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donnamariee

Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS | Technolo... - 0 views

  • Firefox OS won't magically succeed just because it's open source - see webOS The siren song of open source means some people think Firefox OS could take the smartphone market by storm - but that's what they thought about webOS
  • Open source" operating systems are the siren call of the internet. For years, we were promised, Linux was going to be the Next Big Thing on the desktop; the tired old empires of Windows and MacOS were going to be pushed aside, and everyone was going to embrace Linux (though quite which distro wasn't clear). From infants to grannies, they would all see the light, and install software that was built with the user in mind - as long as the user was someone who could hold the idea of the concentric circles of file ownership (root/wheel/std) in their head
  • Despite the fevered imaginings of a fair number at the time, there was simply no chance that webOS was going to go anywhere without direct help from HP; and HP wasn't going to give it that help, since it had plenty of troubles of its own.
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  • LG has indicated that it will be using webOS in its Smart TV line (which, in passing, suggests that Google's hopes of having a multi-manufacturer-pronged assault on the living room with Google TV are being chipped away; Samsung has gone its own way, Sony offers a mixture of Google and its own smart TV offerings, and now it looks like LG isn't exactly all-in). Though that might, in time, become something that it uses on phones or tablets, you'd be crazy to bet on it. LG is smart enough to know that TVs are a world away from phones and tablets, both in terms of the user interaction experience, and the demands that they make for user acceptance.
  • But the siren song of open source OSs becomes deafening when you look at the other announcement to come out of Mobile World Congress, in which Mozilla is touting its Firefox OS as the anathema to the world's ills - or at least those afflicting the smartphone industry. What does Moziila chief executive Gary Kovacs think is going to be the unique selling point of the Firefox OS phones that he expects to see in 2014? "Our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online," he said in Barcelona, adding "We're not trying to get in the middle of an operating system fight; what we are trying to do is be the catalyst to drive more development around the open web."
  • The problem for Firefox OS is that it doesn't have a dedicated hardware backer. Sure, Sony has said that it will make some phones using it. ZTE and Alcatel say they will build hardware that will run it. And Kovacs points to the fact that Firefox OS will run HTML5 apps - not "native" apps (in the sense that iOS or Android apps run natively). That might put a questionmark over whether, by some analysts' measure, the FFOS phone is truly a "smartphone", since their definition for that includes "running apps on a native API". (That's why Gartner and IDC don't class Nokia's Asha phones as smartphones.)
  • So how did Android succeed? Three things. First, Google get a vibrant app ecosystem going even before there was a single phone: it had competitions for apps, with a $10m fund to seed developer ideas. By April 2008 there were almost 2,000 Android applications; two-third came from outside the US. Among the offerings: photo-enhanced driving, on-the-fly party mashups with maps, maintaining passive surveillance on your family's whereabouts. (Some things never change.) Second, it was able to go to Verizon, which was looking enviously at how AT&T was able to offer the iPhone, and suggest that Android phones - when they came along - could be the answer to that competitive challenge. And third, it was Google - the gigantic search-engine-and-everything-else company with the international reputation. If Google was doing a new generation of smartphone software (and if Apple had validated the idea), then it looked like a good deal for everyone. And handset manufacturers were eager to find an alternative to Microsoft.
  • Android is gigantic - some version of it might be on a billion phones this year - meaning there's no obvious need for another open source OS. What, after all, is FFOS actually going to do that Android doesn't, or that iOS or Windows Phone or BlackBerry can't? Yes, we've heard that the target isn't the west, but the developing world; that still doesn't explain why a Chinese handset manufacturer would deploy FFOS rather than Android, whether the Google version or a forked one that could connect to a local app store.
  • Even worse, FFOS is at an immediate competitive disadvantage because the principal browser on smartphones now is based on WebKit. Chrome uses it, MobileSafari uses it, BlackBerry uses it, and Opera uses it too now. That leaves only Internet Explorer on Windows Phone standing alone. Developers writing HTML5 apps will naturally write for compatibility with WebKit, which is always going to behave slightly differently from Firefox's Gecko rendering engine. For FFOS's sake, you have to hope the differences aren't big.
  • That's the trouble with the magical thinking that often attaches to open source projects. Making webOS open source didn't solve its problems; it simply shoved them off into a siding. Having an open source mobile OS didn't guarantee Android's success; the efforts of Google, and the timing in the market, did that.
  • Perhaps for that reason, people have high expectations for the Ubuntu OS and phone, with its fabulously complex array of gestures for control. Bad news, dreamers: it's going to fail in the market too if Canonical attempts to market it as a hardware-software combination - that is, sells Ubuntu phones at retail.
manca_

Apollo Plus: Microsoft's next Windows Phone update to include Wi-Fi, audio, and other f... - 0 views

  • bring new features to Windows
  • // 33inShare Microsoft is currently preparing an update for Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo Plus.
  • A Wi-Fi connection fix is also planned to let connections always remain on, alongside some audio improvements. Apollo Plus will also test Microsoft's ability to deliver Windows Phone 8 updates over-the-air, a change from the previous OS that required users to plug devices into PCs to get similar updates.
Jan Sekavčnik

Twitter in Pyongyang: how North Korea got the mobile internet | Technology | guardian.c... - 1 views

  • the secretive country begins allowing tourists to use the mobile internet
  • it was believed to be the first tweet sent from a mobile phone using the country's new 3G mobile data service.
  • photographer David Guttenfelder uploaded an image to Instagram of a tour guide at a mountain temple, geotagged to Pyongyang.
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  • rists visiting
  • ere strict for to
  • th Kore
  • he past, rule
  • In 2009, I did not offer up my iPhone as we went through customs
  • We'd leave our mobile phones at the airport but use locally purchased phones with SIM cards
  • broadband internet that may be installed on request at our hotel, which is for international visitors.
  • 3G mobile internet would be available within a week only for foreigners.
  • sim cards are €50,
  • calls to Switzerland are an inexplicably cheap €0.38 a minute
  • Our North Korean colleagues watched with surprise as we showed them we could surf the internet from our phones.
  • Not all North Koreans have local mobile phones
  • The world wide web remains strictly off limits for most North Koreans
  • But they cannot surf the "international" internet
  • North Korean universities have their own fairly sophisticated Intranet system
  • Students say they can email one another, but they can't send emails outside the country.
  • Kim Jong Un has pushed science and technology as major policy directives, and we're starting to see more laptops in North Korean offices
  •  
    "Ads by Browse to Save Twitter in Pyongyang: how North Korea got the mobile internet"
Rok Urbancic

Would you buy a 'No internet. No video. No music' laptop? - News - Gadgets & Tech - The... - 0 views

  • wouldn't it be nice to have a phone that just does phone calls?
  • at the Buckeye Tool Expo in Dalton, Ohio there is unusual demand for devices that do less.
  • the exhibition is a draw for the Amish community, whose access to technology is restricted by their faith.
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  • You don't have to wear a bonnet, however, to seek low-technology in a world still gripped by the race to offer enough bells and brushed
  • The Amish laptop is at the extreme end of a quiet drive for digital simplicity
  • The 105 has real buttons, makes calls, sends texts, costs £13 and has, wait for it, a battery life of 35 days
  • Less-smart phones are also winning fans wishing to liberate their fingers and minds from hours of distraction from forgotten pursuits, like reading books, and their wallets from £80 phone bills.
  • The needs of users aren't always the priority of tech giants more often guided by marketing departments.
  • Clutter is banished from screen and keyboard, which features dedicated "copy" and "paste" keys.
  • Ordissimo will compete with SimplicITy, laptops with just six functions launched in 2009
  • The majority of people only want a computer to send emails, Skype their family, browse the web and write documents
inesmag

Apple value falls below $400bn, as Warren Buffett says 'ignore critics' | Technology | ... - 0 views

  • Apple is still embroiled in a legal tussle with Samsung, once its biggest supplier of phone parts. Photograph: Michaela Rehle/Reuters
  • The company is under increasing pressure from rivals including Google and smartphone manufacturers like South Korean electronics giant Samsung, whose Galaxy line has challenged iPhone's success.
  • Samsung used to be Apple's biggest supplier for phone parts, and Apple its largest customer. But in 2010, Jobs vowed to go to "thermonuclear war" over what he saw as copying of iPhone features by phones using Google's Android operating system.
Rebeka Aščerič

BBC News - Children 'switching from TV to mobile internet' - 0 views

  • Television is being pushed aside by mobile internet gadgets, a UK survey of young people's technology suggests.
  • Among seven to 16 year olds, 61% have a mobile phone with internet access.
  • Talking, texting and accessing the internet are now reached through the mobile - with more than three-quarters of secondary-age pupils now using mobiles to get online.
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  • When children are reading at home, it is more likely to be through a screen rather than a book or a magazine.
  • Mobile phones and the internet each occupy about an hour and a half on average per day - but television viewing on average still accounts for two and half hours.
Blaž Gobec

Google's Eric Schmidt: drone wars, virtual kidnaps and privacy for kids | Technology | ... - 0 views

  • Google's Eric Schmidt: drone wars, virtual kidnaps and privacy for kids
  • and parents explain online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex
  • Dark side of the web
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  • "We could see virtual kidnappings – ransoming your ID for real money," Schmidt said.
  • Schmidt said the problems could go further as other technologies become cheaper
  • However, he held out hopes that the rise of connectivity, especially through mobile phones with data services, would reduce corruption and undermine repressive regimes.
  • In each, he said, the need to be connected, first through a mobile phone and then to the internet, became apparent.
Gabrijela Vrbnjak

Apple and Samsung smartphone patent row set for new jury trial | Technology | guardian.... - 0 views

  • battle between Apple and Samsung over smartphone patents
  • is not quite over yet.
  • the jury decided that some Samsung products had copied the appearance of Apple's iPhone 3GS
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  • Samsung used to be Apple's biggest supplier for phone parts, and Apple its largest customer. But in 2010, Steve Jobs, then Apple's chief, vowed to go to "thermonuclear war" over what he saw as copying of iPhone features by Android phones.
  • Samsung meanwhile became the largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and the second most profitable behind Apple. Together, the two companies produce around half of all the smartphones shipped worldwide.
  • Samsung has mounted a series of complaints against the jury decision
  • Apple meanwhile is seeking to have the damages increased.
Rebeka Aščerič

BBC News - Children 'must know web limits' says Wales commissioner - 0 views

  • Adults must impose the necessary checks and balances to keep children safe online, says the children's commissioner for Wales.
  • "All children and young people don't seem much of a distinction between their online and offline lives,"
  • Mr Towler told BBC Radio Wales. "It's all just one thing and they get really excited by the opportunities the internet affords and sometimes parents get a little scared about that and worried about what their children are accessing." 'Crossing the road' Continue reading the main story “Start Quote They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones ” End Quote Keith Towler Children's commissioner Mr Towler said he talks to children in lots of different settings and they "still enjoy playing outside as much as they ever did". He said we need to recognise that the internet provides fantastic opportunities for education and learning and its making sure that children access that safely. He said that was a real challenge for parents and carers. "It's a bit like crossing the road, you try to teach your children the best way of crossing the road well. We need to teach our children the best way of using this fantastic resource. "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'". Handheld computers The commissioner also praised Hwb, the virtual learning environment, which he said provides protection for children using the web in schools. Mr Towler said: "We've got to get parents and carers to recognise that children do operate in the digital world. They're all running around with handheld computers these days, they're not just on phones. "They can access whatever they want whenever they want and parents need to engage on that. " "We need to remember that children and young people are much more savvy than sometimes we think they are, and they are much more responsible than sometimes adults think they are so its not all doom and gloom. "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that." Sangeet Bhullar, executive director of Wise Kids, added that the digital landscape was "evolving rapidly" and up-to-date data was needed on how children and young people in Wales related to it. More on This Story .related-links-list li { position: relative; } .related-links-list .gvl3-icon { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; } Related Stories Web safety lessons urged for infants 05 FEBRUARY 2013, EDUCATION &amp; FAMILY Online chat 'should be monitored' 22 JANUARY 2013, TECHNOLOGY Body to promote digital teaching 22 JUNE 2012, WALES $render("page-see-also","ID"); $render("page-newstracker","ID"); Related Internet links Children's Commissioner for Wales The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites $render("page-related-items","ID"); Share this pageShare this pageShareFacebookTwitter Email Print In association with $render("advert","advert-sponsor-module","page-bookmark-links"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); $render("advert-post-script-load"); More Wales stories RSS Army base shuts in defence shake-up An Army base in Pembrokeshire is to close with 600 troops transferred to St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan. Soldiers' conman jailed three years Wales recall Warburton and Jones <!--
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  • "I think too many parents are very very scared of the internet and because they're so scared they will say 'Oh I don't understand it'".
  • "What we need to do is put the right checks and balances in place and what children always want from parents and carers is to understand what the boundaries are, and that's our job to do that."
mancamikulic

Google Glass: is it a threat to our privacy? | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • glasses that can shoot video, take pictures, and broadcast what you're seeing to the world
  • They weren't due to get them until last Friday
  • Google Glass is the most hotly anticipated new arrival in "wearable computing"
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  • from "mainframe" computers
  • Google's idea is that you need only speak to operate it
  • "OK, Glass, take video!"
  • The only other way to get that point of view is to strap a camera to your head.
  • And yet people are already beginning to fret about the social implications of Glass
  • the question of privacy
  • how will we behave in groups
  • David Yee, the chief technology officer at a company called Editorially
  • Yee's worry was that the young person might be filming everything
  • Joshua Topolsky
  • have tried out Google Glass
  • This is the company that has repeatedly breached the boundaries of what we think is "private".
  • forgetting that sometimes deadly enemies have mutual friends
  • use of personal data without an individual's clear consent.
  • So how comfortable – or uneasy – should we feel about the possibility that what we're doing in a public or semi-public place (or even somewhere private) might get slurped up and assimilated by Google?
  • Oliver Stokes
  • ou could inadvertently become part of somebody else's data collection – that could be quite alarming
  • Now it's going to be able to compute what it is you're looking at.
  • Song Chaoming
  • nalysing mobile phone records
  • how your smartphone is able to show where you are on an onscreen map
  • Social media
  • Where the five million are the wearers of Glass – and the one monitor is Google
  • Google probably knows what you're going to do before you do.
  • Twitter
  • we're more used to the snatched photo or video that tells a story
  • Google doesn't want to discuss these issues.
  • this is a live issue,
  • One of the reasons they're doing Explorers is to get feedback on these things
  • how will we behave with each other?
  • hows data such as your speed, altitude, and even ski-resort maps
  • Concentrating on what was in front of me wasn't hard
  • they do it without letting others realise you are doing anything
  • we get too deeply involved with our technology
  • she pointed out how smartphones change us:
  • Topolsky
  • It brought something new into view
  • the more I used Glass the more it made sense to me; the more I wanted it."
  • how text messages or phone calls would just appear as alerts
  • Glass makes you feel more powerful
  • Hurst
  • is likely to be annoying
  • here's where the problems really start – you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
  • body language change
  • model seems to require voice control
  • how much are we going to share with others
Blaž Gobec

SXSW 2011: The internet is over | Technology | The Guardian - 0 views

  • After three days he found it: the boundary between 'real life' and 'online' has disappeared
  • If my grandchildren ever ask me where I was when I realised the internet was over – they won't, of&nbsp;course, because they'll be too&nbsp;busy playing with the teleportation console
  • If Web 2.0 was the moment when the collaborative promise of the internet seemed finally to be realised – with ordinary users creating instead of just consuming, on sites from Flickr to Facebook to Wikipedia – Web 3.0 is the moment they forget they're doing it. When the GPS system in your phone or iPad can relay your location to any site or device you like
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  • when Facebook uses facial recognition on photographs posted there, when your financial transactions are tracked, and when the location of your car can influence a constantly changing, sensor-driven congestion-charging scheme, all in real time, something has qualitatively changed. You're still creating the web, but without the conscious need to do so. "Our phones and cameras are being turned into eyes and ears for applications,"
  • Videogame designers, the logic goes, have become the modern world's leading experts on how to keep users excited, engaged and committed: the success of the games industry proves that, whatever your personal opinion of Grand Theft Auto or World of Warcraft.
  • Three billion person-hours a week are spent gaming. Couldn't some of that energy be productively harnessed?
  • His take on the education system, for example, is that it is a badly designed game: students compete for good grades, but lose motivation when they fail.
  • A good game, by contrast, never makes you feel like you've failed: you just progress more slowly. Instead of giving bad students an F, why not start all pupils with zero points and have them strive for the high score?
  • "is an interactive technology inspired by snakes."
  • the internet is distracting if it stops you from doing what you really want to be doing; if it doesn't, it isn't. Similarly, warnings about "internet addiction" used to sound like grandparental cautions against the evils of rock music; scoffing at the very notion was a point of pride for those who identified themselves with the future. But you can develop a problematic addiction to anything: there's no reason to exclude the internet,
  • we come to treat ourselves, in subtle ways, like computers. We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation. But "we were not meant to operate as computers do," Schwartz says. "We are meant to pulse." When it comes to managin
  • g our own energy, he insists, we must replace a linear perspective with a cyclical one: "We live by the myth that the best way to get more work done is to work longer hours."
Anja Pirc

Online privacy: Difference Engine: Nobbling the internet | The Economist - 0 views

  • TWO measures affecting the privacy internet users can expect in years ahead are currently under discussion on opposite sides of the globe. The first hails from a Senate committee’s determination to make America’s online privacy laws even more robust. The second concerns efforts by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), an intergovernmental body under the auspices of the United Nations, to rewrite its treaty for regulating telecommunications around the world, which dates from 1988, so as to bring the internet into its fief.
  • The congressional measure, approved overwhelmingly by the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 29th, would require criminal investigators to obtain a search warrant from a judge before being able to coerce internet service providers (ISPs) to hand over a person’s e-mail. The measure would also extend this protection to the rest of a person’s online content, including videos, photographs and documents stored in the "cloud"—ie, on servers operated by ISPs, social-network sites and other online provider
  • a warrant is needed only for unread e-mail less than six months old. If it has already been opened, or is more than six months old, all that law-enforcement officials need is a subpoena. In America, a subpoena does not need court approval and can be issued by a prosecutor. Similarly, a subpoena is sufficient to force ISPs to hand over their routing data, which can then be used to identify a sender’s various e-mails and to whom they were sent. That is how the FBI stumbled on a sex scandal involving David Petraeus, the now-ex director of the CIA, and his biographer.
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  • No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.
  • wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.
  • the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.
  • he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.
  • a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t
  • o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.
  • The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained
Katja Kotnik

BBC - WebWise - Internet Basics - Internet basics - 0 views

  • internet is a worldwide network of computers
  • you can find almost anything
  • library
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  • our mobile phone company, home phone, cable television provider, or even your local supermarket chain can offer you an internet connection.
  • one that allows you to access the internet quickly and view large files, such as watching television programmes or listening to the radio through your computer.
Veronika Lavrenčič

How The Internet Works [Technology Explained] - 0 views

  • How The Internet Works [Technology Explained]
  • it is like a million superhighways with no lines painted on the road
  • a snake pit of computers attaching to modems attaching to phone lines, or cable, or satellites, or cell networks, attaching to more computers, servers, routers and modems and so on, and so on
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  • something called the Internet Protocol (IP)
  • no beginning
  • no end.
  • IP Address
  • a set method for a way of doing things
  • You tell your computer to connect to a resource
  • MakeUseOf.com is a human readable form for the IP address 216.92.56.91. Who’s going to remember that?&nbsp; Exactly
  • Universal Resource Locator (URL)
  • looks up that URL and then figures out the IP address associated with it.
  • Domain Name Server (DNS)
  • REALLY big phone book
  • available IP version 4 (IPv4) space
  • Remember that from the first 3 digits of the IP address?
  • ARIN - American Registry for Internet Numbers
  • Each piece of data you send out is broken down into packets
  • Imagine mailing your friend a book, page by page
  • each packet carries the intended IP address,
  • number to determine where the packet fits back into the data sent, how many packets to expect, as well as your IP address
  • Each packet doesn’t necessarily go down the same set of wires to its destination
  • a device called a router
  • sends the packet to the nearest available router that is closer to that destination
  • t figures that out based on the numbers in your IP address
  • The first three numbers identify a large area, and the rest make it more specific
  • ‘best-effort-delivery’
  • When the packets arrive
  • the server or computer receiving it compiles it into something cohesive, or it puts the book back together, to carry on that metaphor
  • dd in millions of servers, routers, modems, and other networking devices and you can see how the complexity is magnified exponentially.
  •  
    Na zelo preprost način razloženo, kako deluje internet
Janja Petek

Forty years of the internet: how the world changed for ever | Technology | The Guardian - 1 views

  • In October 1969, a student typed 'LO' on a computer - and the internet was born
  • Towards the end of the summer of 1969
  • a large grey metal box was delivered to the office of Leonard Kleinrock, a professor at the University of California in Los Angeles.
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  • At 10.30pm, as Kleinrock's fellow professors and students crowded around, a computer was connected to the IMP, which made contact with a second IMP, attached to a second computer, several hundred miles away at the Stanford Research Institute, and an undergraduate named Charley Kline tapped out a message.
  • It's impossible to say for certain when the internet began, mainly because nobody can agree on what, precisely, the internet is.
  • It's interesting to compare how much has changed in computing and the internet since 1969 with, say, how much has changed in world politics.
  • On the other hand, the breakthrough accomplished that night in 1969 was a decidedly down-to-earth one
  • Twelve years after Charley Kline's first message on the Arpanet, as it was then known, there were still only 213 computers on the network; but 14 years after that, 16 million people were online, and email was beginning to change the world; the first really usable web browser wasn't launched until 1993, but by 1995 we had Amazon, by 1998 Google, and by 2001, Wikipedia, at which point there were 513 million people online. Today the figure is more like 1.7 billion.
  • on New Year's Day 1994 –&nbsp;only yesterday, in other words –&nbsp;there were an estimated 623 websites.
  • On the one hand, they were there because of the Russian Sputnik satellite launch, in 1957, which panicked the American defence establishment, prompting Eisenhower to channel millions of dollars into scientific research, and establishing Arpa, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, to try to win the arms technology race. The idea was "that we would not get surprised again,"
  • "In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face," they declared.
  • The few outsiders who knew of the box's existence couldn't even get its name right: it was an IMP, or "interface message processor"
  • It was already possible to link computers by telephone lines, but it was glacially slow, and every computer in the network had to be connected, by a dedicated line, to every other computer, which meant you couldn't connect more than a handful of machines without everything becoming monstrously complex and costly.
  • The solution, called "packet switching" – which owed its existence to the work of a British physicist, Donald Davies – involved breaking data down into blocks that could be routed around any part of the network that happened to be free, before getting reassembled at the other end.
  • Still, Kleinrock recalls a tangible sense of excitement that night as Kline sat down at the SDS Sigma 7 computer, connected to the IMP, and at the same time made telephone contact with his opposite number at Stanford. As his colleagues watched, he typed the letter L, to begin the word LOGIN.
  • One of the most intriguing things about the growth of the internet is this: to a select group of technological thinkers, the surprise wasn't how quickly it spread across the world, remaking business, culture and politics – but that it took so long to get off the ground.
  • In 1945, the American presidential science adviser, Vannevar Bush, was already imagining the "memex", a device in which "an individual stores all his books, records, and communications", which would be linked to each other by "a mesh of associative trails", like weblinks.
  • And in 1946, an astonishingly complete vision of the future appeared in the magazine Astounding Science Fiction. In a story entitled A Logic Named Joe, the author Murray Leinster envisioned a world in which every home was equipped with a tabletop box that he called a "logic":
  • Instead of smothering their research in the utmost secrecy – as you might expect of a cold war project aimed at winning a technological battle against Moscow – they made public every step of their thinking, in documents known as Requests For Comments.
  • Deliberately or not, they helped encourage a vibrant culture of hobbyists on the fringes of academia –&nbsp;students and rank amateurs who built their own electronic bulletin-board systems and eventually FidoNet, a network to connect them to each other.
  • n argument can be made that these unofficial tinkerings did as much to create the public internet as did the Arpanet. Well into the 90s, by the time the Arpanet had been replaced by NSFNet, a larger government-funded network,
  • It was the hobbyists, making unofficial connections into the main system, who first opened the internet up to allcomers.
  • This was the software known as TCP/IP, which made it possible for networks to connect to other networks, creating a "network of networks", capable of expanding virtually infinitely
  • Nevertheless, by July 1992, an Essex-born businessman named Cliff Stanford had opened Demon Internet, Britain's first commercial internet service provider.
  • After a year or so, Demon had between 2,000 and 3,000 users,
  • the @ symbol was introduced in 1971, and the first message, according to the programmer who sent it, Ray Tomlinson, was "something like QWERTYUIOP".
  • A couple of years later I got my first mobile phone, which came with two batteries: a very large one, for normal use, and an extremely large one, for those occasions on which you might actually want a few hours of power
  • For most of us, though, the web is in effect synonymous with the internet, even if we grasp that in technical terms that's inaccurate: the web is simply a system that sits on top of the internet, making it greatly easier to navigate the information there, and to use it as a medium of sharing and communication.
  • The first ever website was his own, at CERN: info.cern.ch.
  • The idea that a network of computers might enable a specific new way of thinking about information, instead of just allowing people to access the data on each other's terminals, had been around for as long as the idea of the network itself: it's there in Vannevar Bush's memex, and Murray Leinster's logics.
  • Web browsers crossed the border into mainstream use far more rapidly than had been the case with the internet itself: Mosaic launched in 1993 and Netscape followed soon after, though it was an embarrassingly long time before Microsoft realised the commercial necessity of getting involved at all. Amazon and eBay were online by 1995. And in 1998 came Google, offering a powerful new way to search the proliferating mass of information on the web.
  • Google, and others, saw that the key to the web's future would be helping users exclude almost everything on any given topic,&nbsp;restricting search results to the most relevant pages.
  • It is absurd – though also unavoidable here – to compact the whole of what happened from then onwards into a few sentences: the dotcom boom, the historically unprecedented dotcom bust, the growing "digital divide", and then the hugely significant flourishing, over the last seven years, of what became known as Web 2.0.
  • The most confounding thing of all is that in a few years' time, all this stupendous change will probably seem like not very much change at all.
  • Will you remember when the web was something you accessed primarily via a computer? Will you remember when there were places you couldn't get a wireless connection? Will you remember when "being on the web" was still a distinct concept, something that described only a part of your life, instead of permeating all of it? Will you remember Google?
Anja Vasle

Mailbox: the free iPhone app that will change how you use email - Features - Gadgets & ... - 0 views

  • Mailbox is a free iPhone app that aims to change the way you use email.
  • an overflowing inbox is deeply inefficient and it's important to scuttle the unimportant stuff away to stop it from distracting you from the crucial bits.
  • A quick swipe right and emails that you don't need but shouldn't be deleted are swept into an archive, symbolised by a green tick.
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  • A slow swipe right, however, and the tick turns into a red X, telling you that email has been deleted.
  • You can do all these swipes without even opening an email, reading the first two lines of the message in the inbox list.
  • This is a fantastic app, though there are some downsides – mostly to do with the fact that it won't work for everyone. For a start, it's iPhone-only – there's no Android, Windows Phone or BlackBerry version for now.
  • This is a remarkable app that can really make a difference to the way you use email.
Jan Majdič

China to Web Users: Great Firewall? Just Be Glad We're Not North Korea - David Caraglia... - 1 views

  • Last week, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to embrace the Internet. Only a small proportion of that country's 24 million people can access the World Wide Web, and the majority of the 1.5 million mobile phones there belong to political and military elites.
  • Meanwhile, in China, a country that has embraced the Internet to a much greater extent, the big story was about censorship, both online and off.
  • For Chinese social media users, the irony here was too perfect to go unnoticed
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  • A number of social networking and sharing websites are blocked in China, including Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, and certain Google applications
  • "China's progress must be viewed in the context of its unique historical and cultural circumstances.
  • Web users engage with and identify as part of a broader, sometimes international, online community
  • Chinese public preferences are shifting from broadcast media to networked media; with that shift, the expectation for public participation is growing.
  • Knowing well the impact and viral nature of social networking, editors loyal to propaganda authorities took control of the newspaper's microblogging account not long after the scandal broke.
Miha Naprudnik

The Future by Google's Eric Schmidt: Cyber wars, terrorism and ethnic cleansing - RT News - 0 views

  • Cyber-terrorists targeted by government drone strikes, online identities, which are taken hostage and held for ransom, and parents, who explain online privacy to their children long before the subject of sex. That’s how Google’s boss sees the future.
  • ome hackers already take over a user's computer and encrypt its hard drive, locking them out.
  • By hacking more and more e-mail accounts, cyber-criminals expose the online life of others.
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  • Online communication between terrorists could make it hard for them to hide.
  • Speaking about online IDs, Schmidt underlined the growing importance of online privacy. Parents would have to speak to their children about the perils of digital life much earlier than any conversation about the birds and the bees.
  • Schmidt also shared his views on the good side of being online in future, saying that the rise of the connected world, especially through mobile phones with data services, would reduce corruption and undermine repressive regimes.
inesmag

For sale: Your personal info - Feb. 26, 2013 - 1 views

  • Only about 5% of retailers currently have the interest or the ability to market to specific customers based on their location, according to Ingle. Most of what brands are interested in is more generalized information about their customers. But in a rapidly evolving and increasingly mobile marketplace, the brands that arrive late to the location-based targeted advertising game may be left out in the cold.
  • Your smartphone holds a treasure trove of information about you, and cell phone companies are looking for ways to turn that into profit.
  • "An interesting transformation is happening in wireless, in which consumers are no longer customers -- they're the product," said Dan Hays, principal in PricewaterhouseCooper's communications and technology practice. "The trick is for operators to find out how to make money without violating their relationships and trust with their users."
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  • "Network operators sit on a goldmine of data," said Kelly Ahuja, general manager of Cisco's service provider mobility group. "We're going to help them capture and apply it."
donnamariee

BBC News - O2's Tu Go aims to challenge Skype and other Voip apps - 0 views

  • O2 has launched an app which lets users make and receive phone calls and texts via a tablet, computer or smartphone. Tu Go is available for Android, Apple's iOS devices and Windows 7 PCs but limited to "pay monthly" subscribers - so excludes corporate accounts.
  • Users can be logged into the service on up to five devices at once - meaning all will ring if they receive a call - including handsets using Sim cards associated with different networks and internet enabled gadgets such as iPods.
  • The effort represents the telecom industry's latest attempt to tackle competition from Skype and other third-party Voip services. These typically do not charge for app-to-app calls, but do require the user to buy credit if they want to call or send a text to a standard mobile or landline number.
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  • But the scale of the threat was highlighted earlier this week when the chairman of China Mobile - the world's largest telecom carrier - said his firm was now more concerned about the challenge posed by Microsoft's Skype and Tencent's WeChat services than it was about competition from China's rival mobile networks.
  • There are already dozens of Voip apps on the market including lesser-known names such as Tango, Fring, Bria and Zerofone as well as manufacturer's own services including BlackBerry BBM and Apple's Facetime.
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