The Pew Research Center has surveyed Americans on their tech knowledge to celebrate 25 years of the World Wide Web. The results are bafflingly mixed: 69 percent correctly identified URL as standing for Uniform Resource Locator (albeit as a multiple choice answer) but only 23 percent knew that the web and the Internet are not one […]
A leading Twitter executive has mistakenly tweeted about plans to buy an unnamed company. It’s an embarrassing blunder, but it could have been worse. Anthony Noto, the company’s chief financial officer, posted a tweet that read: I still think we should buy them. He is on your schedule for Dec 15 or 16 — we […]
Google is experimenting with a way for users to pay a monthly fee to hide ads from some sites. The participating sites will then get a cut of the money. Google Contributor will allow web users to pay $1, $2 or $3 a month to take part: it doesn’t appear the amount you pay makes […]
The designer of a special font aimed at people with dyslexia says more than 12,000 people have downloaded it since he made it available free of charge for home use. The Dyslexie font is designed to deal with a conflict between the ways many fonts are designed, and one of the ways dyslexia makes reading […]
President Barack Obama has given his clearest backing yet to net neutrality principles. He’s urged the Federal Communications Commission to not just tighten its rules, but make a key change to its rulemaking process. The White House has released both a written and video statement from Obama commenting on the ongoing call for public feedback […]
Around 900 games from console arcades are now available to play online in your browser. It’s a fun diversion, but the man behind it points out that performance is unpredictable at best. The release of the games at the Internet Archive site brings together work from two different projects. The games are largely the result […]
The Internet is awesome for at least 4 billion reasons, but I’ll let Pomplamoose do the job for me since her voice is far prettier than mine. From Pomplamoose: This is a live performance using a Launchpad, Impulse midi controller, and Ableton Live. Filmed in one take, start to finish. No overdubbing or lip syncing! […]
Facebook has made its site available to users of the Tor network, creating an odd mix of anonymity and accountability. On the face of it, Facebook over Tor doesn’t seem to make much sense: if you feel the need to obscure your Internet connection, it doesn’t seem likely you’d want to post publicly under your […]
The Hungarian government has proposed a metered tax on using the Internet. It’s led to “thousands” of protesters taking part in dramatic demonstrations that appear to be having some effect. The tax would technically be applied to internet service providers rather than consumers. The ISPs would be charged 150 forints (a little over 60 US […]
Google has announced tweaks to downgrade the position of links to piracy websites in its results. But the way it is doing so is still upsetting legitimate content providers. The changes, already dubbed the “Pirate update” in the search industry in reference to the previous “Panda” update, cover three tactics to try to make results […]