Internet

Canada seems to be gearing up for a fight between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and Peer-to-Peer file sharing users just as companies in the United States are negotiating common ground. Last year we reported on Bell Canada's practice of torrent ... 'throttling' -- a bandwidth management strategy where users find their file sharing programs suffer significant slow downs or are cut off altogether during peak usage. Despite some minor disapproval, the company has been continuing the practice without serious uproar. However, that was before the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's recent decision ... (view more)

Comcast recently ended hostilities with users of peer-to-peer networks (P2P) last week by agreeing to work with BitTorrent. The agreement, launched hand-in-hand with the one of the inventors of the BitTorrent protocol, is meant to find solutions to ... bandwidth management issues. Comcast and BitTorrent intend to publish their findings so that other P2P's and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) can adapt their solutions. Previously, the cable company had restricted heavy usage of P2P networks using a practice known as 'torrent throttling.' Customers would find their file sharing slow or stop ... (view more)

Adobe has launched a free online version of its popular Photoshop image editing software, combining it with an online picture storage service. Photoshop Express includes basic features such as airbrushing, red-eye reduction and re-sizing, along with ... some fancy effects that turn pictures into sketches or distort them for comic effect. Users also get two gigabytes of online storage, and images can be shared via on-line galleries or integrated with social networking sites such as Facebook. It seems the plan is to introduce Photoshop to new users in the hope of them buying an upgrade to Photoshop ... (view more)

Got a thing for America's most glamorous gadabout? Then take a trip down Facebook lane, where a glitch in the social networking page has opened the door to very private pictures of Paris Hilton for anyone to see. A Canadian computer technician ... recently discovered that a freshly-implemented security measure was anything but secure. The new barrier, designed to prevent random profile visitors from flipping through personal photo albums, can easily be circumvented by simply guessing the ID of a photo. Surprisingly, Facebook never checked to make sure their new barricade actually validated ... (view more)

Movie rental firm Netflix had to delay deliveries by a day after its site was down for nearly 11 hours on Monday. It's thought the problem was caused by a routine weekly maintenance session, scheduled for the middle of the night, mistakenly taking ... place during the day. Engineers noticed the problem at 7am Pacific time and didn't get it fixed until 6pm. (Source: wired.com ) Because the company's distribution centers all rely on the website to access customer data, no deliveries were possible on Monday. A spokesman said on Tuesday that "We're shipping everything that should have been shipped ... (view more)

Have you ever wanted to star in your very own television show? Thanks to the rising popularity of YouTube, it seems as if everyone has their own online show, complete with all the copying, deleting and editing that goes into production. But, have ... you ever wanted to star in your very own LIVE television show? Complete with no script, no rules, absolutely LIVE as it happens? If you own a cell phone, get ready for your close-up! It's inevitable now; every mobile phone will soon have a cellular video camera installed in it. While still in its infancy stage, Qik.com, a small start-up company based ... (view more)

Last week, I reported on the controversial case of social networking fan Chris Avenir, a Canadian university student facing expulsion for creating a Facebook group dedicated to providing hints for an upcoming exam. Seems Avenir won't be expelled ... after all, a result that has many in the web world -- and at Ryerson University -- applauding. Avenir, a first-year computer engineering student at Ryerson in Toronto, Ontario, first came under fire for his "Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions" group. The eighteen year old was harassed by school administrators who believed the group's sole purpose ... (view more)

Social networking sites that connect millions of users are increasingly the target of creative marketing strategies concocted by independent businesses. Facebook, with its 67million users is amongst the largest potential market available to these ... schemes. Until now, most marketing strategies entailed advertising on social networking sites, either directly or through proxy users. However, Denver-based bSocial Networks has introduced a new marketing strategy that attempts to use Facebook applications to generate sales. The company claims that this is "the first consumer-to-consumer (C2C) ... (view more)

Ever since Microsoft announced its failed attempt to acquire Sunnyvale-based Yahoo, the Internet portal has let out a flurry of activity to show that it is still strong enough to stand on its own. Now, Yahoo has announced its latest innovation: a ... Digg-style news page called "Yahoo! Buzz." The first thing Yahoo did once the Microsoft deal was denied was enter into a 'strategic partnership' with T-mobile to bring Yahoo content to European mobile phones. It has also acquired Maven networks, a video platform provider, to shore up its advertising business and the search company expanded its ... (view more)

Last week, Google announced that it had signed a deal with several telecoms to fund an undersea high-bandwidth fiber optic cable between the United States and Japan. The global consortium calls itself "Unity," and includes: Bharti Airtel, Global ... Transit, KDDI Corporation, Pacnet and SingTel in addition to Google. (Source: google.com) The continent-connecting cable will span 10,000 km, will cost $300 million USD, and is expected to increase web traffic between the United States and Asia by 20 percent. NEC corporation and Tyco Telecommunications were chosen to build and install the cable, which ... (view more)