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 […]
When in the Cloud, Trust – but Verify
Quite a lot has been written about the importance of due-diligence in a cloud environment. Sometimes the importance of security and compliance-related vetting in the cloud is easy to justify, like when you’re evaluating an off-premises public cloud hosted at a new service provider. Other times, executives might take some convincing, like when you’re talking […]
Cisco Chews Up the Scenery in the Interoperability Drama
Last week, Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) raised an objection to the Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) acquisition of Skype, saying it would hurt video conferencing interoperability — even though, in this space, you could argue Cisco is not the poster child for interoperability. Coincidently, I met with the CEO of LifeSize last Thursday, and he saw this Microsoft […]
DDoS attacks spread to vulnerable IPv6 Internet
The next-gen Internet, still immature, is now a pathway for Net attacks, a study finds. Also, ideology has become the primary reason for DDoS attacks. The idyllic byways of the next-era IPv6 internet now suffer an illness up to now limited to the mainstream IPv4 web: distributed denial-of-provider assaults. And worse, the still-immature IPv6 network […]
Iran cuts off Internet access
Iran has cut off access to the Internet, leaving millions of people without access to e-mail and social networks. An individual inside the usa showed this morning that Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo electronic mail are not available. Ditto for facebook. up to now, the government has not made any declaration about the carrier interruption. But […]
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 […]
Will Silverlight live or die? Microsoft won’t say
Being a Silverlight developer these days is like being a fan of the Oakland Athletics, the baseball team made famous in the Oscar-nominated film Moneyball. Some heritage, for many who are not followers of the A’s: for just about 3 years now, A’s fanatics and staff ownership itself had been looking ahead to prime League […]
Samsung’s Q4 profit rides high on Galaxy smartphones
Samsung Electronics reigned supreme among Android vendors in the fourth quarter, as its successful smartphone business helped drive an uptick in the company’s fourth-quarter profit. The Korean consumer electronics giant today reported a profit of 4 trillion Korean won, or $3.56 billion, up 8.5 percent from a year-earlier profit of 3.42 trillion Korean won. The […]
Web sites are getting faster–but not enough
Many Web developers have gotten the message: a faster site means people buy more, read more, interact more, and return more. But it sounds as if the message hasn’t sunk in a long way enough, because the top 2,000 retail web sites nonetheless take 10 seconds to load on moderate, in step with a examine […]