Internet

Three of the major US Internet providers have agreed to cut off their subscribers from accessing explicit images of children on the Internet. Sprint, Time Warner and Verizon have all made a voluntary agreement with the New York attorney general ... Andrew Cuomo. They'll also pay a combined $1.125 million to fund efforts to crack down on the problem. While some reports have said they'll be blocking websites, the main target is actually Usenet newsgroups. These are discussion forums which predate the World Wide Web itself. Once the web became popular, they lost a lot of their appeal for discussion ... (view more)

Google has found a new testing panel for its in-development software: the entire Gmail user base. The company already has a dedicated 'Labs' website for the public to test new software and give feedback. Now they are building a Labs option directly ... into the Gmail website, meaning every user will see the features that are being developed. Sensibly enough, the option only includes features designed for Gmail itself, rather than general Google software. Users can read a description of each feature and turn it on or off (they are turned off by default). There's also a web address which users can ... (view more)

One of Wikipedia's co-founders has just announced major changes to Wikia, the search engine he launched earlier this year. Jimmy Wales describes the relaunch as "a complete overhaul of everything", applying the Wikipedia philosophy of user ... involvement to search. This all means that users can add or delete the results appearing for any particular search. They can also rank the relevance of results, which will affect how high up in the list they appear. They'll also be able to edit the headline and description which appears alongside the web address for each result. This means people ... (view more)

It has long frustrated me that I can't saunter into my local Starbucks, buy my favourite over-priced java, slide into an over-sized comfy chair, and browse the Internet. Well, actually, I could, but I would have to pay around $30/month to get it. ... For most Starbucks customers, myself included, the price of a coffee is high enough. Independent coffee shops have had a long tradition of offering free Internet access to customers. The logic is that, if you give them Internet, they are likely to stay longer and buy more. Plus, independent owners are often less the boardroom, bottom-line driven ... (view more)

Were you amazed when tech blog Gizmodo broke the news about Dell's anticipated Mini-Inspiron laptop last recently? Turns out the "breaking news" may not have been all it was cracked up to be. On The Wall Street Journal's Business Technology blog, ... Ben Worthen revealed last week that the whole thing was a calculated ploy by the folks at Dell. In late May, the blogosphere was ablaze with excitement after Gizmodo's Brian Lam posted first-look photographs of an ultra-portable, and possibly ultra-cheap, laptop by Dell. "I bumped into Michael Dell at All Things D after his interview, and he was nice ... (view more)

It's been revealed that one of Britain's leading websites spent more than $200 million of taxpayers' money last year, with commercial rivals complaining it's difficult to compete fairly. The website of the British Broadcasting Corporation ... (bbc.co.uk) is regularly among the most visited UK sites. Last December it attracted an estimated 16.5 million visitors, more than the average figures for sites such as eBay. The BBC is an independent broadcasting group which runs television and radio stations. Neither its stations nor its UK website carry any advertising and most of its funding comes from a ... (view more)

Facebook has unveiled a new look for profile pages in an effort to avoid the clutter that some analysts say hurts rival social networking site MySpace. The main change, which will take effect next month, is that pages will be reorganised into four ... tabbed 'folders' rather than having all the information in one long and unruly list. The four folders are: Feed, which will be the page that appears by default. This contains all the updates relevant to that person such as adding new friends, changing status updates or being tagged in a photograph. Info, which has all the profile details such as ... (view more)

Cisco has denied a human rights activist group's claims that the company is helping China's government censor access to websites among its population. The claims came after the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (a group which campaigns against ... Internet censorship and produces tools for getting round government firewalls) published a leaked slide from a 2002 Cisco presentation about potential business in China. The group claims the slide, which refers to China's Internet monitoring scheme being used to combat Falun Gong (an outlawed spiritual group the slide describes as "an evil cult"), ... (view more)

If you're a Wikipedia fan, you've probably noticed that the site's biggest drawback is its search facility. That's because the internal search tool appears to be largely based on early search engines, which simply measure how often and how ... prominently a particular phrase appears on any given page. While it's still a useful technique, such systems can feel quite ineffective now that we're used to more sophisticated searches such as Google, which takes into account how prestigious and respected each site is in the Internet community. And the Wikipedia system has a big drawback in that it doesn' ... (view more)