Internet & Websites - Page 33

As far as Internet-based corporations go, Google is about as big as they get, and rightfully so as the company offers up so many useful tools that many of us use in our daily lives. Today, we learned just how big Google actually is; a new report from Deepfield that was recently released says that based on the numbers Google represents 25 percent of all North American Internet traffic. This means that it is bigger than Facebook, Netflix, and Instagram combined in terms of bandwidth served.

"What's really interesting is, over just the past year, how pervasive Google has become, not just in Google data centers, but throughout the North American internet," says Craig Labovitz, founder of Deepfield, the monitoring company that did the study. Just three years ago, traffic to Google only accounted for about 6 percent of all Internet traffic.

Over the past year, Google has had to add tens of thousands of servers to its ranks to handle this massive growth and has built data centers on four continents within the last few years. Google has even gone as far as adding thousands of servers to ISPs around the world, called Google Global Cache Servers, that store the most popular content from Google's network such as a YouTube video that might be going viral, popular apps on the Google Play Store, or even a trending topic on Google+. These allow this content to be served to you faster than it would if it was all stored in a central location.

Hot on the heels of Google's public beta of its refreshed maps, the company has now updated its Street View service to include views from atop the Eiffel Tower. Google says that they worked with the Eiffel Tower Operating Company to gather a fairly large stack of panoramic imagery from all three of the Eiffel Tower's viewing platforms. Additionally, Google has built an online exhibit that depicts the story of the Eiffel Tower through 50 archival images, plans, engravings, and photographs.

"In order to capture the imagery, the Street View team followed in the footsteps of 7 million annual visitors and ascended multiple floors of the Tower," Mark Yoshitake of the Google Cultural Institute wrote in a blog post introducing the new material. "Using the Street View Trolley (designed especially for monuments and museums) they filmed 360-degree views of the monument's architecture and its views over Paris."

The Eiffel Tower is 324 meters tall and held the title of tallest construction in the world for 40 years after it was built in 1889 until it was dethroned by the Chrysler building in New York City. It is comprised of over 18,000 separately made pieces and is one of the most photographed structures in the world.

In case you haven't heard, Google has been completely overhauling its web-based map service and unveiled the first beta edition just two months ago at the company's I/O conference. Up until now, you needed to be invited by Google to participate in the beta program but as of today, Google has opened the doors and allow everyone to experience the new Google Maps.

Obtaining access to Google Maps Beta is a simple as visiting maps.Google.com. Once there, you'll be prompted to try out the newly refreshed maps via a box in the left sidebar. The new Maps provides a fullscreen experience and appears to be much quicker at loading than its previous iteration. The zooming is fast and smooth and Google has integrated a new, much smarter search box that is able to display your recent searches, directions, transit, traffic, and bicycling info.

Yes, this means that Google can now show you real-time traffic data right from your desktop at any point in the day. To use this feature, users can simply type a search string similar to "Traffic Near Las Vegas, NV" and the map will pop up and highlight roots with green for fast-moving areas and red for very slow congested areas. Users can use similar search strings to find restaurants, shopping venues, and even entertainment in areas anywhere in the world.

Edward Snowden is probably the most wanted man in the world right now to the United States, with every single slither of information he releases has huge repercussions for every citizen. Today's revelation? Outlook.com has a backdoor, and Microsoft built it for the NSA.

When Microsoft starting testing Outlook.com, the NSA asked for access. Microsoft were forced to work, asking the FBI for some assistance, which took five month of collaboration to build a workaround that gives the NSA full access to encrypted chats on Outlook.com. The backdoor access began two months before Outlook.com went live.

There is a workaround, supposedly, where enabling encryption on Outlook will stop the NSA and probably half the governments of the world from looking at your private data. An NSA newsletter states: "For Prism collection against Hotmail, Live, and Outlook.com emails will be unaffected because Prism collects this data prior to encryption."

Last month, I reported that Yahoo would begin resetting inactive user accounts today, July 15. As expected, the company has started following through with this plan. This morning, Yahoo announced that it has launched its username wish list notification page (Source #2) where users can go and list up to five usernames they have always wanted associated with their Yahoo account. If and when these names become available, and after the reset process is complete, Yahoo will notify you of which names you were granted.

Some of you may be wondering how Yahoo plans on determining which accounts get deleted and which accounts stay. The answer is quite simple: if your Yahoo account has been inactive for at least twelve months, your name, account, and all emails will be deleted. More than likely this has already taken place, but reports say that the process could take a few weeks.

Yahoo says that those first in line for a username will be emailed a link which allows them to claim them sometime in mid-August 2013. After that, Yahoo will allow you to add usernames to a watchlist so you the first to know when they become available. This leads us to believe that the inactive account deletion process will be an ongoing thing, and accounts will be deleted as they pass the 12 months of inactivity milestone.

A few months back, I reported that the French authorities were pushing Twitter to release user data on one of its members who posted an anti-Semitic tweet to his account. Today, the company said in a statement that it has complied with a French government request to hand over tweets related to a rash of anti-Semitism on the site.

The offenses took place last October when several anti-Semantic tweets and hashtags appeared on the short message social network. I won't repeat the tweets here because they are quite offensive, but if you must read them, you can head over to Source #1 below. The tweets caused an uproar in the Union of Jewish French students and other anti-racism groups around France.

The UEJF took their case to the French court system and won a ruling in January that said that Twitter must hand over the account information and names of those who posted the anti-Semitic tweets. Just two months later, the UEFJ sued Twitter for $50 million when the company failed to comply with the court's request.

This morning, Google announced that it will once again allow users to make phone calls from within Gmail through the use of Google Hangouts. The company says that it doesn't matter whether its users are on Gmail or on the web; all users will be able to call the US and Canada for free.

Google says that it heard the cries from many users who were disappointed that they could no longer make calls from within Gmail and this was the major factor in their decision to return the service. Calls can be made to anyone in the US and Canada for free from any country in the world where Hangouts are available. Calls can also be placed outside of North America through the use of Google Voice. A call to India will cost users $0.02 per minute while a call to Mexico will run users $0.15 per minute.

Users do not need to make calls through Gmail alone as Google+ and Chrome extensions also support the feature. The company tells us that with Hangout calls up to 10 people can converse through the video chat while up to five people can participate in voice only. This gives the ability for 15 people to be on the same call it one time.

Early this morning, Facebook finally switched on Graph Search for all of its English-speaking users in the US. By expanding its test program that was rolled out in January from a few thousand users to a few million users, Facebook can now see how its new search performs on a massive scale.

Graph search is a tool that allows people to search Facebook's fast database using natural language searches to find almost anything the social network has ever indexed. An example of one search would be: "Photographs of my friends taken before 2005" or "restaurants in New York City my friends have visited and liked." Facebook would then return results based on your query.

I feel the graph search, while cool, is not really useful past searching for restaurants, photos, or places. I have been a member of the beta program since the week it was released and to be quite honest, the novelty wore off very fast. In the past few months, Facebook has modified the search so much that now most results are quite broad and not a specific as they used to be.

A few months back, Yahoo announced the creation of a new menu bar that would be shared across all of its desktop website services such as mail, search, and photo sharing. Many scoffed at the idea, but others pointed out that Google has been doing the same thing for some time. This morning, Yahoo rolled out the new menu bar to its recently reinvigorated photo sharing service Flickr.

While the new menu bar is technically a useful feature, many Flickr users are not so convinced and as a result, they have taken to the Flickr help forums to vent their disdain. One user wrote "Gosh, what a design disaster...if that annoying bar would at least fit the site design wise at little. Yahoo has learned nothing in the last decade as it seems. Dropping pro account now. Sorry guys, this is just too much."

Historically, I have not been a major fan of Flickr, but have recently flipped a 180 when the service began offering 1TB of free storage to its users. As an ex-professional photographer who still does small shoots on the side, this new amount of storage was very appealing to me. The new integration of this menu bar in its current form is definitely not appealing to the eyes, nor is it in any form inline with the refined, dark theme that Flickr has been sporting since the update.

Google has added new and updated 3D imagery for 50 cities in the United States. Google has promised to bring 3D buildings to the majority of large United States cities, and today's update appears to be a great step towards that goal. Today's update brought new or updated imagery for 50 US cities. New additions include Las Cruces, NM and Bend, OR, while San Francisco, CA and others received updates.

The full list directly from Google:

Yahoo announced today that they would be doing a Google-like summer cleaning in which they sunset older and out-of-date products. One of the most notable products to make Yahoo's sunset list is the ancient search engine AltaVista. There are many other products on list, which you can see below. Most of the product closures take place by the end of July, though two don't happen until the end of September.

CEO Marissa Mayer, a former Googler, appears to be taking the Google approach to these products. Many of these product shutdowns aren't surprising. Previous rumors had suggested that AltaVista was going to be shut down in 2010. Many of these products are legacy or duplicate a function provided by another aspect of Yahoo's offerings. As such, they are just costing the company money.

Sunday night after the clock strikes midnight, Google will shut down its Reader service for good. That's right after eight long years the search giant is pulling the plug on its popular RSS feed importer. The project was created back in early 2005 by Google engineer Chris Wetherell and after two years of development was released to the public through Google Labs in 2007.

With the pending shutdown, many alternatives of popped up with big-name sites such as AOL and Digg both developing their own replacements. Other alternatives have been around for quite a while now such as The Old Reader, Pusle, and my personal favorite, Feedly. All of these alternatives except for Pulse allow for the importation of your Google reader feeds via XML file.

Here at TweakTown most of us have already switched over to Feedly which seems to be winning the race as the most popular Google reader replacement with more than 8 million new subscribers being added since Google announced Reader's shutdown. This is partially because Feedly makes the importation process so simple as all you need to do is log into your Google account and it will import your Google Reader settings automatically. Additionally, the interface is very Google Reader like with some UI improvements for a more refined experience.

Google has processed hundreds of terabytes of Earth imagery to construct a cloud-free version of its satellite imagery used in its Maps and Earth products. The data is also now higher resolution, providing the ability to see the Earth in greater detail. The new imagery comes from NASA's and USGS' Landsat 7 satellite. Due to a hardware failure early in life, this was no easy feat.

Landsat 7's imagery has black stripes in the normal images due to said hardware failure. Google had to combine multiple images in order to remove those black stripes. This same process is essentially how they managed to get a cloudless version of their imagery, even in tropical zones that almost always have some cloud cover.

Google has also focused on bringing the new imagery to zones that hadn't been updated in a while. This means the new imagery focuses on Russia, Indonesia, and central Africa. Google notes that the new image is over 800,000 megapixels. In other words, it would take a piece of paper the size of a city block to print it out at the standard 300dpi.

Facebook strongly denies allegations that it handed over user data to the Turkish government in relation to the ongoing protests currently taking place in Turkey. Facebook notes that they rarely provide any user data to Turkish law enforcement or government officials, with the only exception being if there appears to be an immediate threat to life or a child.

Reports of Facebook providing Turkish officials with user data stemmed from an NPR report that cited a Turkish minister. He claimed that Facebook was "in cooperation with the state" and that Twitter refused to supply user data. Facebook and others are worried about pending litigation that could force them to provide more data to the Turkish government. Some of Turkey's legislators have called for stronger social media use rules in light of the protests.

Facebook has just reported about a bug that "may have allowed some of a person's contact information (email or phone number) to be accessed by people who either had some contact information about that person or some connection to them."

It's important to note that only phone numbers or e-mails were affected. The bug was present in the Download Your Information (DYI) tool. Facebook has a great explanation of what happened:

Trolls, arm your picture stores, Facebook has just unleashed native photo comments. This means you'll now be able to reply directly with that hilarious or trolling picture instead of linking to an outside source. The change will initially roll out to web users, though we expect it to make it through all platforms.

The roll out started today, but that doesn't mean that you will have the ability right away. It's rather simple to reply with an image: in the usual "Write a comment..." box, there is a new little camera icon on the right. Simply click that and pick an image to attach to the comment.

Facebook has an event scheduled for tomorrow, but it's not exactly clear what they will unveil. Facebook's recently introduced #hashtags and this newly released photo reply will certainly add to Zuckerberg's speech, but they certainly aren't the next "big idea." Stay tuned to TweakTown tomorrow to learn just what Facebook is planning.

Microsoft users have long enjoyed the privilege of linked accounts in both Hotmail and Outlook.com services, but that is all about to change. Microsoft says that sometime in the next few months it will be removing the linked account feature from Outlook.com and will be replacing things with user aliases.

Microsoft ultimately blames poor security for the changes noting that users usually keep their main account up to date with password changes, but rarely modify linked account passwords. The new user aliases will essentially be new email addresses that are managed under a single user account. Additionally you will be able to forward all email from secondary accounts to the main account and have the ability to reply from any of the secondary accounts from within the main account.

For about a year now Facebook users have been adding useless hash tags to the end of their post. I am sure I speak for many when I say this was probably the most annoying trend to ever hit the social network. Unfortunately we're about to see an onslaught of hashtags as Facebook has just enabled them to function similar to the way Twitter utilizes them.

Facebook says that starting today hashtags will be clickable on the social networking service that will function similarly to other services like Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest. When clicking on a hashtag, you will see a feed pop-up of what other people are saying about that event, or topic.

Facebook says that now you can:

LinkedIn is the latest web property to join the growing crowd of companies that have implemented a version of two-step authentication. Two-step--or two-factor--authentication make accounts more secure by requiring more than just a password. Users often have to have access to their cell phone to log in on an unrecognized account.

In LinkedIn's case, users will be required to input a code sent via SMS to log in on an unrecognized device. LinkedIn director Vicente Silveira notes, "Most Internet accounts that become compromised are illegitimately accessed from a new or unknown computer. When enabled, two-step verification makes it more difficult for unauthorized users to access your account, requiring them to have both your password and access to your mobile phone."

Twitter and Apple both recently added two-step verification. For Twitter, it might have been too little, too late as they had already suffered from a number of high-profile hackings, including one of the AP's account that led to a rapid drop in the Dow Jones from a fake tweet.

Most of the must-see movie trailers reach Apple's trailers.apple.com website first, but it looks like Apple have very quietly removed both the 1080p trailer availability, and the download option. Before this, Apple let you stream and download trailers in varying resolutions.

You could watch it in 480p or 720p, and download it in 480p, 720p, 1080p and iPod/iPhone quality. Trailers uploaded to the website after May 22 (or so) will no longer include the download ability, and can only be streamed in-browser at the low res of just 480p or 720p. It's not known why Apple are doing this, especially when they have their Retina-based MacBook Pros, that can now just stream 720p video from their own website.