Nine years of protecting civil society online, HTTP/3 usage trends, and a bit of computing history

Welcome to our weekly review of stories from our blog and other sources, covering a range of topics from product announcements, tools and features to disruptions on the Internet. João Tomé is joined by our CTO, John Graham-Cumming.

In this week's program, we delve into spatial computing, and Apple’s new Vision Pro headsets. Then, we go over the nine years of Project Galileo , which since 2014 has been helping journalists, human rights defenders, civil rights activists, and other humanitarian organizations. In 2023, this project is protecting more than 2,271 organizations in 111 countries. Next, we talk about the launch of Waiting Room Analytics, a game-changing feature for those services so successful that they need a waiting room. There’s a deep dive about HTTP/3 (the most recent HTTP protocol version) usage this last year, where bots are still not convinced. We also announce that Cloudflare Area 1, our email protection service, earned a SOC 2 report, related to safekeeping sensitive information.

Last but not least, we share a computing fun fact and delve into history. 190 years ago, Ada Lovelace, often credited as the world's first computer programmer, met Charles Babbage, the inventor of the Analytical Engine, a machine designed to be a general-purpose computer (“The greatest machine that never was ” — TED talk). You can check here a 2018 conversation with Doron Swade and Sydney Padua about it.

At the end, we have in our new "Around NET" short segment, Patrick Day (usually based in Washington DC and from our Policy and Trust Team), sharing some insights directly from the RightsCon summit, in Costa Rica.

You can check the blog posts:

• Understand the impact of Waiting Room settings with Waiting Room Analytics
• Examining HTTP/3 usage one year on
• Nine years of Project Galileo and how the last year has changed it
• Cloudflare Area 1 earns SOC 2 report