Internet

Amazon will have to go to court to defend claims that the search tool on its site misleads customers about the products it stocks. Watchmaker Multi Time Machines (MTM) wants Amazon to make it clearer that it doesn't sell its watches. MTM specializes ... in selling expensive watches which are particularly sturdy and water resistant. They are designed to display the time in a way that's easy to read with very little light used; however, some models also have an option to switch on an extremely bright light. Although sold to the public, many of the watches are designed for and used by the ... (view more)

British news agency BBC has published a list of its articles which are no longer linked to through Google, due to a controversial European law. The move means that the people who requested the pages be removed may have actually made things worse. ... The situation involves the " right to be forgotten ", a policy introduced last year by the European Court of Justice . It rules on those laws that apply across the 26 countries that are part of the European Union. The policy applies in cases where people want pages with embarrassing, outdated or privacy-threatening information about them ... (view more)

Amazon is reportedly exploring the idea of paying members of the public to deliver packages to their neighbors. It appears to be a bare bones idea that may not lead to anything. According to sources quoted by the Wall Street Journal, the project is ... codenamed On My Way. The basic idea is for Amazon to pay retail stores to act as a delivery hub for their neighborhood, working either on a flat rate for a certain time period, or a per-delivery fee. (Source: wsj.com ) The stores would then hold the parcel until a local citizen using a dedicated app saw there was a parcel available in their area ... (view more)

President Obama has signed a law that will limit the government's power to collect data from the public's online and telephone activities. The USA Freedom Act should make it harder for officials to simply collect data in bulk. The Act replaces the ... measures in the 2001 Patriot Act , which extended the government's surveillance powers as a response to the September 11 attacks . That led to the National Security Agency launching a program by which it effectively collected as much data as possible and held on to it so that it could then look back for details on particular individuals ... (view more)

The majority of people in the world could be using the Internet within a couple of years according to new projections. The growth has largely been driven by cheaper and more widely accessible mobile Internet service. The figures come from the ... International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations agency. It says that in the year 2000, just 400 million people were online, around 6.5 percent of the world's population. (Source: bbc.co.uk ) Based on collating international figures, the ITU expects that figure to be 3.2 billion at the end of 2015. That equates to 43.4 percent of people, ... (view more)

One of the key figures in the creation of the Internet has warned that adding billions of gadgets with online connections could mean a slower Internet for many users. Vint Cerf said users need to enable a newer Internet addressing system to get the ... best results. Cerf is sometimes referred to as one of the "fathers of the Internet." He played a key role in the creation of ARPANET , the military network that established many of the technologies that were later at the heart of the Internet. Cerf also helped design the basic system by which Internet data is broken into small pieces, ... (view more)

The company that operates website addresses ending in ".sucks" has been accused of trying to exploit people worried about sites set up to attack them. However, nobody seems quite sure if it breaks any rules or who, if anyone, has the authority to do ... something about it. The controversy involves a major change to the way website registration works that took effect in 2012. Until then, all website addresses ended in one of a limited number of "top level domains" such as .com, .org, or country-specific domains such as .ca for Canada. Anyone Can Become an Administrator of a Top ... (view more)

More ambitious users of trial versions of Windows 10 have now got their hands on the replacement for Internet Explorer . The consensus is that it still needs work, but displays some impressive new features. The new browser is codenamed Spartan , ... though that may not be the final name. It will be the default browser in Windows 10, with Internet Explorer only available by going through the Accessories section of the Programs menu. Internet Explorer is only being included for the sake of compatibility with very old websites that use outdated technology. (Source: networkworld.com ) For the first ... (view more)

A newly-published study shows that the average person could manage without a smartphone for many common tasks. However, for a select group, smartphones are the only realistic option for accessing online services. The report comes from the Pew ... Research Center, which brought together several surveys, each of around 2,000 smartphone users. The results provide very differing meanings, depending on how they are viewed. (Source: pewinternet.org ) Most Tasks Achievable Without Phones On one hand, the study suggests smartphones are by no means vital for many everyday tasks. Participants were asked if ... (view more)

Facebook has clarified its rules on what can and cannot be posted on the site. The changes are designed to bring more common sense, but critics say the rules still have inconsistencies. The decision to remove posts, photos or videos is based on a ... set of rules known as Facebook's community guidelines. In the past, the guidelines have come under heavy criticism for being either too vague and broad, often seeming to outlaw content many people would consider acceptable, or allow content widely considered unacceptable. Three years ago, leaked documents showed the instructions for previous ... (view more)