Weekly Platform News: Upgrading Navigations to HTTPS, Sale of .org Domains, New Browser Engine
In this week’s roundup: DuckDuckGo gets smarter encryption, a fight over the sale of dot org domains, and a new browser engine is in the works.
Let’s get into the news!
DuckDuckGo upgrades and open-sources its encryption
DuckDuckGo has open-sourced its “Smarter Encryption” technology that enables upgrading from HTTP to HTTPS, and Pinterest (a popular social network) is already using it for outbound traffic — when people navigate from Pinterest to other websites — with great results: Their outbound HTTPS traffic increased from 60% to 80%.
DuckDuckGo uses its crawler to automatically generate and maintain a huge list of websites that support HTTPS, approximately 12 million entries. For comparison, Chromium’s HSTS Preload List contains only about 85 thousand entries.
(via DuckDuckGo)
Nonprofits oppose the sale of the .org domain
A coalition of organizations consisting of EFF, Wikimedia, and many others, are urging the Internet Society to stop the sale of the nonprofit organization that operates the .org domain to an investment firm.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) all over the world rely on the .org top-level domain. […] We cannot afford to put them into the hands of a private equity firm that has not earned the trust of the NGO community.
In a separate blog post, Mark Surman (CEO of Mozilla Foundation) urges the Internet Society to “step back and provide public answers to questions of interest to the public and the millions of organizations that have made dot org their home online for the last 15 years.”
(via Elliot Harmon)
A new browser engine is in development
Ekioh (a company from Cambridge, U.K.) is developing an entirely new browser engine for their Flow browser, which also includes Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey as its JavaScript engine. The browser can already run web apps such as Gmail (mostly), and the company plans to release it on desktop soon.
(via Flow Browser)
More news…
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