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"I was wrong. One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was "corrupting my soul. It's a been a year now since I "surfed the web" or "checked my email" or "liked" anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I've managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I'm internet free."

"On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, "Pro" option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The "reports" that Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. We sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of "making the world's knowledge computable.""

Imagine the web as a giant galaxy where the planets are sites clustered together by likeness, and what you might get is something like The Internet Map. Representing over 350,000 websites from 196 countries and all domain zones at the end of 2011, the map displays over 2 million site links based on topical similarities. Each site is represented by a circle, with size depending on the amount of traffic, and the space between each is determined by frequency, or strength, of the link created when user's jump from one website to another.

"The Google Drive team said today that it is rolling out an activity stream to help you monitor changes to your files and folders. A new ⓘ button that appears at the top right corner of the screen gives you access to the stream, which notes actions taken on files and folders in your Drive, and who took them. Edits, comments, new files, changed file names and more will all now appear inside the stream."

"If you go to the Getty Images website, you'll see millions of images, all watermarked. There are more than a hundred years of photography here, from FDR on the campaign trail to last Sunday's Oscars, all stamped with the same transparent square placard reminding you that you don't own the rights. If you want Getty to take off the watermark, you'll have to pay for it. Starting now, that's going to change. Getty Images is dropping the watermark for the bulk of its collection, in exchange for an open-embed program that will let users drop in any image they want, as long as the service gets to append a footer at the bottom of the picture with a credit and link to the licensing page. "

I wonder what the potential is for Google Apps to take Google Apps For Education to the next level? Looks interesting.

"Twitter is rolling out an option to ease the use of direct messages. Traditionally, Twitter has allowed users who follow each other to send direct messages back and forth, or for users to send direct messages to accounts that follow them. A new setting, that appears to have been rolling out over the past week, allows Twitter users to receive direct messages from any follower. "If you check this option, any Twitter user that follows you will be able to send you a DM, regardless of whether you decide to follow them back," says a note before the option is turned on."

"Following small-scale trials, Korean officials are reportedly moving forward with a plan to install remote management software on students' smartphones. iSmartKeeper is an app that restricts what services and apps students have access to. With the app installed, teachers have the ability to lock phones down in one of six modes. Educators can choose to lock all of the phones in the school, allow only emergency calls, allow only phone calls, allow calls and SMS, or turn off specific apps. The idea is to prevent distractions in class, and iSmartKeeper can also allow access to only a single app, ensuring that educational apps can still be used as teaching aids."

Google Brain, the search giant's internal artificial intelligence division, has been making substantial progress on computer vision techniques that let software parse the contents of hand-drawn...

Google has been hit with a record-breaking €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) fine by the European Union for breaking antitrust law. The decision follows a seven-year investigation into the US company's...