DiCarlo has a long and well-argued post on how and why Firefox’s attempts to ape Google Chrome have not only made the browser less usable, but done the very thing Mozilla was trying to prevent — driving people to switch to Chrome.

"Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent."

DiCarlo also calls out Mozilla’s user interface designers, arguing that using the rapid release cycle to constantly change Firefox’s interface compounds the problem and user frustration.

This month, if everything goes according to schedule, your Internet service provider may begin monitoring your account, just to make sure you aren't doing anything wrong with it -- like sharing copyrighted movie or music files.

The effort, dubbed the Center for Copyright Information, hopes to combat the illegal downloading and sharing of movies and music by monitoring it at the source - your computer.

So instead of reaching out to the Internet to track down illegally flowing bits of their movies, the studios will sit back while ISP's "sniff" the packets of data coming to and from their customers' computers.

Part of the problem is that standalone desktop email clients such as Thunderbird have largely fallen out of favor. Thunderbird may claim more than 20 million users, but Gmail alone boasts 425 million active users worldwide, and Gmail isn't the only web-based email service. In light of those numbers, developing Thunderbird probably hasn't been much fun for a while – and now, Mozilla has seemingly decided it isn't worth spending resources on.

This is strong proof that trying to force a change in behavior simply doesn’t work — especially on the internet, where its denizens value freedom above all else. History is full of shutdowns and blockades — Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, Megaupload — and yet file sharing is still just as prevalent. Instead of pissing away billions of dollars on lobbying governments and law enforcement agencies, the only way to truly curb file sharing is to provide an equivalent or better service than torrent sites and digital file lockers.

When the firmware update (which also applied to the EA4500 and EA2700 router models) rolled out, attempting to connect to the browser's internal administrative Web interface brings the user instead to a signup page for the “Cisco Connect Cloud".

In exchange for the convenience of Connect Cloud, you have to agree to some pretty onerous terms. In short, Cisco would really hate it if you use the Web to view porn or download copyrighted files without paying for them.

ExtremeTech found that Cisco has deleted a portion of a privacy statement that said Cisco would keep track of Connect Cloud customers’ “network traffic” and “Internet history."

Cern scientists reporting from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have claimed the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson.

A confirmation that this is the Higgs boson would be one of the biggest scientific discoveries of the century; the hunt for the Higgs has been compared by some physicists to the Apollo programme that reached the Moon in the 1960s.

"We're on the frontier now, on the edge of a new exploration. This could be the only part of the story that's left, or we could open a whole new realm of discovery."

The investigation is related to allegations that Mr Sarkozy's 2007 presidential election campaign received illegal donations from France's richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt.

An investigating magistrate is looking into claims that staff acting for the L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, gave 150,000 euros in cash to Mr Sarkozy's aides during his 2007 bid to become president.

In addition, there are other witnesses who allege that during the 2007 campaign, Mr Sarkozy made several private visits to Ms Bettencourt's home.

Based in Berkeley, California, this tiny startup is built on an idea that’s as unorthodox as Fong’s education. LightSail aims to store the world’s excess energy in giant tanks of compressed air. The goal is to plug these tanks into wind and solar farms, so that they can squirrel away energy for times when it’s most needed, much like reservoirs store rain water.

Is this doable? According to Samir Succar, a researcher at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute, compressed air storage could indeed improve the efficiency of wind and solar farms and other less-than-predictable energy sources.

Amazon tells its customers to plan for this to happen, and to be ready to roll over to a new data center whenever there’s an outage.

According to Twitter messages from Netflix Director of Cloud Architecture Adrian Cockcroft and Instagram Engineer Rick Branson, it looks like an Amazon Elastic Load Balancing service, designed to spread Netflix’s processing loads across data centers, failed during the outage. Without that ELB service working properly, the Netflix and Pintrest services hosted by Amazon crashed.

Friday’s outage wasn’t nearly as severe as the one that took out Amazon in April 2011. Then, a botched network update rolled across several data centers, causing widespread outages on the Amazon cloud.

When Facebook forced its hundreds of millions of users into an @facebook account, commenters across the Internet talked about alterations that had begun in their contacts and address books outside Facebook -- valid e-mail addresses were being changed for @Facebook without people's awareness or consent on their phones and computers.

We now also see that the interception of people's e-mail communication with Facebook's new change is deeply problematic and potentially grave.