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Web inventor warns of 'dark' Net
(BBC News, 23 May 2006)
The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said. . . . Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh. . . . He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period". . . . "What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said. . . . "Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring." . . . The first steps towards this were taken last week when members of the US House of Representatives introduced a net neutrality bill. . . . But telecoms companies in the US do not agree. They would like to implement a two-tier system, where data from companies or institutions that can pay are given priority over those that cannot. . . . This has particularly become an issue with the transmission of TV shows over the internet, with some broadband providers wanting to charge content providers to carry the data. . . . The internet community believes this threatens the open model of the internet as broadband providers will become gatekeepers to the web's content. . . . Providers that can pay will be able to get a commercial advantage over those that cannot. . . . There is a fear that institutions like universities and charities would also suffer. . . . Sir Tim said this was "not the internet model". The "right" model, as exists at the moment, was that any content provider could pay for a connection to the internet and could then put any content on to the web with no discrimination. . . . "You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," he said. . . . A two-tier system would mean that people would only have full access to those portions of the internet that they paid for and that some companies would be given priority over others.

posted by LoZo 2:46 PM

 

Deep ocean trawl finds new forms of life
(BBC NEWS, 4 May 2006)
A three-week voyage of discovery in the Atlantic has returned with tiny animals which appear new to science. . . . They include waif-like plankton with delicate translucent bodies related to jellyfish, hundreds of microscopic shrimps, and several kinds of fish. . . . The voyage is part of the ongoing Census of Marine Life (CoML) which aims to map ocean life throughout the world. . . . Plankton form the base of many marine food chains, and some populations are being disrupted by climatic change. . . . "The deep ocean below 1,000m (3,300ft) is rarely sampled," observed Peter Wiebe, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in the US, lead scientist on the recent voyage. . . . "It's very difficult; you need many thousands of metres of cable," he told the BBC News website. "We were able to sample at 1,000m intervals down to 5,000m (16,500 ft)." . . . housands of specimens were captured during the cruise, of which 500 have been catalogued. . . . They include shrimp-like copepods and ostracods, swimming worms, and tiny jellyfish - some of the gooiest and most fragile animals in the sea. . . . Most are adjusted to living in the cool deep, where temperatures hover around one or two Celsius. . . . Several more voyages are planned in the next two years specifically to examine zooplankton, and scientists involved in CoMZ are also finding places on other cruises in relevant areas. . . . By the time CoML ends in 2010, it hopes to have found and studied every zooplankton species in the ocean.

posted by LoZo 4:49 AM