Internet & Websites - Page 44

With construction completed on Facebook's new datacenter in Forest City, NC, Facebook has flipped the switch in one of the buildings and now it is serving Facebook traffic. The new datacenter broke ground in November 2010 and should be fully operational by the end of the year.

The datacenter is composed of two buildings which house the first major deployment of the v2 Open Compute Project web servers. These servers are based on Intel's lower power Sandy Bridge architecture. The whole of the datacenter was designed to conserve energy, hence the new web servers. The climate in North Carolina will test Open Compute's outdoor air cooling system, as the humidity and temperature is outside of what is normally needed inside a datacenter.

The datacenter stands as a trophy to Facebook's ongoing success as the servers are needed to power Facebook for its 845+ million users. The timing of the opening of the facility is almost perfect because Facebook is nearing an initial public offering which could value the company somewhere around $100 billion.

In a move designed to further differentiate itself from its competitors Netflix, Amazon and HBO Go, earlier this year Hulu announced it would spend $500 million on original content. Today brings Hulu's announcement that it is creating four new original shows to add to its vast library of online shows.

The announcement provided a brief synopsis for each of the upcoming shows that it plans to create. It also includes release dates for 2, and names and talent that will be involved with each show. The first two shows have release dates of 2012 and 2013 whereas the latter two have yet to receive a set date.

Hulu does have some competition in the original online show area. Netflix, too, is funding the creation of original content for its subscribers. This year, Netflix released Lilyhammer and plans to add House of Cards. They also are bringing back Arrested Development which happens to be a favorite of mine. I might just have to get Netflix after all.

Ah, yes. Anonymous, the group that does these hackings in order to benefit the greater good. Social activism, justice. Well, a small group of coders from the larger hacktivist organization are coming together to program a new social music service that will collect music from around the web and allow it to be organized into playlists and share...anonymously.

That's right, a small group of coders from Anonymous are planning on creating a social music service, called Anontune, which will pull together music from various sources such as YouTube and SoundCloud and aggregate them so that they can be put into playlists and shared anonymously. Anonymous will not be hosting any of the music.

The whole project hinges on running a java applet which will provide the anonymity as well as the functions of the project. With running an applet from a group such as Anonymous comes some risk, so you do so at your own risk (read: I am not encouraging this behavior, nor do I or TweakTown necessarily approve of this behavior).

Dubbed 'The Promo Bay', The Pirate Bay would like to help promote your cool music, video, comedic skill, or other talent provided you allow free, easy access to the material that is being promoted. Submissions are thrown into a pool and occasionally one is picked to have their image replace the default Pirate Bay logo and be linked to the page of their choosing.

The Promo Bay has a few rules, however.

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:

Climate change has not resulted in all bad, it would appear. Thanks to the climate change-induced melting of the Arctic sea ice, the Arctic ocean is now navigable by ship. This, in turn, is allowing for new fiber cables to be run at the bottom of the sea. The ultimate result of this is that England is digitally moving 60ms closer to Japan. In other words, there will now be 60ms less latency in the internet connection between England and Japan.

These new lines are good news for a wide variety of reasons. The current cables take a longer route, and traverse some of the heaviest traveled shipping lanes. This means that a ship who drags its anchor in the wrong spot could easily kill the backbone that links most of the world. Additionally, these cables are shorter, resulting in lower latency, as previously mentioned.

Another cable line is going to be laid following the North American coastline, instead of the Russian coastline. This will make connections into Canada, and ultimately reach Japan. The Russian Trans-Arctic Cable System (RUTACS) will be made of 6 pairs of fibers with a 1.6 Tbit/s capacity per pair, and the minimum latency between London and Tokyo will be 76.58 milliseconds. The North American route will have a total bandwidth between the countries will of 6.4 Tbit/s, with latencies between London and Tokyo of 168 ms.

Last July, a wide selection of ISPs, including Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, and Time Warner Cable, announced that they were adopting policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, it has been quiet...too quiet. It was the calm before the storm. According to a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers, most participating ISPs are on track to start implementing the program by July 12. I don't quite understand why ISPs would want to take this on, but apparently they do.

The general plan goes something like this. ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of piracy. If the behavior continues, the ISP is then asked to send out "confirmation notices" asking that they confirm they have received notice. Along with the "confirmation notices," the accused will also be informed of the possible risks and penalties of continuing to pirate material. Again, if the customer continues, the ISP can then ratchet up the pressure. ISPs can then choose to apply what the RIAA calls "mitigation measures." These include throttling connection speed, or stopping the connection altogether until the customer agrees to stop pirating. Luckily, not one of the service providers has agreed to permanently terminate service.

Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said:

In the upcoming months, Google's web search will no longer just spit out a list of web links that match your query. It will start to present facts and direct answers at the top of the results page. These changes are among the biggest that the search giant have ever undergone and are a result of trying to keep a dominant market-share.

While Google isn't replacing its current keyword-search system, they are aiming to provide more relevant results by incorporating technology called "semantic search". Semantic search is the technology related to attempting to understand the meaning of the words themselves and provide relevant results. Over the past two years, Google has been quietly amassing a database of hundreds of millions of entities-people, places and things-which can provide data matched to queries.

After these updates, a Google query for "Lake Tahoe" would result in a listing of key attributes, such as its location, altitude, average temperature or salt content, above the usual listing of links based upon the old keyword search algorithm. When a more complex question is provided, Google may provide just an answer, rather than links to other sites. An example query would look something like, "What are the 10 largest lakes in California?" This query would likely return the answer, rather than links to other sites.

If we listen to the latest data from comScore, Google+ users actually spent an average of 3.3 minutes per month on Google+ in January of this year. Comparing this number to Facebook, where they have an average of 7.5 hours last month, this is a whopping 136-times greater than the average Google+ visitor.

Google of course downplayed the super-low numbers, claiming that their own internal data shows much higher numbers, and that Google+ is actually growing. If we look at the other comScore data, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter all beat Google+ in minutes-per-month spent on the respective social networking websites. We have 17 minutes, 8 minutes, and 21 minutes for LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter, respectively.

Just 7.5 hours a month on Facebook? Well, considering I'm on the thing for 8 hours-plus per day, what am I? A super non-average Facebook user? Am I addicted? Not as much as some, I have friends and family who literally spend those 7.5 hours, in a single day, on a smartphone, and not get bored. I'm bored of Facebook in minutes, I just have it sitting in a Chrome tab, waiting for that (1) to show up and haunt me to check it out.

Foursquare lover? PlayStation Vita owner? Well, the Foursquare app has officially checked in to the US PlayStation Store, and for just 4.5MB, it can be yours. The app works over Wi-Fi, but the app does suggest you use 3G to help the Vita's GPS get the correct position of your check-in.

Foursquare's app is also said to be compatible with the Vita's rear touchpad and cameras, which is a nice bonus. Engadget have prodded around with the Foursquare app and report that it feels similar to the Facebook app released just a few days ago for the PS Vita.

Vita owner? Foursquare user? Be sure to leave a comment to let us know your experience with the Vita + Foursquare, there's over 1.2 million of you out there now!

Facebook have introduced apps for Timeline, in the form of Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest, Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, TripAdvisor, and more. This allows you to enhance your timeline with apps that help tell your story, in the way you want it to look.

Once an app is added, you can update your timeline with activities as they happen. For example, if you like design, shopping or fashion, you can add the Pinterest or Pose apps, to make your favorite items part of your timeline. There are other apps that make your timeline, pop, such as food-centric apps and travel-centric apps.

Facebook promise that there'll soon be apps for all interests, which will launch over time. After you've added an app, you can remove posts directly from timeline, as well as edit your settings from your personal Activity Log. It seems Facebook is slowly becoming an internal Internet. Just like Step Brothers, there's SO MANY ACTIVITIES!