Internet & Websites News - Page 1

If you don't use Google as your search engine, then you won't get the full benefit of the experience of Redditors when it comes to search results.

This is due to a new agreement between Google and Reddit, and it means that Bing, and other search rivals, will no longer get to plug into Reddit and flag up useful posts on the platform as answers to search queries - or at least not recent posts. Only older content (like 2+ years old, from what we can tell via Bing) will be surfaced from Reddit when using any search engine save for Google, according to a report from The Verge.

It's an important move, because Reddit is a useful source of tips and advice, plus, shall we say, lively debate (mind you - where on the web isn't, these days, when it comes to the latter).

Google has announced that it will no longer continue with its plan to completely phase out third-party cookies on its Chrome browser and will instead take a more user-friendly approach.

Google's Privacy Sandbox VP Anthony Chavez wrote the announcement and explained Google has received concerns from developers, privacy advocates, regulators, publishers, and others about the removal of third-party cookies. Google has heard this feedback and has come up with a new plan that won't include the complete removal of third-party cookies, which allows companies to serve targeted advertisements to users based on the activity of the user around other parts of the internet.

Notably, Google said back in 2020 that it was working toward blocking all third-party cookies in 2024, and the company even tested the removal in January when 1% of Chrome users had all third-party cookies blocked. The concerns from regulators come from the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, which is likely concerned Google will favor its own profits in advertisements if third-party cookies are blocked.

NATO is preparing most of its undersea internet cables in case of an attack. If communication systems are attacked through hostile actions like a terrorist attack, they'll automatically reroute subsea internet and data traffic to satellites.

Most regular people think internet communications are mostly done through satellite, but it's mostly transmitted through undersea cables, which has forced researchers from the US, Iceland, Sweden, and Switzerland are working with NATO to build a system that would automatically reroute internet data and traffic from subsea cables, to satellite communications if they were attacked.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Science for Peace and Security Programme has approved a grant of up to $433,600 for the $2.5 million project, with research institutions providing in-kind contributions, reporting Bloomberg. Eyup Kuntay Turmus is an advisor and program manager at the NATO program, confirmed the project was recently approved, and told Bloomberg by email that the project will start "very soon".

ISPs or Internet Service Providers are generally not the biggest fans of Torrent traffic on their networks. Popular peer-to-peer traffic accounts for a large percentage of all web traffic, with most Torrents relating to pirated copies of media - games, movies, music, and TV shows. Several ISPs worldwide have resorted to things like throttling or outright blocking specific port traffic to combat the nonstop flow of peer-to-peer data.

That's not the case for South Korean ISP KT, which created a new division to interfere with customer data transfers and distribute malware. Yes, an ISP deliberately infected 600,000 of its customers. KT Corporation is one of the largest telecommunication companies in the country, and this was only discovered after a lengthy investigation that began in 2020.

Webhard, a popular Korean cloud service and BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing provider thought it was dealing with malicious hacking attempts when users began reporting issues. However, upon closer inspection, Webhard noticed that all affected users were KT customers.

The Internet Archive is an invaluable resource, a digital library for the planet that gives people free access to digitized books, magazines, software, music, and even websites (thanks to the Wayback Machine). It preserves humanity's collected works for current and future generations.

However, thanks to a recent US court decision that ruled in favor of major publishers in a copyright infringement lawsuit, over 500,000 of half a million books are being removed from the Internet Archive's Open Library project. The organization is appealing the decision, but the books cover the works of publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin Random House, and Wiley - the big boys.

So, many known books are unavailable in the Open Library. The good news is that the verdict doesn't affect the Internet Archive's accessibility program, so the affected books are still available for those with print disabilities.

AMD partnered with Vindral to show off some incredible 8K 10-bit HDR live streaming technologies on its Alveo hardware, with ultra-low latencies and all viewers in sync at the NAB Show 2024 in Las Vegas.

The companies noted that the AV1-powered 8K 10-bit HDR quality live streaming tier, with ultra-low latency and all viewers in sync. The demo at the NAB Show 2024 was running as a full on-premise setup of the Vindral CDN, located locally at NAB in Las Vegas, powered by an Alveo MA35D from AMD.

The two companies have been "working closely" to make a viable implementation, quality-secured, and scalable. Daniel Alinder, CEO at Vindral, said: "After our AV1 initiative, the next obvious step was to look to the next frontier. And that's 8K. Not many devices can display it yet, nor can they decode the video, but as a brand aimed to be ahead of the curve it is an important step for us".

An April Fools' gag can be amusing, cringeworthy, miss the mark, or fall flat in that 'meh' way. In the case of the popular social, chat, and online community platform Discord, its little April Fools was seen by 17% of the world's total population in 24 hours.

Discord's April Fools' gag is a simple joke: a short clip announcing that Loot Boxes are coming to Discord - a funny enough gag that would have been funnier during the height of videogame Loot Boxes, around 2017. You can watch it above.

So, how did this video get 1.4 billion (that's right, billion) views on YouTube, making it one of the most popular videos ever? A figure that makes the Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer we all watched in December look like a clip from a niche channel that posts the odd instructional video on how to, I don't know, untangle headphone cables? Apparently, it was a software error.

A class-action lawsuit launched against Google is forcing the company to promise to delete all of the data it collected through its Incognito web browser.

The lawsuit was filed back in 2020 and required Google to pay $5 billion in damages, but according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, Google has decided to instead destroy "billions of data points" it improperly collected. Additionally, the company has said it will update its data collection disclosures and maintain a setting that prevents Chrome's third-party cookies by default for the next five years.

The lawsuit alleged that Google misled Chrome users by telling them its Incognito browser was private despite it still monitoring user activity, which Google pushed back on, saying it informed users that Incognito didn't mean "invisible" and that sites were still able to see their activity. The lawsuit levied federal wiretapping and California privacy laws and asked for $5,000 in damages per user for the alleged offenses. In 2021, Judge Lucy Koh concluded that Google "did not notify" users that the company was still collecting user data in Incognito mode.

For many people around the world home internet connection speeds are a problem, but scientists now believe they can solve this issue and it all has to do with a new chip design.

It's likely that people have put together that Wi-Fi connections slow down when there is more devices connected to that specific network, and this same principle applies for even larger networks such as ones provided by cell towers. An example of this is terrible connection speeds, or a lack of connection at sporting events. These rudimentarily called wireless traffic jams, but now researchers have an idea of solving it.

Typical Wi-Fi networks are powered by a "planar" processor, which produces signals at a flat or two-dimensional range. Due to these signals being emitted in a flat range there is a limited number of frequencies, or connections that can pair with the network at any given moment. To solve this researchers have proposed creating a 3D Wi-Fi chip that would enable the hardware to handle multiple frequencies at the same time, significantly reducing the congestion on the network, thus increasing speed.

How many hours did you spend online this year, huh? According to data analyst group Domo, users spent an absolutely astonishing 1,300,000,000,000 -- or 1.3 trillion -- hours online in 2023 alone... and the year isn't even finished yet.

The statistics are eye-opening, users sent a massive 241 million emails per minute this year, up from 231.4 million in 2022, while people Google searched at 6.3 million queries per minute, which is a 6.7% increase year-over-year.

Domo founder and CEO Josh James explains: "This year's findings reflect the ever-changing and fast-paced digital landscape, which has only been heightened by the rapid popularity of AI models such as ChatGPT. Data drives everything we do, from a quick search online or sending an email to checking the latest headlines on our way to work".