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No, I don't agree that Internet Explorer is dead. However, there has been a significant progress in the adoption of alternative browsers, which is a healthy way to avoid a monopoly in browsers, which are the gate to internet for end users.  The decline in the use of IE thanks to the participation of open source browsers is acknowledged here. 

This article has explored the successful application of internet in Obama's political campaign. Obama's is said to be the first internet president. This article analyzes the advantage of the new media internet campared to the traditional media such as Newspaper, Television, radio, newspaper and so on. As is listed in the article the main advantages of the internet for the campaign use are including the ability to focus on specific demographic segment, and the convenience to create a place for participant to donate, and as is said by the author Samuel Greengard "Obama's staff could conduct polls, solicit ideas and opinions, and hold online town，hall meetings." However this article does not explore the reasons why Internet has this power deeply enough. Behind this power, in my opinoin, it is the "recursive public" that exerts impacts, it would be better if the author also to the "social capital" theory to analyze the power of the internet.

For Google, the project is a pre-emptive move to get a foothold in the living room as more consumers start exploring ways to bring web content to their TV sets.

A new paper on Australia's proposed mandatory filtering plan in context of Australia's broader stance on child pornography. It uses the example the consumption of "Japanese Boys Love" manga by people (mainly girls) underage to explore issues around censorship and governance

PJFenwick is doing a PhD on facebook privacy and his explorations have shown that even when you lock up your settings, your friends (and friends of) can leak your information all over the place. "But by far the most interesting part of all of this have been dark users. Like dark matter, these users are not directly observable, usually because they've completely disabled API access. In fact, some of these users are completely dark unless you're a friend. They don't show up in search results. They don't show up on friends' lists. You can't send them messages. If you try to navigate to their user page (assuming you know it exists), you get redirected back to your homepage. These users have their privacy settings turned up real high, and are supposed to be hard to find. However like dark matter, dark users are observable due to their effects on the rest of the universe. If a dark user comments on a stream entry, I can see that comment. More importantly, I can see their user-ID, and I can generate a URL to a page that will contain their name. I can then watch for their activities elsewhere. Granted, I can't directly search for their activity, but I can observe their effects on my friends. For want of a better term, I've been calling this "dark stalking". What makes this all rather chilling is that I'm doing all of this via the application API. If your friend has installed an application, then it can access quite a lot of information about you, unless you turn it off. If your friend has granted the application the read_stream privilege, then it can read your status stream. Even if a friend of a friend has done this, and you comment on your friend's status entries, it's possible to infer your existence and retrieve those discussions through dark stalking."

Internet Policy Task Force is the name of the new initiative the U.S. Commerce Department founded. During the next months it will take a closer look at current policy frameworks and explore ways to address challenges of the new internet economy and society. It will finally advise the White House on how to improve privacy for individuals online. The article mentions current discussions about privacy issues Google and facebook have to face. But obviously these did not directly lead to the kick off of the initiative.

My most recent blog entry, looking at the implications of the increasing digital literacy among younger generations.

This study explores an under-studied layer of Chinese Internet censorship: how Chinese Internet companies censor user-generated content, usually by deleting it or preventing its publication. Systematic testing of Chinese blog service providers reveals that domestic censorship is very decentralized with wide variation from company to company. Test results also showed that a great deal of politically sensitive material survives in the Chinese blogosphere, and that chances for its survival can likely be improved with knowledge and strategy. The study concludes that choices and actions by private individuals and companies can have a significant impact on the overall balance of freedom and control in the Chinese blogosphere.

Wonder what statistics service providers such as Nielsen will think about this...

Highly detailed white paper on the underworld of cyber-espionage. Multinational corporation and state sponsored - all explore this backbone of the internet to get an advantage. Note: This gets quite technical at times. Very eye opening considering the recent events with the Australian/China cyber attacks on government and corporate targets.

Worth checking out - Villeneuve works for the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab (http://citizenlab.org/) as a 'white hat' hacker who focuses on government censorship and espionage. Thanks to Elizabeth Gan for posting the Toronto Star article (http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/791274--hackers-not-just-geeks-but-activists) where I found reference to this guy.

A document that explores the difficulties of Iranian Cyber Activist to fight against the regime. Explain how Web Pages, Blogs and other internet initiatives like Radio Zamaneh, Jaras and Kalameh have been victims of persecution, filtering, and jail.

First topic: « Early Adolescents' Use of Social Networking Sites to Maintain Friendship and Explore Identity: Implications for Policy »

He admits that "Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. But MS works closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today's web."

It will be considered as a technical achievement in the history of the internet: the introduction of non-latin top level domain names. To date United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Russian Federation, and Egypt will now be able to view a complete domain name in arabic script. Western society probably failed to consider, until recently, the limiting effect of the internet's architecture for speakers of non-latin derived languages. In the same way technically disconnected rural communities form part of the digital divide, so to do inhabitants of countries that had no education in latin based languages. How does a browser support arabic script? The brower itself must support both the character sets of the language. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari all support arabic script.