Broadband Reports has a story on Firefox - apparently, there is some controversy on the recent results that seem to indicate a slippage in growth for the Microsoft Internet Explorer alternative.  However, if the blogsphere is any decent indicator, it is IE that seems to be slipping (e.g. Rodrigo's site).  For TF, most of the viewership is still in various IE flavors, however, the actual share of Firefox has been holding steady in the 15-25% mark.  Interestingly enough, there are a decent number of Netscape, Opera, Safari and Mozilla TF readers out there as well.   more »

Tom Keating had a post in which he references a Skype Forum chat that mentions that China Telecom is engaged in blocking Skype access:

Others in China piped in the thread that they weren't having problems accessing Skype's website, while another posted stated that as far as he knew, "Skype.com is blocked in Shanghai, the only place I know that skype.com isn't available in mainland." Regardless of which areas of China is being blocked, this is very disturbing news. Fortunately, as of right now, according to the forum, they are only blocking access to Skype's English .com website, thus you can simply go to Skype's German site or another foreign Skype site to download Skype or setup a SkypeOut account. Assuming you can read the foreign language of course.

Only a matter of time before bureaucrats there figure out this loophole and close it. But while it is relatively easy for the Chinese to block SkypeOut, Skype is another matter altogether - with the peer-to-peer / supernode architecture, this is not an easy task. Which brings up the question on the supernode: I suspect that its selection is not arbitrary (i.e. Skype probably assigned a number of its own supernodes around the world right from the start, in order to be able to get some reasonable grade-of-service, particularly for paying customers).  If that were the case, after some hacking, could there be a way to block communication if the IP address lies within certain ranges, no?  It would probably take a bit of time to trace all of those, and by that time, a whole lot of the Internet would be blocked, but unfortunately, that probably already happens in some regions of this world. 

   more »