Securing the Internet is no easy task but Google researchers think they have taken a step closer this week with a program called SSL False Start that decreases the load time of SSL connections up to 30%.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a certification that encrypts data between an end-users’ browser and the server. It is a headache to implement and increases connection latency and only a few of the major sites on the Web have instituted “always on” SSL/TLS protection on top of HTTP to create the more secure HTTPS. While SSL False Start is a good step in creating a safer Internet, it is not the cure for all SSL woes. But, it does look like a step in the right direction.

Google developers wrote on the Chromium Blog, “We implemented SSL False Start in Chrome 9, and the results are stunning, yielding a significant decrease in overall SSL connection setup times. SSL False Start reduces the latency of a SSL handshake by 30%.”

The developers were concerned that False Start would not be backwards compatible and that if it affected “user experience for even a small fraction of users, the optimization is non-deployable.” So they tested it out by finding every site that uses HTTPS in Google’s index and it came away with a 94.6% success rate, with 5% timing out and .4% failing. The time-outs turned up as sites that were no longer in service. The developers contacted the domains that failed and said that most have fixed the issue that made False Start fail. The list of sites that are not compatible with False Start is located in the Chromium source code.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Access have teamed up on a campaign called “HTTPS Now” that aims to secure the Internet. Yet, with SSL and encryption still a messy and expensive process, it could be a while before the EFF reaches its goal.

“There is no consistent library for implementing SSL in the browser,” said Tom Bridge, a partner at Technolutionary, a technical services firm. “Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome, they all use different processes for handling the SSL handshake. Encryption is still a heavy-math process, something that requires both RAM and processor time.”

After some high-profile hacks, including Mark Zuckerberg’s own profile, Twitter and Facebook have offered users options in their profile settings to always use HTTPS. Most of the major email clients use HTTPS as well.

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In this video, Matt Winn from Volusion discusses 5 ways an internet sales tax will impact your online business. From new software integrations to a shift in local marketing, youll learn how federal legislation creating an online sales tax will change your operations.

While weve seen this type of legislative chatter before, it seems that an internet sales tax has more backing than ever, thanks to a growing deficit and shrinking budgets. But in the event that The Mainstreet Fairness Act is turned into law, what are the ramifications for your online store?

Take a look at these five predictions regardless of your political standing on this issue, youll want to pay attention and start planning ahead.

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Promoting website is often the most important aspect of any business. Building a website is not only enough in most of the cases. It is required to add more popularity to your website in order bring more visitors to your site. Hence promotion is considered as an important aspect of website building. Pluzit helps you a lot in visiting famous websites. It is a great site to bookmark your favorites on the internet and the best part of Pluzit is that it is absolutely free. You can Bookmark and Share all over internet and also very simple to use. It can be downloaded for free and you could immediately put that into use after you download.

Pluzit is found to be very useful for the promoters and it helps in promoting their website, increasing the traffic of the website and also in improving your website rank. Another main advantage of the pluzit comes in its role of removing the clutter. It has lots of customizable bookmark buttons and is also a reliable tool. You would be guaranteed to get a accurate statistics of the actual scenario and this is considered as the biggest advantage of using the Pulzit. Accurate statistics would often provide the best possible case and also helps you a lot in understanding the real scenario. Thus Pulzit is considered to be a powerful tool for both internet users and the promoters. It makes it very easy for the promoter to use the tool to improve your website. You could login to get the actual data and statistics. The registration is absolutely free and hence you could take care of all your promotion needs by registering with the site in a single click! This site would provide you Videotour about how to use the most powerful bookmarking option, which no other site would provide. In order to illustrate more about the bookmarking option you can view the video tour option that Is available in the website. This video tour would provide you with a complete understanding of the bookmarking feature and would make you an expert in this! If you wish to share something to your friends, there is also a bookmark and share option. This would enable the users to share all the WebPages that they have bookmarked. Bookmarking a website is simple and one could do it with just a single click!

The internet is filled up with thousands of thousands of WebPages and most often we come across lots of WebPages that have useful information. It would be really useful to have a tool that makes it easy for the user to bookmark essential aspects. A feature presented by the Pluzit is no doubt very useful for the surfers as well as for the browsers. Promotion of website has never been this easy as that of Pluzit. Pluzit is no doubt big gift for the promoters and it provides an excellent way to them to their websites with just a button click. With increased number of visitors to your website you could be assured of a better business.

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In a move that might rewrite the entire search market, Google is rumored to be creating a system that will let allow web publishers to submit content to Google for search indexing in real-time.

This of course follows the introduction of PubSubHubBub by Google, a tool to move syndicated content in real-time to aggregators. PubSubHubBub has become a hit among publishers looking to get their information into the market as quickly as possible.

This move by Google, if it comes to fruition, would be a super-PubSubHubBub, not just moving your content into Google Reader at light speed, but also into the hands of the tens of millions of people searching Google every few hours. It would be a bigger move towards a real-time web than Twitter will ever be.

Of course, this would give Google a strong leg up on Bing, and would tie internet publishers even tighter to the internet giant. Many already depend on Google Analytics and Feedburner in their publications Now with PubSubHubBub and the new tool, publishers not working on a Google platform would still be using Google tools to publish.

Is there no corner of the world where Google will not expand into?

Sure to be lost in any discussion are the internet searchers, who will benefit greatly from having the best data in real-time, all the time. Who loses? Microsoft, and any publisher not smart enough to jump on board.

When will this come out? We are not sure at the moment, but when it does, the earthquakes we resonate in search for years to come.

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A fascinating experiment and follow-up by Ars Techinca on ad blockers.

If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don’t agree with, don’t go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website.

I was recently on a roadshow with some folks from EyeWonder, a company that provides a framework to build and place a lot of the ads on the Internet. Some are very clever, others would fall into the annoying category. During the trip I talked to a lot of the creatives at big agencies who are working with sites to place these ads for their brands and the adblocker concern was a big topic. If their brands aren’t getting the views on the ad, they’re not going to want to pony up, and sites lose money.

What’s worse, is that it becomes a downward spiral where the ads being served become more intrusive in order to get the attention of a fading audience. Ultimately, one of the best conversations I had was with someone who used to be the creative “gate” for agencies on a major network of sites. Agencies came to her with their ad ideas and she was the person who gave thumbs up or thumbs down on the ad depending on whether or not it was too obnoxious or wouldn’t jive with what the network’s users expect.

To me, that’s the key. Flash may be synonymous with advertising now, but the same obnoxious ads are going to be created with HTML5 when it becomes prevalent, so the people creating ads have to build them so that they’re targeted and interesting. I don’t think they have to be static, or can’t take up the whole page, but they should follow some basic guidelines (auto-playing sound being a terrible, terrible scourge) and leave the user in control. Close buttons should be obvious, mouse out events should minimize the ad, and it should be difficult to accidentally trigger it. And making sure ads are optimized so they aren’t causing Flash to spin up the CPUs is key to a good user experience.

The web is an interactive place and there is a lot of very interesting work going on in the interactive advertising space. That work directly funnels money back to your favorite sites and pays a lot of bills.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog