The United States government says it wants to give up its regulatory powers over the Internet’s address system. It wants an independent body handling the coordination of DNS by September next year. The proposal comes from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the US Commerce Department. It still retains several key administrative […]
From the PBS Idea Channel: Old meme is old. But why is this such a bad thing? Once the height of internetiness, the sight of a LOLCat now is unforgivable. Memes become passé crazy fast: after just months or even WEEKS of a new meme, we tire of the once hugely popular. Why does this […]
Exactly 25 years after creating a technology now used by 40 percent of the human population, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has called for a bill of rights-style agreement for the world wide web. As we’ve covered elsewhere on Geeks Are Sexy, 12 March 1989 was the day Berners-Lee first wrote to other staff at CERN to […]
A transatlantic study has found that around a third of web domains that used to belong to now-defunct banks are now being used by other people. Thankfully only a handful are being used for outright malicious purposes, but the researchers say steps must be taken to minimize such abuse. Tyler Moore of Southern Methodist University […]
Mozilla wants to know why Dell is charging around $30 to install Firefox on new computers, contradicting its status as free software. It’s not clear how widespread the charge is. The Next Web captured the screenshot pictured above with a £16.25 (approx US$30) charge for one model on Dell’s UK site, though at the time […]
In 2011 Comcast agreed to offer a $9.95 broadband service to low-income families as one of the government conditions for being allowed to buy out NBC Universal. It’s now said it will extend that program, due to expire this fall, indefinitely. Under the program, qualifying families can get a 5 megabits per second connection for […]
Nearly half of all edits to Wikipedia are made by automated computers rather than humans according to a new study. But the bot edits are mainly on the newer language-based versions and are largely constructive. The topic is covered in a paper titled “Bots vs Wikipedians, Anons vs Logged-Ins” by post-doctoral student and Google employee […]
If you’re on Facebook, you’re about to lose your facebook.com e-mail address. And if you didn’t know you had one, well, that’s the main reason it’s going. Since November 2010, Facebook users have had an e-mail address made up of their profile name and @facebook.com. That in itself was confusing as the profile name is […]
Netflix has reportedly agreed to pay Comcast a fee to improve speed and reliability of its streaming. It could set a major precedent in the net neutrality debate. As we reported last week, Netflix confirmed that customers suffered a measurable slowdown in speeds over the past month, which appeared to be largely because of a […]
Netflix says its service during peak hours is getting noticeably slower. It’s putting the blame on cable ISPs, but it seems more a case of what those companies aren’t doing than what they are. The precise details of the slowdown seem to vary depending on which account you read, but the biggest problem seems to […]