Internet & Websites - Page 29

Just how many webpages does The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine include? Well, from late 1996, right up until just a few hours ago, over 400 billion indexed webpages sit on its servers. The Internet Archive has celebrated this milestone by providing a list of highlights for The Wayback Machine over the years:

Four major UK based UK internet service providers have signed a deal with entertainment companies who deal with pirated downloads within the country. According to the report, BBC, BT, SKY, Virgin Media and TalkTalk will be sending educational letters to those who illegally download TV shows.

Under the country's voluntary copyright programme, the entertainment industry will monitor torrent and file-sharing websites to check for any copyright infringement. The entertainment industry will also record IP addresses of those who download illegal content. The ISPs will then send messages to its users on a monthly basis. The ISPs assured that it will not reveal its subscriber's information.

Vcap was setup as an alternative to 2010 Digital Economy Act which had a proposal to terminate internet connections of those who repeatedly download copyright contents via illegal channels.

According to Level 3 Communications which provides internet services for many enterprise and consumer centric ISPs in North America, Latin America and Europe, there are six large broadband consumer with a dominant market who refuse to upgrade its internet server to meet its subscriber's needs.

Level 3's VP of content and media Mark Taylor did not name those ISPs, but said that these companies are determined to break net neutrality for their own profit. He said,"At this time, we have decided not to specifically identify the peers with significant congestion; however, we can say they are large incumbent broadband providers in the US and Europe."

Though he didn't name the ISPs, he did point out that the questioned ISPs also happen to be ranked last in customer satisfaction across the US in the American Customer Satisfaction Index 2013 survey. The ones that are listed in ACSI's survey all the way to the bottom are Comcast, Time-Warner, CenturyLink, Charter, AT&T and Cox.

Russian president Vladimir Putin is cracking down on Internet bloggers in his country, forcing them to register with a national media office. The new "bloggers law" forces bloggers to follow the same laws as larger media publications - and any blog with more than 3,000 readers must register, including traditional blogs and microblogs.

Bloggers in Russia also are no longer allowed to remain anonymous, and all published blogs must include contact information. This new law is designed to help clamp down on criticism against the government. The new law goes into effect on August 1.

"Like previous reforms, this bill's sole aim is to increase control over online content," according a statement from Reporters Without Borders. "At a time when independent media are facing an unprecedented offensive, this is likely to reduce the space for free debate even further. The long list of new prohibitions offers many new possibilities for censoring bloggers when most problems could be solved under existing legislation."

Many users of Facebook have quite a love/hate relationship with the social network. They love using it to keep up with friends and family they don't get to see that often, but many hate how much data they have to share with Facebook. The social network has reportedly unveiled a new anonymous login feature that allows users to log into apps without sharing any personal information.

Along with the anonymous login feature also comes a new version of Facebook Login with improved privacy controls. The goal of anonymous login is to let the user try apps without sharing personal details. The feature is currently in testing with developers and will be rolled out to more developers in the future. It's unclear when users will gain access to anonymous login.

"Sometimes people want to try out apps, but they're not ready to share any information about themselves. For this, we're introducing a way to log in to apps anonymously. Anonymous Login lets people log in to apps so they don't have to remember usernames and passwords, but it doesn't share personal information from Facebook. People can decide later if they want to share any additional information, once they understand more about the app,"� the company said in a statement.

PayPal management fired its strategy director, Rakesh Agrawal, for making series of inappropriate tweets about his fellow co-workers. It all started when 'Rocky' Agrawal started making such tweets at around 1 am during a Jazz fest in New Orleans.

The news source points out that he referred PayPal's vice president of global communications, Christina Smedley as a 'useless middle manager' and a 'piece of shit'. The following tweets by him indicates that he may have been drunk. He then says via Twitter that 'People who should be fired from PayPal Don Christmas a pool a kick'.

Though Rakesh did delete those tweets, those messages were still up long enough for a lot of people to notice. On Saturday, PayPal tweets that it fired Rakesh Agrawal as they have zero tolerance for such behaviour.

AT&T revealed its plans to offer in-flight internet service in collaboration with few companies using a new air-to-ground 4G LTE technology. The company stated that it will be using its existing spectrum and plans to work with Honeywell for hardware and software solution to provide in-flight connections.

"Everyone wants access to high-speed, reliable mobile Internet wherever they are, including at 35,000 feet," said John Stankey, Chief Strategy Officer at AT&T. "We are building on AT&T's significant strengths to develop in-flight connectivity technology unlike any other that exists today, based on 4G LTE standards. We believe this will enable airlines and passengers to benefit from reliable high speeds and a better experience. We expect this service to transform connectivity in the aviation industry - we are truly mobilizing the sky."

AT&T also will be building an air-to-ground network in United States which will be based on 4G LTE standards.

Since its launch, Skype has been an important communication tool for both the private and corporate sectors, and when Group Video Calling was launched, it changed the way many of us conference. Unfortunately, Microsoft slapped a $8.99 price tag on this feature by bundling it into the Skype Premium package, and many of us simply moved on to the free group video conferencing platform Google Calls Hangouts. Today Microsoft has seen the errors of its ways and has opened up group video calling for free to everyone.

"For the last few years, we've offered group video calling to Premium users on Windows desktop and Mac and more recently Xbox One," Skype said in a blog post. "Today, we're excited to announce that we're making group video calling free - for all users on these platforms. And, in the future, we'll be enabling group video calling for all our users across more platforms - at no cost."

The change is mostly because Microsoft wanted to bring Skype group video calling to Xbox One and to do that, it needed to make the service free of charge. As of this morning Skype group video calling is available free on Windows desktop, Mac and Xbox One clients. With this new change, Microsoft has also ended the Skype Premium subscription all together, but it will still charge for making domestic and international phone calls.

Finding interesting news stories on Facebook has become increasingly hard to do over the last few years, and that is mainly due to the dilution of the news feed caused by so many useless and noninformative pages. Today Facebook launched a new service that is aimed at making it much easier to find what news stories are trending on the service, and it's called FB NewsWire.

FB Newswire is powered by Storyful, one of the leading social content discovery services. The new service aggregates news content that has been shared publicly on Facebook originating from individuals and organizations from around the world. Facebook says that it has designed FB Newswire for Journalist and individuals in an effort to make the hot topics and trending news better accessible. As a long-time tech journalist, I can attest to how big of a role Facebook plays in story discovery, and will definitely put this new service to use.

In its new blog post, Netflex blamed Comcast of extorting content companies and its own customers by charging twice for accessing the same content on the internet. It also stated that the internet service provider is not truly offering transit service.

Earlier, Netflix raised concerns about Comcast's merger with Time Warner as it might charge a 'toll' for accessing video content, but at the end of the day Netflix had to made an agreement with Comcast for better quality of streaming of content for its customers.

Netflix pointed out that unlike Level3 and Cogent, Comcast is not carrying traffic to every network on the internet. According to Netflix, rather than moving the traffic, its merely acting as a 'gatekeeper' for its subscribers. Netflix VP of content Ken Florance added,"In this way, Comcast is double dipping by getting both its subscribers and Internet content providers to pay for access to each other."

For the last month or so, Twitter has been testing out a new profile page with select users, and today the company has released its new profile design to all of its users. The complete overhaul has taken Twitter from what many considered to be an outdated design, to a more modern look and feel that is on par with Facebook and Google Plus.

The biggest thing you will notice is that the new Twitter profile now spans the full width of the page, and looks a lot like Facebook's Timeline. Users can now upload a large header image similar in size to what Google+ allows. Users also now benefit from a mosaic-view of their twitter post, but a chronological view is also available. Additionally, users can pin a single Tweet to the top of their feed, which allows them to keep important tweets at the top.

The way Twitter displays Tweets in the mosaic view is based on how much engagement each tweets gets. Tweets that get Favorited or re-tweeted more will move up the list, while less popular tweets get pushed down. Users can also filter tweets from others profiles and select just tweets with images or videos. As you can see above, I have the new profile and honestly it feels like this is how Twitter should have always been.

The so-called Dark Web is one of the few places on the Internet that I rarely visit, which is mostly because I have no reason to visit the type of websites it caters too. With sites like Silk road and other illegal sites populating this seedy corner of the web, it is no surprise that someone has developed a search engine to make it easier to find the illegal stuff you might be searching for.

"I noticed on the forums and Reddit people were constantly asking 'where to get product X?' and 'which market had product X?' or 'who had the best product X and was reliable and not a scam?'" Grams' creator, Gramsadmin, said in an interview with Wired. "I wanted to make it easy for people to find things they wanted on the Dark Net and figure out who was a trustworthy vendor."

Grams has been online since last week, and appears to sever solely as a search engine that queries multiple drug and gun exchanges located on the Dark Web. The search engine is only accessible through the TOR browser and list search results with prices per product listed. Users can change the denomination to the currency of their choosing including Bitcoin, USD and more. It was only a matter of time before something like this popped up, and I am willing to bet that it will not be the last time it happens.

Today Google began rolling out a new feature to GMail that allows users to quickly insert images that were backed up from a mobile device into emails. The new feature has been added to the "insert photo" button located at the bottom of the toolbar of new email compositions, and will give users the option to insert an image located in their mobile device image backup folder.

"Unless you're a budding Ansel Adams, odds are you take most of your photos using your phone. And whether it's photos of your hiking trip or a night out, sending photos to friends and family just got easier," Google said in a blogpost. "Starting today, you can save time and insert your Auto Backup photos from your phone into Gmail messages on the web using the new Insert Photo button."

Google has retained the ability to upload images from your PC and the web, and the new feature will pop up the familiar Google+ image grid and allow you to pick a photo the same way you would if you were sharing it in Google+. Auto Backup is available for iOS and Android and now with GMail integration, it has become more appealing than ever.

Some new stats have been publishes by a third party company called Twopcharts looking at Twitter. At last count, Twitter has about 974 million users, but it's less clear how many of those accounts are still in use. Twopcharts has offered up some numbers that claim twitter is much less active than the 974 million user number might suggest.

The stats that Twopcharts had gathered claim that 44% of those Twitter accounts have never made a single tweet. That means that 44% of Twitter's accounts have never been used. The company goes on to claim that only 126 million of Twitter accounts have sent a tweet in the past 30 days.

Twitter is tight lipped about its stats for the most part and doesn't like to talk about user retention. What Twitter has said in the past is that it has 241 million average monthly users as of December 31 2013. Twopcharts also claims that 391 million Twitter accounts have 0 followers and about 232 million haven't followed a single Twitter user themselves.

Amazon is looking to expand its digital reading material offerings very soon by announcing its acquisition of the popular digital comic book distribution service known as ComiXology. The service offers up most of Marvel's best-selling series and boast more than 100,000 issues and more than 200 million downloads since launch.

No word was given on how much Amazon paid for ComiXology, but we would assume that it is in the hundreds of millions if not more. ComiXology is the largest digital comic book distribution services on the internet, and has been dubbed "The iTunes of comic book sales" in the past by the New York Times. Amazon says that ComiXology will continue to operate as a separate company and will be able to continue down its path, but will be able to do so faster, better, and stronger.

Scamming the system via "like baiting" on Facebook post has been a problem for a long time and today Facebook has announced plans to put an end to these confusing and annoying post once and for all. For those who do not know what "like baiting" is, let me explain. Like baiting is when a person or page or group post an image or post and ask you to "like" the post if you agree, or "share" the post if you disagree, and to "comment" if you agree and disagree. This format changes from post to post, but the basic concept is the same.

Additionally, these post often contain links to nefarious websites, or websites that are aimed at causing the user to accidentally click on advertisements. Facebook is using algorithms to measure how many times people who visit links, like the original post, and is using this data to determine whether or not a post is a "like baiting" spam post. Facebook says that it is punishing posters who frequently publish these type of post by decreasing their reach over a period of a few months. This will result in Facebookers seeing less of these post on their news feed and that is something I think we can all appreciate.

During the Warner Music YouTube blackout in 2009, Warner musicians sold more songs and albums during the hiatus, indicating YouTube hurts music album sales, according to Fairfield University and the University of Colorado.

The research believes top music labels lose out in total sales due to listeners heading to YouTube to listen to new songs - and watch music videos - instead of purchasing individual tracks and albums.

"We showed that the removal of content from YouTube had a casual impact on album sales by upwards of on average 10,000 units per week for top albums," according to the research. "While a great deal has been said about the potential role of these services in promoting and discovering new artists and music, our results cast some double on this widely believed notion, at least with regards to top selling albums."

If you cannot make the time to do grocery shopping, a retail giant may have the solution you. Amazon introduces 'Dash', a service that allows you order groceries via a device that uses barcode scanner and a microphone for voice search.

Dash is an approximately 6-inch device which connects via Wi-Fi to PCs or smartphones where you can check the ordered items. Once the device is connected to your Wi-Fi network, Amazon Dash is always signed in to your Amazon Fresh Account.

As of now, Amazon implemented this service for public testing. The online retail giant is accepting applications from those who are interested to test the product. The company will be testing this in Southern California, San Francisco or Seattle.

It appears that yet another popular website will be closing its doors forever due to "business issues." Gamespy.com has just announced that it will be shutting down its website along with all of its PC gaming servers, effective May 31st. Gamespy has been a staple in the PC gaming community since 1999, and it appears that it will not make it past 14 years old.

"Just to be clear, we're not being shut down because PC gaming isn't a big, important, and growing thing -- because it is. That's not even debatable. It's not even because the GameSpy staff did a bad job of talking about it. Hell, from where I'm sitting we did an awesome job," said GameSpy's Dan Stapleton. "Why is this closure happening, then? It's a business thing, and like most business things it's not easy to explain or understand unless you spend all day crunching numbers and paying bills. Which I don't. So here's the simple version that even I can comprehend: Ziff Davis wants to run an efficient, focused company, and managing several different sites that all cover videogames isn't exactly the model of efficiency. "

Stapleton went on to say that the GameSpy staff will go on to write for other gaming media outlets such as IGN, and that they will continue to bring readers what they need to know about the current state of gaming. It's a sad day to see a staple like GameSpy fall, but such is the way of many sites that have been acquired by Ziff Davis over the years, and I am sure that this will not be the last to shutter its windows.

Video game streaming service, Twitch.TV has just added a new feature to its website today. Users can now enable private chat rooms that are accessible by invite only, which cuts down on the trolls who do what trolls do best. While Twitch already allows users to chat with broadcasters, this new group chat feature lets the broadcaster pick and chose who they wish to allow in their coatroom at any given time.

"One of the most beloved features on Twitch is the ability to chat with the broadcasters and your fellow gamers. In many ways, it's what makes Twitch, Twitch. It's where community memes begin," Twitch said in a blog post. "Where you express your glee, outrage, befuddlement, or amusement, as the case may be. Twitch is a social place, and chat is where the social exchange happens."

Unfortunately, the new group chat feature will remain in beta form, which means that only those who are part of the Twitch Partner Program will be allowed to setup and administer group chats. Normal Twitch members will still be allowed to enter the private group chats though, just not start any themselves. "The beta period is necessary to ensure that Group Chat is stable and scalable before we roll out room creation to everyone. We're always working hard on stability and shoring up the QoS of our chat service in general, and we are keen to roll out this new feature to the rest of the community as quickly as we can," the company concluded.