An anonymous reader shares a report: Google’s YouTube unit says it now reaches 1.5 billion viewers every month — and its users watch more than an hour of mobile videos per day — as it expands its video programming to sell more digital ads. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki also wrote that YouTube Red, the company’s foray into original videos, has launched 37 series that have generated “nearly a quarter billion views.” YouTube Red has 12 new projects in the works, she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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YouTube Claims 1.5 Billion Monthly Users
Reader Trailrunner7 writes: After years of encouraging site owners to transition to HTTPS by default, Google officials say that the effort has begun to pay off. The company’s data now shows that more than half of all pages loaded by Chrome on desktop platforms are served over HTTPS. Google has been among the louder advocates for the increased use of encryption across the web in the last few years. The company has made significant changes to its own infrastructure, encrypting the links between its data center, and also has made HTTPS the default connection option on many of its main services, including Gmail and search. And Google also has been encouraging owners of sites of all shapes and sizes to move to secure connections to protect their users from eavesdropping and data theft. That effort has begun to bear fruit in a big way. New data released by Google shows that at the end of October, 68 percent of pages loaded by the Chrome browser on Chrome OS machines were over HTTPS. That’s a significant increase in just the last 10 months. At the end of 2015, just 50 percent of pages loaded by Chrome on Chrome OS were HTTPS. The numbers for the other desktop operating systems are on the rise as well, with macOS at 60 percent, Linux at 54 percent, and Windows at 53 percent. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Paul Sawers, writing for VentureBeat (condensed): Netflix really wants to show you how fast (or slow) your Internet connection is, and to do so it has launched a new website at Fast.com that conveys the real-time speed of your connection to the Web. It’s designed to give people “greater insight and control of their Internet service.” Netflix said it was for: Providing a website featuring non-downloadable software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection, as well as downloadable computer software for testing and analyzing the speed of a user’s Internet connection.Compared to Speedtest.net, Fast.com doesn’t offer any details on how fast is your upload speeds, what’s the ping time, and any detail on location and ISP. However, it’s seemingly faster, and automatically detects your download speeds when you visit the website. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
An anonymous reader writes: HTTP has served us well for a long time, but will we continue to use HTTP forever? Since Brewster Kahle called for a distributed web, more people have been experimenting with what is being called the Permanent Web: Web sites that can be federated instantly, and served from trustless peers. Popular web hosting site Neocities has announced that they are the first major site to implement IPFS, which is the leading distributed web protocol, and they published the announcement using IPFS itself. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
This report on a 4-acre spider web covering a building has made shiver and curl in disgust. You are looking at the Baltimore Wastewater Treatment Plant, where 4 acres of their facility were covered by a spider web made by an estimated 107 million spiders. That’s 35, 176 spiders per cubic meter! Read more… 
