One of the worst things about the web is the fact that the plethora of information you receive, be it visually or otherwise, is often not fact-checked or verified. Social media has only made this worse by someone finding a touching photo (like the one on the left seen above) and turning it into a […]
Concluding our look back at the stories we covered during 2014 and what happened next, we turn to November. The Unicode Consortium, which develops standards to make sure characters appear consistently across different software and systems, unveiled proposals for changes to emoji, a system of characters for expressing emotions. It suggested the option to choose between […]
Continuing our look at the stories we covered in 2014 and subsequent developments, we turn to September. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani argued that blocking Internet access to cut down political protest was harming the country’s scientific progress. He also lifted a ban on broadband providers offering fast speeds on fixed lines and cellphone networks, something seen as […]
Minneapolis is to get what’s being billed as the world’s fastest broadband connection, a whopping 10 gigabits per second. The service is available to around 30,000 homes and businesses in the city and is provided by US Internet. It already provides a gigabit service but has now flipped the switch to increase that ten-fold. Although […]
In 2014, people searched the Internet TRILLIONS of times. What do these searches say about us? Find out in this video from Google featuring some of the most searched terms of the year. [Google]
Google is to start replacing its CAPTCHA tests with a simple request for users to confirm they are not a robot. The company believes the new system will be easier for humans and harder for computers. Until now Google, and numerous sites that use its CAPTCHA service, have asked web users to type two words […]
Psy’s Gangnam Style video has long been the most watched clip on YouTube. Now it’s forced a rethink of the site’s “hit counter.” The video recently passed the 2,147,483,647-view mark. Maths and computing geeks among us may already have spotted the significance of that, but for the rest of us, it’s all down to that […]
European politicians have voted to break up Google’s business. The vote has no immediate practical effect but is politically symbolic. Strictly speaking the motion, which passed the European Parliament by 384 votes to 174, does not apply solely or specifically to Google, but rather all online search companies. However, with Google used for around 90 […]
The Pew Research Center has surveyed Americans on their tech knowledge to celebrate 25 years of the World Wide Web. The results are bafflingly mixed: 69 percent correctly identified URL as standing for Uniform Resource Locator (albeit as a multiple choice answer) but only 23 percent knew that the web and the Internet are not one […]
A leading Twitter executive has mistakenly tweeted about plans to buy an unnamed company. It’s an embarrassing blunder, but it could have been worse. Anthony Noto, the company’s chief financial officer, posted a tweet that read: I still think we should buy them. He is on your schedule for Dec 15 or 16 — we […]