Why it matters: Google has long been working on an alternative to cookies that splits the difference between user privacy and advertising revenue. However, the company needs more time before fully replacing third-party cookies in Chrome. Fortunately, public testing of Google’s new initiative will begin soon.

On Tuesday, Google announced that it was pushing back its plans to eliminate third-party cookies in Chrome by two years, as the feature is not ready. However, users can start testing the alternative for themselves next month.

Cookies help advertisers track users and serve personalised ads, but they are unpopular because they can compromise users’ privacy. EU anti-cookie legislation is behind all those consent prompts seen on many websites. In 2020, Google announced it was working on a solution that would make third-party cookies obsolete, initially hoping to achieve this goal in two years. Although it missed that deadline, the company is not giving up.

Google’s Privacy Sandbox aims to create a set of standards to help advertisers deliver personalised ads without revealing users’ personal information. One of its components is trust tokens, which play a similar role to cookies but with encryption to mask a user’s identity. Privacy Sandbox incorporates many other technologies to keep ads relevant to users while limiting what advertisers know about them.

These tools appear on Google’s updated Privacy Sandbox roadmap. To date, all have begun pre-launch testing and original testing. The company has set general availability for the third quarter of 2023 and wants to phase out third-party cookies by the end of 2024. In February, Google revealed its intention to bring the system to Android in two years’ time, which is roughly in line with the company’s timeline for Chrome on desktops.

The stable branch of Chrome 104 will include the trial for desktop users when it launches in August. About half of Chrome Desktop beta users have already enabled it. Android users will get it with Chrome 105 stable in late August.

Google’s attempt to balance user privacy and advertisers’ desires contrasts with Apple, Firefox and Brave’s efforts to block tracking entirely. Google’s business depends on advertising, unlike Apple’s, and Google also believes that intransigent blocking drives advertisers to more covert methods such as fingerprinting. With the Privacy Sandbox, the company wants to block fingerprints while providing an alternative for advertisers.

The Whois is a directory that lists the technical and contact data of registered domain names, the sharing, and updating of which is mainly entrusted to Registries and Registrars such as Gandi. This directory allows you to obtain various contact information related to domain names, namely the holder, administrative, technical, and billing contact – collectively referred to as Domain Contacts.

You can use a tool such as this Chrome extension to instantly find the WHOIS data of any domain without having to leave the domain you are visiting!

Historically public, the holder could subscribe to an additional service to protect his identity, which has become almost obsolete with ICANN’s implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The different types of data published in the Whois at the time of the GDPR
The data published by default in the Whois may vary depending on whether the domain name concerned is :

A national Top Level Domain (ccTLD) for which each Registry has its own rules and specific information is compulsorily published;

A generic top-level domain (gTLD), managed by ICANN, for which the mandatory information includes the name, address, telephone number, and email address.

Our attention is focused on the regulatory changes that have affected gTLDs.

Indeed, the principle of public access has been called into question by the entry into force of the GDPR on 25 May 2018. The obligations imposed by ICANN on registrars regarding the collection and publication in WHOIS of information concerning Domain Contacts have therefore evolved towards masking this data by default.

However, these obligations are general and leave it to the Registries and Registrars to define the disclosure mechanism. There is, therefore, no uniform and homogeneous methodology between the different organizations on this issue.

This is why there are many debates between privacy advocates who welcome this lack of systematic disclosure and legitimate access seekers who argue that the public interest or the protection of intellectual property rights, among others, is at stake.

What is domain privacy?

When we talk about domain privacy, we are talking about a service offered by a domain name registrar. In this document, the customer buys the confidentiality of the company, and the company replaces the WHOIS information of the user with information from an email forwarding service using a proxy server.

In this sense, it is essential to choose a reliable registrar before opting for a hosting plan with a free domain. It should also be noted that a hosting company can have a good or bad reputation. However, its role as a registrar may not be good, and it does not offer privacy protection for the domain.

Therefore, when buying a domain, we need to be careful about two things:

1. That the domain registration company has a good reputation.
2. The purchase and confidentiality of a domain

When we buy a domain, we must provide our contact details to the domain registrar. These details will be available to the general public via the WHOIS directory. It is done this way because it was established by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. This body is the one that oversees domain-related issues.

When we talk about domain privacy, this is an additional service that many domain name registrars offer for an additional cost. In case of possession, our information is protected and is not displayed in the WHOIS directory. Instead, this information will be replaced by generic information from our registrar.

Which benefits can domain privacy offer?

As we have just mentioned, having contracted domain privacy, our confidential data will not appear in the WHOIS directory. This will provide us with a series of significant benefits, which we list below:

• It will help reduce spam in our emails and minimize unwanted traffic.
  It may also reduce the chances of our domain being hacked due to a phishing attempt.
  The domain registration company has a good reputation and offers a domain privacy protection service.

Alongside the MateBook X Pro and MateBook E , Huawei also took advantage of its presence at MWC to announce its MateStation X. This all-in-one PC aims to counter the Apple iMac with an XXL screen and a high-performance AMD Ryzen processor.

A very attractive all-in-one, at least at first glance. That’s what Huawei had in store for us with its MateStation X. This new All-in-One PC promises to be a high-end product that doesn’t make easy compromises.

The device relies on a design inspired by the MateView monitor, with a sandblasted and CNC machined aluminum alloy chassis, but also on a large 28.2-inch Ultra HD+ touchscreen LCD.

A large 4K screen… to equip an already stylish PC

Available in two colors (Space Grey and Mystic Silver), this AIO is sure to impress with its display quality. Its 3:2 screen occupies 92% of the available surface but can also count on a 98% coverage of the DCI-P3 spectrum and a DeltaE lower than 1.

There is also a DisplayHDR 400 certification, with a maximum luminance announced at 500 nits. For the moment, Huawei remains discreet on the issue of contrast, which is not specified in its release.

A machine armed by AMD

Behind this large slab is an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H processor (8 cores / 16 threads). It is a mobile APU with high performance, designed initially for laptops … and that we find indeed on many gaming laptops marketed in 2021.

Nevertheless, we would argue that Huawei could have made the effort to offer us an AMD Ryzen 6000 H processor. This new generation of chips is nevertheless quite recent: it was announced at CES 2022, last January.

In any case, the MateStation X is equipped with 16 GB of RAM (DDR4) and 512 GB or 1 TB of M.2 SSD. The device will be offered at a price of $ 1650 in its version coupling 16 GB of RAM and 1 TB of SSD.

Two ships, two companies, but only one objective for billionaires Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson: to cross the space frontier themselves, finally. After having each founded their own space company in the early 2000s, the two men are now about to take off, just a few days apart.

Both a stunning coincidence in the development schedule, and an emblematic reflection of the fierce competition between them, these two flights also mark a turning point for the nascent space tourism industry.

If the two patrons are among the first passengers of Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, their goal is to allow hundreds of (rich) travellers to admire the curvature of the Earth with their own eyes, for a few minutes.

They will not be the first billionaires to go into space: Hungarian-born American Charles Simonyi and Canadian founder of Cirque du Soleil Guy Laliberté spent several days aboard the International Space Station in 2007 and 2009, but made the trip on a Russian Soyuz rocket.

Bezos and Branson will be the first to fly in spacecraft developed by companies they created.

“It’s just an incredible and wonderful coincidence that we’re going in the same month,” the Briton told the Washington Post, assuring that the last-minute announcement of his flight date, July 11, was “really not” timed to beat the Amazon founder, who is scheduled to board on the 20th.

“Become an astronaut”

The first flight will therefore be Virgin Galactic’s, on Sunday from New Mexico. The scheduled time of takeoff has not yet been communicated, but the company said that a live video broadcast would take place from 07:00 local time.

A carrier aircraft will take off from a conventional runway, then drop the spacecraft below it at altitude. The model is called SpaceShipTwo, and the particular one used on Sunday is called VSS Unity.

The two pilots aboard the vessel will then ignite its engine for a supersonic ascent, until exceeding the 80 km of altitude — the height fixed in the United States for the border of the space. The passengers, Richard Branson and three other Virgin Galactic employees, will then detach and float in zero gravity for a few minutes.

The ship will then glide back down to earth.

The role of the founder of the Virgin group? To test and evaluate the experience of future customers, a priori from 2022. About 600 people have already paid for their tickets — between $200,000 and $250,000.

“When I return, I will announce something very exciting to allow more people to become astronauts,” he promised.

Not without minimum training and conditioning

The second space trip will be made by Blue Origin on July 20, the anniversary of the first steps on the moon.

The rocket, named New Shepard after the first American to reach space, Alan Shepard, will blast off vertically from West Texas. The capsule will separate at about 75 km altitude, continuing its trajectory until it exceeds 100 km in altitude — the Karman Line, which marks the beginning of space according to international convention.

By comparison, airliners generally fly at about 10 km high.

After a few minutes, the capsule will begin a free fall back to Earth, braked by three large parachutes and then retrorockets.

On board, Jeff Bezos will be accompanied by his brother, Mark, an 82-year-old former pilot, Wally Funk, and the mysterious winner of an auction, whose name has not yet been revealed but who paid $28 million to participate.

This will be the first manned flight of this rocket (while VSS Unity has already embarked pilots, and even a passenger).

Unlike a major rival, SpaceX, which plans much more ambitious multi-day trips for its own space tourists, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin’s so-called suborbital flights require minimal training.

But after being heralded as imminent for years, the advent of space tourism remains on hold until these tests are fully successful.

In 2014, an accident with a Virgin Galactic ship resulted in the death of a pilot, significantly delaying the program. And another such dramatic event is not allowed.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, reached US$2 trillion in market capitalization on Wall Street on Monday, making a foray into the very exclusive club of valuations exceeding that mark, alongside Apple and Microsoft.

Alphabet’s stock rose for the first time to US$3,012 in early morning trading on the New York Stock Exchange before retreating to US$2,985 (+0.28%) by mid-session. At that peak, its valuation on Wall Street surpassed US$2 trillion for the first time.

One of the best performing stocks in the tech sector

Google’s stock has been one of the best performers in the technology sector this year, with a 70% growth.

It was only in January 2020 that the internet giant, which went public in 2004 at a price of US$85 per share, reached US$1 trillion in market capitalization.

In the third quarter, Alphabet’s revenue jumped 41% to US$65 billion. The group posted a net profit of 18.9 billion, well above market expectations.

The world’s number one online advertising company continues to reap more revenue from both YouTube and its search engine and has expanded its cloud business.

Alphabet stock performance is not even affected by recent lawsuits

The numerous investigations and lawsuits for suspected anti-competitive practices are not weighing on its accounts at this stage.

Founded in the dorms of Stanford University in 1998, after co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin met, the search engine launched its Gmail email service in 2004.

The following years saw rapid growth with the acquisition of Android and YouTube, and the development of Maps, Chrome and Google Cloud, a range of business services.

Google became a subsidiary of its parent company Alphabet in 2015 with the arrival of CEO Sundar Pichai in office that year.