Internet

Internet Service Provider (ISP) Comcast has announced it plans to cut the price of its service for families that can demonstrate financial need. The company, which also offers cable TV and telephone service, is calling this new, cheap web plan ... 'Internet Essentials'. Comcast's new plan has a lot to do with its recent acquisition of NBC Universal, a deal that was completed earlier this year. In order to complete the agreement, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) stipulated that Comcast would need to make broadband memberships available to 400,000 low-income households at a reasonable ... (view more)

After being banned by the newly-formed Google+ social networking platform, hacking group Anonymous have apparently established their own social media hub. The group rose to infamy last year with in support of the controversial whistle-blower website ... WikiLeaks. (Source: google.com) Rejected Hackers Start AnonPlus It's reported that developers from Anonymous attempted to build a profile on Google+, the search giant's new social networking platform. Their profile was later suspended, which then lead the group to build their own, similar service, called AnonPlus. (Source: pcworld.com ) At the ... (view more)

Online swindlers are hoping to cash-in from Facebook's recent integration with Skype by spamming those looking to use their social networking platform as a means to conduct video calling. Cyber scumbags are not only targeting individual users on ... Facebook, but all of their 'friends' as well. According to a report posted on Sophos' Naked Security blog, the latest scam makes the video chat feature appear as a safe application (called "video call") and comes in the form of a Facebook wall post, enticing users to click onto a link dubbed "enable video calls". As Sophos states, the format of the ... (view more)

Microsoft has signed a deal to provide English-language results to China's dominant search engine, Baidu. It's sure to re-ignite a debate about the country's attitude to online censorship. According to Baidu, around 10 million English-language ... searches are carried out on its site every day, and it admits it doesn't do a good job of handling them. Under the new deal, results for such searches will be powered by Microsoft's Bing engine. (Source: com.cn ) The precise details of the arrangement are being kept confidential, though at least one report states no money is changing hands. The most ... (view more)

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all reportedly bidding to buy out online video service, Hulu.com. But they all have different reasons for considering the move. For those who aren't aware of it, Hulu is one of the most popular legal video streaming ... services. It allows users in the US to see recent and archived programming from several major American networks and cable channels, with viewing available on computers, smartphones, tablets and directly on some TV sets. It had appeared Hulu was going to join several other tech companies over the next few years by cashing in through public share ... (view more)

According to reports, MySpace has been sold by News Corp to advertising network Specific Media for an estimated $35 million. The total sum is apparently a mix of stock and cash, with News Corp holding on to about 5 per cent of MySpace. Unfortunately ... for MySpace staff, the move won't be a happy one. The deal between News Corp and Specific Media is reportedly contingent on MySpace cutting half of its 400 staff members, meaning that layoffs should come down hard by the end of this week. It's likely MySpace management, like CEO Mike Jones, will stay on for an interim period to help with the ... (view more)

The number of people using Facebook has dropped in several major countries, according to a recent report. It's not enough to stop an ongoing rise in the global total, but the growth rate worldwide has notably slowed. The figure comes from a firm ... named Inside Facebook, which takes its figures from Facebook's own advertising tools. It notes that measures may vary from source to source and can depend on exactly what is counted. With these figures, only active users are counted, rather than those who leave accounts dormant. National drops include the US falling from 155.2 million to 149.4 million ... (view more)

As of Wednesday, the Winklevoss brothers abandoned an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and it appeared that they had finally given up their long-running crusade to win further compensation from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. A day later, however, ... a new court document has been filed which aims to prove that Zuckerberg hid instant messages that may have helped prove their original case. How Facebook Came to Be As depicted in the movie "The Social Network," the Winklevoss twins were once involved in a very similar project with Zuckerberg, and their falling out led to years of legal wrangling ... (view more)

Justifying a $50+ month cable or satellite subscription is getting harder to swallow -- particularly when services like Netflix offer a huge database of TV and movie content for just $8 a month. In fact, a new report shows that many people are tired ... of those hefty cable bills, and are ditching their subscriptions in favor of Netflix. Dallas, Texas-based media research firm Diffusion Group is responsible for the report, which included a survey of 2,000 American broadband users. The report suggests that Netflix members were twice as likely as non-members to cancel or drastically reduce their ... (view more)

The Internet's governing body has given final approval to expand website addresses from .com, .net and .org to virtually anything. It could mean a major boost for the web, but may also lead to a barrage of court cases. The decision involved top ... level domains (TLD), the final section of a website address. At the moment these are strictly controlled, with just 22 international domains (the best known being .com) plus 250 or so country-specific domains (such as .ca for Canada). That system has been overhauled by ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Named and Numbers. It's just voted in ... (view more)