Qualification for the competition is decided by competitor teams placing in their domestic league championship, on a quota system, with countries with stronger domestic league competition allocated more teams. Clubs that play in stronger domestic leagues also enter at later stages of the competition.
For example, the three strongest domestic leagues, as rated by UEFA, place their champions and runners-up directly into the group phase, and their third-and fourth-place teams enter at the third qualifying round.
There is one exception to this rule: the current Champions League titleholder is an automatic qualifier for the group stage, regardless of where it finished in its domestic league.
However, until 2005 if the Champions League winner was from a country that was entitled to send four clubs to the competition, it was not assured of entry unless it was in the top four. This issue came to a head after English club Liverpool won the 2004-05 competition. Liverpool finished fifth in the FA Premier League, one spot outside automatic qualifying position.
After Liverpool won the Champions League, The FA was forced to choose whether to send Liverpool to the 2005-06 competition at the expense of the team that finished fourth - namely Everton, the other major club in Liverpool. As the FA had already decided that the top four Premiership clubs would qualify for the competition despite Liverpool's victory, they decided to continue lobbying for a fifth Champions League place following this win. After this FA decision, UEFA president Lennart Johansson went on record as saying that the Champions League winner should be able to defend its title regardless of its league position. Prior to 2005, if a fourth placed team was denied a Champions League place for this reason, it was granted a place in the UEFA Cup.
The last time such a scenario played out was in 2000, when Real Madrid won the title but finished fifth in the Spanish League. As a result, Real Zaragoza was forced into the UEFA Cup. Two years later, Zaragoza was relegated, an unfortunate turn of events that some fans believed to be a direct result of the lost prestige and revenue.
In June 2005, the UEFA committee met to discuss the fate of Liverpool. Liverpool was awarded a place in the first qualifying round without displacing their arch-rivals Everton - England thus entered 5 teams from the qualifying stages of the competition. Liverpool kept one of the top eight seeds but were not treated as an English side for the purposes of the draw, meaning they could play another English side prior to the quarter-finals. Due to the way in which the seeding works, this means Liverpool could have played city rivals Everton in the third qualifying round.
After qualifying, the Reds were ultimately drawn to play Premiership champions Chelsea in the group phase. Everton failed to qualify because of their loss to Villareal and participated briefly in the UEFA Cup before being knocked out 5-1 on aggregate by Dinamo Bucharest in the very first round.
UEFA also said that the rules have been amended and should the situation arise again, the title holders will replace the 4th placed team in the domestic league (with that team being entered into the UEFA Cup, as happened to Zaragoza in 2000). This ensures that in future, the number of teams from every country will remain stable.
The set of tools was developed by Google in partnership with the New America Foundation, the PlanetLab Consortium and academic researchers
Google's Vint Cerf and Stephen Stuart write on the official company blog:
“ By running these tools, users will get information about their connection and provide researchers with valuable aggregate data. Like M-Lab itself these tools are still in development, and they will only support a limited number of simultaneous users at this initial stage.”
“No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they're getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research in this area, M-Lab aims to help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.”
Cable companies have been claiming for a long time now that a new way of Internet speed management was needed in order to ensure that everyone a fair treatment. Last year, Comcast was caught playing around with its customers' connection speeds, an action aimed specifically at those running BitTorrent. Eventually, the company had to give up the practice and set a monthly data cap.
In the mean time, Cox Communications announced its own set of plans, united under the name of “congestion management”
Adobe aims to conquer new territory: the company announced the availability of the Adobe Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player on mobile phones.
“The Distributable Player enables a direct distribution of our mobile player similar to the distribution model for Flash Player on the desktop,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president, Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “With this new runtime and Adobe’s popular authoring tools, Adobe Flash Platform developers can unleash their creativity, develop new, innovative games and other mobile applications, and reach a much broader audience across screens and different platforms.”
At present time, the Distributable Player supports over-the-air downloads for consumers in the United States, U.K., Spain, Italy and India, with more countries to be added over time. No waiting list has been unveiled.
In addition, Adobe also announced the Flash Lite Developer Challenge, a development contest featuring a great prize of $30,000. The competition begins at 12:00 GMT on 16 February 2009 and will end at 12:00 GMT on 31 May 2009.
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