Internet Use/New Technologies
03 August 2013
Twitter manager apologises to women as police investigate eight allegations of abuse The Independent
A Twitter boss has personally apologised to women who have experienced abuse on the social networking site, following rape and bomb threats in the past week, including those against Independent columnist Grace Dent and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado-Perez.
01 August 2013
How did Estonia become a leader in technology? The Economist
When Estonia regained its independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, less than half its population had a telephone line and its only independent link to the outside world was a Finnish mobile phone concealed in the foreign minister's garden. Two decades later, it is a world leader in technology. Estonian geeks developed the code behind Skype, Hotmail and Kazaa (an early file-sharing network). In 2007 it became the first country to allow online voting in a general election. It has among the world's zippiest broadband speeds and holds the record for start-ups per person. Its 1.3m citizens pay for parking spaces with their mobile phones and have their health records stored in the digital cloud. Filing an annual tax return online, as 95% of Estonians do, takes about five minutes. How did the smallest Baltic state develop such a strong tech culture?
29 July 2013
Twitter to simplify the reporting of abusive tweets, after outcry over rape threats CNET
After an outcry in Britain over rape threats on Twitter, the company said a feature designed to make it easier to report abusive tweets when using Twitter on the iPhone would be coming to other platforms. The recipient of those threats expressed approval but added that the service needs "to step up and take responsibility for what is tweeted on their site."
28 July 2013
Access control changes a must for future, safe Internet, Vint Cerf says ZDNet
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet, is watching his baby evolve and he sees a bright future awash in a sea of data, devices and ubiquitous connectivity, but a darker side foreshadows wholesale changes needed in access controls and privacy hardened by hardware-reinforced security.
27 July 2013
Porn sites get more internet traffic in UK than social networks or shopping The Guardian
Internet traffic to legal pornography sites in the UK comprised 8.5% of all "clicks" on web pages in June - exceeding those for shopping, news, business or social networks, according to new data obtained exclusively by the Guardian.
25 July 2013
Facebook Is Erasing Doubts on Mobile New York Times
If Facebook were a car, it just went from zero to 60 mph in six seconds.
23 July 2013
UK's digital economy larger and more successful than official reports suggest, researchers say Out-Law
There are at least 40% more companies that make up the UK's 'digital economy' than any Government estimates, and those companies tend to be considerably more successful than non-digital companies, researchers have found.
Google accounts for 25 percent of all Internet traffic, study finds Computerworld
The diversified range of new products being built and provided by Google now make the company accountable for nearly 25 percent of all Internet traffic, up from a mere 6 percent just three years ago, according to a new study.
22 July 2013
AltaVista is dead. Here's why it's so hard to compete with Google Washington Post
Altavista, one of the leading search engines of the 1990s, died this week. It was 18 years old. It had languished for years before its owner, Yahoo, finally pulled the plug.
21 July 2013
ISPs clamour for a fairer contribution from content firms The Economist
The raid by the European Commission's antitrust gumshoes this month on Orange (formerly France Telecom), Deutsche Telekom and Telefónica of Spain seemed to come out of the blue. The companies professed a surprise verging on stupefaction. Even some Brussels insiders were caught on the hop.
20 July 2013
Internet Traffic Jams, Meet Your Robot Nemesis Network World
On an 80-core computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, scientists have built a tool that might make networks significantly faster just by coming up with better algorithms.
Japan, South Korea continue to lead in fibre Internet PC World
The number of fiber Internet subscriptions rose 12.7 percent in the countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the Paris-based group said Thursday.
19 July 2013
Topics that spark Wikipedia 'edit wars' revealed BBC News
Articles about ex-US President George W Bush and anarchism are the most hotly contested on Wikipedia's English-language edition, research suggests.
18 July 2013
China smartphone owners swell number of internet users to 591m BBC News
China now has 591 million internet users, according to the latest official figures from the country.
17 July 2013
Study: Technology in the classroom helps writing (sort of) Washington Post
Technology in the classroom has made students better collaborators, but not necessarily better writers, a new study says.
16 July 2013
Australian online shopping segment worth $18.3 billion: report Computerworld
The online shopping segment in Australia is forecast to be worth $18.3 billion in 2013, with an average spend per consumer of $1750, according to a new Frost & Sullivan study.
Why Web Reviewers Make Up Bad Things New York Times
It's pretty clear exactly who writes fake positive reviews on the Web: friends or relatives of the author or the shop or restaurant owner, or sometimes the author or shop owner himself. The goal of fake positive reviews is to increase sales, and the reviewers are the ones who benefit, or want their friends to benefit.
Australia's telecom costs skyrocket: OECD report ZDNet
According to the OECD Communications Outlook, published this month, the average telecommunications connection in Australia, be it wireless or fixed line, cost the user US$1,135 in 2011. Across the OECD, only Swiss consumers pay more for their telecommunications, and only just. The typical Aussie customer was paying 73 percent more than the OECD average.
14 July 2013
From VHS to Google Glass, porn drives the tech market The Guardian
In wartime, technology is driven by our shared weakness for violence. In 1939, the RAF was still sending biplanes into battle. By 1945 we had jets. Spitfires and stealth bombers are beautiful things because more design man-hours have been devoted to the technology of killing than into any other field of endeavour.
13 July 2013
AltaVista is dead. Here's why it’s so hard to compete with Google Washington Post
Altavista, one of the leading search engines of the 1990s, died this week. It was 18 years old. It had languished for years before its owner, Yahoo, finally pulled the plug.
Escaping Google's gravity: How small search engines define success CNET
It's not easy to compete in the world of search. Once you get past Google's juggernaut, you're still squaring off against Yahoo and Bing. But some of the smaller search engines are looking to attract people by offering what the others can't: peace of mind.
11 July 2013
Search Ads Account for 52.8% of World's Mobile Ad Revenue in 2012 ClickZ
Mobile advertising revenue is up across the globe, according to the latest findings from the Interactive Advertising Bureau. The report showed mobile ad revenue grew 82.8 percent in 2012 to a total of $8.9 billion. This is up from $5.3 billion in 2011.
10 July 2013
Iran launches 'national email service' The Guardian
Iran has launched its own "national email service", requiring all citizens to sign up to it to "safely" communicate with government officials.
Salons or Not, Cyberspace Is Still a Distant Place for Most Cubans New York Times
By the standards of many Cubans, Lazaro Noa García is an adept internaut. He e-mails his daughter in Mexico a couple of times a week at a cybersalon in an upscale suburb, and checks soccer scores and news on Yahoo.
07 July 2013
Why isn't there an Asian Google? Independent on Sunday
Looking at the statistics Asia seems like the natural home of the internet. It has nearly 50% of the world's internet users and accounts for nearly one third of the global e-commerce market; the fastest broadband speeds in the world are based in Asia (one list places the top three countries as Hong Kong, South Korea, and Japan), and it has the quickest growth in mobile broadband of any region worldwide.
