Tag: INTERNET

A 75-year-old woman in the Democratic Republic of Georgia is facing criminal charges after she damaged a fiber-optic cable responsible for providing Internet service to neighboring Armenia. The elderly woman was scavenging for copper on March 28th when she managed to cut the connection for the entire country. All three of Armenia's major providers were unable to connect citizens to the Web for ...

We've selected our favorite and most promising Kickstarter projects, and spoke with the creators about why they deserve your time (and money). Check them out for yourself, and if these bright young things inspire you, maybe you can help launch their dreams into reality. Kickstarter doesn't have to be about changing the world -- the simple design of a well-crafted stylus may be groundbreaking ...

The Web 2.0 idea of the Internet -- that it is a vast landscape with feral stories running alongside civilized, "official" ones, a place where liking a story becomes "Liking" a story, and a place where you haphazardly broadcast everything from your dinner location to your fight with your girlfriend -- is getting old. Too many choices. Too much information. The barrage of feeds or check-ins or ...

BlueBeat, a site that sells streaming music by a range of artists, just settled a federal lawsuit that a bunch of pissed-off record labels had brought against it for selling and streaming Beatles songs. The songs were posted about a year before Apple released them on iTunes and were sold for just $0.25 each. By the time BlueBeat was forced to pull them, more than 67,000 songs had been sold. The ...

When the Middle East erupted in revolution earlier this year, many regimes responded to the upheaval by ramping up their online censorship efforts. And, according to the Wall Street Journal, a lot of them had help from American software companies. Throughout the region, governments have been using technologies and tools developed by U.S. firms to clamp down on the Web. McAfee reportedly ...

So long, 'Dexter.' We hardly knew thee. Just days after Netflix announced its first foray into the content business (a political drama starring Kevin Spacey), Showtime said it would not be renewing streaming rights come summer for its shows that are currently on-air, such as 'Dexter' and 'Californication.' It's a little tit-for-tat; Showtime will be offering these shows on its own online service. ...

Earlier today, a British hacker was sentenced to two years in prison for five counts of hacking and theft. Ashley Mitchell, 29, hacked into Zynga (the game giant behind 'FarmVille' and 'Texas HoldEm Poker'), stole more than $11 million in credits, and laundered a third of them through Facebook. There are some potentially interesting ramifications to this case. The court ignored the defense's ...

It ain't a nice time to be a female star. The FBI is investigating a hacking ring it believes is responsible for swiping "sensitive" material from the e-mail accounts and phones of dozens of stars. According to TMZ, 50 celebrities (including Selena Gomez, Jessica Alba and Scarlett Johansson) have been targeted, with nude photos and embarrassing videos allegedly stolen. Supposedly, all the ...

Well, it's happened, Facebook has gone and destroyed all that is holy about the Internet. A study released this week by Experian Hitwise found that for the first time, traffic to social networking sites has edged out that to "entertainment" (bam chicka wah wah) sites. Before you pour one on the curb, it's worth noting the study only looked at U.K. users. And we all know that they have some issues ...

People, people! How many times do we have to go over this? If you do something illegal, don't post it on Facebook. It ain't exactly rocket science. Today's very special lesson comes via Pennsylvania, where a young man gave his betrothed a stolen diamond ring (classy!) that she very quickly took to bragging about on the Intertubes. "Look what Robby gave me I love him so much," Crystal ...

If it takes hours to download files on your Wi-Fi network, you might want to try clearing out some of your furniture and turning off your radios. According to a new study from Bristol University in the U.K., wireless connections can be "significantly slowed" by interference from electronic devices, or by physical barriers, like walls, doors, and other household items. The study, led by Prof. ...

For our second annual spotlight on cyber-security, Switched turned to a renowned expert in the field: Eugene H. Spafford, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Among his many professional associations and corporate and governmental advisory roles, Spafford is the Executive Director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), which supports ...

The list of nominees for this year's Nobel Peace Prize includes plenty of individuals and organizations that probably deserve the award, along with two curious candidates that will almost certainly hog all of the media's attention: WikiLeaks and the Internet. This year's field features a whopping 241 nominees, breaking the record of 237 set just last year. Notable candidates include former ...

Libyans may not be able to rely on their own national networks to access the Internet, but they can still get online the old-fashioned way, thanks to a small Dutch ISP called XS4ALL. Users with modems can log into XS4ALL by dialing +31205350535, and entering xs4all as both the user name and password. The downside is that accessing the ISP will require Libyan users to pay international calling ...

Having apparently not learned much from Mubarak's ouster in Egypt, the government of Bahrain may now be restricting access to the Internet, due to ongoing protests. Massachusetts-based Arbor Networks says it has seen a 10- to 20-percent drop in Web traffic into and out of the country, suggesting that Bahrain is blocking sites. It did note that the dip could be due to technical issues with the ...