Internet & Websites News - Page 32
Super Bowl 50 sets record for most data transferred at sporting event
Super Bowl 50 didn't just set records on the field, but data-wise as well: a historic 10.15 terabytes of data were transferred over the Levi's Stadium Wi-Fi network on game day, according to provider Extreme Networks. The figure represents a 63% jump over last year's 6.23 TB, and sets the record for most data transferred at a sporting event.
To put things in perspective, 10.15 TB of data is equivalent to more than 6,000 hours of HD video or about 1.2 million 2MB photos.
Levi's features over 12,000 network ports, over 1,200 Wi-Fi access points, about 1,200 Bluetooth beacons, and 40Gbps of bandwidth.
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Australian airline Twitter account hacked, used to hurl Kanye abuse
While Kanye West has been on a rampant Twitter tirade surrounding his 'Life of Pablo' album release, even social media accounts from The Land Down Under have gotten in on the action.
Virgin Australia's official Twitter account told Kanye West to "EAD" recently, further labelling him as a "douche" and embodying the common insult of many Aussie Generation X or Y youths.
While this tweet did come from the official and verified Virgin Australia account, it was soon after deleted with the company releasing a statement that "A recent tweet on our account was not published by a Virgin Australia employee and we are investigating the matter."
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Aussie telco Telstra smashed by free data day, 1841 terabytes
Thanks to a recent nation-wide outage, Telstra offered its mobile customers a free data Sunday promotion, seeing those from The Land Down Under take full advantage of this offering.
In total, it is explained that Australians downloaded a massive 1841 terabytes, something that News.com.au explained as 5.1 million Game of Thrones episodes.
With the majority of this data being downloaded over 4G connections, Telstra group managing director of networks, Mike Wright, explained that "Over the course of the day we had twice as much traffic as we would normally see on a Sunday (or any day)," further stating that "We hope it helps make up for some of the inconvenience we caused."
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CBS not talking with Apple about streaming TV services anymore
CBS was in some heated negotiations with Apple to bring forth their lofty network services through the network, and potentially allowing you to stream that content to Apple devices. But that's no longer, or so says the CEO of CBS.
According to the CEO, Les Moonves, they really haven't heard from Apple regarding that aforementioned TV streaming service. The initial meetings occurred, and they appeared to be positive from what we can gather. It's just that Apple never called them back afterwards.
"We had conversations awhile back, and we haven't had recent conversations with them," Moonves told CNNMoney in an interview. Internet streaming services have accounted for nearly 40% of their revenue this past year, meaning that they understand the importance of digital media. They've made a number of partnerships with outside companies for streaming content, so a partnership with Apple isn't out of the question. Apple just needs to answer the phone.
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Google's 'right to be forgotten' initiative extended to every domain
The right to be forgotten, or the set of regulations that were passed in the EU that allow people the right, and ability, to ask that search results pertaining to them be hidden or outright deleted, is being extended thoroughly.
It used to be that only the particular countries Google domain would remove those search results, but now all domains within Google will subsequently erase that information. That means that someone in Belgium requesting info be forgotten won't have those same search results available on Google.de either. It seems that this is a result of a Canadian court case forcing Google to apply the rules worldwide combined with France's threat of a fine if such widespread forgetfulness wasn't implemented.
The original idea was quaint because it didn't quite cover the entire worldwide web as it should have from the very beginning. You could just as easily find the same info by doing searches from other country domains, so it really amounted to doing next to nothing.
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Search engines are about to be creepy good at predicting what you want
Google and Bing are already quite good at predicting what you're thinking and giving you relevant suggestions. But it's slow and the predictive algorithms just aren't quite good for actual real-time suggestions. So a graduate student from Cornell wants to speed things up considerably, making things potentially awesome, yet incredibly creepy.
We all like our personalized suggestions when shopping or even when searching for things. It legitimately helps us, despite the privacy concerns related to it. But those results don't show up instantaneously. There's a significant amount of background work going on that links your actions to those personalized results. Wenlei Xie has come up with an algorithm that could potentially speed things up to near real-time.
Search engines and their underlying suggestions generally use a weighted node graph which is examined analyzed to see just how appropriate the suggestion is based on years of collecting and correlating information. The problem that Xie has found is that there's just so much information to walk through, that it's incredibly slow. So to make it faster and more relevant even sooner, he's proposed simplifying those graphs. In essence they're assembling only the most pertinent information, and discarding a lot of the fluff, to make it quicker.
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Twitter has shut down over 125,000 accounts for promoting terrorism
In a new blog post, Twitter has revealed that it has shut down over 125,000 user accounts since mid-2015 for promoting terrorism, particularly terrorism related to ISIS. The company reminds that while it values free speech, terrorist threats and any violent threats for that matter are forbidden on its service.
"Like most people around the world, we are horrified by the atrocities perpetrated by extremist groups," it writes. "We condemn the use of Twitter to promote terrorism and the Twitter Rules make it clear that this type of behavior, or any violent threat, is not permitted on our service."
"As an open platform for expression, we have always sought to strike a balance between the enforcement of our own Twitter Rules covering prohibited behaviors. The legitimate needs of law enforcement, and the ability of users to share their views freely - including views that some people may disagree with or find offensive."
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Frinkiac is an incredible Simpsons-centric search engine
A search engine just for The Simpsons? If you were ever curious about when someone said something, then you can now search through all pieces of dialogue from all 15 seasons.
The search engine parses through nearly 3 million screenshots from every season and shows the appropriate dialogue beside it. You can easily make a meme out of it just by clicking the appropriate button. So if you've ever been curious when any word has been said, just type it in and you'll get every result you'll ever need.
And now you'll never have an excuse not to quote The Simpsons. The search engine itself is fast and efficient with a good layout that's easy to use. It's all very Simpson's-esque as well. This is perfect for those fans that need a quick reference. It's also an example of what could be useful for any number of other shows or games. The program itself was written in Go and works in a fairly simplistic way, according to the blog post by the creator, Paul Kehrer.
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The 411 on 420: Facebook is deleting medical marijuana pages
Facebook is reportedly deleting the pages of medical marijuana dispensaries, according to NJ.com, with three New Jersey-based ones being removed, as well as others across the United States.
Why is Facebook deleting these pages? Well, they're violating the social network's terms of service, with Facebook leaving a note behind when it removed the pages: "We remove any promotion or encouragement of drug use. Your page is currently not visible on Facebook. It looks like content on your page does not follow the Facebook Community Terms and Standards".
New Jersey law "law strictly regulates what information can and cannot be displayed on a dispensary's website, which has led many of the organizations to use Facebook as a supplemental information source", reports Engadget. Strain names can't be listed on a New Jersey-based dispensary site for example, with Facebook's move on removing the pages leaving patients pissed off, and rightly so.
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Australian Government uses Facebook to track $2m AU of welfare fraud
The Australian Government has hired some third-party agencies in order to scour social media and track down Aussies gathering welfare donations illegally.
Boasting a current $1.43 million US ($2m AU) haul, the department responsible for processing welfare in the Land Down Under, Centrelink, further commented that $1.21 million US ($1.7m AU) has been discovered by them monitoring eBay accounts of welfare recipients not claiming this form of sale as income. Some of the offenders are said to have made the mistake of posting "Thank God it's Friday" on their Facebook, explaining that they were relieved the working week was over while receiving unemployment benefits at the same time.
Stuart Robert, the Minister for Humans Services, stated that this research resulted in "3,072 compliance reviews, 1,888 cases of overpayment and five arrests on warrants for failing to attend court for welfare fraud offences" as reported by the Canberra Times.
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