Today’s topics include the U.S. Appeals Court declining a full court rehearing of the broadband Title II reclassification decision; Microsoft resurrecting its “My People” contact feature for Windows 10; SharePoint developers looking to weather the shift to cloud development; and Google Chrome marking more HTTP pages as insecure this fall.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit’s May 1 decision not to grant a full court rehearing of the broadband Title II reclassification decision isn’t a victory for net neutrality, despite the buzz that’s been making its way around the internet. But at the same time, it’s not a defeat for it either.
In reality, it’s simply a procedural action that the court recognizes that a full hearing would likely be a waste of time given that the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to go back to regulating the internet under Title I of the Communications Act.
The majority decision not to rehear the case was based not only on the announcement by the FCC to change the reclassification, but also the presidential interference with an independent agency and the fact that the FCC changed course suddenly with little explanation after receiving comments based on the likelihood of net neutrality legislation.
Windows 10 Creators Update includes many new features and enhancements, but watchful users may have noticed that one feature was missing when Microsoft began rolling out the operating system upgrade on April 11.
First announced last fall, Windows 10 Creators Update was slated to ship with My People, a feature that enables users to pin contacts to the taskbar to encourage quick messaging and drag-and-drop content sharing.
Now, members of the Windows Insider early access program can finally try out My People for themselves by downloading Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16184 for the PC. My People supports multiple communications apps like Microsoft’s own Skype, which users can select for each contact.
Microsoft’s popular enterprise document management software SharePoint is used by countless corporations to store, disseminate and collaborate on business information.
Naturally, no two businesses are the same, so an army of SharePoint developers is helping organizations tailor the platform to their needs. Lately, however, many developers are feeling the ground shift under them as Microsoft takes a more web-like approach to SharePoint.
Officially released in February, SharePoint Framework borrows modern web development techniques to enable more in-house customization and a shift toward more client-side development on SharePoint Online, the cloud-delivered version of the software, before support is extended to the on-premises version.
Starting this October, Google’s Chrome web browser will start displaying a “Not secure” warning on web pages that do not use the HTTPS protocol when users enter data into them.
At the same time, Chrome will also begin displaying the same warning on all HTTP pages that a user visits while in Incognito mode. The new warnings are part of Google’s continuing effort to get website owners to start using HTTPS instead of the less secure HTTP.
HTTPS pages encrypt all communications between a user’s web browser and the web page they are visiting and are therefore considered more secure against snooping, man-in-the-middle and other types of attacks.