Internet & Websites News - Page 84

Many users of the popular Google service Gmail were reporting the service as unavailable this morning. The extent and cause of the outage are not known at the moment. Twitter was abuzz with reports from many users who are unable to access the service. The outage was not a complete outage as some people were still able to access the service.

Other services appeared to be down in conjunction with Gmail. If Gmail was down for you, it is likely that Docs and Google+ were unavailable for you as well. Google acknowledged the problem with a post Google's Apps status dashboard: "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Mail. We will provide more information shortly."

At 10:40am PT Google Tweeted that, "#Gmail should be back for some of you already, and will be back for everyone soon. Thanks for your patience."

A new report is out that shows Hulu Plus's growth is accelerating. January of this year saw Hulu Plus reach 1.5 million subscribers, so if this report is true, Hulu managed to add 500,000 subscribers in just 4 months. That rate well outpaces the previous rate of adding about 1,000,000 per year. Nothing official has come from the company just yet.

"We grew the business 60 percent from 2010 to approximately $420 million in revenue [in 2011]," Hulu CEO Jason Kilar said in January. "We exceeded our plan despite the soft advertising market (economy) in the second half of 2011.... Hulu Plus now has more than 1.5 million paying subscribers."

The report comes from the New York Times which states that the company will announce this week that it has hit 2 million subscribers. 2011 saw Hulu add 1.1 million subscribers. The previous 4 months saw them add 500,000. If this pace continues, they are on track to gain 1.5 million new subscribers this year.

For all of the Harry Potter fans out there, Pottormore finally opens for all, sort of. You see, you can now register after providing some personal details to find out if you're magical or not, but that doesn't give you access. Your account has to be verified before you can access the site.

Unfortunately for us, the site's management has let it be known that the approval/verification process could be slow even though they plan to verify a steady stream of accounts. They make note that you may not gain access right away. Darn. Currently you will find e-books of all 7 books as well as the audiobook versions.

Once you do gain access, you will be able to have access to interactive tours of locations mentioned in the books and the virtual tools needed to practice your magical arts. The owners plan to add more features over the coming weeks and months. Additionally, after your registration is approved, you will be sorted into one of the four houses and be chosen by your wand.

I thought it was ridiculous when I saw an 8 year old with a cell phone last week, but apparently it's worse than I thought. A new study suggests that he was using Facebook on his phone as well, even though Facebook requires users to be 13 years of age or older. With all of the money and the technical prowess that Facebook has, shouldn't they be able to find an under-aged user?

Apparently not, or at least according to a new study released by Minor Monitor. I would like to point out the self interest that the company might have in a study like this. The study says that 38% of the kids on Facebook are under 13, with an incredible 4% being under SIX. I'll remind you we're talking about physical age--if it were mental age, I'm sure the number would be much higher.

It's incredible to think that parents either allow their kids on Facebook or don't know that they're on there. Three-quarters of parents surveyed in this study admitted to worrying about their children's safety on Facebook, but it doesn't appear to have caused them to prevent their children from using Facebook.

Tor is a popular program which enables people behind heavy government censorship to view the entire unobstructed internet. It's basically a proxy server which encrypts the outgoing packets so that they can't be snooped on. Unfortunately, these data packets can still be identified so the traffic can theoretically still be blocked.

Computer scientists have now come up with a way to mask these data packets as Skype traffic. This makes it near impossible for the government to block the data packets. If a government were to block Skype, there would be a massive outcry from other governments and the citizens themselves.

"The goal is to make the traffic look like some other protocol that they are not willing to block," Ian Goldberg, a professor at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo, told Ars. "They could just shut off the Internet, of course, like Egypt did for a few days a year or so ago, but that, of course, would be extremely unpopular to their own people that are wondering why can't see pictures of cute cats."

Everyone that I know pretty much uses Facebook daily. They spend more time on Facebook than they do getting sleep. I'm guilty of it too, but is there really a problem with staying in contact with all of my friends? Experts believe that Facebook could be worse than alcohol or cigarettes. We outline the 5 possible issues with Facebook below.

1. Eating Disorders

Facebook, according to a new study, makes people feel bad about themselves. The Center for Eating Disorders at Sheppard Pratt found that more than 50% say that seeing pictures of themselves and others on the site "makes them more conscious about their own body and their weight." This wasn't just females either, as 40% of males said they comment negatively on their own pictures.

The FaceBook Data Team has published an interesting new study based upon U.S. Facebook data from 2010 and 2011. The data concerns the changes in relationship status and the trends associated with them. Some of the trends and results of the study are obvious, such as February 14th being the highest gain in new relationships, but there are less obvious results, such as the trends for the most common break up day. The best part? This data is separated into 3 distinct age groups.

Today, being Friday (in the US at least), is the most common day for breakups for people older than 25, so be on the watch for a breakup. But if you're single, don't fret, because Monday is the statistically highest day for new relationships. For people under 25, Thursday is the highest day for breakups, probably because they want to be able to go out Friday night and party.

In addition to the statistics about the days of the weeks, the data shows trends over the entire year. Summer is particularly bad for relationships, whereas winter appears to be generally positive. The most interesting part of the yearly trends is that they are very similar over all the age groups, whereas the weekly trend shows a difference. And lastly, its curious, to me at least, that December 25th is the second highest day of the year for new relationships.

Facebook have just rolled out its best photo update to-date, where they'll now display photos in high-resolution and allow the feature of full-screen viewing of images. The pictures will of course be much clearer, crisper, and higher quality than ever before.

The latest version of Firefox, as well as Chrome users, can view the full-screen photos by clicking the arrow in the top right corner. The last time Facebook updated its photo viewer was back in February, where the photo interface appears in a pop-out box with the caption information and ads displayed in the right sidebar.

Facebook knew that the photos weren't in good enough quality, where Facebook engineer Ryan Mack said in a blog post that he started working on the photo updates as soon as he noticed the coloring was off in his photos. Mack said:

I've never quite understood why FaceBook has a poke option, nor why it seems to have such a high appeal with FaceBook users. I imagine that it is meant to bring some sort of "real" contact back into something that is purely digital with no physical contact. Thanks to two inventors, however, there can now be real physical contact that is initiated by a lowly FaceBook poke.

Jasper van Loenen and Bartholomäus Traubeck have invented a machine that translates a digital FaceBook poke into an actual poke, albeit by a machine. Simply strap it to your body in a location of your choosing, and the machine will jab you every time you get poked on FaceBook, almost like it were a voodoo doll.

The inventors explain:

Exactly six years ago, the first tweet ever was posted by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. This makes today Twitter's sixth-birthday. The public debut of Twitter is technically July 6th, but the service was clearly running as the first tweet was placed today. Incredibly, the micro-blogging service now has over 350 million registered users, with 100 million posting regularly during 2011.

To celebrate, let's look at some more interesting statistics regarding Twitter:

-Born from a 5-member team, Twitter is now available in 28 languages and employs over 835 people.