"The Internet Society, an organization dedicated to the good of the Internet, is organizing "World IPv6 Day" on June 8 of this year. Web giants Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, with a combined one billion visitors per day, are participating by enabling IPv6 for their main services that day. Content distributors Limelight and Akamai are also joining the party by enabling their customers to participate. But unlike during the IETF IPv6 experiment, IPv4 won't be turned off."

"Question: How much of a difference do "green" drives actually make in a system build? Do you save enough power for it to be worthwhile, or is it just a marketing gimmick? When a drive is "green," the designation usually just means that it runs on the slower side—5400 rotations per minute, as opposed to the more ubiquitous 7200 RPM. But in some cases, this slowdown can translate to drives that are quieter, cooler, and less power-hungry. We're not talking the same power savings as, say, switching to fluorescent light-bulbs from full-spectrum ones.

"Canadians can't stand going without coffee. Even worse? Not having a team in the FIFA World Cup event for 2014. Absolutely unthinkable, say eight of ten Canadians. But you know what they really hate? Metered Internet pricing, or Usage Based Billing (UBB) as they call it—letting the dominant Internet Service Providers charge broadband subscribers and smaller competitive ISPs by the quantity of data use."

"A survey of cyberspace says that the United States enjoys the honor of being the world's "top attack traffic source," accounting for 12 percent of all such malicious data—eight percent of the globe's in the third quarter of 2010. This could represent the activities of "infected hosts that are looking for other hosts to spread to, or it may represent brute force attempts to log in to other systems," according to the Akamai Corporation's David Belson.

"Canada's official telecommunications regulatory agency is unhappy about the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's recent decision that the unedited version of the Dire Straits song "Money for Nothing" is "unacceptable for broadcast." The CBSC, which represents 760 private Canadian radio/television license owners, made that call earlier this month in response to a complaint that the tune includes three references to an offensive word."

"Apple is making it more difficult for iPhone 4 owners to perform simple DIY repairs by replacing common Phillps head screws with a rare "pentalobe" screws. While newer iPhone 4s have included the screws from the factory, it is also Apple policy to replace any Phillips head screws with the new pentalobe screws whenever an iPhone 4 is taken in for service." "This screw head clearly has one purpose," iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens told Ars.

"Our experience of the music we love stimulates the pleasure chemical dopamine in our brain, concludes a new study produced by a slew of scholars at McGill University. The researchers followed the brain patterns of test subjects with MRI imaging, and identified dopamine streaming into the striatum region of their forebrains "at peak emotional arousal during music listening." | more

"The promise of HTML5's <video> tag was a simple one: to allow web pages to contain embedded video without the need for plugins. With the decision to remove support for the widespread H.264 codec from future versions of Chrome, Google has undermined this widely-anticipated feature. The company is claiming that it wants to support "open codecs" instead, and so from now on will support only two formats: its own WebM codec, and Theora.

"The dispute concerns something called "pending lists" maintained privately by the major labels. Since 1988, it has become increasingly common for the labels to simply issue CDs (often compilation albums) without actually locking down the copyright permission and pay arrangements with the music's creators.

"I got some hands-on time to test the prototype at Sony's CES booth after the company's press briefing. It has two separate screens on the inside—one for each eye. It has a simple slider for adjusting the distance between the screens, allowing it to be easily calibrated to match the spacing between the user's eyes for optimal 3D performance.