Online video is a teen thing, says Pew report
The eyes have it when it comes to teens and online video: 27 percent of them say they've recorded and uploaded videos to the Internet, compared to 14 percent of adults, according to a new study from the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project.
In 2006, the last time Pew surveyed 12- to 17-year-olds about online video behavior, 14 percent of teens said they were putting video online on sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
In the "Teens and Online Video" report, issued Thursday, Pew said video chatting is also popular with 37 percent of teens, who say they use programs such as Skype, Google Talk or Apple's iChat. Read more...
Mobile Internet to exceed PC access in India by the end of this year
Use of the mobile Web is set to overtake fixed-line Internet in India by the end of the year, as the country’s mobile revolution continues at full speed.
Statistics from statcounter – via Trak.in – show that a steady depreciation in the use of Internet from PCs is coinciding with continued grow of Web surfing from mobile devices. The data suggests that, with PC usage just a few percent points ahead, the lines will cross and access from mobile will overtake the PC before the end of the year.
As the graphic shows, India’s mobile Web usage has grown strongly to account for just under 50 percent, as March-April, that’s up from just 2 percent in January 2009 and 18 percent in January 2011. Read more...
Google Co-Founder Blasts Entertainment Industry On Piracy
In a new interview where he outlines his fears for the future of freedom on the Internet, Google co-founder Sergey Brin slams the entertainment industry for its response to piracy. While lobbying for Chinese and Iranian-style censorship measures, Brin says the music and movie companies have failed to understand that it is their approach to making content available that fuels the problems.
Instead of the entertainment industry beating up the little guys on the issue of piracy, in 2011 and early 2012 they went for the nuclear legislative option. The ensuing battle for the free flow of information online polarized the Internet. Read more...
Another delay in domain name expansion
There's another delay in efforts to create hundreds of Internet address suffixes to join ".com" and others in use.
Last week, a technical glitch forced the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is in charge of domain names, to abruptly shut down a system for letting companies and organizations apply for new names. Read more...
Famous bunnies of the Internet
"Between the death of Little Til, Herman Cain's dead rabbit ad, and the kidnapping of Miss Cooper, it's a bad time to be a bunny or bunny enthusiast," Gawker recently noted. Indeed, for lovers of all things lagomorph, it's best not to remember March at all. So, as we move forward to International Bunny Appreciation Day (which just so happens to coincide with Easter) this Sunday, let's cleanse our palates for April via this review of our very favorite bunny locations on the Internet.
Cocoa-chan, the therapy rabbit
Cocoa-chan is featured in "Pray for Japan," a documentary about survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. Here’s how she’s described it on her Pray for Japan Facebook page:
Sometimes humans can't help people more than little furry critters can. There was a special rabbit, Cocoa, giving people traumatized by the tragedy a little unconditional love. I gave this very special volunteer a folder of her very own. Cocoa-chan is still on her mission of providing help and hope...Stu is making sure all her fans here on the page get to see new pictures of her. Read more...
Facebook focus guides Google CEO’s 1st year on job
Google co-founder Larry Page has a Facebook fixation.
When he replaced his mentor Eric Schmidt as Google's CEO last April, Page insisted that the company had to be more aggressive about countering the threat posed by Facebook's ever-growing popularity.
Page responded with a social networking crusade that is still reshaping Google Inc. as he marks his one-year anniversary as chief executive on Wednesday. Read more...
Microsoft joins Google in the race to speed up the web
The Internet Engineering Task Force is meeting this week to discuss the future of the internet, and ways to make it faster and more responsive. If Microsoft has anything to say about it, that future will involve the replacement of the familiar HTTP standard with something much faster.
The existing HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) is the computer language by which computers communicate with each other on the web. It's been the workhorse of the internet for over 15 years, but with the internet having evolved so much since, it's generally agreed by tech experts that a more modern, faster approach is needed — an HTTP 2.0, if you will. Read more...
Poll: Users diss ‘new iPad’ name for Apple’s next tablet
Apple's generic name for its new iPad -- that's the name, "the new iPad" -- got the thumbs down in a just-concluded poll of more than 1,100 Internet users.
SodaHead.com, which bills itself as the Web's "premier opinion-based community," started the vote last week after Apple unveiled the third-generation device, and wrapped up polling today.
The results of the poll, which posed the simple question "Do you like the name of the new iPad?" to site users, was a defeat for Apple: By a 53%-to-47% margin, voters picked "No, I liked the old format" over the alternative of "Yes, it's new and fresh!" Read more...
We need good code, says Diffie at Black Hat Europe
Cryptographer Whitfield Diffie reckons one of the most important things for good cryptography and security in the age of the Internet is good code.
Unfortunately, really good code is generally too expensive to write, he said at the Black Hat Europe conference.
"We are as much moving into a software age as we moved into an iron age," Diffie said, comparing the Internet evolution to the first cities formed on earth. "We take our cultural machinery and are moving that into the Internet," told the audience in the opening keynote of Black Hat Europe here this week. Read more...
Judge extends DNS Changer deadline as malware cleanup progresses
A federal judge yesterday extended an operation that will keep hundreds of thousands of users infected with the "DNS Changer" malware connected to the Internet until they can scrub their machines.
Meanwhile, Tacoma, Wash.-based Internet Identity (IID), which has been monitoring the cleanup efforts, said today that it had seen a "dramatic" decrease in the number of computers infected with DNS Changer.
DNS Changer, which at its peak infected more than four million Windows PCs and Macs worldwide, was the target of a major takedown led by the U.S. Department of Justice last November.
The malware hijacked users' clicks by modifying their computers' domain name system (DNS) settings to send URL requests to the criminals' own servers, a tactic that shunted victims to hacker-created sites that resembled the real domains. Read more...
Feds request DNS Changer extension to keep 400K users online
Officials with the U.S. government have asked a New York judge to extend an impending deadline that could sever ties to the Internet for hundreds of thousands of users infected with the "DNS Changer" malware.
DNS Changer, which at its peak was installed on more than four million Windows PCs and Macs worldwide -- a quarter of them in the U.S. alone -- was the target of a major takedown last November organized by the U.S. Department of Justice.
The malware hijacked users' clicks by modifying their computers' domain name system (DNS) settings to send URL requests to the criminals' own servers, a tactic that shunted victims to hacker-created sites that resembled the real domains. Read more...
Anonymous threatens to DDOS root Internet servers
An upcoming campaign announced by the hacking group Anonymous directed against the Internet's core address lookup system is unlikely to cause much damage, according to one security expert.
In a warning on Pastebin, Anonymous said last Thursday it would launch an action on March 31 as part of "Operation Global Blackout" that would target the root Domain Name System (DNS) servers.
Anonymous said the attack has been planned as a protest against "our irresponsible leaders and the beloved bankers who are starving the world for their own selfish needs out of sheer sadistic fun".
The DNS translates a Web site name, such as www.idg.com, into a numerical IP (Internet Protocol) address, which is used by computers to find the Web site. Read more...
Whitney Houston fans to follow funeral on Internet
They won't be there in person, but singer Whitney Houston's millions of fans worldwide will be able to share in her homecoming service Saturday as they watch her private funeral on the Internet.
It will provide a much-needed connection for fans who have lacked a formal place to eulogize Houston, one of the world's best-selling artists who died in Beverly Hills, Calif., on Saturday at the age of 48.
Some have gathered and placed flowers outside the Newark, N.J., church where the funeral will be held by invitation-only at the request of Houston's family, who wish to maintain some privacy. Others have stopped by the funeral home. But many have longed to share more fully in commemorating the superstar's life, and have shown their grief in one of the few ways available to them — by buying her music. Read more...
MSN adds new feature to take Internet’s pulse
Microsoft is hooking up MSN.com with a hipper sidekick to broaden its appeal and stay on top of the Internet's hottest topics.
The trend-tracking service, called "msnNOW," tunes into the buzz by sifting through millions of Internet searches and links circulating among the hordes on Facebook and Twitter. The chatter is then distilled into the equivalent of a digital water cooler — a place where people can go to keep in touch without taking up a lot of their time.
After months of development, the new feature debuts Thursday at http://now.msn.com.
The service is primarily aimed at college-age teenagers and young adults who are increasingly relying on smartphones and other mobile devices to remain plugged into what everyone is talking about from one hour to the next. It's an "information-snacking" addiction that msnNOW is looking to feed with a smorgasbord of morsels served up a team of about 20 editors who will write 100-word summaries of the stories driving online conversations, said Bob Visse, MSN's general manager. Read more...
SeaMicro puts 256 Xeon cores in server
SeaMicro on Tuesday announced a microserver that incorporates 256 Xeon processor cores to enable faster delivery of data for Internet-based activities such as social media or search.
The SM10000-XE server is a 10U rack server with 64 quad-core Intel E3-1260L processors that run at a clock speed of 2.4GHz. The server is designed to provide faster response to Internet queries by speeding dynamic Web applications and tasks such as extraction of information from databases.
The new server is an upgrade from SeaMicro's SM10000-64HD, which launched last year with 384 dual-core Atom low-power netbook chips. The new server's Xeon processors have "heavyweight" cores that can deliver a better performance than Atom cores, said Andrew Feldman [CQ], CEO of SeaMicro. Read more...