This Week in Web #2

Internet Explorer Continues to be Edged Out

Web Browser Market Shares May 2007 to December 2015 - Courtesy of w3Counter
Web Browser Market Shares May 2007 to December 2015 – Courtesy of w3Counter

Internet Explorer has long been a punching bag of the web. Articles with colorful titles like "Death to Internet Explorer" are celebrating the end-of-life support for IE versions older than 11. This officially went into effect on Wednesday, 12 January 2016, but the effects aren't likely to be seen at many businesses until more pressing reasons to update occur. These are the biggest losers, as it's clear that most users who have the option made the switch off of IE years ago. W3Counter, who among other things tracks global share of browser usage, has Chrome at the most popular browser by market share in late July 2012.

Commentators are seeing it as Microsoft pushing users to it's new Edge browser, while forgetting that end-of-life policies exist for most major software producers. There's only so long that a company can be expected to support outdated versions of their software, and the impetus on end-users exists to upgrade or risk the consequences. Note that Microsoft still promises security fixes for these older releases, provided that they are the latest that version of Windows can run.

While this might not be as big a problem in the open source world where active users can continue to enhance their software, close sourced software like the most popular web browsers does not have this freedom. While there are many philosophies to open source software, one thing is clear: if you rely on something produced by another vendor (like the many web apps geared toward IE6 that had to sink or swim when its time came), you'd better be sure you've got contingency plans in place.

Finally, if you're looking at which browser to switch to, a ZDNet contributor ran some benchmark tests on a mid-tier PC running Windows 7 to determine which browsers offer the highest performance. Chrome tops his list, followed by Opera, with Firefox lagging behind. IE11 is still worse off though, as it is really made for the Windows 10 architecture.


The Father of Online Anonymity Has a Plan to End the Crypto War

Andy Greenberg, Wired

david Chaum, an early developer of online anonymity tools, has been working on a new project called Privategrity with a team comprised of security experts at several universities, with the goal of ending the "Crypto War" between digital rights groups and world governments.

The tool is intended to put a controversial backdoor system in place that many government groups, including the CIA and FBI in the US and GCHQ in Britain, have been fighting for since the dawn of personal digital cryptography. The method that he has devised involves a nine member security council, with servers located in nine separate countries under nine separate compliance laws. Any attempt at decryption would have to be unanimous under the scheme, which would allow the group in total agreement to block or track specific users.


Apple’s Tim Cook Lashes Out at White House Officials for Being Wishy-Washy on Encryption

Jenna McLaughlin, The Intercept

Tim Cook, along with representatives from Facebook, Twitter, Cloudflare, Google, Drop Box, Microsoft, and LinkedIn, met with White House officials this week to discuss encryption and product security as well as the use of their technology by radical groups.

Cook and the other Silicon Valley executives have been adamant in refusal to purposefully weaken their software security. A briefing of the meeting has indicated that in addition to encryption, detection and measurement of radicalization on the companies' platforms was another top priority of the meeting.


The heroes who saved the Internet in 2015

The Daily Dot

To ring in the new year The Daily Dot published their list of influential folks in the realm of internet freedom in 2015. Ranging from the realms of government, like Gigi Sohn of the FCC and Senator Rand Paul, to Academics like Alison Macrina of the Library Freedom Project, through private sector employees like Colin Crowell of Twitter, the list covers a wide range of people fighting very hard for the rights of others using the internet. Reading through the list is also a great way to get caught up on some important issues regarding internet freedoms, and find new resources like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Who Has Your Back" report, detailing companies that defend their users' data from the government.


"Je Suis Charlie," but your free speech is terrorism

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing

Just a reminder that words and actions are not the same thing. Where strong verbal support has come out for the defense of free speech in France after a localized attack on satirical news magazine Charlie Hebdo just over a year ago, that support was not in evidence while free speech rights in the country have been systematically curtailed, ramping up following the November Paris attacks.


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