Archive for the 'Internet' Tag

51 post(s) are associated with this Tag

Video: Twitter in Plain English

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You might have seen some of Commoncraft’s paperwork in the past like for example “RSS in Plain English”, “Wikis” or “Blogs” in Plain English or “Social Bookmarking” explained in the same way.

Now they have added another animation to their series of basic explanatory videos called…

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Video: The IT Crowd - Break the Internet

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This is to cheer up some of you after the Google stock price seems to be falling and falling and falling.

We finally found the reason why this is happening: “…and I have it on good authority. If you type Google into Google you can break the Internet…

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Data visualization: Social networks around the world

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With new data on Facebook making the headlines yesterday telling us that their user numbers are leveling out in the US and the UK, we remembered that we recently have seen a great info-graphic showing the use of social networks with the most popular providers per country around the world in the French Newspaper “Le Monde”

The data used in the graphic is from August 2007 but it’s interesting to see the popularity of providers in different countries. There are a few white spots on the map, some…

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Humor: Chasing saints at Ebay

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There are web sites sieving through the offers of the online auction house “Ebay” to find the strangest, funniest or famous people selling things. There are people offering themselves or their services like women as party gags etc.

And you might have heard about it when in 2004 a slice of toast said to have an in-print of Holy Mary’s face reached offers of USD 20 Millions (it actually was sold later for USD 28,000 and is now displayed at a casino with other Ebay curiosities). So yesterday “CNN” was running a report on what was described in the offer at Ebay as “Virgin Mary pretzel” and the object went for USD 16,000.

So as with most successful pranks soon there will be…

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Humor: (Dada) Time Waster web sites (2)

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Also in the best tradition of the “dadaist nihilistic movement” from the 1920s, this site neither does anything nor provides any useful information - but in difference to the two others we have introduced in a “previous post” this one also has some kind of political aspect and if it’s just a name.

The web site with the title “B.O. Is Your New Bicycle” provides you with a new teaser line every time you click on the text.

Our favorite so far: “B.O. spent the afternoon setting up your router”…

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Internet: Wikileaks.org ordered offline by US court

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The BBC today has an article online about Wikileaks.org, a website that allows whistle-blowers to anonymously post government and corporate documents.

The “BBC reports” that “…following a California court ruling, the site been taken offline in the US…” Well seemingly that’s not completely true. You won’t get access to the site via wikileaks.org but that’s because the DNS server entries have been deleted.

But hey - there are other ways. You can access the site’s content at other servers on the Internet (see image below). We suggest searching for the web site’s name and DNS and you might find it yourself. Popular bookmarking sites might also turn out helpful.

While you can question the motives why people upload documents to this site or even question the content of some of them, Wikileaks.org definitely had a rough ride the last days.

Within days they endured a fire in their server room, massive DDoS attacks and censorship threats…

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Internet: Lights go out on two fiber backbones

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A reminder on how dependent we already are on global communication networks and how quickly these can fall apart has again been provided yesterday afternoon.

Close to the Egyptian harbor of Alexandria, ships that could not enter the harbor due to weather conditions have stripped apart underwater fiber network cables for Internet and telephone communications with their anchors. The damaged cables are part of the “SEA-ME-WE 4″ fiber backbones reaching from Europe to Asia and into Africa. As a result from these damages Internet connectivity in Egypt has dropped to about 30% of the normal bandwidth and also Arabian countries as well as India have reported substantial impairments within data traffic to and from these countries…

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Music: Deutsche Grammophon starts online shop

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The highly reputable Deutsche Grammophon has tonight started to provide many of its classic music recordings as MP3 downloads.

Like its parent company, Universal Music Group that already earlier this year has begun offering music recordings without digital rights management protection, Deutsche Grammophon will provide the downloads DRM free through its online shop called “DG web shop”.

The store currently offers about 2,400 albums including 600 out-of-print CDs as high quality 320 kbps (vs. 128-192 kbps standard rate) MP3s. You can download complete works, individual tracks or whole albums…

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A new type of spam

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Everybody who runs a web site or blog knows what I’m talking about - SPAM
To us it is a continuous phenomenon that people are clogging the web with nonsense like this.

Pharmaceuticals, enhancements of your body parts, people doing things in front of cams you name it…

But luckily there is help around and I’m sure almost anybody is using spam filters today. We for example receive an average of about 1,000 smd (spam messages per day) these days - our “record day” was beyond 10,000 - but hey it takes one click and they are gone.

But now there are some new types of messages coming around of which we would like to highlight two:

The first one (pictured below) uses a cop/paste legitimate text from documents or books to look like a normal comment. Well two things: First the text normally is not related to the post - bye-bye. Second, if you have a closer look you might realize that its just cut out from a document…

The second one is potentially more dangerous…

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Humor: (Dada) Time Waster web sites

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In the best tradition of the “dadaist” nihilistic movement from the 1920s, these sites don’t exactly do anything or provide any useful information - in short they are a bit pointless.

Remember what the “first web cam” was used for - to monitor a coffee pot. Yes that’s the spirit.

Let’s create an art out of this….

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