Americans won big on net neutrality in February, when the FCC voted to adoptnew rules that would allow it to rein in the abusive and discriminatory practices of big telecommunications operators, such as blocking or throttling of Internet data, and charging content providers for access to an Internet “fast lane.”
Four months later, while the dust hasn’t quite settled here in the United States (due to court challenges and a defunding bill), across the Atlantic the fight is still hotting up. The European Commission (the unelected executive body of the European Union) kicked things off in 2013 with a proposal to cover net neutrality, along with other telecommunications topics such as mobile phone roaming charges, in a new Telecommunications Single Market Regulation.
It’s been 10 years since Reddit first launched – basically an eternity in Web time – and it’s celebrating its birthday by looking back at its history, as well as some statistics on where the platform is today.
After a long hiatus, WikiLeaks is back in the business of leaking top-secret documents that even world leaders can’t ignore.
Slack, the much buzzed about team communications service that’s shaking up business communications, has announced that it’s passed one million active users per day. The news comes just four months after the company shared that it had passed 500,000 daily active users. The growth is fast, but not unprecedented: over the same time period in 2010, Yammer saw similar growth hitting the 1 million mark within 18 months of launching. Those figures, however, were overall user signups and not how active its user base was. Since February, Slack has also grown its paid customers to 300,000, up from 135,000. The company opened up to the world for the…
I always cringe when educational pundits talk about evaluating teachers according to “value-added” assessment models, as if the value that teachers offer their students could be easily quantified or evaluated according to any standardized metric.
Custom-made, and painfully slow, self-driving cars are now roaming the streets of Mountain View.
Mobile has the moxie and if your business hasn’t stepped up to the mobile bar, there is no doubt you’re missing out. Today we’re talking about the single most critical mobile component of your business: Your website. Is it mobile-friendly?
You’ve spotted a hot music torrent in the top 100 most popular downloads on The Pirate Bay. You’re keen to obtain it but if you grab it now, the chances are that several anti-piracy companies will monitor the transaction.
Google Photos, like Facebook or Apple Photos, has built-in facial recognition and the software can automatically organize your photos based on people’s faces. While you cannot assign names to the recognized faces, at least yet, the software algorithms can smartly identify and group photos of people to help you visually find photos quickly.
Twitter criticism has reached critical mass in the past couple of weeks, topped off by CEO Dick Costolo’s departure. One frequent complaint is that Twitter is too unorganized; when you log in and look at your stream, it’s hard to tell what the day’s most important events are.
In “Inceptionism,” scientists at Google Research describe their work training neural nets with sets of images, then tweaking the “layers” of neural net nodes to produce weird outcomes. Read the rest
The Dawn of Online Music Piracy
By 1994, the development of the first mp3 encoder was complete. Working at an audio research laboratory at Germany’s state-funded Fraunhofer Institute, engineers had labored for seven years and spent millions of dollars to develop a functioning prototype.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is trying to work out the rules for facial recognition — whether and when cameras can be put in public places that programatically identify you as you walk past and then save a record of where you’ve been and who you were with. Read the rest
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.