Netcraft: November web server survey. Apache holds steady, IIS plunges, mostly due to one hosting company, Homestead.com. Homestead recently cut off its free hosted users in the hopes that they had achieved enough stealth lock-in to entice existing customers to pay for what they used to get for free. Predictably, most of them didn’t (although maybe enough did to keep Homestead in business, I don’t know).
Netcraft: Microsoft a distant third in Samoa. No, really. But they totally rule The Cook Islands, which have one of the shortest web addresses I’ve ever seen.
k.st. The shortest email addresses on earth.
The Register: AOL/Time Warner drops e-books. First domino. Good riddance.
iPoding: Play Breakout on your iPod. From the main menu, go to About, then hold down the center button. As my girlfriend would say, “That is so unnecessary.”
iPod bra. Er, case. Buy it. Or not.
AES accepted as new government standard for encryption [via Slashdot] This is a big deal. I’ve been following this story for 4 years, practically since it started. For those of you who don’t trust the U.S. government (which, these days, is just about everybody — thanks, W, for turning us all into wacky conspiracy nuts), this algorithm was selected by cryptography experts after an open, international competition. It is not intentionally weak in any way.
The AES was developed to replace the old federal standard, the DES, which has been in place since 1977. In recent years, a variation of DES called Triple DES has served as the recommended encryption system while AES was being finalized. NIST anticipates that Triple DES will remain an approved algorithm (for U.S. government use) for the foreseeable future. Single DES is being phased out of use.
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