This week marks the 10th birthday of Skype. To celebrate, comedian Mark Malkoff called as many countries in one week as he could and compiled the project in the video below. 162 countries later, the takeaway is that people everywhere are pretty much the same, and we all want to be happy. You probably remember […]
Skype has confirmed rumors it has been working on 3D video conferencing. But the company says it could take many years’ work before it becomes viable. Speaking to the BBC, Skype chief (and Microsoft vice-president) Mark Gillett said the company had indeed been carrying out lab work to explore 3D calls, something he said was […]
A British man has brought together two forms of communication technologies, making a tickertape machine that can print tweets. Tickertape machines were used in the late 19th century to transfer stock prices over telegraph lines, printing them out on paper tape at the destination. In effect they were simply Morse code machines that printed out […]
A website specializing in legal news relating to open source software says it will cease activity because of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. Pamela Jones, who runs Groklaw, says it’s no longer possible to guarantee confidentiality to sources. The site covered many of the patent and other legal cases relating to technology including battles […]
Using a proxy server to visit a site that has banned you could violate US law according to a court ruling. But that matter hasn’t yet been settled, and it may not apply to cases where it’s the site that has been blocked. The case involves a dispute between Craigslist and a company called 3Taps […]
It’s no secret that many Internet users have become highly reliant on Google’s services. But an as-yet unexplained outage at the company showed just how significant a part it now plays in our online life. For a few minutes last Friday afternoon, all Google services became unavailable. Google’s publicly released status notes show the outage […]
The PirateBay has launched its own web browser. The creatively-named PirateBrowser should help people who are restricted from accessing some websites, thought it’s not a guarantee of complete privacy. According to a post on the PirateBay blog (which, ironically, I had to access via a proxy server thanks to a court-ordered block by my ISP), […]
Initially priced at $7500, this awesome Reddit alien knight statue was sent as a donation from the guys over at thisiswhyimbroke.com to the reddit office as a gift. Standing over 5 feet tall – not including the large rocky mountain base – this version of the Reddit Alien was modeled after the Knights of /New, […]
Various things that happen over the Internet in 60 seconds. [Source: Qmee]
If you’ve heard that the feds raided a woman’s house after she innocently searched for a pressure cooker, and her husband for a backpack online, well, that’s not quite the whole story. Freelance writer Michele Catalono attracted intense media attention today after blogging about a raid by “six agents from the joint terrorism task force.” […]