Major Internet service providers (ISPs), home networking equipment manufacturers, and web companies around the world are coming together to permanently enable IPv6 for their products and services by 6 June 2012.

ON JULY 9th users of hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide will be mystified. They will no longer be able to access websites, e-mail servers and other resources despite an active internet connection. The indirect culprit is the DNS Changer Trojan horse, a piece of malware which tweaks operating-system settings on computers and residential internet routers so as to redirect traffic to certain sites and rack up advertising fees. But it is America's Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) that is the proximate cause of the disruption.

It took 36 years for the Internet to get its first billion users. The second billion will probably be added by 2015; most of these new users will be in Asia. The third billion will be harder, and might not be reached until 2040.

A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.<p>

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other.

The email arrived in James Charles Cafferty's inbox on July 14, 2011. Unlike most unsolicited email on the Internet, the message did not pitch mortgages, get rich quick scams, or penis pills. Instead, it provided a link to an under-the-radar child pornography website and the password needed to access it. Cafferty, a diplomatic security officer working for the US government at its London embassy, waited for three days, then clicked on the link.

This year the number of internet users worldwide reached 2.27bn, almost exactly twice what it was in 5 years ago, 1.15bn. We all know the Internet is big, but this kind of growth really puts things into perspective.</p><p>

The Internet population has been swelling rapidly since the arrival of the World Wide Web (which rests firmly on top of the foundation provided by the Internet). It’s human nature to get used to changes, so most of us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps changing.</p><p>

And as the internet population grows, so does the potential size of online services. One example of this extreme evolution is Facebook. Last year we noted that Facebook now has more users than the entire Internet had back in 2004, the year the social network was founded.

We are inviting people from outside The National Archives to work with us, to apply changes to the legislation in the database. Quality is maintained through our editorial practice and a stringent process of review. It is an exciting time as private sector companies are now investing, employing people to work with us to bring the database up to date and to maintain it.

I finally decided today that even though sometimes I get some value from having comments here on Scripting News, in balance they're not worth the trouble. So I'm turning them off.