Tag: internet
Swindon to give free Wi-Fi internet to all residents
Line rental and connection charges will be free, with Digital City UK hoping that users will upgrade to a subsidised 20mb subscription service.
Web addresses in multiple languages by mid-2010
The change will delight web surfers worldwide, who will be able to use keyboards from their native territories rather than struggling with western Roman characters.
BT on course with its super-fast broadband project
BT has announced that an additional 69 towns will be receiving their super-fast fibre-based broadband by this time next year – meaning the service will be available to 1.5 million homes and businesses.
BT’s Steve Robertson said: “We had aimed to get fibre to half a million homes by next March but we’re now being far more ambitious. We’ve received a tremendous response to date and so we’re keen to get on with the job.”
Their overall goal of the project, which is costing the telecommunication giant £1.5billion, is to have 10 million homes covered by 2012 – 40% of the country.
BT will be offering access to ISPs on an open, wholesale basis thereby supporting a competitive market. The first areas to have access to the network went live earlier this week. Trials are taking place in Muswell Hill, London and Whitchurch, South Wales and involve 16 different ISPs.
The plan is great news for internet users and makes a bit of a mockery of the plan set out in the Digital Britain report to ensure that the country is covered by a broadband network capable of 2Mbps. The super-fast network being developed by BT should be capable of speeds of 40Mbps – 100Mbps. No wonder MPs are to open an inquiry into whether the 2Mbps plan is ambitious enough. Clearly it isn’t.
(via BT & Computing.co.uk)
HP introduces first ever web connected printer
Yeah printers are boring, we know. But not the HP PhotoSmart Premium with TouchSmart Web. Oh no. This printer is so far from boring, it’s positively intoxicating.
Ok, it’s not that exciting but as far as printers go, it’s pretty cool. You see, dear readers, the HP PhotoSmart Premium is the first printer that will connect directly to the web.
It has a 4.33-inch screen in order to access its internet apps. Yes, that’s right, I said apps. On a printer.
HP has struck up partnerships with USA Today, Google, Fandango, Coupons.com, DreamWorks, Nickelodeon, Web Sudoku and Weathernews so as users can select the relevant app and access, and directly print if required, news, maps, coupons, tickets, recipes, personal calendars and more – all at the touch of a button. Users can also connect directly to Snapfish to print their own digital photos.
The printer prints, faxes, copies and scans. It can print directly from Wi-Fi-enabled PCs, Bluetooth devices and the iPhone.
Out in the Autumn across the pond for $399, the model is expected in the UK next year.
(via HP)
Facebook usernames, what will you christen yourself?
On Saturday morning at 5.01am UK time, Facebook usernames goes live. Users will have the chance to register a username which will develop a unique URL for their profile. Currently the URL is populated by random characters and the move will make it “easier for people to find and connect with you” according to Facebook.
As with any change that involves the social networking giant, the announcement has created a big debate online. Some users have been requesting the service for a while now, whereas some users are stringently against it.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the positive and negative impacts the move may cause:
Positive – The creation of usernames should improve shareability, which has got to be a good thing in terms of a social media. Instead of having to search for an individual’s actual name via Google or Facebook directly, users can now search by username – which has proved popular on other platforms like Twitter and MySpace.
It will also be much easier to give your Facebook details to new people you meet. You could even have it printed on a business card if you are really cool/sad.
It will also make it easier to link all of your social networking tools together – providing you use the same username for every platform you are registered with.
Negative – As with any change to Facebook, concerns are going to be raised about privacy and security. Protest groups have, not surprisingly, already been set up.
There are also major worries that people won’t be able to get their desired user names. Facebook has over 200million members, remember. That’s a lot of people competing to get usernames. There’s bound to be issues with username squatting as well, as there are with domain names currently.
The move also leads to comparisons with MySpace – a service that many people stopped using as the popularity of Facebook began to take hold. It could be argued that usernames are a bit of a backward step.
Either way, expect Facebook to freeze up at 5.01am on Saturday as the race begins. I’ll be awarding a gold star to anyone who manages to register ‘markzuckerberg’ as their username.
Read the full FAQs here.
.tv domain name under threat with Tuvalu sinking
Er, we could be in a spot of bother here. Techdigest.tv is in danger of disappearing. According to internet domain bagging site Godaddy, the island of Tuvalu is sinking and it’s Tuvalu to whom we owe our .tv domain name just as we owe .co.uk to the United Kingdom.
Should any country cease to exist then, according to web law, the domain must cease to exist as well. Oh dear.
Tuvalu is only 4.5m above sea level at its highest, so with climate change on the radar, it’ll be the first place to be hit badly by rising sea levels. Worse still, the island is indeed itself sinking, as Godaddy warns. Firstly, islands sink back into the sea – that’s just what they do – and secondly, there’s a large degree of compaction cause by farming methods too.
So, when it’s being attacked at both ends like that, perhaps it’s no surprise people are now being advised away from the .tv suffix, even if it does lend itself to the video form. Time to start squatting on Techdigest.something else.
(via Boing Boing)
4chan founder named as "World's Most Influential Person"
Each year for the last three years, TIME Magazine has run an internet poll to find the “World’s Most Influential Person”. This year, the winner is moot – a 21-year-old student whose grandmother calls him Christopher Poole. He’s the founder of 4chan.org – the world’s second biggest, but certainly silliest, message boards.
Since 2003, when the site launched, it’s brought Lolcats, Chocolate Rain and Rickrolling into the mainstream. More impressive is its traffic, though – the site gets 5.6 million unique users a month and one sub-board sees 150-200,000 posts a day.
Although TIME’s web team was forced to act against several attempts to hack the vote, moot recieved 16,794,368 legitimate votes. Although he might not seem the obvious choice for World’s Most Influential Person, nor do previous winners – Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto in 2007 and Korean pop phenomenon Rain in 2006.
TIME.com managing editor Josh Tyrangiel said: “I would remind anyone who doubts the results that this is an Internet poll. Doubting the results is kind of the point.”
(via TIME)
UPDATED: BT announces cheapest UK home and mobile broadband combo
It’s pretty much a straight up fight for your data between all the mobile networks and just about everyone else who pipes any kind of service into your home. Doubtless the electric and water companies will be on it soon enough but today is the turn of BT to land their latest blow in the shape of the cheapest home and mobile broadband combo package on the block.
They’re offering you a dongle, 1GB of mobile data per month at a supposed 7.2Mbps and limited 8Mbps home broadband package for a total of £303.08 over 18 months or just £15.65 a month if that sounds too scary.
The deal’s well over £100 cheaper than similar offers from Virgin and Orange and comes with the BT satisfaction of speedy set up and the fact that it’ll probably work more often than not.
Out now over here.
What happens to your user name when you die?
User names are starting to become an issue. One’s identity online was never really a problem beyond trying to get the top result in a Google search – not an easy feat if you’re name’s John Smith but as Dan or Daniel Sung, depending upon how I’m feeling, I’ve always enjoyed the luxury of being somewhere near the top.
The trouble is, that my name’s not so rare that I always get my choice of user name on all the big services out there. Most people’s aren’t but, again, that was never really a problem when it was just about e-mail addresses, but now that Google profiles becoming all the rage and services like Twitter actually affect my career, suddenly, my juvenile choices of [email protected] and [email protected] aren’t very useful any more.
I can’t get [email protected]. It’s too late, unless I want to add a bunch of underscores and a three digit number, and because of that I can’t get the vanity URL I’m after. Regardless of whether [email protected] has actually clued up to the possbility of his http://www.google.com/profile/dansung address (and he hasn’t because the link’s dead) the fact is that I can’t have it because I don’t have the [email protected] user name in the first place. Instead, I have to be satisfied in my petty revenge that enough spambots should have picked up his credentials by now and sent a few thousand messages to clog up his account.
So, how do I go about getting my name back, aside paying the guy for it? What if it’s some kid who never uses the account? What if the owner of [email protected] is dead? Any chance then?Well, I seem to remember in the terms and conditions when I signed up to hotmail that if you don’t use your account for 60 days or so, then MSN terminates it, and, in fact, having asked around all the majors – Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and Twitter, that does seem to be largely the case. Here’s how it runs.
Gmail
Google was very helpful on the matter, answering my question directly and then pointing me towards the supporting terms and conditions.
Google will terminate your account in accordance with the terms of service if you fail to login to your account for a period of nine months is the phrase I was looking for along with the fact that people can actively delete their accounts.
Now, the tricky part is that, although the user names will become freed up, it will only happen after an unspecified time period and I’ve no idea whether that’s a matter of days, months or years. Still, there is some hope for [email protected] to eventually arrive at its rightful owner.
Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! was also most accommodating. The answer was very different though. It seems, with their service, that once your name has gone, it’s gone forever. As it stands, inactive accounts are not terminated and will lie idle indefinitely.
On the plus side, they did launch Ymail just last year, so I might be in for a shout at bagging that one while the service is fresh. Yep, all mine. Eat that one [email protected].
MSN
No reply back from MSN as yet but I’ll stick with that 60-day account termination I remember from back in the day. No word on whether they recycle the addresses but I’m infuriated to see that I’ve only got a choice between hotmail.co.uk and live.co.uk with all .coms presumably available to those in the States or behind proxy servers of some sort, or, in fact, those with some other way round which I have, as yet, to work out.
Accounts that are inactive for more than 6 months may be removed without further notice
That’s what Twitter has to say about things, but notice the use of “may” rather than “will”. I would assume that Twitter does recycle user names, though, because they’re hot on name squatting. Go and have a look at the whole section dedicated to it if you don’t believe me.
The catch is that I happen to know of a chap desperately trying to get his user name in full knowledge that its current owner has done sod all with the account for well over the six month period. He has petitioned Twitter but they’ve done nought about it. All mouth and no trousers it seems.
The trouble is that the internet is still young; an adolescent really. It’s only now that this kind of thing is becoming an issue and, given the surprise of most of the press officers when I called, it’s something that we the users are realising a lot faster than the big web players.
So, there’s a few ways this can go. Either they get wise to this and realise that they need to start releasing user names or they get wiser and start charging some kind of premium for them. That was Facebooks toe in the water this morning. I wonder how well that would go down if Google tried the same?
So, what happens to your user name when you die? Well, that depends. For now, it’s very possible you can take it with you to the grave. Then, it seems my choices are either begging Google for some kind of alert service for when my name is released or a cash offer to the current owner. If you’re listening [email protected], how does fifty quid grab you?
The internet could be run out of capacity within two years
Growth of the internet could outpace its current infrastructure within two years, claims a new report from a clutch of scientists at a university. Unless billions of dollars are invested in new fibre-optic cabling connections within the next six months, internet users could face increasing interruption of service.
“It’s going to be madness,” claimed the project leader, “Amazon will be up sh*t creek without a paddle, eBay will be all at sea, and Twitter users are going to get into a right flap.”
The study is the first to apply the equivalent of ‘Finagle’s Law’ to the internet. It’s a scientific principle which, when applied to the massive dataset collected by the scientists, predicts that things are going to rapidly start falling apart before next Christmas.
The blame has been pinned on spammers, software pirates and child-porn rings, which all use massive amounts of bandwidth – up to a 161 exabytes of data each year. “We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined,” said a leading industry analyst.
The Chinese government has been the first to respond, changing their one-child policy into a one-strike policy. Under the new system, anyone accessing the internet more than once a day will be disconnected for life. Unless similar action is taken by other world leaders, however, the problem is only likely to escalate.
A few proposals to increase the size of the internet are also on the table, but at a very early stage. One idea would see earth bouncing its communications off the rings of Saturn, using the latency inherent in such a procedure as a storage device.
Another would see the internet being put into a massive zip file, which users would have to unzip manually before use. Linux users are up in arms at this suggestion, demanding that the internet be available as a .tar.gz archive, too. Apple are also rumoured to have plans to launch their own internet, which they claim will be “really fast”.
