One of the breakout stars from this year’s SXSW festival took his passion for music and his desire to create a new collaborative experience for musicians and the entire music industry to a deeper, more enriching level. MIT grad Philip Cohen has created a new cloud-based platform that transforms the way music is created. AudioCommon […]
A ruling this week means Google will have a much easier job of defending claims that it broke the law by scanning Gmail accounts. A range of people had looked to sue Google over the way it used automated scanning of messages both to produce targeted advertising that appears at the top of the inbox, […]
The American pay-TV industry as a whole has had an overall drop in subscribers for the first time. But even if it’s evidence of “cord-cutting,” the firms involved haven’t really lost out much. There have been a few cases before where individual cable firms have had a quarterly decline in pay-TV subscribers. Now Leichtman Research […]
The United States government says it wants to give up its regulatory powers over the Internet’s address system. It wants an independent body handling the coordination of DNS by September next year. The proposal comes from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the US Commerce Department. It still retains several key administrative […]
From the PBS Idea Channel: Old meme is old. But why is this such a bad thing? Once the height of internetiness, the sight of a LOLCat now is unforgivable. Memes become passé crazy fast: after just months or even WEEKS of a new meme, we tire of the once hugely popular. Why does this […]
Exactly 25 years after creating a technology now used by 40 percent of the human population, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has called for a bill of rights-style agreement for the world wide web. As we’ve covered elsewhere on Geeks Are Sexy, 12 March 1989 was the day Berners-Lee first wrote to other staff at CERN to […]
A transatlantic study has found that around a third of web domains that used to belong to now-defunct banks are now being used by other people. Thankfully only a handful are being used for outright malicious purposes, but the researchers say steps must be taken to minimize such abuse. Tyler Moore of Southern Methodist University […]
Mozilla wants to know why Dell is charging around $30 to install Firefox on new computers, contradicting its status as free software. It’s not clear how widespread the charge is. The Next Web captured the screenshot pictured above with a £16.25 (approx US$30) charge for one model on Dell’s UK site, though at the time […]
In 2011 Comcast agreed to offer a $9.95 broadband service to low-income families as one of the government conditions for being allowed to buy out NBC Universal. It’s now said it will extend that program, due to expire this fall, indefinitely. Under the program, qualifying families can get a 5 megabits per second connection for […]
Nearly half of all edits to Wikipedia are made by automated computers rather than humans according to a new study. But the bot edits are mainly on the newer language-based versions and are largely constructive. The topic is covered in a paper titled “Bots vs Wikipedians, Anons vs Logged-Ins” by post-doctoral student and Google employee […]