Register Log in

Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents

Week in tech: mega-merger mania

AT&T's acquisition of T-Mobile and its immediate aftermath dominated the news …

Back to the front of the pack: Ars reviews Firefox 4: Mozilla has released Firefox 4, the latest version of the open source Web browser. Ars takes a close hands-on look at the updated browser, which brings performance improvements, synchronization support, and a significant user interface overhaul.

The Linux graphics stack from X to Wayland: Ars looks at the evolution of the Linux graphics stack, from the origins of the X project in the 1980s to the recent Wayland effort.

How the Comodo certificate fraud calls CA trust into question: The security provided by HTTPS is dependent on trust. Without that trust, HTTPS can no longer be regarded as effective protection against eavesdropping. But is that trust deserved? A recent incident suggests not.

AT&T swallows T-Mobile to create US' largest carrier: AT&T has announced that it will be buying T-Mobile, creating the US' largest cellular carrier, and giving AT&T a quick fix for infrastructure and spectrum limits. The Internet quickly exploded with snark, anger, and despair over T-Mobile's sale after the announcement (who knew so many people loved T-Mobile?), while analysis showed that the merger would mean higher prices and fewer choices for consumers if it is approved.

Oracle: Itanium is dead. Intel: not by a long shot!: Oracle has announced that Itanium is dead. Intel, for its part, says Oracle is wrong, wrong, wrong.

Did file-sharing cause recording industry collapse? Economists say no: Big Content dominates the global debate about file sharing with a master narrative that emphasizes music industry revenue and job losses. But the London School of Economics says that file sharing is creating a new economy that governments need to promote rather than criminalize.

Copyright troll Righthaven achieves spectacular "fair use" loss: Righthaven set out to save newspapers by suing wildly. Instead, its campaign led a federal judge to say that nonprofits can post even complete news articles online under "fair use" rules. Whoops.

HTTPS is great: here's why everyone needs to use it (so we can too): A piece from Wired that recently ran on Ars wondered why all HTTP traffic wasn't encrypted. Now we're taking it a step further and explaining some of the issues that are standing in the way of universal HTTPS adoption, as well as why Ars isn't there yet.

Google maps 300TB of real-world Internet speed data: Two years of data on actual download speeds around the world has now been graphed by Google's Public Data Explorer. See how your country, state, or city stacks up.

Expand full story

You must to comment.

You May Also Like

    Need to register for a new account?

    If you don't have an account yet it's free and easy.