The Award Winning Place for Plain English Explanations of Internet Stuff
Hundreds of thousands of would-be video watchers found that YouTube was down for them Tuesday night – in fact it’s still down for some people – because of an oopsie by the Pakistan government, trying to block its own people from accessing YouTube. Instead, Pakistan accidentally ended up blocking as much as 2/3rs of YouTube users around the world from accessing YouTube.
What happens to your email after you die? Can the executor of your estate (or the administrator if you die without a will) gain access to your email account and read all of your email? That is the question at the heart of a lawsuit, Ajemian vs. Yahoo, that is heading to the Supreme Court, assuming that the Supreme Court agrees to hear it.
With the Obama administration’s plan to ease trade restrictions between the United States and Cuba, Cubanos may finally have easier access to an unrestricted Internet. At present, only 5% of Cubans have unfiltered access to the Internet, but if technology and electronics start flowing into Cuba as predicted, the Internet floodgates will open, opening up whole new avenues of communication and trade.
Today Google posted some news on their blog, along with the release of their Transparency Report, which shows increasing requests from the government for private user data. In fact, the report shows that, of all the governments in the world, the U.S. leads the pack in personal information requests.
The scene was a pudgy man being chased around by scantily clad girls, but it wasn’t an homage to Benny Hill, it was Kim Dotcom’s launch party for his re-emergence back into the .com world – his new site, Mega (not to be confused with his now defunct file sharing website, Megaupload). Mega outdoes Dropbox by offering 50GBs of free file storage, unlike the 2GBs offered by Dropbox.
The social media world is buzzing with opinions about the new Myspace now that they have released the new version. Ever since it was announced that Justin Timberlake was one of the new partners involved in reviving the dead social media site, the Internet has been flooded with speculations as to how the newly revamped site will compare with Facebook, Pinterest, Pandora, Songza and, of course, how it compares with the old Myspace.
Google had made shopping, sight-seeing and travel even easier, by making the indoor floor plans of malls, museums, libraries, transit stations and airports, worldwide, available through Google Maps. The feature, previously exclusively available through Google Maps for Android, is now available on your desktop so that it can be used by all.
If you received an email from Twitter prompting you to change your password due to a possible hack, you’re not alone. It was a mistake from Twitter, who has issued a statement explaining what happened.
Google is going beyond Google Street View and rolling out the backpack cam operated Google Street View Trekker, a wilderness cam that offers a wilderness view of all the corners of the world that Google Street View has previously left untouched, namely woods views and forest views. The backpack cams can be carried by hikers and campers who are on foot and already headed to spots where cars and planes cannot easily go and Google is starting with the Grand Canyon.
Toys R Us is throwing their hat, or rather tablet, into the ring by introducing the Tabeo. The Tabeo is a tablet made just for children, and is proving that it might be a worthy adversary for the new kid-friendly Kindle Fire HD.
Well, Facebook has finally done it, they’ve found a way to allow unscrupulous marketers to spam your Facebook account. Facebook will allow advertisers to target users based on personal information such as phone numbers, user IDs, and email addresses. In a confirmation to PCMag.com, Facebook relayed their new marketing program which will begin next week, targeting ads to their “existing customers.”
With the announcement that they are introducing, “expecting a baby,” as a life event option for parents-to-be, Facebook is once again proving that they have mastered the art of capitalizing on their users’ lives. And in true Facebook fashion, they claim that, no, this is just another thoughtful tool for excited expectant parents to share their overwhelming joy with their loved ones…but that perhaps they will consider using it for advertising at a later date.
Would you pay to belong to an ad-free social network? Dalton Caldwell, mastermind behind App.net, akin to an ad-free Facebook or ad-free Twitter, thinks you just might. While he doesn’t presume that App.net will score the huge user-base of Twitter or Facebook, he does think that he will amass enough of a following that the $50 per person annual fee, coupled with the an ad-free and developer-friendly platform, will build a sustainable network that instills trust among both users and developers.