Internet

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which is the closest thing to a web-wide governing body, has made several key changes to the way website addresses will work. It's added Chinese character addresses, backed a dedicated adult ... domain, and taken a further step towards tighter Internet security. The addition of Chinese characters follows a similar move last month, when Arabic script was included. It means for the first time the entire address can be written in the script, including the part at the end which indicates a country. To avoid confusion, the system isn't used for ... (view more)

A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is holding 'closed-door meetings' with industry insiders to broker a deal on Net Neutrality -- controlling the Internet over the people that use it. ... Included in the meeting were a small group of industry lobbyists from AT ... (view more)

The seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a reoccurring public nightmare for the company at the forefront of the situation, BP (British Petroleum). As many continue to look for ways to repair the problem, others still are left ... asking why it took so long for news of the spill to reach the public. For many critics, BP's failing to use social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter was a huge mistake. It's been suggested that the company could have used these sites to spread awareness and more quickly develop solutions for the issue. (Source: computerworld.com ) BP does ... (view more)

According to a recent report, it appears Facebook had a very, very good year in 2009. It seems the social networking site saw revenue climb $100 million over its revenue plateau for 2008, reaching a figure listed at $800 million. Reuters cites ... unnamed sources in its report. These same sources also note Facebook net profits in the tens of millions of dollars, although more specific figures have not been made available. Facebook CEO: Little Motivation to Go Public Because it's a private company, Facebook doesn't reveal specific revenue figures. Pressure to sell Facebook shares publically hasn't ... (view more)

With almost a half-billion users worldwide, the popularity of the social networking medium Facebook is at an all-time high. In reflecting upon the success of her company, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has made a rather bold ... statement, claiming that it is only a matter of time before traditional email goes the way of the floppy disk and cassette tape. Texting and Social Networks Outpace Email While it might be hard to imagine a world without Hotmail or Gmail, the demographics tell a different story. According to Sandberg, only 11 percent of teenagers continue to use ... (view more)

Hallmark has been forced to pull a popular graduation card from its store shelves this weekend after complaints that the card makes a racist reference. Given that the electronic greeting is a little fuzzy, opinion is mixed on the legitimacy of the ... complaint. The card is a space-themed greeting for graduates of high school, or -- given the card's fairly childish tone -- public/elementary school. There are two characters speaking in the message, one named "Hoops," the other "Yoyo". Their declaration is that the world should look out for the card's recipient, who is bound to do big things. Card ... (view more)

It turns out Facebook can be useful for more than hunting down your high school buddies and long-lost sweethearts. According to a recent report, it seems one woman used the popular social networking site to find two of her children, kidnapped in ... 1995. The woman, who lives in San Bernardino, California, has not yet been named. However, what we do know is that she used Facebook to find her children, who in 1995 were abducted by her then-husband. The tykes were just two and three years old when they were taken from their mother. New Technologies Make Staying Hidden Harder Back in the mid-90s, ... (view more)

Even as Facebook constantly adjusts its privacy settings to make critics happy, privacy groups remain convinced that the site can do much more to protect the personal information of its many, many members. In a series of recent interviews, Facebook ... critics have launched new but familiar tirades against the site. Criticism of Facebook has been mounting over the past year. Privacy groups have sent a reported three letters to federal regulators claiming the site's executives are guilty of illegal activity -- including exposing user information to third parties without consent -- and they promise ... (view more)

A new site aims to demonstrate Facebook's lax security and privacy by exposing some of the more embarrassing messages which users have posted. However, Facebook users appear to have undermined the site by posting intentionally bogus messages. The ... new site is known as Openbook and is intended to highlight changes made last month which made the search facility on Facebook much more public, even to non-users. It's even possible for status updates and other user info to appear on public search engines. This was particularly problematic as there have been several changes to Facebook's privacy ... (view more)

Facebook users are generally trusting when it comes to their privacy, but some issues push them right over the edge. Take a recent glitch that allowed outsiders to view private user information, including friend names and the content of their chat ... conversations. The glitch emerged late last week, and has once again brought scrutiny and anger down upon the heads of Facebook brass. Users of the social networking site discovered that they were able to find out more about their friends than had been the case in the past, and some could even uncover chat conversations between other people. (Source ... (view more)