Once upon a time back in 1991, before the Commercial Internet Exchange CIX transformed the net, the Internet was intended to be used only for high-minded academic or technical research. There were ASCII girlie pictures too, but serious work was what it was built for. Fast forward 24 years, and what the Internet is really all about is streaming Game of Thrones, The Man in the High Castle, and The Walking Dead. Don’t believe me? Look at the latest Internet usage numbers in Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report. There, you’ll find real-time entertainment streaming video and audio traffic accounting for…
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Megan Fox Credit: Luca Teuchmann/WireImage.comMegan Fox thinks that social media is unhealthy for kids. The mom of two told Entertainment Tonightthat she thinks platforms such as Instagram and Twitter are “really toxic for our youth culture.” According to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 star, “there is a hierarchy in schools of who’s the cool kid based on who has the most followers and who has the most likes. It’s a really terrible message to wake up every day and have your kids going, ‘Who liked my photo?’ and ‘Who’s following me?'” Fox said she even had to quit Twitter…
ZenRooms, a hotel booking platform for price-conscious travelers, is the newest startup from Rocket Internet. Like other Rocket Internet companies, ZenRooms replicates a proven business model—in this case, OYO’s—in new marketplaces. Like India-based OYO (which received a $100 million investment from SoftBank this summer) ZenRooms works with budget hotels to create a network of rooms that it audits in order to provide standardized service. That way, customers are assured they will get a good night’s rest even if they have never heard of the hotel before. ZenRooms will avoid competing directly with OYO by launching in different countries. It has…
Arturo Galvan FULLERTON POLICE DEPARTMENT BY STEVE HELLING @stevehelling 12/11/2015 AT 01:10 PM EST Police call it a “cautionary tale” that raises questions about the information that people post on their social media accounts. Arturo Galvan, a 44-year-old father of three young girls, is accused of using social media to stalk women and steal items from their homes. According to the Fullerton Police Department, Galavan used photos posted on Instagram and other social media sites to pinpoint where women lived. Then, according to police, he would break in and steal their computers, iPads, televisions – and their panties and bras.…
(Lucie Lang/iStock) By Editorial Board December 11 Follow postopinions FOLLOWING THE terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., President Obama and French officials have said they want U.S. Internet technology companies to do more to resist becoming terrorist tools. Congress, too: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) quickly reintroduced a bill that would require social media firms to report “any terrorist activity” — vaguely defined — to U.S. authorities. But when it comes to cracking down on social media, governments must tread carefully. Advocates for strong intervention cite child pornography as an analogy. Social media sites use special software that compares uploaded…
Lara Brown, left, and Grace de Souza, both 14. Composite: Graham Turner/David Levene Lara Brown and Grace de Souza 1 The ‘talk’ Every teenager must endure “the talk” before they are allowed access to the internet: a flow of warnings and cautions, making sure you know that “you mustn’t ‘friend’ anyone you don’t know” or “post anything you might regret later in life”. Parents tell you what you already know, but neglect to warn you about really bad stuff, such as the brutal body-shaming, or the pornography they are too embarrassed to mention. 2 Hypocrisy No phones at the table,…
Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton said this week that we should think about shutting down parts of the Internet to stop terrorist groups from inspiring and recruiting followers in distant lands. Mr. Trump even suggested an expert who’d be perfect for the job: “We have to go see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening, and we have to talk to them — maybe, in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way,” he said on Monday in South Carolina. Many online responded to Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton with jeers, pointing…
READ THIS Google Cloud Storage now swallows posted tapes, USBs, and hard drive backups Businesses on poor internet connections have a new postal option for moving large volumes of data to Google Cloud Storage. Read More Google Cloud Platform is upgrading its service for managedMySQL databases with the release of the second generation of Cloud SQL in beta. With flavorful descriptions like “vanilla MySQL” and serving as “yoga for your database,” Google Cloud Platform product manager Brett Hesterberg touted the ease of use behind Cloud SQL. “It lets you hand off to Google the mundane, but necessary and often time…
9 affordable Arduino-powered robot kits Need a cool gift idea? Hankering to build a robot army? These Arduino-powered robotics kits are affordable, expandable, and the perfect way to learn robotics OR conquer your enemies. Read More Eight years ago, Morgan Quigley, Eric Berger and Andrew Ng published a paper that was not about ROS. It was about STAIR, the STanford Artificial Intelligence Robot, which used a library called Switchyard to pass messages between software modules to perform complex manipulation tasks like stapler grasping. Switchyard was a purpose-built framework that was designed to be modular and robot-independent, and it was such…
Earlier this Fall, Microsoft conceded that it wouldn’t meet its original target of delivering extension support for its Windows 10 Edge browser this calendar year. But it looks like a preview of that extension support is on track to come to a preview build of Windows 10 relatively soon. A leak discovered by @h0x0d, aka The Walking Cat, makes it seem Microosft’s Edge extension preview is coming relatively soon. A Microsoft Web page announcing “Extensions are here!” briefly appeared earlier this week touting the addition of Edge extensions. (Microsoft has since removed that page.) From that not-yet-finalized page: “Beginning with…