Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games

The world's first website

Back up at its original URL courtesy of CERN: "Twenty years of a free, open web." Rob

Abandoned websites

Vestigial corporate barnacles too insignificant to warrant the effort of deletion, these immortal websites offer nostalgia and not a little humor. [Wired] Rob

Tim Berners-Lee: The Web needs to stay open, but DRM is fine by me

AUSTIN—The knight who invented the World Wide Web came to SXSW to point out a few ways in which we're still doing it wrong.

Tim Berners-Lee's "Open Web Platform: Hopes & Fears" keynote hopscotched from the past of the Web to its present and future, with some of the same hectic confusion that his invention shows in practice. (The thought that probably went through attendees' heads: "Sir Tim is nervous at public speaking. Just like us!")

But his conclusion was clear enough: The Web is our work, and we shouldn't put our tools down.

Read the rest

YouTube briefly added to new Russian web blacklist

Not long after Russia's new kiddie porn internet blacklist went live, YouTube was added to it and blocked. Gabriela Baczynska writes, "Russian officials offered assurances they were not seeking to block access to YouTube on Wednesday, saying a technical error caused the popular video-sharing website to appear briefly on a register of sites containing banned content." Rob

Homophobic Chick-Fil-A in a chickeny shitstorm

Homophobic chicken-slingers Chick-Fil-A are reeling in a tempest of bad publicity. First the Jim Henson company yanked its toys from its stores, then the mayor of Boston told it that it should set up business elsewhere, and now a mysterious stranger has begun to astroturf on its behalf on Facebook. Chick-Fil-A says that it has no idea who the person pretending to be a teenage girl who really passionately supports the cause of discrimination against homosexuals is (though I'm sure they appreciate "her" support) -- and for the record, they say that Henson's toys were withdrawn for "safety" reasons. Cory

Flash in the pan

Adobe is finally giving up on Flash in mobile browsers, according to Jason Perlow at ZDNet. Rob