Clipmarks | wildcat's internet collection

The era of the American Internet is ending.

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:45:18 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: “Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

SAN FRANCISCO — The era of the American Internet is ending.

Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.

Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.

And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.

“Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,”

Tags: net, traffic, routing, us

Why You Should Download Firefox 3 Right Now

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:40:48 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.webmonkey.com

Firefox 3 — available for download at 10am PDT Tuesday — is the culmination of a two-year quest to build the best browser ever. And while it’s not perfect, it comes pretty close.

The open-source web browser is the fastest and most secure version of Firefox yet. Significant improvements have been made to the way it uses your computer’s resources, so the memory leaks and other performance problems found in Firefox 2 have been stamped out. Text and image rendering have also been improved, and the underlying code for Gecko, the engine that draws the actual web pages on the screen, has been updated. There are also heaps of useful features that have been added for both power users and newcomers alike.

Here’s why we think Firefox 3 is one of the most kick-ass software releases of 2008.

History, bookmarks and discovery

Speed and performance

Security

Native look and feel

A better fit for your workflow

Tags: firefox3, best, open source

Is the End of Unlimited Internet Near?

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:04:04 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.abcnews.go.com

Get ready to say goodbye to unlimited Internet access.

Comcast Corp., the nation's second-largest Internet service provider, says it would set an official limit on the amount of data subscribers can download and upload each month.

Last week, Comcast -- the second-largest Internet service provider in the country -- announced that starting Oct. 1 it would officially set a threshold for monthly Internet usage.

In an online announcement, the service provider said that although it already contacts residential customers who use excessive amounts of bandwidth, it had never provided a specific limit. Now, Comcast said it will amend its user agreement to say that users will be allowed 250 gigabytes of monthly usage.

The company emphasizes that its cap is generous and will only affect about 1 percent of its 14.4 million customers. Experts say these customers might include heavy gamers and those who use a significant amount of bandwidth for creating or uploading video.

Tags: end, unlimited, internet

Web users 'getting more selfish'

Sun, 25 May 2008 09:26:10 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

Web users are getting more ruthless and selfish when they go online, reveals research.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most ignore efforts to make them linger and are suspicious of promotions designed to hold their attention.

Search rules

Instead, many are "hot potato" driven and just want to get a specific task completed.

Success rates measuring whether people achieve what they set out to do online are now about 75%, said Dr Nielsen. In 1999 this figure stood at 60%.

There were two reasons for this, he said.

"The designs have become better but also users have become accustomed to that interactive environment," Dr Nielsen told BBC News.

Now, when people go online they know what they want and how to do it, he said.

Tags: web, users, selfishness, speed

Firefox Users Most Secure on Internet, Study Reveals

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 10:43:11 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.crn.com

Mozilla Firefox fans might rest a little easier these days after a study released Tuesday revealed that its users are most secure on the Internet.

The study "Understanding the Web browser threat: Examination of vulnerable online Web browser populations and the "insecurity iceberg," was a collaborative effort conducted by researchers at The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Google and IBM (NYSE:IBM) Internet Security Services. The research offers a comprehensive analysis of Web browsers, particularly in the area of security. The study's aim was to analyze Web browser preference and behavior for people using the Internet.

Altogether, the study found that less than 60 percent (59.1) of people use up-to-date, fully patched Web browsers. Failure update browsers exponentially increases the chance for remote attacks executed by hackers, the study found.

Tags: browsers, firefox, net

The Web's Perspective Diversity Paradox

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 13:13:26 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Paradoxically, even as the daunting array of information sources grows, we seek comfort by consuming narrow views that support our own interests and biases.

Clip Source: www.technewsworld.com

The Internet has brought an unprecedented amount of diversity to the news and viewpoints readily available to the everyday reader. Sitting at your desk, you can immediately read the same story reported by Fox News, Al Jazeera, or any point of view in between. The paradox is that despite this diversity, many readers remain tightly focused on news sources that merely echo their own world views, writes Timothy J. McNulty.

For all the potential of the Internet, there are times when I consider it a cesspool of misinformation, ignorant opinion and faked imagery. I also find it confusing and untrustworthy.

Then someone reminds me how valuable it is to have checks and balances, not only on the government but also on the media. They remind me how glorious it is to enjoy another worldview and to examine what we think through others' eyes.

'What the Government Wants You to Know'

Base-Level Trust

Limiting access to information is routine around the world

BBC vs. CNN

Tags: diversity, opinions

The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:12:11 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to George Box's maxim: "All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them."

Clip Source: www.wired.com

"All models are wrong, but some are useful."

So proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don't have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don't have to settle for models at all.

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

Tags: theory, data, scientific model, computation cloud, google

'Shake-up' for internet proposed

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 15:15:13 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

The net could see its biggest transformation in decades if plans to open up the address system are passed.

The net's regulators will vote on Thursday to decide if the strict rules on so-called top level domain names, such as .com or .uk, can be relaxed.

If approved, it could allow companies to turn their brands into domain names while individuals could also carve out their own corner of the net.

The move could also see the launch of .xxx, after years of wrangling.

Top level domains are currently limited to individual countries, such as .uk (UK) or .it (Italy), as well as to commerce, .com, and to institutional organisations, such as .net, or .org.

To get around the restrictions, some companies have used the current system to their own ends.

For example, the Polynesia island nation Tuvalu, has leased the use of the .tv address to many television firms.

It's a massive increase in the geography of the real estate of the internet

Tags: net, web, addresses, domain names

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:39:40 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.theatlantic.com

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial »

brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think

I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy.

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages

Tags: google

Experts: Internet Addiction Growing

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:14:43 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.redorbit.com

The author of a book on Internet addiction says that 5 to 10 percent of the U.S. population is hooked with larger percentages in other countries addicted.

Kimberly Young, clinical director of the Center for Internet Addiction Recovery, told Medill News Service that many addicts are hooked on one particular aspect of the Internet. The major ones include online gambling and gaming, sex sites, compulsive surfers and even addiction to eBay.

Coleen Moore of the Illinois Center for Addiction Recovery said that she has seen young adults who spend 14 to 18 hours a day at their computers. At that point, the Internet is keeping them from work, family life and friendships outside the virtual world.

Young compared the Internet to alcohol. Many people can use it and then turn to something else but some lose control. She said that treatment is in its early stages, depending on therapy.

Tags: net, addiction

Google Wants to Index Your DNA, Too

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 11:23:46 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.businessweek.com

The Web search giant's investment in Navigenics is further proof it wants an early stake in direct-to-consumer genetic screening

Your DNA falls into the realm of "the world's information," and it seems that Google (GOOG), as part of its corporate mission, is making a play to organize that, too. The Internet giant received heavy press in 2007 when it invested at least $4.4 million (BusinessWeek.com, 11/29/07) in a genetic screening company, 23andMe, that was started by Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and her business partner.

Much in the way it invested in 23andMe, Google wants to plant an early stake in a potentially large new market around genetic data. "We are interested in supporting companies and making investments in companies that [bolster] our mission statement, which is organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful," Google spokesman Andrew Pederson says

Tags: google, indexing, dna

The Web Knows How

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:29:35 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: and again where is clipversity?

Clip Source: www.technewsworld.com

Just about any practical task -- from changing a motorcycle's oil filter to the proper care and feeding of a pet monkey -- can be found on the Web on sites like WikiHow and Howcast. The sites vary widely in their approaches. Some limit their offerings to in-house video clips, while others employ a wiki model and make themselves completely open to revisions from anyone.

Terri Rossman considers herself a visual learner. So when the 52-year-old marketing professional wanted to learn a new knitting stitch, she turned to the Web.

"I searched for 'knit bobble stitch' on Google and I found a video of someone doing it," said Rossman, who lives in the Detroit area. "It was perfect for me."

The Web has become the place where people go to learn new tricks. Traffic to sites like eHow.com and WikiHow.com have doubled over the past year, according to figures from ComScore Networks, while start-ups such as Howcast.com and Findhow.com, a search engine to find "how-to" content, are entering the field.

Tags: web, net, knowledge, learning

Google Chrome is here

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 02:15:27 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

Clip Source: googleblog.blogspot.com

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

Tags: google chrome, browser, opensource

Better Than Free

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 11:58:38 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.kk.org

The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we make while we ride upon it. In order to send a message from one corner of the internet to another, the protocols of communication demand that the whole message be copied along the way several times. IT companies make a lot of money selling equipment that facilitates this ceaseless copying. Every bit of data ever produced on any computer is copied somewhere. The digital economy is thus run on a river of copies. Unlike the mass-produced reproductions of the machine age, these copies are not just cheap, they are free.

When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
When copies are super abundant, stuff which can't be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied.

Well, what can't be copied?

Brave New World of Digital Intimacy

Sat, 06 Sep 2008 12:15:43 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: It is easy to become unsettled by privacy-eroding aspects of awareness tools. But there is another — quite different — result of all this incessant updating: a culture of people who know much more about themselves. Many of the avid Twitterers, Flickrers and Facebook users I interviewed described an unexpected side-effect of constant self-disclosure. The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act. It’s like the Greek dictum to “know thyself,” or the therapeutic concept of mindfulness. (Indeed, the question that floats eternally at the top of Twitter’s Web site — “What are you doing?” — can come to seem existentially freighted. What are you doing?) Having an audience can make the self-reflection even more acute, since, as my interviewees noted, they’re trying to describe their activities in a way that is not only accurate but also interesting to others: the status update as a literary form.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Pundits predicted that News Feed would kill Facebook, but the opposite happened. It catalyzed a massive boom in the site’s growth. A few weeks after the News Feed imbroglio, Zuckerberg opened the site to the general public (previously, only students could join), and it grew quickly; today, it has 100 million users

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

In essence, Facebook users didn’t think they wanted constant, up-to-the-minute updates on what other people are doing. Yet when they experienced this sort of omnipresent knowledge, they found it intriguing and addictive. Why?

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye.

Tags: brave new world, digital intimacy