internet

The Pandora Internet radio service will stop broadcasting to British listeners after the 15 January thanks to a dispute over royalty payments. The site plays music based on the listener's favourite artists or tracks. It analyses songs for musical ... styles, pace, tone and instrument to find similarities between tracks. Users can give a thumbs up or thumbs down to each song they hear (similar to the way TiVo works), decisions that directly affect what new songs will be played in future. The idea is to create a radio station customized for the individual listener. In the United States, licensing ... (view more)

Who will Americans choose in 2008 to lead the country into a new decade? Republican? Democrat? Conservative? Liberal? Independent? The conventional wisdom is to compare the various presidential candidates on all the so-called "popular" issues: ... things like immigration, Roe vs. Wade, the war in Iraq, the economy, Global Warming, and health care. But the stance a president takes on 'high' technology can also result in world-changing events and may be more important than you think. Don't believe it? Consider President Kennedy -- his going-to-the-moon objective catalyzed years of technology ... (view more)

A report from the Associate Press reveals details of a telephone survey of 1,623 Internet users conducted between Nov. 30, 2006 and Dec. 30, 2006 by Pew Internet and American Life Project showing that more Americans are Googling themselves, their ... friends, co-workers and romantic interests. According to the report from Pew, 47 percent of U.S. adult Internet users have searched for information about themselves through Google or another search engine, more than doubling the 22 percent of users from the previous survey conducted in 2002. About 60 percent of Internet users aren't worried about the ... (view more)

The rise of online video sites could cause major problems for the Internet as a whole, according to researchers. The amount of traffic on the web is increasing much quicker than its capacity. Brett Swanson of the Discover Institute says this is most ... likely to affect the 'edges' of the Internet, the final mile or so of cabling between telephone exchanges and peoples homes. He has coined the phrase 'exaflood', which refers to an exabyte, or one thousand million gigabytes of date. Until recently, an exabyte had simply been a mathematical concept, but Cisco estimates total Internet traffic will ... (view more)

Scared about holiday spam and spyware messages? Although it's some ways off, Symantec is now just a few weeks away from shipping a test edition of its next significant update to the Norton 360 security/backup formula. The finished product is ... expected to wrap up early this spring, shipping by the time March wraps up. So, what's under the hood of this new Norton 360 (for now dubbed 'version 2.0)? Preventative measures against Internet hackers and identity thieves A "Smart Firewall" that reportedly uses behavior-based methods to weed out incoming threats New software that can be used to back up ... (view more)

Although separated by just a small strip of water known as the English Channel, Britain and France have often shared very different political opinions. Though today the two are firm allies, culturally it appears that they each have very unique ... attitudes towards one major facet of modern technology and web use: illegal downloading. In a recent move, the French government announced it would be creating a specialized anti-piracy body with greater-than-average powers to weed out those suspected of illegally downloading music and movies. In a bold statement on the new policy, French President ... (view more)

Congress has been occupied with several matters concerning the Internet recently. The legislative body recently gave the 'go ahead' to measures that should make broadband service more accessible in the future. On Tuesday of last week, the House of ... Representatives approved H.R. 3919 which requires the government to survey the current availability of broadband access by counting the number of household and corporate subscribers. Based on that data the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) will then develop a map displaying accessibility distribution throughout the ... (view more)

The group behind the regulation of website addresses is planning the first step to a multi-lingual Internet. The International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is working to allow top level domains to be registered in languages ... which do not use the Latin alphabet. This is the set of 26 letters, also known as the Roman alphabet, used in languages such as English, French of German. The top level domain is the part of the website address which identifies the type of site (such as .COM or .NET) or the country of origin (such as .CA for Canada). ICANN have launched the project by ... (view more)

We hear a lot about Internet threats as they develop, but how are these scares addressed by the government? According to one survey, the potential for disaster has convinced about 65% of the country's government-employed IT managers to spend more ... time on security than they did in 2006. The recent survey was conducted by Cisco Systems, no slouch in the security sphere. The security firm found that spyware and bots remain the top concern of most answering the survey, with security breaches and poor training finishing second and third. Part of the reason for spyware's infamous rise has something ... (view more)

Just weeks after Microsoft made a big score by buying up part of rising web titan Facebook, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has now stated that it will be clamping down on Internet advertising. It's a measure the group hopes will ... reduce the amount of user tracking associated with the practice. According to John Leibowitz, the FTC's commissioner, the initiative is meant to keep children safe while they're clicking around online. If Mom or Dad views a not-so-appropriate site, there's a chance that marketing tools custom-designed for the individual and his or her tastes will pop ... (view more)