead, Netflix, which has been using Amazon Web Services since 2009 for some of its services, moved its entire technology infrastructure to AWS in November 2012.

Specifically, depending on customer demand, Netflix's front-end services are running on 500 to 1,000 Linux-based Tomcat JavaServer and NGINX web servers. These are empowered by hundreds of other Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and the NoSQL Cassandra database servers using the Memcached high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. All of this, and more besides, are distributed across three Amazon Web Services availability zones. Every time you visit Netflix either with a device or a web browser, all these are brought together within a second to show you your video selections.

According to Cockcroft, if something goes wrong, Netflix can continue to run the entire service on two out of three zones. Netcraft didn't simply take Amazon's word for this. They tested out total Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) failures with its open-source Chaos Gorilla software. "We go around trying to break things to prove everything is resistant to it," said Cockcroft. Netflix, in concert with Amazon, is working on multi EC2 region availability. Once in place, an entire EC2 zone failure won't stop Netflix videos from flowing to customers.

That won't be easy though. It's not so much that the problem is replicating videos and services across the EC2 zones. Netflix already has its own content delivery network (CDN), Open Connect, and servers placed at local ISP hubs for that. No, the real problem is setting the Domain Name System (DNS) so that users are directed to the right Amazon zone when one is down. That's because Cockcroft said, DNS provider wildly different application programming interfaces (API)s, and they're designed to be hand-managed by an engineer and thus are not at all easy to automate.

That isn't stopping Netflix from addressing the problem just because it's difficult. Indeed, Netflix plans on failure. As Cockcroft titled his talk, Netflix is about dystopia as a service. The plan isn't if something will fail on the cloud, it's on how to keep working no matter how the clouds or specific services fail. Netflix's services are designed to, when something go wrong, gradually degrade rather than fail completely.

As he said, sure, perfection, utopia would be great, but if you're always striving for perfection, you always end up compromising. So instead of striving for perfection, Netflix is continuously updating its systems in real time rather than perfecting them. How fast is that? Netflix wants to "code features in days instead of months; we want to deploy new hardware in minutes instead of weeks; and we want to see instant responses in seconds instead of hours". By deploying on the cloud, Netflix can do all of this.

Sure, sometimes, this doesn't work. In December 2012, for example, a failure in AWS's Elastic Load Balancer in the US-East-Region1 datacenter brought Netflix down during the Christmas holiday.

On the other hand, the Netflix method of producing code sooner rather than later, and running in such a way that the service keeps going even though some components are — not may, but are — broken and inefficient at any given time, has produced a service that is capable of being the single largest consumer of internet bandwidth. Clearly, it's not perfect, but Netflix's design decision to "create a highly agile and highly available service from ephemeral and often broken components" on the cloud works, and as far as Netflix is concerned, for day to day cloud-based video delivery, that's much better than "perfection" could ever be.

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To understand what's really happening, you need to know that whenever you try to connect to any site that doesn't support Secure-Socket Layer (SSL)/Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) connections, you're going to get an HTTPS error message. Below is an example of a typical error message.

Of course, that's not the error message you're seeing from Bing. That's because Bing is using the Akamai CDN. A CDN is designed to speed up traffic to popular web sites by mirroring these sites on their global network of servers. Thus, when you first "connect" to Bing or other Akamai-supported sites, such as the White House, chances are you're almost certainly connecting to a near-by — in terms of network traffic — Akamai server instead.

Akamai supports HTTPS connections, but only if the host site supports it. Otherwise, the link along the security chain from the Akamai network to the core website is broken, and the connection wouldn't truly be secure. In this situation, Akamai presents a different error message — the one you'll see now if you try to reach Bing or The White House using an unsupported HTTPS connection.

Officially, neither Akamai nor Microsoft has any comment, but really, everything is fine with Bing. Microsoft did not let its security certificate for Bing expire the way it did its Azure cloud service in February. You see. Microsoft has never had a SSL certificate for Bing in the first place.

This is also not the first — nor I'm sure will it be the last — time that someone reports a site is broken because of this problem. All that's really happening is that a normally invisible part of the internet infrastructure, the CDN, is appearing because someone is trying to force a secure connection to a site that doesn't support it.

That said, major websites should support Transport Layer Security (TLS), SSL, and HTTPS. Without this layer of security, anytime you use an open wi-fi connection or other open network, the potential exists for crackers, using tools such as FireSheep and its network packet sniffer for dummies descendants, to watch your web browsing activities.

Since FireSheep showed up in 2010, more and more sites — including Twitter, Google, and Facebook — have all enabled secure connections. It's well past time Microsoft started supporting basic security on Bing as well.

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Aereo, itself, is based on a very simple idea. Many people want to cut the cable cord, but find it hard to watch the major broadcast networks even with an over-the-air (OTA) antenna. Aereo takes several existing technologies and creates a packaged solution for these people.

First, Aereo sets up clusters of miniature antennas in an area. When you sign up for the service, you are assigned two of those antennas. One is for watching live shows and the other is for recording programs. Your local OTA shows are then streamed to a cloud-based digital video recorder (DVR)-like service.

This isn't just a TiVo in the clouds, though. Whether you're watching a "live" show or a recorded one, you're creating, the company states, "three separate unique copies of the show, each in a different bit rate optimized for different streaming conditions. The lowest bit rate file is ideal for streaming over 3G connections. The medium rate file will work well over most wi-fi connections. The highest rate file is intended for really fast broadband connections. While watching, you can choose the Video Quality on your device. If you select 'auto', you will automatically choose the best bit rate for your current network conditions".

The only customer problem with this is that, at most, you can only record up to 40 hours of video. If you're like me, that's nowhere near enough storage.

When you want to watch your local TV, you then stream your shows to a wide variety of devices. Currently, you can watch Aereo shows on PCs with up-to-date versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Internet Explorer web browsers. You can also watch shows on Apple iPads; iPhones running iOS 4.x or better; Apple TV, using Airplay; and Roku units with 3.0 or higher firmware. Android support will be arriving shortly.

At this time, the service is only available in New York City. You can't, for example, subscribe to the service in Chicago and watch New York City channels. Aereo is planning on expanding to 22 new cities in 2013.

Sounds simple enough, doesn't it? It's really not much different from what I currently do with my OTA antenna and my TiVo Premiere.

Many broadcast companies see this, however, as threatening their business models. While advertising was once the life's blood for broadcast TV, over the last few years, cable and satellite operator retransmission fees has become vital to their business. Aereo doesn't pay such a surcharge. As a result, several of these companies, including CBS, ZDNet's parent company, have taken Aereo to court on copyright grounds.

In the courtroom, the networks have lost twice. Given that the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that they have "not demonstrated that they are likely to prevail on the merits of this claim in their copyright infringement action", it seems unlikely they'll win in the courts.

So it is that CBS and Fox are threatening to turn off OTA broadcasts in NYC if Aereo continues to stream broadcast TV without paying retransmission fees. As an alternative to switching to black, CBS and Fox are proposing that their OTA signals would only be available to OTA subscribers using some as-yet-unknown digital rights management (DRM) package.

Let's hope that all sides can come to a mutual agreement and that it doesn't come to that.

Related Stories:

• CNET: CBS joins Fox in considering subscription-only model

• CNET: Aereo wins big one in streaming case against TV networks

• CNET: Aereo said to be talking partnership with AT&T and Dish

• Intel plans to launch Internet television service this year

• Microsoft sells its IPTV business to Ericsson

• NYC broadcasters sue to shut down web TV service Aereo

That sounds nice, but without industry backing, it doesn't mean much.

OpenDaylight has the support it needs to transform SDN. Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat, and VMware are all founding Platinum and Gold members of the project. It will donate software and engineering resources for this open source framework, and help to define the future of an open SDN platform. Yes, that's right: Cisco and Juniper, Microsoft and Red Hat, and other major industry rivals are all joining forces.

Specifically, OpenDaylight will be supporting already existing open standards such as OpenFlow. The project's goal is to deliver a common open-source framework and platform for SDN across the industry for customers, partners, and developers. The customer win: A single, multi-vendor and open-source SDN platform.

The first code from the OpenDaylight Project should be released in 3Q13; expected donations and projects include an open controller, a virtual overlay network, protocol plugins, and switch device enhancements. What makes it in will be determined by the OpenDaylight Technical Steering Committee (TSC).

"This is a rare gathering of leaders in the technology ecosystem who have decided to combine efforts in a common platform in order to innovate faster and build better products for their customers," said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation in a statement. "The world has learned that collaborative development can quickly drive software innovation, especially in fast moving markets. We are excited to be working with OpenDaylight and expect truly amazing things to come."

At this point, we know that Big Switch Networks is planning to contribute open-source elements of its Open SDN Suite to the OpenDaylight Project. This will include controller code, advanced data store with high availability, distributed virtual routing service applications, network virtualization, network overlays, and other applications.

Cisco has contributed controller technology including an Application Framework and Service Abstraction Layer (SAL). This provides basic controller functionality with support for southbound plug-ins to communicate with network devices using various protocols including OpenFlow, the ability to integrate controller applications as modules, and a set of REST APIs (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) to expose the controller capabilities.

Cisco's arch-rival Juniper Networks is planning to contribute a number of technical elements including Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) client and server protocol code and a flexible data model.

For its part, Citrix is  contributing an application controller that integrates Layer 4-7 network services into OpenDaylight Project. Citrix has also committed to contributing a plug-in for OpenDaylight into the Apache CloudStack project.

IBM intends to submit an open-source version of its Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet [PDF link] technology as its initial contribution. According to IBM, DOVE is designed to work on top of existing network infrastructures to help simplify the process of setting up, managing and scaling virtual networks for faster and more flexible delivery of cloud, analytics, mobile and social business services.

Red Hat will be working on building and delivering an SDN solution that integrates with OpenStack and Linux's built-in Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

Microsoft hasn't spelled out what it plans to contribute to the project yet. In a statement, Brad Anderson, Microsoft's Corporate VP for Windows Server and System Center, said, "Microsoft is pleased to be a member of the OpenDaylight Project and to work with industry leaders to create a common framework and platform for SDN. The OpenDaylight Project aligns with Microsoft’s commitment to open standards-based development and enables the industry to benefit from Microsoft’s deep experience running global, large-scale data-centers and delivering flexible, elastic cloud-scale services."

All the OpenDaylight code will be operating-system independent and is expected to be available on multiple platforms. It will be licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL). This is an Open Source Initiative approved license.

These companies are taking on a monster of a job. The problem isn't so much the standards or the code, it's getting everyone on the same page. The mere fact that The Linux Foundation has brought together essentially all the major players in the SDN space and has gotten them to agree to work on a common, open framework is remarkable in its own right. If they're successful in actually creating the OpenDaylight framework, SDN will be one giant step closer to becoming the new datacenter and corporate networking standard.

Related stories

• Software defined networking: Hype or hope?

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• HP: Software defined networking enterprise-wide in 2015

Indeed, you could see this move coming at least three years ago when Aaron Patzer, Mint's founder and then Intuit VP and GM of personal finance said, "Quicken Online will be going away, and we'll be migrating to Mint". At the time, he also suggested that Intuit "will have desktop products for at least another five years, simply due to comfort level more than anything else". We're two years away from that deadline. Could this be the first step to putting an end to desktop Quicken?

That would be premature.

But for now, Greg Wright, vice president of product management at Intuit Financial Services, said in a statement that "more than 12 million people already use Mint.com to manage their complete financial picture, and have identified savings of more than $30 billion toward their personal goals. By blending Mint with their digital banking home page, financial institutions can provide immediate, meaningful financial insights to their customers, help more people save money, and further deepen banking relationships by recommending relevant financial products at the time when people are most interested."

Intuit argues that the new Mint offering will help financial institutions position themselves as trusted advisors, improving their customers' financial lives. Specifically, its features, which its non-bank branded version already includes, are:

• Showing customers their entire financial picture in one place: Automatically organizes spending from more than 19,000 financial accounts into categories and shows where money is going with easy-to-understand charts

• Offering free actionable advice on how to save money: Delivers personalized alerts and insights based on individual transactional behavior, financial habits, and goals

• Providing on-the-go tracking with mobile apps: Provides an award-winning mobile experience that gives customers the big picture view and dollar-and-cent details of their money on their iOS and Android mobile phones and tablets

• Suggesting helpful products and services: Alerts customers to relevant products and services from their financial institution that are specific to their situation at a time when they are most interested in learning more.

Intuit's move is also meant to help banks with their marketing. Wright continued, "Mint is more than just online pie charts. It's an easy way for banks to provide valuable advice and services based on a customer's specific needs and use of financial products, all in the place millions of people look for help."

To me, if you add in Intuit's other recent online service moves, such as QuickBooks Online for iPad; the hook-up between TurboTax and local accountants; and its promotion of QuickBooks Online. it's clear that Intuit, one of the last major pure desktop software program players, is getting ready to move its product line once and for all to the cloud. Mint, with its easy-to-use web interface, free price-tag, and compatibility with all platforms, may well be Intuit's future and Quicken's successor.

Why not? After all, three out of four Intuit customers are already using Intuit's online services.

Related stories

• Intuit optimizes QuickBooks Online for Apple iPad

• Intuit aims to give small business spin to big data

• Intuit's latest service hooks up small businesses with accountants

• Intuit opens up APIs to its financial data service in US, Canada

• Intuit: Pain and pleasure in the cloud

While some people may have been surprised that Google has finally made Blink, its own fork of the popular WebKit Web browser engine, in Web developer circles this move came as no surprise.

While Apple and Google had long worked together on the open-source WebKit project for years, developers both inside and outside of Google wanted Google to move away from Apple. In addition, the two tech giants had different visions for the Web browser engine.

As Adam Barth, a Google Software Engineer wrote:

Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation — so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open-source rendering engine based on WebKit.

This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines — similar to having multiple browsers — will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem. In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files — comprising more than 4.5 million lines — right off the bat. Over the long term, a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.

Throughout this transition, we'll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the Web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we've set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

Justin Schuh, a Google Chrome security software engineer, added on Google+ that while he's not speaking for Google or the Chromium project, that:

I think it’s safe to say that the Chrome security team has taken a very active role in WebKit security over the last several years, and really led the pack in making Webkit more robust against exploits. We’ve fuzzed at previously unheard of scales, paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in bug bounties, performed extensive code auditing, fixed many hundreds of security bugs, and introduced a slew of hardening measures. And while we're very proud of the work we've done on WebKit security, the fact is that it’s getting harder and harder for us to make a big impact anymore.

The big issue is a side effect of Chrome’s design. While our architecture has tremendous strengths (beyond just security), it’s also very different from other WebKit-based browsers, and grows even more so with the rest of the WebKit project's increasing focus on the WebKit2 layer. These differences have forced us to make increasingly difficult decisions, like sidelining major security enhancements that don’t fit well with WebKit. Meanwhile, we were regularly handling security regressions resulting from things like differing release schedules, and maintaining legacy behavior required by WebKit as an API [Application Programming Interface]. These growing pains are common enough when a project like WebKit evolves to encompass such a broad set of consumers, but eventually you can reach a point where the burden on some members is just too high.

So, with the Blink project we now have a chance to fix quite a bit of technical security debt that’s accumulated over the years. These changes are all things that fit well with Chrome’s architecture, but were not viable in WebKit given their impact on other platforms.

These security issues have often been mentioned as a reason for Google to leave Apple behind. In some Web developer circles it's been felt that Apple's programmers hadn't been carrying their fair share of the load of making WebKit (which Apple's Safari Web browser uses) secure.

Google isn't going alone in this new fork. Opera, which recently left its own Web-browser engine for WebKit, is joining them. Hvard Molland, a lead Opera software developer, tweeted, "So what about Opera? Opera is going with Blink as well."

The first fruits of this shift should be seen in the next few updates of Google's Chrome Web browser. As for Apple? We can only presume that they'll keep working with WebKit.

Related Stories:

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Why the differences? The two most popular web browser counters use different methodologies.

NetMarketShare gathers its data from approximately 40,000 websites that use Net Applications (its parent company), HitsLink analytics service, and SharePost bookmarking service. They track 160 million visits a month, but only count visitors to a particular site once per day. That data is then massaged by Net Applications depending on the traffic it believes comes from a particular country and the number of internet users per country, according to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). So for example, as the company explains, "If our global data shows that Brazil represents 2 percent of our traffic, and the CIA table shows Brazil to represent 4 percent of global internet traffic, we will count each unique visitor from Brazil twice."

StatCounter also collects data from its customers, but it uses a much larger sample. StatCounter tracks over 3 million webs sites that use its StatCounter traffic analysis service. The company claims to follow over 15 billion page views per month. In addition, StatCounter doesn't massage its data. Instead, it bases its numbers entirely on raw page hits.

Here's how it works. Say ZDNet tracks web browsers using both Net Application and StatCounter's technologies. If you visited ZDNet 20-times in a day from your office in Rio de Janeiro, NetMarketShare would register your web browser visiting the site twice. StatCounter, on the other hand, would count it as 20 separate hits. This may not seem like it would make much difference, but as their respective numbers shows, it does.

So with no further adieu, here are the latest web browser statistics:

By NetMarketShare's PC count, Internet Explorer (IE) squeezed out a tiny 0.01 percent gain, from 55.82 percent to 55.83 percent. In second place, Firefox moved up by 0.09 percent, from 20.12-percent to 20.21-percent. Third-place Chrome gained the most with a modest jump of 0.18 points from 16.27 percent to 16.45 percent.

All this growth came at the expense of the trailing pair of web browsers: Safari, which dropped 0.11 percent to 5.31 percent, and Opera, which fell 0.08 percentage points to 0.46 percent.

Of course, StatCounter sees March's data in an entirely different light. By their numbers, Chrome led in March with 38.07 percent, followed by IE with 29.3 percent, and then Firefox with 20.8 percent. Bringing up the rear, Safari came in with 8.5 percent, and Opera limped in last with 1.17 percent.

When it comes to smartphones and tablets, the two also disagree. By NetMarketShare's reckoning, Safari jumped up to 61.79 percent from 55.41 percent in February. The native Android browser came in second place with 21.86 percent share, and Opera Mini stayed in third place with 8.4 percent. The two most popular web browsers on the desktop? Chrome and IE? They barely register, with Chrome coming in fourth at 2.43 percent and IE with 1.99 percent.

StatCounter sees a vastly different mobile web browsing world. From StatCounter's viewpoint, Android's in first with 30.78 percent. It's followed by Safari on the iPhone at 24.44 percent. Even if you add in Safari on the iPod touch, Apple's mobile web-browsing offering still comes in at second place with 27.05 percent.

Opera takes third with 15.54 percent. It's followed by the UC Browser, a multi-platform mobile browser, with 8.27 percent, and fifth place went to Nokia with 6.96 percent. StatCounter does agree with NetMarketShare on one point: Neither Chrome nor IE matter in the mobile space.

So which numbers do you believe? I can argue for either set, but personally, I find that StatCounter agrees more with the numbers I see from my own websites using Google Analytics.

Related stories

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• Pwn2Own: Down go all the browsers

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• Microsoft delivers final version of IE 10 for Windows 7

According to market-research company The NPD Group, the average US internet household now has 5.7 internet-connected devices. That's up from 5.3 devices only three months ago. By their count, there are now more than half-a-billion internet-connected devices in the US alone.

While the good old PC is still the most commonly connected device, the real growth is coming from tablets and smartphones. In the last quarter alone, NPD saw nearly 18 million more tablets and 9 million more smartphones appear. Specifically, "Apple and Samsung remained the most prevalent smartphone brands consumers own, and Apple continues to dominate the tablet market".

In a statement, John Buffone, NPD Connected Intelligence' director said, "Even with this extraordinary growth in the smartphone and tablet market, PCs are still the most prevalent connected device in US internet households, and this is a fact that won't be changing any time soon. However, when you look at the combined number of smartphones and tablets consumers own, for the first time ever, it exceeded the installed base of computers." Specifically, NPD found that smartphone penetration rose from 52 percent to 57 percent of cell phone users, while tablet penetration increased significantly from 35 to 53 percent of internet households.

So what are we using all these devices for? In an earlier blog posting, Buffone noted that, "We can now watch HBOGO on three TVs in our home. Last night, we saw they started promoting its availability on AirPlay. As an early adopter, my first thought was, 'I want an Apple TV, too'. But there is no need, as all three TVs we own provide HBOGO, and each through a different type of device. Apple TV does, however, offer screen mirroring, which none of the other connected devices in our home provide, and that is bound to be useful — right? At least, this is often the thinking and behaviour of early adopters, which is quite different than that of the general consumer. It's these 'events', such as the availability of a prominent service like HBOGO, that often drive consumers to new technology. As devices such as Apple TV, Roku, Xbox, and others offer increased utility and easier ways to access the content you want to watch. This results in more mass-market consumers getting engaged."

In short, NPD is recognizing what a lot of us — including Netflix — already knew: People are increasingly turning to internet-based video and audio for their entertainment needs. Indeed, by late 2010, Netflix had already become the single largest internet service, leaving web use and peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing eating its dust. In fact, by late 2012, Netflix alone was taking up a third of all download traffic in North America during the evening hours.

That's great, but there's a problem with this. As Netflix and other on-demand internet video services become more popular, our internet bandwidth will struggle to keep up with the demand. That's especially true if you rely on 4G for your internet connection. As more and more devices ask for more and more video, our internet bandwidth is going to start to become overwhelmed. In 2010, the major US internet registry VeriSign said that the internet's bandwidth needed to increase by a factor of one thousand. They may have underestimated it.

At the same time, behind the scenes where users never go, we're continuing to run out of old-style IPv4 internet addresses. ISPs and users are not moving as quickly as they should to IPv6. The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) is still on track to run out of conventional IPv4 addresses on March 22, 2014. With so many more smartphones and tablets arriving on the internet, I suspect we're going to be running out sooner than that.

In other words, it's dandy that we're all getting so connected, but we're quickly getting to a point where our internet infrastructure may not be able to keep up with all our devices.

Related stories

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• OTT services beneficial to 'dumb pipe' ISPs

The DNS is the master address list for the Internet. Thanks to it, you can simply type in a human-readable URL, such as my own Web site's practical-tech.com, instead of writing out its IPv4 address "209.50.251.116." That's all well and good, but DNS doesn't have any built-in way to make sure that the IP address information it's feeding your browser is the real address.

That security hole has led to a kind of attack known as DNS cache poisoning. In it, you can click your way to what appears to be the site you want to go to, but under the surface, your browser is directed by a bad DNS address to a malware-loaded site.

DNSSEC addresses this, wrote Yunhong Gu, Team Leader for Google Public DNS, "by authenticating DNS responses using digital signatures and public key cryptography. Each DNS zone maintains a set of private/public key pairs, and for each DNS record, a unique digital signature is generated and encrypted using the private key. The corresponding public key is then authenticated via a chain of trust by keys of upper-level zones. DNSSEC effectively prevents response tampering because in practice, signatures are almost impossible to forge without access to private keys. Also, the resolvers will reject responses without correct signatures."

So, you might think if you switched to Google's Public DNS servers, you'd automatically get the benefits of DNSSEC and you'd have one less Internet worry. Alas, you'd be wrong.

You see, as Gu, explained, "Effective deployment of DNSSEC requires action from both DNS resolvers and authoritative name servers. Resolvers, especially those of ISPs and other public resolvers, need to start validating DNS responses. Meanwhile, domain owners have to sign their domains. Today, about 1/3 of top-level domains have been signed, but most second-level domains remain unsigned. We encourage all involved parties to push DNSSEC deployment and to further protect Internet users from DNS-based network intrusions."

In addition, because DNSSEC is still uncommon, Web browsers tend to do a lousy job of supporting it. Chrome has had built-in DNSSEC support since version 14, but for other Web browsers you have to add in DNSSEC support with extensions. At this time there are DNSSEC extensions for Firefox and Internet Explorer. There's also a Chrome DNSSEC extension, which helps make it clearer when you're visiting a site that's been authenticated by DNSSEC. As far as I've been able to determine there are no such extensions or native support for DNSSEC in Opera or Safari.

So, while Gu states that, "DNSSEC is a critical step towards securing the Internet. By validating data origin and data integrity, DNSSEC complements other Internet security mechanisms, such as SSL," even with Google's support it's still not widely supported. Indeed, "only 7% of queries from the client side are DNSSEC-enabled (about 3% requesting validation and 4% requesting DNSSEC data but no validation) and about 1% of DNS responses from the name server side are signed. Overall, DNSSEC is still at an early stage and we hope that our support will help expedite its deployment."

Let's hope it does. Anything we can do to make the Internet safer is a win in my book.

Related Stories:

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Winer, who created the first version of RSS in 1997, continued, "Never used the damn thing. Didn't trust the idea of a big company like Google's interests being so aligned with mine that I could trust them to get all my news."

While Winer may not miss it, at least one petition asking Google to keep Google Reader alive has now topped 100,000 subscribers. Winer's heard from some people who don't want Google Reader to go. His reaction generated "a lot of traffic and a fair amount of hate from people who love Google Reader and probably don't like to hear from someone who uses RSS who won't miss it (i.e. me)."

He again emphasized that "it's possible to use RSS without being dependent on Google Reader. And since GR is going away, that should probably be seen as good news, not bad."

Why? Because "people will be well-served by a newly revitalized market for RSS products, now that the dominant product, the 800-pound gorilla, is withdrawing."

As it happens there's no shortage of RSS clients already available. Besides, as ZDNet's own David Morgenstern reported, "Developers had expressed worry about the continuation of Google Reader for more than a year. Google Reader was not a syncing service, and its APIs (application programming interfaces) were undocumented and unsupported."  It's also worth noting that at the same time Google announced it wasn't going to support Google Reader any more, the company also announced that it was deemphasizing its support for the open CalDAV calendaring protocol in favor of its own in-house protocol.

What does concern Weiner is how Google can control access to news. He wrote, "The thing to fear is that Google intends to control the news people can subscribe to, the same way Apple controls what apps you can buy for the iPad. Plus, the way Twitter decides what clients can have access to our tweets."

Winer has a point. Of my own personal Web sites, the single largest traffic source is Google with an average of 15 percent of my daily traffic.

Winer added, Google's "got a pretty nice interface for it, btw — the magical Google Now. It knows what information you're likely to want to see, and shows it to you. It's really good. But it's creepy in two ways. One way most people see is that it's snooping on what you do to figure out what you want to read. The second way: It's also deciding what you don't see.

He loves that "the content of my (news) river is not determined by any tech company. Do I think it will stay that way? It's possible that it might not."

Winer concluded, "We broke free for a bit with unrestricted flow from blogs and news orgs via RSS. There are people who would like to put the genie back in the bottle." Therefore, "News people — if your plan for the future includes free flow of news from journalists to readers, now's the time to take a look" (at continuing to support RSS.)

Related Stories:

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• Who will pick up RSS now that Google Reader is going bye-bye?
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CalDAV, for those who don't know it, is an open standard for Web-based calendar services. It's used in Apple's iCal, Mozilla's Calendar Project-based programs, and a host of other calendaring, e-mail, and groupware programs. It's as close to a lingua franca for calendaring applications as we have, and now Google will only be supporting it for "whitelisted developers, and will be shut down for other developers on September 16, 2013."

What Google wants developers to do instead of supporting this open Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard is to use Google Calendar API (application programming interface) instead. Excuse me, what's wrong with just supporting CalDAV? Could it have something to do with an ongoing feud between Google and Microsoft?

Recently, Google announced that they were dropping Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) support for syncing e-mail, contacts and calendar for non-paying Google customers. That would have left many Windows Phone users high and dry. So, Microsoft announced that they'd start "building support into our software for the new sync protocols Google is using for calendar and contacts—CalDAV and CardDAV. These new protocols, combined with our existing support for the IMAP protocol for email, will enable Windows Phone users to continue to connect to Google services after July 31, 2013."

Back in January that was fine with Google. A Google spokesperson said, "With the launch of CardDAV, it’s now possible to build a seamless sync experience using open protocols (IMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV) for Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts. We'll start rolling out this change as planned across all platforms."

As for Windows 8 and RT Microsoft wasn't going to support calendar integration with CalDAV at all. Specifically, Microsoft said that it would be "a good time to simply switch to Outlook.com." As for syncing with Google's calender using Windows 8 or RT's native calendaring apps, all Microsoft currently had to say was, "Unfortunately, with Google changing the way it supports EAS, your Google calendar can’t sync with the Calendar app."

Now, in what looks like a tit-for-tat move, Google seems to be saying, "Well, if you won't let your users use our calendaring functionality, we won't provide an open way of doing it for anyone unless they ask very nicely with sugar on top."

A Google representative has said that as far as they're concerned Microsoft will still be able to implement CalDAV support on Windows Phone. Will Microsoft do it though? And, what about Windows 8? RT? We still don't know. 

Oh, come on! Google, Microsoft, get over it. CalDAV is a mature open technology that's used by everyone. If you support it, everyone benefits. If you don't, besides making it harder for Google users to work with Microsoft services, and vice-versa, you're making it harder for everyone else to use your services. So could everyone please just support CalDAV and make both users' and programmers' lives a little easier? Please!?

Correction: Microsoft has never announced any intention to support CalDAV for Windows 8 and RT's native apps

Related Stories:

• Microsoft in the clear to add Google CalDAV support to Windows Phone
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• Google to kill off Google Reader in 'spring cleaning'
• Who will pick up RSS now that Google Reader is going bye-bye?
• Sad to see Google Reader go? Come on, folks...it's 2013.
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