Category: Internet

An Alberta, Canada court has handed down an interesting ruling regarding detainees’ rights and how they run up against the modern world.

According to the ruling, police must provide the accused access to the internet so that they can initiate a Google (or Bing, I guess) search for legal counsel.

The case in question involved a 19-year-old man who was detained for possible driving under the influence. Since his cellphone was already in lockup, police offered him the phone at the station as well as the local Yellow Pages.

Also available to Christopher McKay was the 411 directory assistance, but according to court documents he didn’t even consider it a “viable search engine.” The court asked McKay how he would have found legal counsel if given the choice, and he said Google.

The court agreed that he should have been given access to a computer with internet access to aid in his lawyer search.

“The Crown says that the police do not have any duty in law to provide access to the internet for detainees when there is no specific request to access the internet. The Court disagrees. In particular case, the accused was actually directed to use the toll free number and he did so in ignorance of the potential to use other resources with which he might have been more familiar. In the Court’s view, in the year 2013 police providing access to the internet is part of a detainee’s reasonable opportunity to contact legal counsel. This is so even whether counsel of choice is not an issue and the accused is simply seeking general information from a source such as Google,” said the court.

The court showed that a quick Google search for “Calgary criminal defense lawyers” turned up plenty of viable options, and even came to the wild conclusion that the information of Google may even be more up-to-date and helpful than the information contained in the Yellow Pages or the like.

The court also noted that police are now routinely using the internet in order to assist with their investigations, so it stands to reason that they should provide the accused access to the internet to find a lawyer.

Basically, it boils down to the fact that plenty of young people have no idea what the hell 411 is, and Google is how they find information in their daily lives.

“There are sufficient numbers of individuals born post computer age who have no understanding of the paper world who have extensive knowledge and understanding of the virtual world,” said the court. “These individuals must be accommodated and the only way to do that is to ensure that detainees under arrest be given the opportunity to use the internet to call a lawyer in the same way that they can use a telephone book to call a lawyer.”

[via The Star]

Google (GOOG) has decided to take the next step in its anti-piracy efforts by working with Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to cut off funding for websites accused of making money off of pirated content, the Telegraph reports. According to the Telegraph, Google is “considering the radical measure so that it can get rid of the root cause instead of having to change its own search results” and would like to “block funding to websites that do not respond to legal challenges.” However, the Telegraph also reports that Google is wary of embracing such a strategy because it “may have unintended consequences, for instance companies using it to stamp out” competitors by accusing them of piracy to cut off their funds.

State lawmakers all across the country busy at work crafting ridiculous, head-spinning laws can take the day off. There is no way they can top this.

A new bill proposed in the Illinois State Senate looks to completely wipe out any form of anonymity on the internet by requiring that the operators of basically any website on the entire internet take down any comment that isn’t attached to an IP, address, and real name-verified poster.

It’s called the Internet Posting Removal Act and was introduced on February 13th by Illinois General Assembly veteran Ira I. Silverstein [D].

Here’s the summary of the bill:

Creates the Internet Posting Removal Act. Provides that a web site administrator shall, upon request, remove any posted comments posted by an anonymous poster unless the anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate. Effective 90 days after becoming law.

Not wanting to leave any bases uncovered, Silverstein includes that an “Anonymous Poster” means “any individual who posts a message on a web site including social networks, blogs, forums, message boards, or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”

Silverstein also proposes that “all web site administrators shall have a contact number or e-mail address posted for such removal requests clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted.”

Beyond the obvious questions about self-verification of IP addresses (?) and home addresses (wat?), the logistics of this thing are mind-boggling at best. Any comment on any site that has commenting? And we haven’t even talked about the constitutionality angle.

When people who have no idea how the internet actually works start drafting laws, this is what happens. This isn’t the first, nor the last bill of this type that will hit state legislatures. More than likely, this bill will never make it out of committee (it’s been referred to assignments). But the simple knowledge that this kind of thing could even exist is enough to make you need a drink.

[h/t reddit]

Now this is some can-do spirit we can all admire. BBC News reports that the rural United Kingdom farming community of Lancashire has built its own fiber network with an all-volunteer troupe of workers who are digging trenches and laying down fiber optics cables. The community is calling its project B4RN, or Broadband for the Rural North, and it’s pledging to “build a community-owned gigabit Fibre To The Home (FTTH) network in the scarcely populated, deeply rural uplands of Lancashire in the north west of England utilising the skills, time, energy and ingenuity of the local residents and businesses.”

Continue reading…

Once a year, with no specific schedule in mind, the FCC offers up a report on broadband quality in America. It’s part of the Commission’s National Broadband Plan that seeks to study broadband growth in the U.S. and ways to expand cheap, fast Internet across the country. This month’s report shows that ISPs haven’t really improved much since the last report in July.

Let’s get the most important part of this report out of the way. Are ISPs not delivering advertised speeds? Some aren’t, but the majority of them are, at least during peak periods. The study found that in September of last year, ISPs delivered 97 percent of advertised speeds with some even going above and beyond the call of duty by offering over 100 percent of their advertised speeds.

Of course, there are some ISPs that are still not delivered anywhere near their advertised speeds. Some of these ISPs include AT&T, Qwest, Windstream and Lexington’s own Insight. All of which are offering anywhere between 80 and 90 percent of the advertised speeds.

Which ISPs are going above and beyond what they promise? Cablevision, Verizon Fiber and ViaSat are all offering more than 100 percent of their advertised speeds. Amazingly, ViaSat is offering almost 140 percent more than what they currently advertise in download streams.

Moving on, the FCC report reveals that consumers are continuing to migrate to faster Internet speeds. This is only a good thing as it’s once again proving wrong the concept that most Internet consumers don’t want faster speeds. In even further good news, 46 percent of consumers on 0 to 1 Mbps speed Internet moved up to a faster speed tier between April and September of last year. Unfortunately, the study doesn’t say to which tier these folks moved to, but it was enough to raise the average speed of the Internet in the U.S. to 15.6 Mbps. The FCC notes that this is an annualized increase of 20 percent.

Finally, the report found that satellite Internet is making huge leaps and bounds in terms of advertised speeds versus actual speeds. You already saw before that ViaSat was offering 140 percent of its advertised speeds, and that carries over to the actual charts which shows that satellite Internet providers on average offer 137 percent of their advertised speeds. Coming in second place is Fiber, which offers 115 percent of its advertised speeds. Cable is second with 98.5 percent, and DSL is last with 85.3 percent.

The FCC points out, however, that satellite Internet, which is largely offered as an alternative to rural homes that can’t access to terrestrial lines, still has issues with latency. That is the time it takes to connect and transfer information is still very slow compared to land lines. That being said, satellite Internet companies are improving their technology every year which has led to this year’s massive jump over its traditionally advertised speeds.

So, what can we take away from this report? It’s good that ISPs are still mostly delivering what they advertise, and that people are still upgrading to higher speeds. What the FCC report doesn’t take into account, however, is the prohibitive prices and refusal to expand that keep most consumers away from high speed Internet. Those issues need to be addressed before we start seeing truly remarkable results from these reports.

It seems that the FCC will be focusing on this more in the future. In a statement to The Hill, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said that “we most continue to see increases in broadband speed and capacity” to “unleash innovation and realize broadband’s full potential.” Let’s hope the Commission will actually do something about that this year.

Those who feel wronged by corporations have increasingly taken to social media to get their revenge.

For business, this represents a threat — and an opportunity — that obviously can’t be ignored. A 2012 Nielsen survey found that people value advice from online peers on both what to buy as well as what to avoid. Almost two in tree of those who review products online say they do so to protect others; an additional one in four use social media to punish corporations for their own bad experiences.

This disciplining of brands through social media is a global phenomenon, but there are important regional differences and corporations would do well to localize their response.

This is especially true in emerging markets, which are rapidly catching up with wealthy nations in online penetration. The U.S. may have the most Facebook members of any country, at about 170 million people. But Brazil, India, and Indonesia together have more. Mexico, Turkey, and the Philippines together add another 100 million Facebook users. China’s Facebook, Renren Network, boasts about 160 million users. These are some of the countries where corporations need to quickly develop a sustainable social media strategy before it is too late.

Is there anything that corporations have learned in developed markets which might be transferable? Yes there is. Recent consumer research in Canada shows that consumers feel most uncomfortable and become most voluble and strident when they sense they are responsible for a product’s failure. This is likely to be highly relevant in societies where lower average education levels mean buyers will more frequently face products they find hard to use.

Still, it seems likely that most complaints about products and services stem from actual flaws in those products and services. This is true in high-income countries as well as low-income ones, but in high-income economies people generally have alternative channels through which to voice their complaints. Over centuries, these societies have designed effective systems for administration of justice. There, citizens are likely to feel their reasonable complaints will be properly attended to — unlike in many low-income societies.

This helps explain the eagerness, and vociferousness, with which consumers have taken to complaining via social media in emerging markets such as Brazil. A fascinating perspective on this can be found in research conducted in Sri Lanka in the 1970s by the renowned anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere.

Obeyesekere sought to explain why so many Sinhalese enlisted the help of sorcerers to put painful or even deadly spells on those who had wronged them. He found that it was in part due to their distrust of the formal legal system, which left them feeling impotent and unable to seek restitution or justice. Anger combined with impotence is not something that people are proud of. Obeyesekere’s subjects often resorted to sorcerers at distant shrines to avoid being seen in their own community as weak enough to seek “getting back” through sorcery. The deities whose powers were called for at these shrines were seen as arbiters of justice who “punish evil doers and redress wrongs.”

Social media in developing countries today provides some of the soothing elements of Sinhalese sorcery. When products the consumer has paid for do not work, frustration is a likely result. Seeking reparation through formal channels and not getting enough of it will add insult after injury and the ensuing anger will trigger retribution. Anger vented through social media is likely to damage the image of the brand and therefore inflict pain on the corporation which the customer is angry with. Additionally, social media provides enough anonymity to hide the weak should they find that preferable.

What corporations doing business in emerging markets need to realize is that, in order to avoid firestorms of social media backlash, they need to think harder about the needs and abilities of their customers. For example, multinational corporations in Brazil, managed by an English-speaking elite, frequently sell goods packaged in China with instructions in several languages that are all targeted at reading level about twice that of the average Brazilian customer. The same products might frustrate Brazilian customers less if they were packaged in Brazil with more user-friendly instruction manuals in the local language. In the meantime, said corporations might even find that promoting employees who don’t belong to the country’s elite to decision-making positions may help them avoid such simple mistakes, along with contributing to corporate social responsibility.

In all, corporations in developing countries have not shown a friendly enough face after separating customers from their money. Brazilian customers when poorly serviced react angrily and resort to complaining through social media. In this sense, social media has replaced the sorcerer’s function; and it works even better: Corporations in Brazil act more speedily in dealing with customers who complain through social media.

In the eyes of the entertainment industry, The Pirate Bay is nothing but a piracy outfit dedicated to destroying their business. These groups make it vocally known that they hate copyright infringement. Maybe they could be taken a little more seriously if they weren’t violating other’s copyright.

TorrentFreak reports that Finnish anti-piracy outfit CIAPC has recently opened a new Web site. Here’s the front page design:

What does this look like? Oh right, it’s the exact same layout as used by The Pirate Bay:

Besides the graphic and text, the sites are essentially the same. That’s not a coincidence as a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay says CIAPC stole their CSS code to build their parody Web site. That’s not exactly sitting well with the The Pirate Bay.

You might be wondering why The Pirate Bay cares so much about this. The group doesn’t exactly care that people use their Web site to share pirated content with others. So why do they suddenly care about copyright? The Pirate Bay has a strict usage policy in place that restricts other from using its site design.

The group also feels that their lawsuit is a matter of principal. In a statement to TorrentFreak, a Pirate Bay spokesperson said:

“We feel that we must make a statement and therefore we will sue them for copyright infringement. If not even IFPI and their friends can respect copyright, perhaps it’s time to move on?”

It’s not known how serious The Pirate Bay is about this potential litigation, but I kind of hope that they go forward with it. It would be absolutely hilarious to see The Pirate Bay sue CIAPC for copyright infringement – the very thing such anti-piracy groups stand against.

Small and medium-sized enterprises — SMEs — have long been recognized for their vital role in creating jobs and supporting supply chains in national economies. In Europe, for instance, a full 99% of all businesses are SMEs. Of these 90% employ less than 10 people. Not surprisingly, two-thirds of all jobs created in the EU are created in SMEs.

Yet even in this age of globalization, SMEs — their massive presence in the economy and vital role in innovation notwithstanding — are still viewed as largely only effective in their domestic and, occasionally, regional markets. In the traditional view of the global economy, SMEs are seen acting merely as suppliers to multinational companies, allowing these giant shakers of the global economy to build complex value chains cutting across many countries.

Seeing SMEs in such traditional light compels policymakers and their policy wonks, such as the European experts who drafted the report on “Supporting the internationalisation of SMEs” to focus on run-of-the-mill supply chain participation stuff, such as capacity building of micro-enterprises for the export market.

In the United States, similar sentiments prevail. The Small Business Administration and the U.S. Trade Representative are the primary government agencies working on the issues of the international competitiveness of American SMEs in the global marketplace. At their most passionate, these agencies tend to concentrate on and agitate over the fact that while U.S. SMEs account for 97% of the total number of exporting firms they produce less than 30% of the total value of U.S. exports.

I feel that this Western-centric perception of SMEs and their struggles and prospects in the global marketplace misses a key trend that has already begun in earnest in emerging markets. There is growing evidence of global SMEs that do more than supply inputs for the global supply chain. Beyond their products or names becoming known in multiple countries, or even used across the globe, some SMEs will actually do what once only giant corporations could and actually establish operations in multiple countries. Or as they say in the more uppity business schools: build a global footprint.

That is to say, SMEs are now primed to move above where policy wonks believe is their best perch — as trade lubricators who facilitate the circulation of inputs in a global production machine controlled by big business — and become significant brands and final economic output generators. They shall become multinationals in their own right. Nano-multinationals.

Two major trends are shaping this development: the growth of network technologies and the growing cultural tolerance for foreign business practices even in countries far away from the global mainstream.

Nano-multinationals can spread their influence using strong trust-based networks, as their founders connect to friends and allies in different parts of the globe who can help them navigate the local business culture on the strength of shared principles and common entrepreneurial visions. In this way, nano-multinationals will be very different from the command and control machines built by expensive lawyers and consultants for giant corporations — not just because they shall remain small and lean, but also because their value systems and cultural models are essentially different.

Some of these nano-multinationals take their products global via network technologies. For example, both Kickstarter and Indiegogo are very small companies (about 50 and 20 employees respectively) with a massive and growing product footprint around the world. But my argument is that nano-multinationls will also increasingly develop an operational footprint in multiple countries, something that the Kickstarters of this world have not had to do.

The motivating factor for going beyond the reliance on network technologies and the low-cost distribution models they provide is strongest in emerging markets where the ecosystems for internet innovation are not as deep as in the West. Rather than depend entirely on network technologies, this new breed of emerging-market-based multinational would explore trust networks, as we have said already, but also benefit from a growing shift of high-powered professional services online. Whilst trust-powered overseas expansion does not require the same range of legal, tax, regulatory and risk management services as traditional multinationals, it does require a minimum of advisory services.

In the same way that IT consulting, security auditing, and publishing have moved online, allowing entrepreneurs to deploy new operational models, good quality, always-available, flexible advisory services will strengthen the quality of global expansion for SMEs while keeping the costs of operating in new countries low enough to justify the essence of the nano-multinational proposition.

Some of these on-the-ground nano-multinationals are in fact here already — although at this point most are still based in the West. Take Worldreader, a nonprofit working to spark an e-book publishing phenomenon targeted at school needs in the developing world. Or check out Jana, a marketing rewards platform that claims 3.48 billion mobile users around the world in its database, most in places where only a local deal with a local telco can make them accessible. If you want more glamour, you can try any of the new-age concierge services that curate local luxuries for the global jetset, such as Josh Spear’s Valet.

This is just a beginning. Don’t be surprised if a nano-multinational shows up soon on a High Street near you.

Banner ads didn’t always suck. I should know. I helped create the first one.

My children tell me that’s like inventing smallpox.

It was October 1994, a fantastically idealistic time on the Internet. Many pioneers of digital advertising believed it possible to create advertising so useful it’s a service. We knew that if we asked ourselves, “How can we help people?” rather than, “What can we sell people?” we could rewire people’s brains to seek out brand experiences, rather than run from them.

That first banner that Modem Media, the fledgling digital agency where I worked, built for AT&T, was helpful, and it was useful. At a time when people wondered what the Web was all about, it connected visitors of hotwired.com to a tour of seven of the world’s finest art museums. It demonstrated how AT&T could transport people through space and time via the Internet — just as AT&T had done 100 years earlier with the first long distance network. Of those who saw the ad, 44% clicked.

Not only did people love the experience, they loved it enough to share it with friends. We were blown away. “People don’t share ads,” we told ourselves. “They share candy bars, and Coca-Cola, and porch swings.” It was the first time I heard the word “viral” applied positively. We were on to something.

For a few wonderful years, while big agencies slept with their backs to the Web, we did incredible work for major brands — not ads, but content experiences that delivered utility. We knew, as my Modem Media boss G.M. O’Connell once said, that, “People read newspapers, listen to the radio, and watch TV, but they go to the Web to get things done.”

By 1998, though, spending on Internet advertising had grown to the point where the established agencies woke up. Innovative shops like Modem Media, Razorfish, and Agency.com were snapped up. Before long, content and utility were corrupted by the only thing big agencies understood: reach and frequency. We were back to delivering what TV spots, radio spots, and print ads had delivered for years: sales messages. The rest, as they say, is history.

But this is a very interesting time. There’s a perfect storm building that will give us all the chance to redeem ourselves, and change the course of advertising forever.

Storm #1

Consumers are migrating in droves to mobile devices. And as Clayton Christensen wrote in a recent Nieman Report, those consumers are focused on getting jobs done.

We check news on Twitter. We search Google Maps for directions. We compare restaurants on Zagat. We take photos with Instagram and upload them to Facebook. All those people on the elevator with their noses in their smartphones? They’re not lazy or anti-social. They’re getting things done.

And do you know what else they’re doing? They’re sharing stuff that interests them, or helps them, or that they think might help their friends. Mobile sharing is the new word of mouth.

Storm #2

Advertisers follow eyeballs. Mobile advertising revenues will grow from $4.06 billion in 2012 to $20.89 billion in 2016, according to eMarketer. Unfortunately, ad agencies have been taking the worst ad experience ever invented — banners — and simply shrinking them to fit mobile screens.

For consumers who are focused on getting things done, banners are a nuisance at best, and invisible at worst. Recent studies by Trademob show that about 40% of clicks on mobile banners are due to “fat finger syndrome,” meaning consumers click on mobile banners by mistake, or because advertisers trick them into clicking. And nobody is going to share a mobile banner, because they offer no help, and no value, to anyone. If advertisers thought there was even a snowball’s chance in hell that people might share their ads, they’d put “share” buttons on them.

Storm #3

Because of Storms 1 and 2, many of the companies that produce the content that ads have been traditionally placed next to — especially old-school publishers with print properties to support — are suffering. Heck, even Google has seen declines in cost per click as consumers migrate from PCs to smart phones. Ineffective ads on mobile mean advertisers pay less for space than they did on PCs, and much less than they used to pay for print or TV. As a result, there are a lot of very talented producers of useful content, especially journalists, on the streets.

Learning to help instead of sell

“Customer service is the killer app of the Web,” Google’s Eric Schmidt, then with Sun Microsystems, said way back in 1998. Brands such as Google, Zappos, Amazon, eBay, and others win because they ask “How can I help you?” instead of “What can I sell you?”

Advertisers and their agencies, for the most part, don’t know how to be helpful. Thirty-second TV commercials, print ads, radio ads, and direct mail are all forms of content. But nobody’s addicted to them, because most ads ask, “What can I sell you?” Thousands of people have saved every issue of National Geographic in their attics. How many have saved every Viagra ad ever created? If you want to use content to build relationships with people, don’t turn to an agency — at least not a traditional agency.

The future of advertising lies not in ads as we’ve known them, but in helping all those people on all those elevators get stuff done, or entertaining them. The companies and people that understand content, and utility, will be the ones to thrive.

Given how many underemployed journalists, directors, designers, and such there are out there, this shouldn’t be that hard to do. But most companies dabble. A three-minute YouTube video here and there does not represent a commitment to content.

The ones to watch are the brands and people that have jumped feet first into content and utility. Three spring to mind:

Red Bull launched Red Bull Media House in 2007. They describe themselves as “a multi-platform media company with a focus on sports, culture, and lifestyle.” If you heard or read anything about Felix Baumgartner’s historic jump from space you already know something about Red Bull Media House.

Last November, the Coca-Cola Company transformed itself into a digital publisher. The company installed a publishing infrastructure, hired editorial staff, and converted its corporate website into a rich, multi-media magazine. Besides creating a wealth of original content, this platform aggregates content from hundreds of partners around the globe. (Full disclosure: My firm, the Wonderfactory, helped them do it.)

Nike has mastered the art of utility, and transformed itself into a product and services company. Its lineup of Nike+ apps and devices help athletes track their performance, providing a wealth of data that can be used to improve workouts, or, someday, to create highly personalized content experiences that will keep athletes “married” to Nike for years.

To remain relevant to consumers who spend hours each day focused on smaller screens trying to get stuff done, marketers will have to think like publishers and technology companies. Like Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and Nike, they’ll need to transform themselves into product and service companies. They’ll need to ask consumers, “How can we help you?” instead of “What can we sell you?”

Can this really happen? A banner-ad pioneer can dream.

Almost a year ago, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews introduced an Internet surveillance bill called C-30 that would require ISPs to collect all information on their customers. The bill was met with a massive retaliation at the hands of clvil liberties groups and Anonymous. Now, after a year of bitter struggle, the Canadian government has killed the bill.

The Globe and Mail reports that Canada’s Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced this week that Bill C-30 is officially dead. In the announcement, Nicholson said the government abandoned the bill after listening “to the concerns of Canadians.” He also said that any attempts to modernize the country’s criminal code will not contain “warrantless mandatory disclosure of basic subscriber information or the the requirement for telecommunications service providers to build intercept capability within their systems.”

The bad parts of the bill may be dead, but Canada is preserving one part of it for law enforcement. The police will be allowed to make use of warrantless wiretaps in the case of an emergency, but there are a few important caveats included in the legislation.

For one, police must alert citizens they were subject to a wiretap after an investigation has been closed. The government is also required to issue annual reports on how wiretaps are used. Finally, warrantless wiretaps are restricted to only certain officials for certain crimes.

It’s certainly different from how wiretapping works in the U.S. FISA allows the government to wiretap anyone without a warrant, and without ever notifying them. Some members of Congress have worked towards making it more transparent, but proponents argue that it must be kept secret.

Canada’s killing of C-30 comes on the heels of an expected cybersecurity executive order that may very well curtail more privacy on the Internet for Americans. Maybe it’s time American lawmakers looked north for a little inspiration for how Internet surveillance should really work – limited and transparent.

The United States has a problem – our Internet costs far too much for speeds that barely amount to anything. The FCC engineered a plan to get us on the right track with the National Broadband Plan, but not a lot has come of it yet. Now one Internet fairness proponent has come out swinging in favor of cheaper Internet for all.

Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, recently went on air with veteran journalist Bill Moyers to talk about the current state of the Internet in the U.S. Here’s what you can expect to hear about:

“Government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public interest – rigging the rules, raising prices, and stifling competition. As a result, Crawford says, all of us are at the mercy of the biggest business monopoly since Standard Oil in the first Gilded Age a hundred years ago.”

Susan Crawford on Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly, and Unfair from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

If you want to learn more about Internet monopolies and how it affects our economy, Crawford has written a book about in called Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age.

[h/t: Gizmodo]

We were surprised last summer when we learned that there were still 3 million lost souls who were trapped in AOL dial-up hell, since we figured that dial-up Internet service had gone the way of POGs and Beanie Babies as ’90s trends that had been mercifully relegated to the dustbin of history. But as Business Insider’s Henry Blodget points out, AOL’s (AOL) dial-up subscription service is still the company’s major money maker and produced an operating income before depreciation and amortization of $158.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2012. Blodget notes that even though AOL’s dial-up business is still shrinking, it’s still producing “about $500 million a year… that AOL can use and is using to invest in other cool businesses (content and an ad network).” So take comfort, AOL dial-up subscribers: Your willingness to wait 45 minutes to watch a three-minute YouTube video is powering AOL’s other businesses to new and exciting heights.

Monopoly recently gave the internet (more specifically people on Facebook) the opportunity to kick out one of the old, stale pieces and replace it with a cool, hip new piece. Monopoly made one of the new options a cat. The internet loves cats. The internet picked the cat. Monopoly now has a cat piece. End of the most predictable story in history.

Jon Stewart laments the internet’s love for cats – a love that clearly clouded the judgement of otherwise sane people (I guess).

“It’s gotta be the f*cking robot. Are you kidding me?” said Stewart.

It wasn’t. Damn you, cats.

Internet legend Sweet Brown has just starred in a new ad for Tulsa-based dentists Shortline Dental. We’re happy that Sweet Brown can turn her memedom into cash. You should be too.

A toothache? Ain’t nobody got time for that.

[Shortline Dental via reddit]

Facebook experienced a glitch late on Thursday, which took down a whole lot of sites temporarily, illustrating just how much power Facebook holds over the web.

Users would visit a site, and then it would redirect to an error message on Facebook.com.

Sites affected by the bug include: Hulu, CNN, MNSBC, Gawker Media sites, ESPN, Reuters, Yelp, Business Insider, Soundcloud and the Washington Post, to name a few.

The statement Facebook has been sending around to various publications is:

“For a short period of time, there was a bug that redirected people logging in with Facebook from third-party sites to Facebook.com. The issue was quickly resolved, and Login with Facebook is now working as usual.”

All Things D has video clip showing the bug in action:

The bug didn’t last long, and might not seem like that big of a deal to some, but when businesses all over the web have sites that are connected to Facebook, it’s a big deal to know that their sites (and potentially transactions/conversions) can be compromised simply because Facebook experienced some problem.

Really, even though it was Facebook this time, who’s to say it couldn’t happen because of any other service that millions of sites are connected to in one way or another, like Google or Twitter? Twitter is practically famous for having site issues, though I don’t recall anything of this nature in the past.

It’s unclear how many sites on the web are actually connected to Facebook. This isn’t one of the stats that Facebook displays in its stats section. Back in June, Pingdom reported that 24.3% of the top 10,000 websites in the world have some form of official Facebook integration on their homepage. Frankly, I’m surprised that number isn’t higher, though it may very well be by now anyway.

Still, these services have become important components of how a large portion of the web operates – how businesses operate. For many, simply disconnecting from them is not an option, and they are left to the mercy of these higher Internet powers.

It is Facebook’s massive reach across the web that may soon prove to be a hugely powerful weapon in the search space. As you may know, Facebook recently unveiled its new Graph Search tool in beta. It’s still rolling out, and Facebook is working to bring many more features to it. During the announcement, Mark Zuckerberg indicated that Facebook’s Open Graph would be added in the future. One has to imagine that Facebook-related activity (which could be any number of things as long as people are logged in) on sites across the web will be part of the equation, which could actually play a major role in ranking content.

An interview with Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica. He is the author of the forthcoming article Encyclopaedia Britannica’s President on Killing Off a 244-Year-Old Product.

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by February 15.

There are a lot of 2012 internet video compilations that have surfaced, and even though we’re already in February of 2013, I expect there will be plenty more. 2012 was the biggest year for internet video – bigger and more powerful than 2011, which was bigger and more powerful than 2010 and so on.

Although there are a lot of 2012 video wrap-ups, this is probably the best and most fully-realized one I’ve seen so far – although it leans pretty heavily on sports, auto, and other feats of athleticism.

Here’s twelve and a half minutes of what everyone was watching for the past year. Buckle up:

[MiamiViceStyle via Gizmodo]

The fall of SOPA was, by far, one of the most interesting events of 2012. It showed that the Internet can and will be an unstoppable force when faced with a threat that targets its very core. Now let’s relive those events so that we may know why we fight for the Internet and the freedom it brings.

Vimeo user Sam Mularczyk created a video that recounts the events that led up to the fall of SOPA. It’s a great history refresher for those of us who have already forgotten what made the SOPA protests such a significant event.

The Fall Of SOPA from Sam Mularczyk on Vimeo.

The end of the video mentions that the Internet still faces threats at the hands of other treaties and bills like ACTA, TPP and CISPA. Some of these have already been shelved thanks to other massive protests, but others are still moving full steam ahead under a veil of secrecy. To defeat these bills, we may need another protest on the same scale of the SOPA blackout, but that’s not likely to happen.

In short, the Internet is consistently under threat by groups that would seek to undermine it for control or personal gain. The only way to stop it is to use the Internet as it was intended – a communication platform that allows those of similar minds to band together. There’s not always going to be a blackout that spurs Internet users to action, but reminding ourselves of what can be accomplished when we band together may just be enough to shelve other threats to the Internet that are likely to emerge in 2013.

[h/t: Boing Boing]

American banks reportedly come under hostile cyberattack from Iran. Elite media companies confirm their firewalls have been breached by successful Chinese cyberattacks. Indeed, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt boldly declares China the world’s “most sophisticated and prolific hacker” nation. The President of the United States reportedly has assumed new powers to preserve, protect and defend America’s digital infrastructures.

The scenarios I offered as serious business threat assessment almost two years ago now appear too polite and conservative in retrospect. The inherently global nature of the internet and the opportunities it offers for mischief, manipulation and mayhem have apparently proven irresistible. Businesses with dealings in China that either offend authorities or offer opportunities for industrial — or post-industrial — espionage have come under attack. This feels like a “cold” cyberwar where “humans” have been digitally superseded by bots, loggers and viruses. The purported Iranian attacks are more disruptive; less exercises in active espionage than pokes, prods and probes to determine exploitable systems weaknesses.

To paraphrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in cyberwarfare, but cyberwarfare is interested in you.

Business — both global and entrepreneurial — is the hard target here. If your company uses digital networks to manage supply chains, customer relationships, internal communications, financials and/or sensitive information that might interest Chinese or Iranian cyberwarriors, then a risk assessment re-think is paramount. If you’re outsourcing Web 2.0 to Amazon Web Services and/or other cloud providers, you need to know their security protocols and contingency plans have intensified to mission-critical.

But, most of all, you need to recognize that cyberconflict realities dictate that “the government” — broadly defined and construed — will increasingly become business’s new best friend in cyberspace.The internet’s intrinsically international reach means that any and all cyberattacks — serious or casual — cross multiple sovereignties and jurisdictions. When the European subsidiary of a US bank — or web services provider — comes under attack, who, exactly, do they ask for help? Are these cross-border “crimes” requiring police action? Should diplomatic intervention come from American or European authorities? What role — public or covert — should the respective national intelligence agencies be playing?

The single most important new reality emerging from this (apparent) rise in state-sponsored cyberattack on private enterprise is that individual businesses are ill-equipped and poorly-positioned to confront these incursions on their own. Companies can’t — and shouldn’t — unilaterally wage cyberwar on countries. But expecting effective legal recourse from sovereign nations that have, at best, ambivalent relationships with the “rule of law” is wishful thinking. Businesses — from digital entrepreneurs to the Fortune 10 behemoths — will have little choice but to partner with government to establish technical standards, incident reporting protocols and counter-measure responses for any meaningful hope of deterring or denying state-sponsored cyberattacks.

Such cooperation, collaboration and coordination won’t come for “free.” We’ll likely see increased surveillance and monitoring of private and hybrid clouds, and proprietary networks, so governments and business alike can acquire greater intelligence and insight into the nature of the attacks and their own vulnerabilities. This will become an enormous challenge for “privacy” advocates and organizations wary of being too open with their customer/supplier data.

But if state-sponsored hackers are corrupting communications between European financial service firms and their megadatacenters in India, what recourse exists? If state-sponsored cyberwarriors go after Microsoft’s, SAP’s, IBM’s, and/or Amazon’s “cloud services” offerings and disrupt the digital nervous systems of millions of users, strong diplomatic protests seem impotent. If a China or Iran succeeded in shutting down a major bank’s ATM network for a week, what kind of response qualifies as ‘proportionate’?

Remember the May 2010 “flash crash” where the stock market plunged nearly 1000 points in a matter of moments? Suppose, just as a thought experiment, that had been caused by a state-sponsored cyber-attack.

In another context, Intel co-founder and former CEO Andy Grove once observed, “Only the paranoid survive.” The recent cyber-flare-ups and skirmishes are, metaphorically, digital shots across the bow of Western businesses and their networks. Private businesses typically lack the legal standing and security resources to fend for themselves in the teeth of state-sponsored attacks from overseas. The exceptionally astute historian and foreign policy scholar Walter Russell Mead observes that the global interdependencies and vulnerabilities the Internet creates for global business requires a new entente between government and business. He asserts that traditionally pacifistic Silicon Valley progressives may soon demand a more robust nationally security posture for America and the West in the face of demonstrable digital threat.

If cyberattacks become more innovative or intense, the West may well see the emergence of a “military, post-industrial complex” to protect and assert its interests.