It’s been almost 15 years since the last standard of HTTP was ratified. HTTP is the protocol which transports web pages across the internet.  It’s a brilliantly thought out and quite simple protocol.  It’s beginning to show it’s age though, especially with the rise of many requests across multiple web servers. AJAX and newer technologies like WebSockets have worked around it’s limitations.  It’s inefficient at connections, is designed to be stateless, so doesn’t maintain data in it’s headers between requests, and it’s not great at doing lots of requests in parallel.  So, some clever bods at Google and elsewhere have come up with a new standard, which is due to join browsers next year. There’s some technologies like Google’s SPDY which have helped in the meantime, but this protocol change is really what the web needs for efficiency improvement, especially on mobile devices. When this makes it to browsers, (and web servers) we’ll see some real speed ups on many web sites. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9FxNzv1Tr8

Do you have an Android phone? Some interesting news I read this week was that an innocuous (on by default) setting on Android phones can save your Wifi passwords on Google’s servers.  It also backs up all your app settings, bookmarks and so on.  This isn’t that worrying - it could be considered a useful feature.  However, the worrying thing is that these plain-text passwords aren’t encrypted using your account details - they are available in unencrypted form to Google employees. This includes the password to any Wifi point you’ve connected to - home, work, and so on.  Seeing as how Google have been harshly criticised in the past for collecting data about the locations of Wifi access points, it seems a little foolish to trust them with unencrypted passwords to all these access points too.  We already know they can be compelled to hand off this information to the security services.  It just makes it a little too easy for it to be abused. They claim that turning off the feature will delete the data from their servers - but who knows whether that happens or not?  I am getting more and more concerned about how much this one company knows about me.  It gives them an awful lot of power. What if I want to save my app settings but not my Wifi passwords?  There is no option.  It’s pretty much all or nothing.  I shall be backing up my data myself from now on I think…