Google has named the next four areas in the US to get its gigabit-a-second fiber broadband.
The advertising giant said on Tuesday it will next roll out high-speed connections to 18 cities in and around Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Raleigh-Durham, NC; and Nashville, TN.
Charlotte city officials had indicated they were expecting to be named as one of the next places to feel Google's cable.
The expansion will bring the total number of areas with Google Fiber deployments to seven: the California biz already offers fiber broadband in and around Kansas City, MO, Austin, TX, and Provo, UT.
Google charges $70 a month for gigabit internet, $120 if you want TV with it, or free if you're happy with 5Mbit/s for the downlink. Only the freebie option requires a $300 installation fee. Despite the price tag, the service is hotly anticipated in the few chosen cities.
The presence of Google Fiber also has the side-effect of spurring rival carriers, such as AT&T, to offer their own high-speed broadband services in the area.
Later this year, the Chocolate Factory will also make its decision on where the next set of Fiber rollouts will take place. Five areas are being considered: Portland, OR; San Jose, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; Phoenix, AZ; and San Antonio, TX. ®
YouTube has decided it's had enough of Adobe's perenially-p0wned Flash and will therefore now default to delivering video with the HTML5 <video> tag.
A post by the video vault's engineering and development team says the move is now possible, and sensible, because the industry has invented useful things like adaptive bitrates, encryption, new codecs and WebRTC that make the <video> usable work in the real world.
Those additions mean HTML5 is at least as functional – or more so – than Flash, and if YouTube detects you are running Chrome, IE 11, Safari 8 and beta versions of Firefox, it'll now deliver video using <video> and flush Flash.
YouTube's also decided to can what it calls the “'old style' of Flash
YouTube seems not to care a jot that its actions are inimical to Adobe, saying it's just doing what all the cool kids – Netflix, Apple, Microsoft and its competitor Vimeo – have already done.
Which is not to say that Flash is dead: those who don't run the browsers above will still get YouTube delivered by whatever technology works bes tin their environment. And that will often – perhaps too often* – be Flash. ®
Bootnote * Until they get p0wned, that is: Flash is so horridly buggy that Apple has just updated its plugin-blockers to foil versions of the product prior to 16.0.0.296 and 13.0.0.264.
Linux has an intimidating image, making it seem like it would be difficult to start using it. But the switch from Windows and Mac is actually pretty easy, if you can ease yourself into it.
[The GHOST vulnerability is a flaw in a vital part of every major Linux distro. It could, in theory, allow hackers to take control of computers without the need for a username or password.+
[Los blogs no son como eran y sobre todo lo que las empresas buscan en ellos ya no es lo mismo que buscaban antes
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Facebook has been ordered by a Belgian court to stop tracking non-Facebook users when they visit the Facebook site. Facebook has been given 48 hours to stop the tracking or face possible fines of up to 250,000 Euro a day.
Facebook has said that it will appeal the ruling, claiming that since their european headquarters are situated in Ireland, they should only be bound by the Irish Data Protection Regulator.
Facebook’s chief of security Alex Stamos has posted an explanation about why non-Facebook users are tracked when they visit the site.
The tracking issue centres around the creation of a “cookie” called “datr” whenever anyone visits a Facebook page. This cookie contains an identification number that identifies the same browser returning each time to different Facebook pages. Once created, the cookie will last 2 years unless the user explicitly deletes it. The cookie is created for all visitors to Facebook, irrespective of whether they are a Facebook user or even whether they are logged into Facebook at the time.
According to Stamos, the measure is needed to:
Prevent the creation of fake and spammy accounts
Reduce the risk of someone’s account being taken over by someone else
Protect people’s content from being stolen
Stopping denial of service attacks against Facebook
The principle behind this is that if you can identify requests that arrive at the site for whatever reason, abnormal patterns may unmask people creating fake accounts, hijacking a real account or just issuing so many requests that it overwhelms the site.
Stamos’ defence of tracking users is that they have been using it for the past 5 years and nobody had complained until now, that it was common practice and that there was little harm because the data was not collected for any purpose other than security.
The dilemma raised by Facebook’s actions is a common one in the conflicting spheres of maintaining privacy and maintaining security. It is obvious that if you can identify all visitors to a site, then it is possible to determine more information about what they are doing than if they were anonymous. The problem with this from a moral perspective is that everyone is being tagged, irrespective of whether their intent was going to be malicious or not. It is essentially compromising the privacy of the vast majority for the sake of a much smaller likelihood of bad behaviour.
I checked and sure enough: five Facebook cookies even though I have no Facebook account. They're gone now, and I've created an exception blocking Facebook from planting more cookies on my systems.
"Microsoft es una empresa radicalmente diferente desde que Satya Nadella tomó el control del timón. En tan sólo un corto período de tiempo, se ha transformado de un gigante corporativo cerrada que dominaba el espacio de PC en los años 90, a una empresa que fabrica productos que excitan personas."
"Microsoft es una empresa radicalmente diferente desde que Satya Nadella tomó el control del timón. En tan sólo un corto período de tiempo, se ha transformado de un gigante corporativo cerrada que dominaba el espacio de PC en los años 90, a una empresa que fabrica productos que excitan personas."
Theresa May is planning to introduce huge regulations on the way the internet works, allowing the government to decide what is said online.
Particular focus has been drawn to the end of the manifesto, which makes clear that the Tories want to introduce huge changes to the way the internet works.
"Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet," it states. "We disagree."
Senior Tories confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the phrasing indicates that the government intends to introduce huge restrictions on what people can post, share and publish online.
The plans will allow Britain to become "the global leader in the regulation of the use of personal data and the internet", the manifesto claims.
It comes just soon after the Investigatory Powers Act came into law. That legislation allowed the government to force internet companies to keep records on their customers' browsing histories, as well as giving ministers the power to break apps like WhatsApp so that messages can be read.
The manifesto makes reference to those increased powers, saying that the government will work even harder to ensure there is no "safe space for terrorists to be able to communicate online". That is apparently a reference in part to its work to encourage technology companies to build backdoors into their encrypted messaging services – which gives the government the ability to read terrorists' messages, but also weakens the security of everyone else's messages, technology companies have warned.
The government now appears to be launching a similarly radical change in the way that social networks and internet companies work. While much of the internet is currently controlled by private businesses like Google and Facebook, Theresa May intends to allow government to decide what is and isn't published, the manifesto suggests.
The new rules would include laws that make it harder than ever to access pornographic and other websites. The government will be able to place restrictions on seeing adult content and any exceptions would have to be justified to ministers, the manifesto suggests.
The manifesto even suggests that the government might stop search engines like Google from directing people to pornographic websites. "We will put a responsibility on industry not to direct users – even unintentionally – to hate speech, pornography, or other sources of harm," the Conservatives write.
The laws would also force technology companies to delete anything that a person posted when they were under 18.
But perhaps most unusually they would be forced to help controversial government schemes like its Prevent strategy, by promoting counter-extremist narratives.
"In harnessing the digital revolution, we must take steps to protect the vulnerable and give people confidence to use the internet without fear of abuse, criminality or exposure to horrific content", the manifesto claims in a section called 'the safest place to be online'.
The plans are in keeping with the Tories' commitment that the online world must be regulated as strongly as the offline one, and that the same rules should apply in both.
"Our starting point is that online rules should reflect those that govern our lives offline," the Conservatives' manifesto says, explaining this justification for a new level of regulation.
"It should be as unacceptable to bully online as it is in the playground, as difficult to groom a young child on the internet as it is in a community, as hard for children to access violent and degrading pornography online as it is in the high street, and as difficult to commit a crime digitally as it is physically."
The manifesto also proposes that internet companies will have to pay a levy, like the one currently paid by gambling firms. Just like with gambling, that money will be used to pay for advertising schemes to tell people about the dangers of the internet, in particular being used to "support awareness and preventative activity to counter internet harms", according to the manifesto.
The Conservatives will also seek to regulate the kind of news that is posted online and how companies are paid for it. If elected, Theresa May will "take steps to protect the reliability and objectivity of information that is essential to our democracy" – and crack down on Facebook and Google to ensure that news companies get enough advertising money.
If internet companies refuse to comply with the rulings – a suggestion that some have already made about the powers in the Investigatory Powers Act – then there will be a strict and strong set of ways to punish them.
"We will introduce a sanctions regime to ensure compliance, giving regulators the ability to fine or prosecute those companies that fail in their legal duties, and to order the removal of content where it clearly breaches UK law," the manifesto reads.
In laying out its plan for increased regulation, the Tories anticipate and reject potential criticism that such rules could put people at risk.
"While we cannot create this framework alone, it is for government, not private companies, to protect the security of people and ensure the fairness of the rules by which people and businesses abide," the document reads. "Nor do we agree that the risks of such an approach outweigh the potential benefits."
[The Invisible Web refers to the part of the WWW that's not indexed by the search engines. Most of us think that that search powerhouses like Google and Bing are like the Great Oracle"¦they see everything. Unfortunately, they can't because they aren't divine at all; they are just web spiders who index pages by following one hyperlink after the other.]
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Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes calls for the company to be broken up
15 Hours Ago
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes issued a forceful call for regulators to break up the company he helped build in a New York Times op-ed published Thursday.
Hughes, who left Facebook to work for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign, said that from his own experience building and working inside the company, Facebook now has more power than a private sector entity is due. While emphasizing his belief that CEO Mark Zuckerberg has good intentions overall, he said the executive has far too much unchecked power, aided by his majority voting stake in the company.
Elon Musk and his team of boffins are exploring ways in which they can connect a computer interface to the mind. The South African-born billionaire claims to have already trialled the revolutionary device on a monkey which was able to control the computer with its brain. Mr Musk said at a presentation on Tuesday: “A monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain.”
NeuraLink describes the device as “sewing machine-like”. The system implants ultra-thin threads deep into the brain’s nervous system.The company has applied to US regulators in the hopes of beginning trials on humans next year.Primarily, the firm states that initially it wants to help people with severe neurological conditions, but as with all of his companies, Mr Musk is aiming for more and sees humanity’s future as having “superhuman cognition”.The device in question, which is nameless so far, will see the tiny thread fitted with 3,000 electrodes which can monitor the activity of 1,000 neurons.
Mr Musk hopes the product will be on the market within four years.
Economic justice advocates applauded on Tuesday as the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states filed a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Seattle-based Amazon.com for illegally dominating the online retail economy at the expense of consumers.
The 172-page complaint "lays out how Amazon has used a set of punitive and coercive tactics to unlawfully maintain its monopolies," said FTC Chair Lina Khan in a statement. "The complaint sets forth detailed allegations noting how Amazon is now exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself while raising prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of businesses that rely on Amazon to reach them."
The document—filed in a federal court in Washington state—alleges that Amazon maintains "durable monopoly power" in the online superstore and marketplace services markets, including by stifling price competition and coercing sellers into using its fulfillment service.
