Category: Internet
Swine Flu: Google maps and Twitter panic
The weekend’s reports of an outbreak of Swine Flu originating in Mexico have created something of a stir on Twitter and done a very interesting job of highlighting some of the major differences between the real-time search system and the more established approach of Google.
On the one hand, Google has assimilated an interesting webpage on facts of the flu on their own and other people have created Google maps pinpointing all the confirmed cases worldwide. At the other end of the scale, the speed of response and democracy of search results on Twitter has produced something closer to mass panic.
There’s been a Chinese whispers effect whereby a host of tweets built around anecdotal evidence, to put it kindly, have produced a mixed bag of misinformation and hysteria. My personal favourites are the opportunist:
and the poetic:
There must be some interesting looking log cabins in that town.
To fan the flames of total ignorance, I’d suggest that this outbreak will have a similar effect as the bird flu a few years back. We’ll see it all over the news. They’ll be plenty of reported deaths but they’ll mostly be amongst the very old and the infirm and the WHO will get a grip in it soon enough.
Meanwhile, if you find yourself hot, sweaty and oinking uncontrollably, I suggest you get yourself down the docs pronto.
(via FP)
Pirate Bay founders jailed and fined, vow to continue
It’s taken two months to get here, and now a Swedish court has jailed the four men responsible for The Pirate Bay for one year.
Despite the fact that The Pirate Bay’s servers don’t host any copyright material themselves, merely acting as a gateway for users to torrent material from others’ machines, the court has ruled that they must also pay £2.4m in damages.
A representative of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), John Kennedy, said that, “There has been a perception that piracy is OK and that the music industry should just have to accept it. This verdict will change that.”…
eBay nutcase of the week: Turbonegro bass player's hair
I have two important pieces of news for fans of Norwegian punk band Turbonegro. First bassist Thomas Seltzer, aka Happy-Tom, has cut off his hair, and second, he’s put in on eBay.
It’s a pretty healthy, if grey mottled, looking mop and the description is that it’s fresh from the scalp. The bidding’s currently reached $190 but you’ll be pleased to hear that the item is protected against loss or damage up to $100 of that.
And, just in case you were wondering if it really does belong to Tom, there are a number of photos on the auction site featuring both Mr Seltzer and his former thatch. All Turbonegro fans still conscious have 4 days 3 hours to react.
(via CMUdaily)
Kangaroo could be hopping Channel over to France
So, it looks as if the poor developers behind the Competition Commission scuppered Project Kangaroo will not have all their good work go to waste. No matter that the BBC et al couldn’t get the multi-channel video platform up and running in UK because Orange’s parent company, France Telecom, is looking to take it across the Channel.
A spokesperson for France Telecom said: “We are examining this company and we see of course that it could be interesting. Nothing has been decided but we can confirm we are examining it.”
It’d be a bit of a shame for the consumer to see what should have been our service disappear off elsewhere but, with a suspected £20m invested in the project in the first place, you can hardly blame them.
(via Brands Republic)
The internet could be run out of capacity within two years
Growth of the internet could outpace its current infrastructure within two years, claims a new report from a clutch of scientists at a university. Unless billions of dollars are invested in new fibre-optic cabling connections within the next six months, internet users could face increasing interruption of service.
“It’s going to be madness,” claimed the project leader, “Amazon will be up sh*t creek without a paddle, eBay will be all at sea, and Twitter users are going to get into a right flap.”
The study is the first to apply the equivalent of ‘Finagle’s Law’ to the internet. It’s a scientific principle which, when applied to the massive dataset collected by the scientists, predicts that things are going to rapidly start falling apart before next Christmas.
The blame has been pinned on spammers, software pirates and child-porn rings, which all use massive amounts of bandwidth – up to a 161 exabytes of data each year. “We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined,” said a leading industry analyst.
The Chinese government has been the first to respond, changing their one-child policy into a one-strike policy. Under the new system, anyone accessing the internet more than once a day will be disconnected for life. Unless similar action is taken by other world leaders, however, the problem is only likely to escalate.
A few proposals to increase the size of the internet are also on the table, but at a very early stage. One idea would see earth bouncing its communications off the rings of Saturn, using the latency inherent in such a procedure as a storage device.
Another would see the internet being put into a massive zip file, which users would have to unzip manually before use. Linux users are up in arms at this suggestion, demanding that the internet be available as a .tar.gz archive, too. Apple are also rumoured to have plans to launch their own internet, which they claim will be “really fast”.
MyID.is online identity security service launches beta
A service by the name of MyID.is has hit beta today with the aim to provide security to your online identity. It’s a pretty ambitious way for a company to claim your id on your behalf and verify all the blog posts, social networking profiles and other accounts set up in your name. It also happens to work as an OpenID.
It’s an excellent idea in theory with only three drawbacks to its success. First, to be really effective, everyone has to start using it, or at least enough people for it to be accepted and used across all major sites and applications.
There’s no reason that can’t happen but, although there are no exact competitors, there are the likes of PayPal who offer something similar in the financial realm and haven’t laid the best foundations with the best public feeling.
Second, is the issue of having to give up all your personal information and banking details to get your account set up in the first place. Now, I’m pretty happy with doing just about everything online but I can’t remember giving up the lot all on one page before. It might be tricky convincing people that it’s a good thing to do.
Lastly, what about the danger of this database being hacked? Well, at least here the company has done as much as they can by sending all the data off into a bank-like security system far, far away without even looking at it. Still not totally reassured by that but I appreciate the effort. I just don’t quite like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket and this vault might prove just too much of a tempting target to hordes and hordes of hackers – a big badge of honour and some serious rewards too.
Still, I do like the sound of what MyID.is does and perhaps once a few more people give it a try, I might pluck up the courage too.
(via TechCrunch)
Palace of Westminster blocks MPs surfing for pr0n
MPs are not allowed to surf the web as free as a bird when sitting in their Commons offices. It turns out that the Palace of Westminster blocks sites considered to be pornographic or inappropriate and, most amusingly of all, this includes the Daily Sport.
We’re led to believe that the block came to light after one MP tried to access a column on the site of the publication self-styled as “world’s most outrageous newspaper” which was written by the Member of Parliament for Montgomeryshire, Lembit Öpik.
The official line from Westminster is that all “offensive or illegal content or sources of malicious software” are blocked with a message to contact the Commons Authority if they wish to view the site. The case of the Daily Sport article was probably the first time an MP wasn’t red-faced enough to do so.
On the on hand, I think it’s important for research that all sites are available to MPs. They need to know what’s going on out there. On the other, I’m convinced they’d just be sitting around looking at pr0n all day.
Perhaps what disturbs me most of all is what an MP is doing writing for the Daily Sport at all. I’m not sure any political opinion’s going to be taken very seriously alongside such stories as “I get £20k benefits and can’t be arsed to get dressed”target=”_blank” and Clarkson’s in the sh*t(ter)!
(via BBC)
Prison Officer sacked after friending prisoners on Facebook
There are several no-nos to avoid when you’re a prison officer. Letting the inmates out for a picnic is one. Swapping places with the prisoners and pretending you’re in some kind of Bizarro World is another. Befriending them on Facebook is another equally stupid sounding mistake, but one that a Leicestershire prison officer was sacked over.
An investigation into Nathan Singh was initiated when he was suspected of providing mobile phones and other such banned items to inmates. He was really caught bang to right when it was discovered that amongst his Facebook friends were 13 criminals, even though they didn’t find any evidence of his alleged smuggling. He was sacked for gross misconduct as a result.
Teen paints 60ft penis on roof of parents' house for Google Earth's cameras
When you’re designing a million pound house, there are all kinds of things you need to check. Double glazing? Check. Burglar alarm? Check. 60 ft phallus painted on the roof? Ch… wait, what?
And that expression of surprise was probably comparable to the reaction of Andy McInnes when reporters from The Sun asked him if he was aware of the giant penis daubed in white paint across his rooftop. Unsurprisingly he wasn’t (it’s not the kind of question you answer with “why yes, of course” is it?). Turns out the stunt was his son’s dong doing – having seen a TV programme on Google Earth, he wanted to see if the giant phallus would be picked up by Google’s cameras. The answer? No, the website still shows the original pristine rooftop at the time of writing, despite the artwork being up there for over a year now.
Pirate Bay to offer improved annonymity to bit torrent users
As the Pirate Bay trial comes to its conclusion, bit torrent has once again been dragged, kicking and screaming into the light. The defendants of the case could spend their time worrying about the outcome, but instead they’ve channeled their efforts into adding more protection to keep the long arm of the law away from those who use the service for nefarious purposes. They’ve developed a new service called IPREDATOR, which promises to be better at keeping users’ details a secret than current VPN services.
The service is currently in private beta, and will be gradually rolled out to all users some time around April 1st. The significance of the date isn’t thanks to April Fool’s Day, but because that’s the date when Sweden’s contraversial new Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) come into effect, which grant copyright holders more rights to get their hands on file sharers’ details. You’ve got to hand it to the Pirate Bay – they’ve got a lot of chutspa.
