SPDY Gonzales: Google Continues Its Push To Take The Web To Breakneck Speeds

 

 

Google is obsessed with speed. By many accounts its Chrome web browser is alread

y the fastest out there, and it runs laps around the two big boys: Firefox and IE. But that’s not good enough for Google. And so now they’re also working on their own web content transportation protocol.

To be clear, despite some of the wording ins its blog post, SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) isn’t about fully replacing HTTP, the standard web protocol since 1996, but it is about augmenting it, to make delivery faster. How much faster? After doing some initial internal tests with Chrome, Google claims that the top 25 websites in the world can load up to 55% faster with SPDY.

Of course, as Google notes, those tests were done in Google’s labs, likely under optimal conditions. SPDY in an average home during daily use may produce different results. But again, this protocol is still very young, so it’s entirely possible that things could get even faster. To that end, Google is asking for the development community’s help. They’ve posted some early documentation and code samples, hoping for feedback.

In the docs, Google lays out the difference between HTTP and SPDY:

SPDY is intended to be as compatible as possible with current web-based applications. This means that, from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, nothing has changed. To achieve this, all of the application request and response header semantics are preserved.  SPDY introduces a “session” which resides between the HTTP application layer and the TCP transport to regulate the flow of data. This “session” is akin to an HTTP request-response pair.

I reached out to Google just to confirm that they weren’t going to try and do something completely crazy like change the “http://” we all know and love with “spdy://”, don’t worry, they’re not. As stated above, SPDY will create a session of sorts that resides between HTTP and the data transportation.

What will be interesting about this protocol is if it’s optimized for Chrome over the other web browsers. It would seem Google wouldn’t do that, since its ultimate goal is to have people using the web through any means as quickly as they can (so as best to serve their ads more often). But when you’re developing both a protocol and a browser, it seems likely that Google will have an advantage to offer the best experience.

A few startups are also working on ways to deliver web content faster. One, FasterWeb, which we covered in July, is hoping to improve web surfing speeds tenfold next year. Their approach is different, optimizing content on the provider or ISP end.

New PC to encourage older users

Eighty year old Betty Parsons uses a computer for the first time.

A new computer aimed at people aged over 60 who are unfamiliar with PCs and the internet has been unveiled.

The simplified desktop – called SimplicITy – has just six buttons directing users to basic tasks such as e-mail and chat.

The computer comes pre-loaded with 17 video tutorials from television presenter Valerie SingletonMore than 6 million people over the age of 65 have never used the internet, according to government figures.

‘Social benefit’

Each made-to-order computer takes two weeks from request to delivery and can be ordered by post.

The computer has been developed in partnership with Wessex Computers and a website aimed at older people called discount-age, set up by Ms Singleton.

She said she was shocked by the number of older people who do not have computers – a survey by the Office for National Statistics in August 2009 revealed that 6.4 million people over 65 have never used the internet.

There are some people who will undoubtedly feel patronised by the very idea of a computer for the elderly

Rory Cellan-Jones

Technology correspondent

“I think people just don’t understand them,” she told BBC News.”I’ve been using a computer for quite some time and I don’t understand everything.”

“Every time I learn a new thing to do on my computer I have to write it down so that I can remember it.”

The SimplicITy computer has no log-in screen when started up, and contains no drop-down menus.

It opens straight to a front page called “square one” containing separate clickable buttons for e-mail, browsing the web, files (for storing word documents and photos etc), online chat and a user profile.

The e-mail system is a modified version of an Italian design called Eldy.

All SimplicITy users with an eldy.org address will be able to chat to each other via the “chat” button.

The computer is built using Linux operating system, a free operating system that can be customised by users.

If people decide they no longer need the SimplicITy desktop, they can replace it with a standard Linux desktop.

Andrew Harrop, head of public policy for charity Age Concern and Help the Aged said efforts to get older people online should be “applauded”.

“Pensioners who aren’t online are missing out on hundreds of pounds in potential savings by shopping around and can also often miss out on the best interest rates for savings accounts,not to mention the social benefits of being online,” he said.

more about “New PC to encourage older users“, posted with vodpod

Intel vs. AMD

What happens if I remove my processor fan?

Here is the answer!   Enjoy it!

(people, do not do this at home …)

So… What do you think?

Nov. 10, 1983: Computer ‘Virus’ Is Born

1983: Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, gives a prescient peek at the digital future when he demonstrates a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. A quarter-century later, computer viruses have become a pandemic for which there’s no inoculation.

Cohen inserted his proof-of-concept code into a Unix command, and within five minutes of launching it onto a mainframe computer, had gained control of the system. In four other demonstrations, the code managed to seize control within half an hour on average, bypassing all of the security mechanisms current at the time. It was Cohen’s academic adviser, Len Adleman (the A in RSA Security), who likened the self-replicating program to a virus, thus coining the term.

But Cohen’s malware wasn’t the first of its kind.

Others had theorized about self-replicating programs that could spread from computer to computer, and a couple of tinkerers had already successfully launched their own digital infections prior to Cohen’s presentation. But his proof-of-concept program put computer scientists on notice about the potential scourge of an intentionally malicious attack.

A 15-year-old kid from Pennsylvania was one programmer who beat Cohen to the draw. Rich Skrenta had a penchant for playing jokes on friends by spiking Apple II gaming programs with trick code that would shut down their computers or do other annoying things.

In 1982 he wrote the Elk Cloner program — a self-replicating boot-sector virus that infected Apple II computers through a floppy disk. Every 50th time the infected computer re-booted, a little ditty popped up:

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it’s Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Skrenta’s program wasn’t called a virus, since that moniker came later, nor did it spread widely outside his circle of friends.

That was left for the first virus spotted “in the wild” a couple of years later.

The “Brain” was written in 1986 by two Pakistani brothers who claimed they only intended to infect IBM PCs running bootleg copies of a heart-monitoring program they created. The virus included a copyright notice with the brothers’ names and phone numbers so that people whose computers were infected could contact the brothers to obtain a “vaccination.” Numerous variations of Brain followed.

Then in 1988, Robert Tappan Morris Jr., a Cornell University graduate student and son of a National Security Agency chief scientist, unleashed the first widely propagating worm.

Unlike viruses, which are embedded in programs and copy themselves from system to system to unleash a payload, a worm can travel on its own without a carrier program, slithering through networks, searching for any connected system to infect with clones of itself, clogging the network as it spreads.

It’s been estimated that between 5 and 10 percent of all machines connected to the internet at that time — most of them at universities or other research facilities — were hit by the worm.

Morris was the first person to be tried and convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. He was given three years probation and is now a professor at MIT.

The growth of viruses and worms was fairly slow after this until the mid-1990s, when the proliferation of desktop PCs and e-mail usage opened the way for large-scale infections. Viruses that previously relied on floppy disks and the “sneakernet” to spread, could now infect millions of machines with a little clever social engineering designed to trick users into opening infected attachments.

The Melissa virus set the tone for fast-moving viruses in 1999, reaching about 250,000 computers. Its payload was mostly innocuous, however. Whenever the time of day matched the date — say, 5:20 on May 20 — a quote from The Simpsons popped up on the screen.

The Love Bug struck a year later, leaving Melissa in the dust. Also known as LoveLetter, it was crafted by a student in the Philippines, and arrived at inboxes with the subject line, “I Love You.”

When a user clicked on an e-mail attachment named LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs, the virus used Microsoft Outlook to send itself to everyone in the user’s address book. It then contacted one of four web pages to download a Trojan horse designed to collect user names and passwords stored on the computer and send them to an e-mail address in the Philippines.

The virus spread more widely than any malware before it, hitting 55 million computers and infecting 2.5 to 3 million. It was estimated to have caused $10 billion in damage, but the student who unleashed it escaped prosecution because the Philippines had no computer-crime law at the time.

Viruses have proliferated rapidly since then, and malware has become more sophisticated and more vicious. The motives of malware writers have changed as well — instead of doing annoying tricks to your computer to get attention, the majority of programs sit stealthily on your computer to steal data, siphon money from online bank accounts or turn your system into a zombie for spam-spewing botnets.

Source: Various
Photo: Fred Cohen