Posts Tagged ‘Internet’
Time Warner Cable to test TV on this new thing called Internet
Time Warner Cable has signed up at least seven large media companies for a test that will offer television programs on the Internet to paying subscribers…says the Wall Street Journal.
Networks participating in the trial are expected to include General Electric Co’s Syfy, Time Warner Inc’s TNT, Cablevision Systems Corp’s AMC and the British Broadcasting Corp’s BBC America, people told the paper.
Other companies that could be involved in the trial are CBS Corp, Discovery Communications Inc and Viacom Inc, the paper cited some of the people as saying.
The te$t involve$ TV show$ being made available on the Web to a limited number of home$, the paper said.
All right. Who went and told them about The Internet?
Insane Sarah Palin, Late At Night On July 4, Threatens To Sue Entire Internet, Via Twitter
Click on Tweet to feel suitably warned
Thanks, Mr. Justin
Michael Jackson dies. Did the Internet almost go with him?
CNN would like you to think so.
The biggest showbiz story of the year saw the troubled star take a good slice of the Internet with him, as the ripples caused by the news of his death swept around the globe.
“Between approximately 2:40 p.m. PDT and 3:15 p.m. PDT today, some Google News users experienced difficulty accessing search results for queries related to Michael Jackson,” a Google spokesman told CNET, which also reported that Google News users complained that the service was inaccessible for a time. At its peak, Google Trends rated the Jackson story as “volcanic.”
As sites fell, users raced to other sites: TechCrunch reported that TMZ, which broke the story, had several outages; users then switched to Perez Hilton’s blog, which also struggled to deal with the requests it received.
CNN reported a fivefold rise in traffic and visitors in just over an hour, receiving 20 million page views in the hour the story broke.
Twitter crashed as users saw multiple “fail whales” — the illustrations the site uses as error messages — user FoieGrasie posting, “Irony: The protesters in Iran using Twitter as com are unable to get online because of all the posts of ‘Michael Jackson RIP.’ Well done.” The site’s status blog said that Twitter had had to temporarily disable its search results, saved searches and trend topics.
Of course, Twitter fails if you blow two farts in their general direction. The fact that Google News had a couple of slow patches is still better than crashing on their own – once a month – for hours at a time.
Fighting porn the official rationale for more censorship in China
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
The move will give the government unprecedented control over what can and cannot be seen on the internet. In recent weeks, China blocked access to a host of websites, including Hotmail and Twitter, and expressed worries that the internet was becoming a tool of protest.
An issue of the state-controlled magazine, Outlook Weekly, strongly criticised local officials for not paying more attention to the internet, saying that online debate forums in China are not just “ordinary chit chat in free time” but could also be stirring trouble…
The program, called Green Dam, is designed primarily to stop access to pornography, according to its makers, Jinhui Computer System Engineering company. “From July 1, every PC will be shipped with the software before it is sold to customers,” said a member of the company’s marketing department, who identified herself only as Miss Zhou.
“This is very good news for users, so they should not uninstall it. It will automatically filter pornographic images and antirevolutionary content. It will not take up much space on the hard drive. It is very stable and we have conducted many tests already,” she added.
A second program, called Youth Escort, filters out rude or subversive words.
If the two programs are installed, they can allegedly transmit personal information and make it difficult for users to tell what access is being denied.
Under the terms of the new rules, manufacturers can also ship the programme on a separate disc, but have to report how many units have been sold together with Green Dam.
Yes, this reminds me of what some governments in the West are also trying to make official policy – and meeting stern resistance from the geek community and anyone who espouses a constitutional view of civil liberties.
Of course, you needn’t wear a tinfoil hat to believe the tale that some software producers already collaborate with the FBI and CIA and provide a backdoor for spying on ordinary citizens. After all, most of our Telcos and Internet providers have already been proven to roll over for the Feds – and Congress passed laws protecting them from lawsuits over such an invasion of privacy.
China just appears to be barging ahead in a manner suited to their administrative style. We’re more democratic in the West. Our government allows discussion – before they screw us, anyway.
Internet data almost at 500 billion gigabytes
Guardian/Bob Sacha/Corbis used by permission
The world’s store of digital content is now the equivalent of one full top-of-the-range iPod for every two people on the planet, following the explosion of social networking sites, internet-enabled mobile phones and government surveillance.
At 487bn gigabytes, if the world’s rapidly expanding digital content were printed and bound into books it would form a stack that would stretch from Earth to Pluto 10 times. As more people join the digital tribe – increasingly through internet-enabled mobile phones – the world’s digital output is increasing at such a rate that those stacks of books are rising quicker than NASA’s fastest space rocket.
The large files from digital cameras and the world’s burgeoning army of surveillance cameras account for a significant proportion of the digital universe. The rapid increase in so-called machine to machine communications – such as when an Oyster card is touched on a reader or a satellite navigation system requests information about its location – has seen the number of individual digital creation events balloon, despite the economic recession.
The digital universe is expected to double in size over the next 18 months, according to the latest research from technology consultancy IDC and sponsored by IT firm EMC, fuelled by a rise in the number of mobile phones. At the time of their first Digital Universe report in 2007, the pair reckoned the world’s total digital content was 161bn gigabytes.
How much of the load would be reduced by switching everyone off bloatware like Microsoft Office?
Murdoch will charge for access to all his newspaper websites
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission
Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation’s newspaper websites within a year as he strives to fix a ”malfunctioning” business model.
Encouraged by booming online subscription revenues at the Wall Street Journal, the billionaire media mogul said that papers were going through an “epochal” debate over whether to charge. “That it is possible to charge for content on the web is obvious from the Wall Street Journal’s experience,” he said.
Asked whether he envisaged fees at his British papers such as the Times, the Sunday Times, the Sun and the News of the World, he replied: “We’re absolutely looking at that.” He said that moves could begin “within the next 12 months‚” adding: “The current days of the internet will soon be over…”
News Corp has cut 3,000 jobs over the last year, although Murdoch said very few affected journalists or “creative” personnel. Its filmed entertainment division enjoyed an 8% rise in profits to $282m, while Fox News Channel in the US helped push profits from cable subscription networks up by 30% to $429m.
Poisonally – I think he’s whistling in the dark. The situation with the Wall Street Journal is that it has very few competitors and they, like the Financial Times for example, also charge for access. Someone comes along with a business plan to tie a cable TV financial channel to a free-access online site [done well, of course] and Murdoch’s plan is toast.
He talk about his business plan as if it’s distinct from – yet leading – this communications behemoth called The Internet.
Has he considered that the Guardian keeps winning best news website in the world and he wins nothing, nada, nuttin’ honey!
Over half of American voters used the Web to prep for 2008 election
More than half of U.S. adults used the Internet to participate in the 2008 election — the first time that threshold has been crossed. Some 55 percent searched for political news online, researched candidate positions, debated issues or otherwise participated in the election over the Internet, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.
New forms of Internet communication such as blogs, social-networking sites like Facebook and video-sharing sites played a prominent role, the nonprofit group said. Among its findings:
* 45 percent of Internet users watched online videos related to politics or the election;
* 33 percent of Internet users shared political content with others;
* 52 percent of those on a social network used it for political purposes.
The Internet has grown steadily as a source of political news since 2000, when 11 percent of voters went online to keep up with political developments. That figure now stands at 26 percent. Among young voters and those with broadband connections the Internet has eclipsed traditional media like television, radio and newspapers, the survey found.
If you have any smarts at all, you can use the Web to fact-check some of the more or less political claims made, as well. True Believers are exempt from this procedure, of course.
French Assembly rejects government rule over the Web
French politicians have unexpectedly rejected a bill that would have cut off the internet connections of anyone found to be repeatedly downloading music or videos without paying for them. The legislation would also have led to the creation of the world’s first state surveillance system on web pirates…
The bill had been championed by the president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose wife, the singer Carla Bruni, has long advocated a crackdown on piracy. On Monday, film director Steven Soderbergh urged US authorities to draw inspiration from the French bill in their fight against piracy.
Under the proposed legislation, new powers would have been granted to music and film companies to enable them to monitor internet users and report illegal downloads to a new copyright protection agency.
Anyone found to have broken the law would have been traced via their IP (internet protocol) address and handed up to three warnings before their connection was severed for up to a year. Offenders would have had to keep paying for their internet connection despite it having been cut off…
Civil liberties campaigners and members of the Socialist party said the new surveillance powers were tantamount to “the criminalisation of an entire generation”.
Others had said it could end up punishing the wrong people, for instance parents whose children download in secret or employers whose staff use computers at work to break the law.
Always heartwarming to witness politicians with enough courage to support individual liberties over profit. The system may not be perfect; but, surveillance, threats and repression are illegitimate solutions.
The 300-year History of Internet Dating
Almost everyone these days can name a couple they know that met on the Internet, though it wasn’t so long ago that skimming the online personals for love was considered strange, even a bit desperate…
Internet dating is just the modern version of the first “matrimonial” agencies of the 1700s, which helped lonely bachelors search for wives through printed ads, said author H.G. Cocks, a history lecturer at the University of Nottingham, UK. In between, the social acceptance of personals has waxed and waned with the times…
It only took a few decades after the invention of the modern newspaper in 1690 for the new medium to become a way for people to meet in Britain. Matrimonial agencies were big business there by the early 18th century, printing ads on behalf of men who paid the agency to recruit them a good wife. Being single passed the age of 21 was considered almost shameful in that era, and the ads were often a last resort for the men who advertised and the women who read them. If a match resulted, it is unlikely that you boasted the fact to your friends, Cocks said…
Personal ads went mainstream in the early 20th century, with expectations at a much lower level than their earlier incarnations. Many of the postings were simply calls for friends or pen pals, becoming especially popular among single servicemen, called “lonely soldiers,” during World War I…
Personals died away again until the 1960s, when ads became part of the growing counterculture in the UK, along with drug experimentation and the Beatles, the author explains. Like the latter, though, it took some time for the personal ad to be accepted by the Mom-and-Pop public…
The difference between the personal ads of the previous centuries and today’s is the age of those using Internet dating sites, according to statistics. The core demographic of those publicly “looking for love” has been turned on its head, with people settling down and marrying much later (if at all) in Western cultures. Internet sites tend to favor older singles, many of whom turn to the technology after a divorce or traditional forms of courtship have failed, Cocks said.
I forget that Personals and Internet dating is still a big deal for some stiffs. Cripes. One of my cousins met her hubbie online 20 years ago. They have a long and happy relationship.
Better off than a lot of folks who relied on church socials. Though it still depends on your community. Even though I was an atheist by 13, I kept on with church for 5 more years because it was the best place in my neighborhood to meet girls.
Engineering students help bring the Internet to rural Africa
Residents of rural Kenya now have e-mail accounts and Internet access thanks in part to the work of University of Michigan engineering students who enabled satellite-based service at three locations there. Their work was supported by Google.
Only five percent of Africans have access to the Web, compared with 74 percent of North Americans. Over the past year, undergraduates in two of Thomas Zurbuchen’s master’s level space systems design classes devised and built a satellite-based system that could inexpensively and easily bring the Web to underserved Africa. In November, three students brought their system to Kenya and installed it with help from local organizations there…
The ground stations they created use off-the-shelf technology and operate with solar power. The students realized that often, places without the Internet are places without reliable electricity…
When the semester ended, most students moved on. But a handful stayed on the project to build the prototypes and take them oversees.
Kelly Moran, Trisha Donajkowski and Joan Ervin, who recently graduated with master’s degrees in AOSS, brought the stations to Kenya. They spent 10 days there, hauling the equipment to various sites and working with residents and local organizations to install the Internet cafes.
It’s really that easy, you know. They used off-the-shelf components. Money was raised one way or another – it didn’t take a lot.
But, governments in developing nations don’t have any spare money. And it’s usually only geeks who think of providing useful stuff like wells and cookers, Web access and laptops and satellite dishes. Somehow, our nation is cluttered with individuals and organizations who think the 3rd World should remain – quaint.
