Google asks judge to block Miss. attorney general’s inquiry
JACKSON, MISS. An Internet giant was scheduled to face off with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood on Friday. Google will ask U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate to block an investigation by Hood into the company. Hood has been pushing Google since 2013 to prevent use of the company’s search engine to find illegal […]
Will the internet of things finally kill privacy?
Immense economic pressure could eventually coerce everyone into sharing their information with firms, since not disclosing your data will itself imply that you are undesirable. In the internet of things, the Federal Trade Commission sees the possibility of flourishing new markets. But it also sees a prologue to Black Mirror: […]
Why Netflix is entering Cuba even though the internet barely works there
Netflix just launched in the unlikeliest of locales: Cuba, where less than 5% of the population has internet access and the streaming media company’s subscription cost—$8 a month—is almost half of the average salary. The move was made possible by the recent deal to normalize relations with the United States, which included a promise […]
Smart TVs raise privacy concerns
Reports that new Samsung TVs can capture personal information with their voice recognition feature has sparked concern about what critics perceive as digital spying by so-called smart devices. Nor is Samsung the only smart TV manufacturer collecting this type of data. In Samsung’s case, at least, users have the option to disable the collection. […]
Hacked again? Russian hackers still inside Sony Pictures’ network, security firm says
Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) might have a second security breach on its hands, or maybe the hackers from November’s scandalous attack are still inside the company systems, according to a security firm that claims to have seen evidence of Russian hackers having access to SPE internal data. The hackers accessed SPE’s Culver City, California network […]
Tribunal says UK spies’ Internet surveillance was unlawful
U.K. spies acted illegally when they scooped up data about Britons’ electronic communications gathered by the U.S. National Security Agency, a court ruled Friday in a landmark judgment against Britain’s security services. But the judges said now that details of the practices are known, they are within the law. Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which deals […]
Biggest test in U.S.-Cuba talks: the Internet
Contrary to what the headlines suggest, the biggest test of President Obama’s move to normalize relations with Cuba will not be whether the two countries agree to set up embassies in their respective capitals, nor whether there is an avalanche of U.S. tourists to Cuba, but whether Cuba will accept U.S. help to expand Internet […]
Pebble: More than 1 million smartwatches sold
Pebble has sold more than 1 million smartwatches, the company said Monday. The milestone was reached on December 31, a company rep confirmed with CNET. The sales figure is up dramatically from the 400,000 sold as of last March, CEO Eric Migicovsky told The Verge. A price drop last fall may have helped boost […]
FCC redefines advanced broadband as 25 Mbps; Republicans blow a gasket
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission has redefined advanced broadband as having 25Mbps download speeds, up from 4Mbps, giving the agency new authority to pass rules to encourage deployment across the country. The FCC, in a 3-2 party-line vote Thursday, also determined that this newly-defined advanced broadband wasn’t being rolled out in a timely manner […]
Congress should let cities provide their own Internet
PRESIDENT OBAMA made it a point to highlight the importance of providing high-speed Internet access to all Americans in his State of the Union address last week. No one disagrees with the sentiment. The method he proposed, however — removing legislative barriers that prevent some cities and towns from creating their own Internet networks — […]
Cuban youth build secret computer network despite Wi-Fi ban
Cut off from the Internet, young Cubans have quietly linked thousands of computers into a hidden network that stretches miles across Havana, letting them chat with friends, play games and download hit movies in a mini-replica of the online world that most can’t access. HAVANA — Home Internet connections are banned for all but a handful […]
Under the Sea: In the Age of Wireless, Can’t We Do Better than Intercontinental Fiber Optic Cables?
On Saturday, a ship waiting to enter the Kenyan port city of Mombasa wandered into a restricted area and dropped its anchor, inadvertently severing a major undersea Internet and phone link to East Africa. This kind of thing occurs every so often, but Saturday’s incident represents a selected stroke of bad timing. The cable severed […]
A New Net
In 2003 Martìn Casado found himself with no small challenge on his hands: he needed to reinvent the technology that underpins the Internet. It had been developed decades earlier and was proving unsuited to an era of cyberwarfare. Casado, then a researcher at Lawrence Livermore nationwide Laboratory, have been approached through a usa intelligence agency […]
Vint Cerf: Internet access isn’t a human right
Although some countries around the world argue that Internet access is a fundamental right, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” Vint Cerf, doesn’t see it that way. “Technology is an enabler of rights, not a right itself,” Cerf, who is also a Google’s chief Internet evangelist, wrote yesterday in an editorial in The New […]
How mobile affected the datacenter in 2011
While the topic of green datacenters tends to hold the attention of myself and other datacenter folks and the various changes in the datacenter facility model have captured the majority of the ink on datacenter issues in 2011, a look back really does show that other topics have actually had more impact on the everyday […]
Google to Battle Siri with Majel
Google is reportedly working on a rival to Apple’s virtual assistant Siri, codenamed Majel, and will likely launch the service next year. Majel is called after actress Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, and when you have geek cred you could additionally recognize that she was once the voice of the Federation computer (and Nurse Chapel) on “famous person […]
4G technologies: WiMAX and LTE
4G has been causing quite a stir lately and this is to be expected, given many carries have already revealed plans to embark on 4G in the coming months, not to mention some of them have a head start, having deployed the necessary infrastructure. Actually, do we know what 4G offers? Let’s take a closer […]
WiMAX vs. LTE vs. HSPA+: who cares who wins?
“We must stop the confusion about which technology is going to win; it achieves nothing positive and risks damage to the entire industry.” Anyone among the curious band of people who track articles about the status of mobile broadband (and the chances are that you are one of them) will have noticed an interesting trend […]
The Future Associated with Internet – 4G WiMAX
Imagine a global where cellular Web had been actually almost everywhere. You can function – as well as perform – anyplace you wanted. You can open your own laptop and solution several immediate email messages with your vehicle”s oil transformed. You can actually navigate to the park watching an episode of the preferred TV show […]
Forget Ethernet, researchers want data centers to go wireless
You know those cabling contests that try to get systems administrators to show off their racks? If this article from the MIT Technology Review is right, those may become a distant memory as researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Intel and IBM have shown how they can send data between servers without those […]