Tag: internet
Internet Explorer 8 release candidate now available
Internet Explorer’s been in beta for a while now – nearly six months – so it’s nice to see that it’s finally made its way into a release candidate form. If you’re bored of the Windows 7 beta already, then why not give it a spin?
Since we last reported on it, the ‘compatibility mode’ has become automatic – switching whenever the IE8 engine can’t render a page properly, rather than having to be triggered on demand. There’s also built-in clickjacking prevention, and Microsoft has updated the InPrivate (porn) mode and the filtering system.
Internet population hits one billion, or 15% of world population
Internet stat-tracker ComScore has just announced that it reckons that world internet usage topped 1 billion in December 2008, 14.9% of the estimated population of the world in July 08. Asia-Pacific, including China, sent the most users, followed by Europe, followed by North America. However, the USA comes second in the ranking by country, with the UK in fifth.
Interestingly the stats don’t include access from public computers, like Internet Cafes, or access from mobile phones. In reality, therefore, the figure’s likely to be considerably higher. 77% of the world uses Google to search, which is a massive figure, and Wikipedia is fifth in the most-viewed-websites list, with 27% of the world visiting it. Facebook sits in seventh.
Press Release (via TheNextWeb)
Related posts: Female players now make up about 40% of the MMO population | EU mobile phone subscriptions now outnumber population
Virus infects Royal Navy computers; sailors lose vital access to Facebook
It seems there’s been a nasty virus floating around some of the Navy’s finest warships — and no it’s not something one of the crew caught during their last shore leave, but in fact a computer virus that’s caused the loss of email and Internet access.
The affected computers are part of the Fujitsu-supplied NavyStar N* system and also handle storekeeping and various support functions…
Over a decade of web archives blocked by Demon's overzealous "dirty old men" filter
Yet again it seems that systems designed to block out illegal/deemed objectionable content have gon into overdrive and blocked a huge chunk of the Internet, including the company itself.
If you haven’t discovered the Wayback Machine before, it’s a massive archive of what’s been published online since 1996. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that, amongst that hideously large (but interesting) archive will be some material that some deem inappropriate. This seems to have triggered Demon Internet’s IWF-inspired filters to block the entire archive, including pages of — yep, you’ve guessed it — Demon and its owners Thus Internet, plus the IWF…
CES 2009: Sony Cybershot G3 – Wi-Fi camera with built-in browser
Gosh, this is rather nifty. Sony’s new Cybershot G3 camera has an inbuilt web browser! Eat that, Eye-Fi. You can log on to a wireless hotspot, and surf the web to your heart’s content. Disclaimer – depending on the sites your heart wants to render, it may not end up 100% content.
Sony provides a “Easy Upload” homepage, with quick links to Shutterfly, Picasa, Dailymotion, Photobucket and YouTube (no Flickr?). It’ll store your login information, too, so you don’t have to type it in on the 3.5″ touchscreen every time. But what about the camera itself? It’s got a 10 megapixel sensor, 4x optical zoom and Face Detection, along with 4GB of internal storage. Available right now, for $500 (£330).
(via Gizmodo)
For more CES stories, click here.
CES 2009: Cisco announces Internet-connected Media Hub: get your music and video organised
Cisco has announced its new Media Hub (well, the Linksys by Cisco Media Hub, but that’s a bit of a “my company owns your brand” mouthful) which allows users to consolidate their home multimedia libraries and access them from their network or over the Internet.
The Hub comes preloaded with a general media server as well as an iTunes server, and automatically searches the network for other media devices, presenting music, pictures and video within a simple web browser…
Forward-thinking Estonia engaging the youths by allowing voting by TXT MSG
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The modernist regime of Estonia is EMBRACING the inexorable decline of future society and the eventual eradication of all vowels by allowing its citizens to vote via TXT MSG in the country’s 2011 general election.
It’s not quite as easy as simply texting in your choice of leader and an emoticon, though – all would-be text voters will need a special security-enabled SIM card to validate their identity and ensure there’s no funny business…
Skyfire is a very capable little mobile internet browser
Those among you who access the web on your mobile device will know the value of a good internet browsing application. Most standard phone browsers (iPhone excepted) are rubbish at rendering the web on a tiny screen. I’m secretly quite a fan of the bog-standard N95 browser, but if I wasn’t, then I’d try Skyfire, which launched today.
It’s simple enough – just an application which you download and install on your S60 phone, but then it offers a very ‘full’ browsing experience, which renders pages like they would on a PC and lets you zoom in and out of them. It’s powerful, though – it’ll happily render Flash, Silverlight, Ajax and Java.
British ISPs block Wikipedia over album cover
That image to the right, when uncensored, is the cover to German heavy metal band Scorpions’ 1976 album “Virgin Killer”. It was the centre of a storm yesterday after six British ISPs blocked their subscribers from accessing pages that featured it, including Wikipedia.
As well as the block of the offending page, another result was that Wikipedia editors and administrators in the UK became suddenly unable to edit pages when not logged in. This has prompted an uproar amongst users of the site – which relies on editing by volunteers for its content.
Nokia launches N97 – new touchscreen behemoth
Yesterday, Nokia execs teased the world’s tech bloggers by saying that they had a big announcement, and were surprised that it hadn’t leaked. I’m surprised too – the big announcement is the N97. It’s the followup to their brilliant, and ridiculously successful N95, and semi-upgrade the N96.
The specs on this baby promise a lot. It’ll have a 3.5″, 640 x 360 touchscreen display (16:9, not 16:10), a QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA and Wi-Fi, 32GB(!) of onboard memory, a 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, “DVD-quality” video capture (eat that, iPhone), and a battery that promises to pump out a day and a half of continuous audio playback. No mention of GPS, but I’d be very surprised if it lacks it.
Best of all, Nokia promises an ‘always-open’ window to the internet and social networking sites. If that integration runs clearly through the phone, it could be very powerful indeed. This is Nokia’s answer to the iPhone. The specs certainly win the day, but can they crack the all-important interface? We’ll have to wait and see.
Nokia N97 (via N96 Bruce Lee edition – enter the handset | MWC 2008: Nokia N96 versus Nokia N95
