Category: Internet
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Yahoo eyes major stake in YouTube alternative Dailymotion
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Google launches Google Keep note-taking service
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Olathe, Kansas Is The Next City To Get Google Fiber
Earlier this year, Google CEO Larry Page hinted that Google Fiber would be coming to more cities in the future. The hint renewed cities’ efforts to attract Google Fiber to their communities, but only one city has emerged victorious in its attempt to lure Google to their community.
Google announced today that Olathe, Kansas is to be the next recipient of Google Fiber. The company says that the Olathe City Council approved Google Fiber this week, and that Google will now work on bringing the gigabit Internet service to their community.
So why did Olathe get Google Fiber? A major reason seems to be its ability to attract new businesses.
Olathe has become one of the fastest-growing cities in Kansas and has attracted an influx of new businesses and residents. They’ve all noticed what a great community Olathe is, and so have we. We think that Fiber and widespread Internet access will help to create jobs, grow local businesses, and make Olathe even stronger as it grows.
A more obvious reason is that Olathe is in the Kanas City metro area. In other words, it wouldn’t take much effort on the part of Google to expand Fiber to these areas. In fact, the announcement says that Google is hoping to bring Fiber to more cities around Kansas City.
Those who are still waiting for Google Fiber in the Kansas Cities won’t have to worry about this announcement changing anything. Google says that construction and installation is still on schedule. As for Olathe, Google says that it will announce more details regarding pre-registration and construction timing when it’s done with the preliminary “planning and engineering work.”
As for everybody else, you’ll just have to keep praying to the Internet gods for Google Fiber to deliver you from the oppressive ISPs in your community.
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Study finds illegal downloading doesn’t harm music industry
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Vint Cert Doesn’t Think The Internet Is In Any Danger
Vint Cerf knows a thing or two about the Internet – he helped invent it. So, what does he think about all the doom and gloom that’s directed towards the future of the Internet? He’s not worried in the least.
In a response to Danny Hillis’ concern that the Internet may one day fail, Cerf says the ubiquity of the Internet will be its saving grace. In other words, the Internet’s constant evolution and movement into every facet of our lives will ensure that it stays ahead of any potential threats.
Instead of putting his faith in a Plan B to save the Internet, Cerf says that a Plan C is much more likely to happen. In short, he thinks that something may come along that proves to be far more effective than the Internet. His bet is on quantum communication – an idea that’s just crazy enough to work.
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Internet Pioneer Danny Hillis Argues That The Web Needs A Plan B
In February of last year, Anonymous threatened to take down the Internet in “Operation Global Blackout.” Needless to say, it was an empty threat, but something similar could one day happen. We could all lose access to the Internet. If that were to happen, would we have a Plan B?
In a TED talk released today, Danny Hillis speaks on the importance of having a Plan B for when and if the Internet is even taken offline:
In the 1970s and 1980s, a generous spirit suffused the internet, whose users were few and far between. But today, the net is ubiquitous, connecting billions of people, machines and essential pieces of infrastructure — leaving us vulnerable to cyber-attack or meltdown. Internet pioneer Danny Hillis argues that the Internet wasn’t designed for this kind of scale, and sounds a clarion call for us to develop a Plan B: a parallel system to fall back on should — or when — the Internet crashes.
Hillis’ Plan B may be closer than we think as we reported in early 2012 on the efforts of a group of hackers and engineers to build a censorship-free Internet that would coexist with our current network. It wouldn’t exactly be a network that billions of people could fall back on if the Internet were to ever go down, but it proves that a Plan B is certainly possible.
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Google Keep note-taking service leaks ahead of debut
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Vint Cerf: Actually, the Internet’s going to be just fine
One of the greatest privileges of co-curating TED isn’t just getting to work with incredible speakers, but also talking with those in the audience. Danny Hillis gave a sobering presentation, “The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B,” at TED2013, detailing his concern at the exponential growth of the Internet, and the need for a back-up plan should all else fail.
Who better to respond to this idea than the system’s so-called “Father,” Vint Cerf, who I knew was in the audience? Vint (who just this morning accepted the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his ground-breaking work on the Internet) agreed to answer a few questions about Danny’s talk from the stage. In the process, he gave the TED audience his perspective on the continued evolution of the system he helped design, and provided us with both a fascinating history lesson and his own manifesto for what to do now. Here’s an edited look at what he told us.
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What the internet looked like in 1982: A closer look at Danny Hillis’ vintage directory of users
Danny Hillis registered the third domain name on the internet. You read that correctly — the third. In today’s talk, given at TED2013, he shares what a different world the online community felt like at that point in time.
Danny Hillis: The Internet could crash. We need a Plan B To underscore the point, Hillis brought a book onstage with him. It’s the ARPANET Directory, a list of every person who had an email address in 1982.About the size of a high school’s Parent-Teacher Association directory, Hillis says that the heft of the book makes the online community of the time seem “deceptively large.”
“There’s actually only about 20 people on each page — because we have the name, address and telephone number of each person,” says Hillis, thumbing through it. “And everyone’s listed twice because they’re there once by name and once by email address.”
He continues, “There were only two other Dannys on the internet then. I knew them both.”
When Hillis picked his domain name, Think.com, the only options that were taken were BBN.com and Symbolics.com. It occurred to Hillis to make some additional selections, but he felt that would violate the take-only-what-you-need ethos that permeated the internet then.
Danny Hillis: Back to the future (of 1994)“I thought, ‘There’s some really interesting names out there. Maybe I should register a few extras just in case.’ But then I thought, ‘Nah, that wouldn’t be very nice,’” he remembers. “That basic feeling of trust permeated the whole network. There was a real sense that we could depend on each other to do things.”Hillis’ point is that trust was built into the technical protocol of the internet. While that was fine when it existed on a small scale, now it includes billions of users and an unquanitifiable amount of machinery and infrastructure. The entire system isn’t just vulnerable to attack — it’s even vulnerable to mistakes. To hear why Hillis thinks we’re setting ourselves up for a disaster, perhaps one even bigger than the financial meltdown, watch this talk. It’s a bold call for us to make a backup system should the Internet crash. A must-see for anyone who has hopped online today. Which, naturally, includes you.
Want to take a closer look at the ARPANET Directory? Here is a snippet view in Google Books. And, it’s searchable. In fact, here is Danny Hillis’ entry.
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Teens Are Increasingly Turning To Smartphones For Their Internet Fix
Kids these days take the Internet for granted. When I was their age, I had to wait my turn to use the family desktop in the kitchen. Even then, it was on a painfully slow 56k dial-up connection. The accelerated spread of smartphone use among teenagers will ensure that they never have to experience true hardship like I did.
The Pew Research Center released a new study today that found smartphone use increased among teenagers aged 12-17 by over 10 percent last year. One in four teens are also abandoning traditional Web browsing on computers in favor of browsing the Internet via their smartphone.
“The nature of teens’ internet use has transformed dramatically — from stationary connections tied to shared desktops in the home to always-on connections that move with them throughout the day,” said Mary Madden, Senior Researcher for the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project and co-author of the report. “In many ways, teens represent the leading edge of mobile connectivity, and the patterns of their technology use often signal future changes in the adult population.”
To get a full sense of how connected teenagers are today, take a look at the numbers:
- 78% of teens now have a cell phone, and almost half (47%) of them own smartphones. That translates into 37% of all teens who have smartphones, up from just 23% in 2011.
- 23% of teens have a tablet computer, a level comparable to the general adult population.
- 95% of teens use the internet.
- 93% of teens have a computer or have access to one at home. Seven in ten (71%) teens with home computer access say the laptop or desktop they use most often is one they share with other family members.
No wonder teens are using the smartphones as their primary Internet access device. Sharing a computer with the rest of the family is a sure fire way to get caught browsing questionable Web sites.
Check out the rest of the study here.
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Rapyuta Is A Hive Mind For Robots In The Cloud
Just as we share all sorts of tidbits about our lives over the web, The scientists over at RoboEarth have created an open source network that robots can use to share and reuse knowledge amongst themselves. Called Rapyuta, think of it as an Facebook for robots.
Smarter robots with higher computational abilities require more memory and hardware. That’s just Robotics 101. RoboEarth offers to take all of that heavy-duty computation and upload it into the cloud, where any robot might be able to interface with it at any time to learn from other robots how to deal with any given situation. The catalog of behaviors can make dumb robots smarter without a lot of on-board computing.
Rapyuta, which was publicly released last month, will eventually hold an ocean of information robots can access. They write:
Data stored in the RoboEarth knowledge base include software components, maps for navigation (e.g., object locations, world models), task knowledge (e.g., action recipes, manipulation strategies), and object recognition models (e.g., images, object models).So yes, soon two of these mechanical monstrosities will be able to communicate with each other, learn from prior experience, and effectively work together to kill you. Or complete all of your household chores, depending upon which futuristic scenario you’re thinking about here.
Sci-fi fans will note that this all sounds pretty ominous and the company isn’t doing us any favors. If they want to assure us that Rapyuta won’t become a precursor to a real-life Skynet, they might at the very least stop with the cultural touchstones. Never mind that the robots in the flying island Laputa (a few letters away from Rapyuta) from the Japanese animated feature Castle in the Sky threaten to annihilate human civilization, but RoboEarth calls the robots that interface with Rapyuta as Hardware Abstraction Layers AKA HALs.
Maybe a robopocalypse is in the offing after all.
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Tim Berners-Lee Says “Six Strikes” Threatens Democracy
It’s been a few weeks since the launch of the “Six Strikes” Copyright Alert System. There haven’t been any widespread reports of people receiving copyright alerts yet, but the programs opponents are growing. In fact, opponents now have a powerful man on their side – the father of the Internet.
Marketplace interviewed Tim Berners-Lee at SXSW Interactive, and the Internet freedom proponent had some choice words for programs, like the Copyright Alert System, that attempt to police the Internet.
The World Wide Web should be a blank sheet of paper. The Internet service providers, their duty is to get me bits. Bits in, bits out. If the police want to come and arrest me for doing something illegal, then the police have to come. But it’s not the job of an Internet service provider to be, in this case, not just the police, but then also the judge and the jury.
Berners-Lee’s concern is similar to previous statements made by public figures that have come out against the controversial CAS program. New Jersey Gubernatorial candidate Carl Bergmanson was quoted last month as saying “ISPs have no right to decide what you can and can not download.”
Looking at the bigger picture, Berners-Lee says that the Copyright Alert System and similar programs threaten the open Internet and democracy as a whole:
To start with, for business, you really use the Internet to produce an open market. And perhaps more dear to me for the future, is democracy. We need to be able to find ways of governing ourselves in peace. We need to be able to find ways of coming to agreements with people in other countries, in other cultures, about what we are going to do with our planet and how we are going to solve global warming. For that, we need a very strong democracy. Democracy involves people being informed, being able to communicate, being able to hold each other accountable. And all that absolutely depends on the neutral Internet.
The FCC, the agency in charge of creating net neutrality rules for the U.S., has stayed remarkably quiet during the debate over the Copyright Alert System. Their silence can only mean that the Commission supports the program for now, but it will be interesting to see what the Commission does if the CAS starts to target innocent Internet users.
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Student Hacker Directs FSU Wi-Fi Users to Infamous Meatspin Video (For a Good Cause)
A 26-year-old Florida State University student has been charged with “offenses against computer users,” a third-degree felony, for hacking the campus’ Wi-Fi network and directing users to an infamous shock site.
Benjamin Blouin fully admits to hacking the network, but he says that he only did so to illustrate its flaws.
Anyone trying to access the FSU Wi-Fi on March 1st was redirected from the FSU homepage to a “video of two men having sex.” To denizens of the internet, that redirect led everyone to the infamous shock video known as “Meatspin.”
Meatspin, a meme from the mid-2000s (SFW), features a close-up of two men having sex with the Dead of Alive song “You Spin Me Round” playing in the background. It actually comes from a porno film from 1985.
Apparently, Blouin says that he has been trying to bring the issue of network insecurity to the school’s attention for over a year. I guess he just needed something a little more shocking to get it.
“Anybody’s identity, while they’re logged onto that network, could be at risk,” said our hacktivist.
According to the report, FSU has shut off public access to the Wi-Fi network to “implement system upgrades.” Apparently, they will not require everyone to login to use the Wi-Fi.
All I can say is that this is the most successful use of meatspin that I’ve ever seen. And boy, are they some pretty great comedic opportunities associated with meatspin (risky click of the day award goes to…).
[News Herald via BetaBeat]
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Did eBay Just Prove That Paid Search Ads Don’t Work?
Before you read the rest of this post, go to Google and try searching for “Amazon.” You’ll probably notice that the top two listings are both for Amazon’s website, with the first appearing on a light beige background. If you click on the first — a paid search ad — Amazon will pay Google for attracting your business. If you click on the second, Amazon gets your business but Google gets nothing. Try “Macys,” “Walgreens,” and “Sports Authority” — you’ll see the same thing.
If you search for eBay, though, you’ll find only a single listing — an unpaid one. Odds are, after marketers at Amazon, Walgreens and elsewhere catch wind of a preliminary study released on Friday, their search listings will start to look a lot more like eBay’s. The study — by eBay Research Labs economists Thomas Blake, Chris Noskos, and Steve Tadelis — analyzed eBay sales after shutting down purchases of search ads on Google and elsewhere, while maintaining a control set of regions where search ads continued unchanged. Their findings suggest that many paid ads generate virtually no increase in sales, and even for ones that do, the sales benefits are far eclipsed by the cost of the ads themselves.
Companies spend enormous sums on marketing their products. Yet it’s notoriously difficult to measure the impact of ad expenditures. Companies advertise heavily at times when they hope to sell a lot — like Christmas Eve and Boxing Day — and in areas where they expect to see their sales grow. So a naïve examination of the relationship between ad expenditures and revenues will of course find they move in sync, even if customers don’t pay the ads any mind.
Advertising has also traditionally produced a lot of waste — I see ads for Brioni suits when I open up the morning paper, even though the last time I wore a suit was on my wedding day. The study’s authors quote 19th century retailer John Wannamaker: “I know half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I can never find out which half.”
The internet promised to change all that. Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others gave sellers the opportunity to target their pitches to customers who were plausibly interested in their products. That’s why paid ads for Amazon come up in response to a search for books, but not life insurance. Further aligning the interests of companies and consumers, advertisers only get charged for paid search listings that actually get clicked on, ensuring that they pay for attracting genuinely interested customers.
But what do companies actually get for the billions they now spend on search marketing? The eBay team began by examining whether there’s any benefit to buying search ads that contain the word “ebay.” In these cases, it’s possible that in the absence of paid listings, customers would simply click on the unpaid — or “natural” — listing, which would appear at the top of the search anyway. So in March 2012, eBay conducted a controlled trial to see what would happen if they shut off this “branded keyword advertising” by halting their purchases of search ads containing the word “ebay” on Microsoft and Yahoo search engines, while continuing to purchase search ads on Google as a control. There was no change in eBay sales via Yahoo and Bing, relative to those that came through Google — consumers simply substituted clicks on the unpaid search listing for the now-absent paid ones.
Encouraged by these findings, eBay management agreed to run a controlled experiment where they shut off all Google search ads in a third of the country, while continuing to buy ads everywhere else. In contrast to branded keywords — where it’s inevitable that the company will end up as one of the top unpaid listings — there’s a good chance that if you try searching for “used les paul guitar,” a guitar reseller will appear ahead of eBay’s search listing. So in order to drive a customer to eBay for his guitar purchase rather than, say, Guitar Center, it might be worth the cost of placing a carefully targeted ad.
But in aggregate, that’s not what the eBay team found — overall, there was no appreciable decline in sales of eBay listings in the part of the country where Google ad purchases were shut off. People who thought to buy guitars via eBay were finding their way to the site anyway, either by clicking on natural listings, or by going directly to eBay’s site without using a search engine at all. Search ads did generate a modest increase in the likelihood that internet surfers with little recent history of eBay transactions would end up making purchases on eBay. So paid search ads serve an informational function, letting a sliver of potential eBay customers know that they’re in the guitar business. But by the time you get to customers who have had three prior eBay transactions in the last year, the effect of paid search on sales drops almost to zero. Overall, paid search turns out to be a very expensive way of attracting new business: The study’s authors estimate that, at least in the short-run, paid ads generate only about 25 cents in extra revenues for each dollar of ad expenditures. (For branded keyword searches, the additional revenues are close to zero.)
People buying search ads aren’t idiots — they’ve looked at the correlation between keyword purchases and subsequent sales and no doubt found it to be strong. But this study suggests that marketing departments should be more careful in confusing causation and correlation in assessing the returns to their ad expenditures, to avoid the equivalent of concluding that marketing works because you advertise and sell a lot in December.
The study’s authors note that paid search may be more profitable for other companies than it’s been for eBay. For example, as Stop and Shop tries to get a foothold in the crowded New York online grocery marketplace, they might sensibly buy some ads to compete with Fresh Direct. Paid search may also be worth it for smaller companies that lack the name recognition and high Google page rank that make paid searches less valuable for the eBays and Amazons of the world — some of Google’s own research indicates that this is likely the case. Caveats aside, eBay’s experiences suggest that all companies should look carefully at how much bang they’re getting for their search marketing dollars.
The larger lesson from eBay’s experiment is about the importance of questioning conventional marketing wisdom. As much as the internet has given companies opportunities to target their ads, it’s also given them a ready testing ground to experiment with different business practices to see what really works.
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Google Might Be Willing To Let You Use That .Fun Domain You Always Wanted
Early last year, ICANN opened up applications for generic top-level domains. At the end of it all, it was revealed that Google applied for 101 gTLDs. Now more details are starting to emerge on what Google plans to do with them.
CNET reports that Google sent a letter to ICANN last week about its intentions for the gTLDs it had applied for. Most of the letter is spent dispelling the fear that new gTLDs will stifle competition on the Internet by giving Internet giants like Google a distinct advantage on the Web over smaller startups and competitors. The most interesting part of the letter, however, is this one paragraph:
After careful analysis, Google has identified four of our current single registrant applications that we will revise: .app, .blog, .cloud and .search. These terms have been identified by governments (via Early Warning) and others within the community as being potentially valuable and useful to industry as a whole. We also believe that for each of these terms we can create a strong set of user experiences and expectations without restricting the string to use with Google products.
What this means is that Google recognizes some of the gTLDs it applied for would better serve the company if others could use them. In a report from last year, it was presumed that Google would be saving the above gTLDs for its own products, or perhaps leasing them out only to certain partners. This new revelation from Google seems to indicate that the company is willing to open these domains to the public.
Of course, it should be noted that Google does not own these domains yet. Other companies, like Amazon, has also applied for many of these same gTLDs. That being said, Google is planning to do something with these domains if it can obtain them. The question now is what that something is.
Most seem to think that Google will use these domains to enter the lucrative domain registrar business. Such a move would put Google in direct competition with Go Daddy and others offering similar services. With domains like .soy and .fun potentially on offer, who wouldn’t want to register through Google?
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Study: Megaupload shutdown boosted movie sales
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Facebook may someday charge users for an ad-free experience
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Facebook users shared more data following privacy policy changes
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Zoe Lofgren Tries For ECPA Reform Once Again
Alongside the much needed Aaron’s Law, Internet superhero Rep. Zoe Lofgren has reintroduced her ECPA amendment into the House for consideration. The new bill keeps many of the protections from last year’s ECPA 2.0 Act, but features a few important additions.
Lofgren announced today that she has introduced the Online Communications and Geolocation Protection Act in the House. As its name implies, this new bill goes beyond what the original ECPA 2.0 Act hoped to accomplish. For one, the fight is no longer restricted to law enforcement snooping through your emails without a warrant as Lofgren is also targeting law enforcement’s ability to obtain smartphone location data without a warrant as well.
“Fourth Amendment protections don’t stop at the Internet. Americans expect Constitutional protections to extend to their online communications and location data,” Rep. Lofgren said. “Establishing a warrant standard for government access to cloud and geolocation provides Americans with the privacy protections they expect, and would enable service providers to foster greater trust with their users and international trading partners.”
Here’s a breakdown of the core tenets of this new bill:
- Require the government to obtain a warrant to access to wire or electronic communications content;
- Require the government to obtain a warrant to intercept or force service providers to disclose geolocation data;
- Preserve exceptions for emergency situations, foreign intelligence surveillance, individual consent, public information, and emergency assistance;
- Prohibit service providers from disclosing a user’s geolocation information to the government in the absence of a warrant or exception;
- Prohibit the use of unlawfully obtained geolocation information as evidence;
- Provide for administrative discipline and a civil cause of action if geolocation information is unlawfully intercepted or disclosed.
One of the things keeping the ECPA 2.0 Act from getting anywhere was that Lofgren didn’t have any co-sponsors. That all changes with this bill as she has managed to rope in Texas Rep. Ted Poe and Washington Rep. Suzan DelBene as co-sponsors. Both seem genuinely excited to be supporting the bill as well:
“In the past decade, advances in technology and the Internet have dramatically changed the way we communicate, live and work – and in this constantly evolving world, Congress must be a good steward of policy to ensure our laws keep up,” said Rep. DelBene. “When current law affords more protections for a letter in a filing cabinet than an email on a server, it’s clear our policies are outdated. This bill will update privacy protections for consumers while resolving competing interests between innovation, international competitiveness, and public safety.”
Poe wins the best statement of the day award, however, for rightly pointing out that the Constitution does not change in the face of new technology:
“As technology continues to evolve and improve, Congress must ensure that the Fourth Amendment rights of our citizens are protected. We live in a much different world than 1986. It’s time for Washington to modernize this outdated legislation to catch up with the times. Technology may change, but the Constitution does not.”
The addition of geolocation protection should also help Lofgren get a few friends in the Senate. Sen. Al Franken is probably going to introduce his twice defeated Location Privacy Protection Act into the Senate again, and most of Lofgren’s bill would fit snugly with Franken’s legislation. As for the email protections in Lofgren’s bill, it might be able to buddy up with Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s proposed legislation that seeks to modernize the ECPA.
I wouldn’t suggest you get too excited though. Law enforcement agencies have fought against any and all ECPA reform over the past few years claiming that it would make their jobs harder. It may very well do that, but Americans have an expectation of privacy the extends into the digital realm. The law needs to be updated to keep up with this expectation.
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Want a map of the internet? There’s an app for that.
The folks at Peer1, the hosting provider, have my number. They just released a map of the Internet that combines my love of cartography and connectivity in one beautiful mash up of pixels. The app is pretty simple, and shows the connections between bandwidth providers around the world.
It’s an update to the a physical map Peer1 did in 2011, that was also awesome, but thanks to the Android and iOS apps you can now play around with the map in a global view or a network view. The global view is like one of those satellite images of city lights at night with glowing dots representing connections. The network view is a bit more esoteric, clustering those with the most connections at one end.
The network view.
It’s pretty basic, focusing mostly on the names of the players and how many connections they have to others on the net. For example it shows Hurricane Electric and Level 3 with more than a thousand connections to other peers while Google has 59. Apple and Facebook have 32 and 17 respectively. The app also allows you to perform a traceroute to measure how long it takes packets to traverse the networks, but that function wasn’t working on the iOS version I downloaded.
A global view with provider info.
There’s also a little timeline where you can watch how the internet spreads with more providers and connection points popping up. As for why Peer1 did an app instead of a poster or even a web site, Rajan Sodhi of PEER 1 said via email:
“We decided to go with a mobile app for phones and tablets because we wanted to take advantage of the human gesturing – tapping, pinching, swiping, panning, rotating, etc – to make a more interactive and immersive experience for the user. The internet is complex, as the user can see, and we want to simplify or humanize it to make it more understandable.”
I can’t wait to show my daughter as just one more way to explain how we’re all connected using the internet. This isn’t an app you’d use every day, but it is a beautiful way to show someone what the internet looks like.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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