Category: Internet
Google blacklists ENTIRE INTERNET
Over the weekend, between 2.30pm and 3.25pm on Saturday, Google managed to blacklist the entire internet. I know that it’s a dangerous place, Goog, but that’s ridiculous. Next to every single one of its search results appeared This site may harm your computer”, and users would have to go through a warning page.
Normally, Google only flags pages this way if the site is known to host malware. Google updates its list, though, and during the weekend’s update, the website “/” was accidentally added to the list. Because that covers every website in the world, every website in the world was blocked. Nice work Google – I’m glad I’m not trusting you with pretty much all my important data. Oh… hang on a sec…
(via Official Google Blog)
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Google Street View car in SENSELESS animal slaughter shock – pictures included
For the love of GOD, won’t someone stop them?
Google’s roaming fleet of privacy-invading world-mapping cars caused a bit of a stir yesterday, when one of the people who spends their every waking hour combing Street View for photos of hookers, drugs deals going down, shootings and sunbathing ladies found this – the moment the Street View car flattened a deer.
You’d think the driver would’ve said something and told his bosses not to upload the pictures, but no. Although the photo has since been removed from the service, to…
eBay Nutcase of the Week: Jon Ward auctions date with himself for… £46
Spurred on by the sorry tale of that American slapper who auctioned her alleged virginity for several million dollars, long-term Potters Bar singleton Jon Ward decided to sell an all-expenses-paid night out with himself “in London” on eBay.
The listing’s ended, but you can read Jon’s excellent self-oriented sales speak here.
The result? A lady called “sexysarah2009” bought an evening with Jon…
British Film Council launches FindAnyFilm.com: first thoughts
Film fans, this story’s for you. The British Film Council has spent £1 million on developing a new website called FindAnyFilm. It’s been seven months in development, and aims to combine cinema listings with links to buy DVDs or downloads, or watch films online.
The implementation is very simple – just put in the name of a film, actor/actress, genre, or the name of a cinema, and you’ll be presented with a list of relevant results. It’s well-implemented, though I ran into a few launch-day bugs, like not being able to display a map of where a specific cinema was. I’m sure that kind of thing will be fixed by the end of the week.
Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundation throw their weight behind open source web video
Pay attention, because this one’s important. Web video has issues. It has issues because it’s closed, and proprietary. The vast majority of web video is delivered in the Flash format, which owned by Adobe. This means that video sites have to suffer restrictions and pay license fees. Wouldn’t it be better if there was an open source version?
Enter Theora. It’s an open-source video codec which, when combined with the Vorbis audio codec and the .OGG file format, could replace Flash as the dominant form for web video.
Internet Explorer 8 release candidate now available
Internet Explorer’s been in beta for a while now – nearly six months – so it’s nice to see that it’s finally made its way into a release candidate form. If you’re bored of the Windows 7 beta already, then why not give it a spin?
Since we last reported on it, the ‘compatibility mode’ has become automatic – switching whenever the IE8 engine can’t render a page properly, rather than having to be triggered on demand. There’s also built-in clickjacking prevention, and Microsoft has updated the InPrivate (porn) mode and the filtering system.
Internet comes of age – social networks more popular than porn sites in the UK
Times were, back in the old days when the internet was mainly for “hobbyists,” easy access to vast reserves of pornography was the big seller of PCs and, you might argue, was instrumental in the uptake of broadband. It was in my house, at least. But not any more.
Web traffic counter Hitwise reckons traffic to social networking sites out-stripped that of porn providers for the first time in the UK late last year. Hitwise says it’s all women’s fault, with 55% of social net traffic coming from lady browsers uploading photos of cats to Facebook, and, as a result, they’re spending…
Having a bad day? Bailiffs taken away your netbook? Tell the world at F*** My Life
Here’s a new social networking micro-blogging toy that Stephen Fry hasn’t signed up to yet – F*** My Life.
Founded as an IRC channel and quickly growing into full micro-blog status, the idea of FMyLife is to broadcast an unrelenting stream of misery and examples of forehead-slapping idiocy people have encountered, creating a nice antidote to the cheerful, kitten-related rubbish spewed out by most vacuous…
Internet population hits one billion, or 15% of world population
Internet stat-tracker ComScore has just announced that it reckons that world internet usage topped 1 billion in December 2008, 14.9% of the estimated population of the world in July 08. Asia-Pacific, including China, sent the most users, followed by Europe, followed by North America. However, the USA comes second in the ranking by country, with the UK in fifth.
Interestingly the stats don’t include access from public computers, like Internet Cafes, or access from mobile phones. In reality, therefore, the figure’s likely to be considerably higher. 77% of the world uses Google to search, which is a massive figure, and Wikipedia is fifth in the most-viewed-websites list, with 27% of the world visiting it. Facebook sits in seventh.
Press Release (via TheNextWeb)
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That 'friend' of yours who never buys music is safe – UK will not disconnect web access of music pirates
Hooray! The tedious and long-running saga of the UK possibly adopting the ‘three strikes’ system for disconnecting the internet access of music pirates has been dumped, with David Lammy, the Intellectual Property Minister, today saying there are “no plans” to introduce such a scheme.
Last year, everyone thought the French Technique of ordering ISPs to disconnect the harder-core of music pirates was the way to go, with the UK apparently considering adopting the idea.
However, Lammy has just told The Times that the government..
