Internet & Websites - Page 31

British government officials are currently debating the Intellectual Property Bill, with the Prime Minister's staff looking to crack down severely on repeat file sharers. The government wants to begin removing Internet access privileges to repeat offenders that are determined to be 'persistent offenders.' In fact, increasing the maximum penalty for copyright infringement up to 10 years is a current topic of discussion during the meeting.

"The discrepancy I mentioned is a source of great frustration," said Mike Weatherly, the Prime Minister's intellectual property MP, in a statement. "For example, the private prosecution by the Federation Against Copyright Theft of Anton Vickerman, who was making £50,000 a month from running a website (SurfTheChannel) that facilitated mass-scale copyright infringement, saw him convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to four years in prison."

A counter argument issued by Helen Goodman, UK MP, noted that it seems ignorant to distinguish between the teenager downloading music for a mobile device and organized copyright piracy groups.

With many parts of the world still waiting for 4G or even 3G coverage, the South Korean government is looking forward and beginning to invest into the infrastructure needed to bring 5G to the country by 2020. South Korea will invest $1.5 billion in the infrastructure build-out and will work with local firms to accomplish the task.

5G is expected to become much faster than most of the wired broadbad service in most of the world with speeds hitting limits up to 1000 times the current fastest 4G LTE bandwidth. This means that 5G users will be able to download a 1GB file in less than two seconds, or an entire Blu-ray ISO in less than a single minute. South Korea expects the network roll out to be completed by the end of the decade, and it expects handset technology to have caught up by then.

In the last few years, YouTube traffic has exploded thanks to faster internet connections and mobile device speeds increasing, and one of the biggest complaints is that YouTube seems to perform better on some ISPs than others. Today Google announced that it has released a performance report that outlines which ISPs perform better with YouTube.

At the moment, Google's video quality report only shows a series of slides that aim to educate the public on how YouTube videos are delivered to you via CDN servers, but ultimately will feature a list of ISPs and will rate them on how they perform with YouTube traffic. If viewers on a specific ISP are able to watch 90-percent of YouTube Videos at 720p resolution at consistent quality without buffering, then that ISP will be branded as "YouTube HD Certified."

"We wanted to give users a measure of performance that they can truly understand," Google's Shiva Rajaraman said in an interview. "The other side is we felt this would be beneficial for ISPs too, because now they can describe their service and the various product offerings and price points they might have to their customers in a way that they can truly understand: You can access YouTube in HD on my ISP, or not."

Subscription channels HBO, Showtime and Starz are fighting back against a recent NPD Group study that reported pay TV channels have dropped 6 percent of customers through the past two years.

Following the public outcry, NPD clarified its statement sand said while subscribers have declined, TV subscribers are including more channels to their subscription package.

There is fierce competition among broadcasters, cable/satellite providers, and online video content services all vying for consumer attention. Subscribers have a number of different choices when it comes to video content, with HBO, Showtime, Starz, and other broadcasters opening up Web-based streaming for paying customers.

The 35mm film format has been used by movie studios for more than 100 years, but the digital format continues to push the technological envelope. Movie studio Paramount Pictures is now the first studio to leave behind 35mm in favor of going fully digital - and it's a trend that could be mimicked by other companies in the future.

"It's of huge significance because Paramount is the first studio to make this policy known,"said Jan-Christopher Horak, UCLA Film & Television Archive Director. "For 120 years, film and 35 mm has been the format of choice for theatrical presentations. Now we're seeing the end of that. I'm not shocked that it's happened, but how quickly it has happened."

Just 8 percent of U.S. movie theaters only use 35mm and haven't switched to digital, though Paramount will still ship 35mm to theaters in other countries. Movie studios like digital because it's significantly more cost-effective, with digital copies on discs running less than $100 - but the film versions cost upwards of $2,000.

The Sacramento Kings from the National Basketball Association (NBA) announced it will become the first professional sports team to accept bitcoin as a form of payment. Until March 1, basketball fans can purchase game tickets and merchandise in a "faster and more" secure manner, according to the team.

"We are maniacally focused on creating the most seamless experience for our fans in all facets,"said Vivek Ranadive, majority team owner of the Kings, in a press statement. "With BitPay, we are able to implement a technology that allows our fans to make Kings-related purchases without physically reaching into their wallets. A major tenet of the NBA 3.0 philosophy is about utilizing technology for the betterment of the fan experience, and this is yet another step in that process."

While the Kings became the first major pro sports team to accept bitcoin payments, expect others to jump onboard as well. If nothing else, other organizations will patiently observe and learn from any technology growing pains that the Kings - and any major business - face when trying to accept bitcoin.

Set-top box maker Roku is innovating and will spend more time in 2014 focused on supporting streaming services with custom partnerships alongside TV manufacturers. Roku's shift from set-top boxes and moving directly into app support for HDTV makers is a smart strategy for long-term longevity. All content is available on the Roku TV home screen, with the platform currently supporting more than 1,200 apps - and includes partners such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Pandora, and Rdio. All updates will be implemented by Roku and rolled out directly into the connected smart TVs.

TV makers TCL and Hisense are the first two manufacturers to jump onboard with Roku, though better known, higher-end companies should eventually jump into the fun. HDTVs supporting Roku TV models will be available fall 2014, with TV sizing expected to range from 32" up to 55".

"Consumers will enjoy the ease and satisfaction of Roku TV while manufacturers leverage our design specifications, content relationships and software expertise," said Anthony Wood, Roku CEO, in a press statement. "At the same time the content community will gain additional distribution and revenues through an already popular and trusted streaming platform - now in the TV."

The top Google searches of 2013 include the deaths of former South African president Nelson Mandela, 'Fast and the Furious' actor Paul Walker, and the latest generation of the Apple iPhone.

Google compiles the list based on search queries that saw the highest search volume through 2013.

Full list:

When it comes to online entities, there are few who change domain names as often as ThePirateBay, and this morning we are learning that the infamous BitTorrent tracking site has moved yet again. After Caribbean authorities were bullied into to seizing the .sx domain name TPB had used over the last six months, the pirates have moved to Ascension Island and now lay claim to thepiratebay.ac.

Unfortunately the website will not have much time to rest in its stay on Ascension, as the pirates are planning a more permanent stay in Peru and its .pe top level domain. If Peruvian authorities choose to let the RIAA and MPAA bully them into seizure as well, then TPB officials say that they have dozens of TLD's that they can move to at any time.

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have all been ordered by a French court to remove search results from 16 websites that host pirated materials. The case itself began in December 2011, with a handful of French organizations and groups that protect large companies like Paramount, and Sony.

Local ISPs are being ordered to "implement all appropriate means including blocking" of these pirate websites. Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and ISPs have two weeks to remote or block the 16 websites in question, which the court found were in violation of copyright laws, as these websites are "dedicated or virtually dedicated to the distribution of audiovisual works without the consent of their creators."

It looks like Netflix is having issues pushing out its content to its massive user base, and because of that, Netflix is not able to push it all out in what it calls "Super HD", or 1080p.

Netflix's stream gets pushed out to you as soon as possible, but not in its full-resolution glory. This is done so that you're not sitting there watching it buffer for minutes on end, but as soon as the stream is capable of delivering 1080p video, it will switch over. If the bandwidth slows down, the resolution will drop and the buffering of Super HD will begin again.

This is all done to keep you, the content consumer, with a full show always - instead of buffering constantly, not being able to enjoy the latest episode of Orange is the New Black, or House of Cards. The bigger question I have, is that Netflix wants to push Ultra HD, or 4K, content to the masses, but if it's tripping over the network cables in its servers trying to deliver Full HD, with issues, what will Ultra HD cause?

If you have ever wanted to visit the streets of Venice and be escorted through its historic waterways by a serenading gondolier, then you do not have to wait any longer. Today Google rolled out a very extensive and thorough look at the city of love via its Street View service.

The tour through Venice not only hits the tourist highlights, but little visited areas of the city as well. Google utilized its Trekker backpack and Trike Street View imaging devices to capture the beautiful city in 360 degrees of glory. Head over to the source link below to visit places like Piazza San Marco and St. Marks' Cathedral, the Synagogue of the first Jewish Ghetto and even the Devil's Bridge in Torcello island.

"The narrow roads and bridges of Venice show off the need for the Trekker to bring imagery of more breathtaking places online for the world to see," a Google spokesperson said in an Interview. "Other pedestrian-only places we could take the Trekker include hiking in the natural forests and climbing the steps of ancient temples and castles."

On November 17th, Amazon.com and the United States Postal Service will launch a new initiative that will see Amazon customers receiving packages in the mail on Sundays. Initially, this service will only be offered in Los Angeles and New York City, with the majority of the country receiving the service later in 2014.

Amazon says that Dallas, Houston, New Orleans, and Phoenix will be amongst the first additional cities to receive the service in 2014, and further rollout will take place as it grows in popularity. Amazon will deliver its packages from shipping centers to USPS facilities on Saturday evenings, and will then hand things off to USPS for Sunday delivery. At the moment, it is unclear if this service will cost extra or not, but the truth is that USPS could use a financial boost at the moment.

"If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can order a backpack for your child on Friday and be packing it for them Sunday night," said Dave Clark, Amazon's vice president of worldwide operations and customer service. "We're excited that now every day is an Amazon delivery day and we know our Prime members, who voraciously shop on Amazon, will love the additional convenience they will experience as part of this new service."

If you haven't heard about Lavabit, well, it was the e-mail service that Edward Snowden used until it was pretty much forced to close its electronic doors. The creator of the service, Ladar Levison, has now launched a Kickstarter campaign, where he's trying to raise funds for a dark mail encrypted e-mail service.

The dark mail service requires $196,608 in order to take the Lavabit source code and bake it into a free, and open-source project with the new dark mail protocol. Dark mail is looking to deliver a next-generation form of e-mail with end-to-end encryption, free from the prying eyes of our governments and their spy agencies.

The campaign will also be delivering the first dark mail clients to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.

It appears that Hollywood has won one of its larger battles in the "war on bittorrent." Long time torrent search engine, isoHunt, will be closing its site forever as the result of a pre-trial settlement. The settlement includes an agreement that sees isoHunt paying $110 million in damages to Hollywood studios.

This settlement ended what has been an ongoing battle over the last seven years between isoHunt founder Gary Fung, and was filed on grounds that the website enticed internet users to torrent movies and TV shows. The settlement comes after a ruling against isoHunt back in March of this year, where the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that there was ample evidence that Fung offered his service with the intent to promote piracy.

Chris Dodd, chairman of the MPAA, said in a statement that the settlement "sends a strong message that those who build businesses around encouraging, enabling and helping others to commit copyright infringement are themselves infringers, and will be held accountable for their actions."

Recently Slashdot announced the websites third redesign in its thirteen year lifespan, and TweakTown was invited over to take a look at the new diggs. This morning I was given a personal walkthrough with Slashdot's Senior Editor, Tim Lord, who emphasized that Slashdot's goal with the redesign is to help better deliver content to its readers across all devices.

The first thing that really caught my eye is the website's new modern theme. The old sites rounded corners and "Web 2.0" gradients are no more, and the new layout is very appealing to the eye. Lord told me that they really focused hard on simplifying the overall layout, and wanted to make things easy to navigate. The removal of the sites old left-hand navigation bar has greatly cleaned up the overall appearance as well.

Lord said that while Slashdot has always been more heavily weighted towards text, the new layout allows Slashdot to display a single eye catching image atop some of the frontpage post. While some users prefer an image along with their teaser, so do not, and Slashdot has kept those users in mind. A new widget has been placed at the top of the news feed that allows users to switch between three viewing modes. The Standard View will appear as default and will display a single image along with the content teaser. Additionally users can select Headline and Classic views that will set the site to display just the post headlines or the classic view which displays the full post.

Over the last year, Yahoo's Marissa Meyer has been working hard at revitalizing the stale company with new looks, new services, and changing the companys image to something more modern and hip. Today the company has unveiled a complete redesign for its Mail service that brings forth a more refined and elegant email experience.

The new Yahoo Mail is being rolled out today across all platforms and features a new compose screen as well as a new Flickr-generated theme that gives the service a transparent UI. Users now also have a data cap of 1TB, which is much larger than Gmail, but still not unlimited like previously given. Yahoo does say that 1TB of email storage is enough room for 6,000 years of email though.

Yahoo chose to roll out the new design today, on what is the service's 16th birthday, and personally I love the look and feel of the new Yahoo Mail. As an avid Gmail user I really hope that Google takes a long and hard look at this new UI from Yahoo and implements some changes of its own to Gmail. What do you think about the new layout? Are you a fan of Gmail or Yahoo? Let me know in the comments.

The NASA website is currently down due to the US government shutdown dilemma, but The Pirate Party of Russia has stepped up, offering its dedicated servers to the US space agency to host its website.

NASA was meant to celebrate its 55th birthday last week, but couldn't because of the government shutdown stopping its operations. A total of 18,000 employees have been affected, with future missions now at risk. The Pirate Party said in a statement: "We would like to offer you bulletproof collocation or dedicated servers on our hosting platform till the end of the crisis."

The statement also said: "We stand for Internet privacy, and as the result you would not have to worry about programs such as PRISM and other illegal activities of secret services of different countries. Your traffic, your activity and the activity of your users will be in safety." Now, if you're like me and didn't hear about the Pirate Party of Russia until today, they were founded in 2009 and are quite active in Russia as a public movement.

Earlier today, the FBI announced that it had seized Silk Road, an underground drug marketplace located on the darkweb. Along with the seizure came the arrest of the website's founder, Ross Ulbricht. Silk Road was only accessible through the TOR network, and was responsible for the sale of billions of dollars of drugs.

Anyone could logon, and purchase a bag of weed, a few ecstasy pills, or even much harder drugs like heroin and crystal meth. Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering, and could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. The bust came after FBI agents and law enforcement officers made more than 100 purchases through the "hidden" site, many of which were said to contain very high purity drugs.

The FBI report says that Silk Road did more than $1.2 billion in illegal drug transactions since 2011 which netted Ulbricht about $80 million in commissions from the sale. The website had more than 957,079 registered users and conducted more than 1.2 million transactions. Between 2011 and 2013.

Facebook has began providing television networks with metrics on what TV shows its users are talking about the most. ABC, NBC, FOX, and CBS have all began receiving reports from the social network that clue these companies in on what shows Facebook users like, share, and comment on.

Facebook says that the reports are delivered weekly, and that all user data is anonymized, and the only thing networks see is a final compiled metric such as "total social interactions that occurred." Facebook is hoping that this new initiative will take some of the market share away from Twitter, which is usually the go to for real-time viewer stats during big TV events.

"The conversation is being generated by a group that is much more representative of the general population," Daniel Slotwiner, the head of Facebook's TV metrics team, said in an interview. "That means we should have a better signal as it relates to ratings."