There may be a reason. Netcraft, an Internet monitoring company that has tracked Web growth since 1995, says a mammoth milestone was reached during the month of October.
"There are now 100 million Web sites with domain names and content on them," said Netcraft's Rich Miller.
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As copyright issues loom, online video sites are casting about for ways to screen material for music videos and film clips.
For the past year, the popularity of social networking and video sharing online has lit up the technology sector. The stars of each category respectively are MySpace, with more than 50 million registered users and YouTube, which presents more than 100 million videos daily.
Now powerful entertainment conglomerates increasingly want these sites to strip themselves of copyright material. But the nail-biting truth is that while strides are being made in developing ways to weed out copyright work in audio files, little headway has been made in finding an effective way to review video.
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YouTube's popularity is proving to be a headache for a company with a similar Web address. Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment is suing the viral video site recently acquired by Google, according to a news report on WTOL-TV in Toledo, Ohio.
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A second security flaw that could cause the new Firefox 2 browser to crash has been publicly disclosed.
The vulnerability lies in the way the open-source browser handles JavaScript code. Viewing a rigged Web page will cause the browser to exit, a representative for Mozilla, the publisher of the software, said Wednesday. Contrary to claims on security mailing lists, the bug cannot be exploited to run arbitrary code on a PC running Firefox 2, the representative said.
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The website of the United Nations' Internet Governance Forum has been suspended and replaced with a cartoon dog pulling wires out of a PC.
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You'd think that of all places that should have speedy and reliable Internet access, a United Nations summit on the Internet would be high on the list.
Not quite. The organizers of the summit, held at a luxury resort hotel on the Athenian Riveria not far from the city center, couldn't even provide a working Internet connection.
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So many software downloads, so little time. Who likes to download, launch and click through that installation wizard application after application? No one, that's who - especially when you've got a computer to get set up and running quick.
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A security hole in Visual Studio is being used in attacks that target users of the developer suite, Microsoft has warned.
The flaw lies in an ActiveX control in Visual Studio 2005, the software maker said in a security advisory sent out late Tuesday. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system," the software maker warned.
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Novell has promoted Troy Richardson to president of Novell Americas and hired Maarten Koster to be president of Novell Asia Pacific, the Linux and server software company said. Richardson, formerly president and general manager of sales for Novell's northeast U.S. region, replaces Susan Heystee. Heystee has become vice president and general manager for global strategic alliances, a newly created post.
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"Microsoft has launched the sixth edition of their embedded OS Windows CE and this time has included the full source. From the article: 'Developers can now access shared source code for the Windows CE kernel -- as well as certain device drivers and application-level components -- directly from within the Windows Embedded CE 6.0 distribution package. To do this, they click on a function in the IDE that installs the shared source, and indicate their acceptance of the associated shared source license.'"
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"DailyTech has an article suggesting that Google might be involved in a partnership with the CIA. The article also quotes a former CIA officer that Google's refusal to comply with the DOJ over privacy issues was 'a little hypocritical [...] because they were heavily in bed with the Central Intelligence Agency.'"
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Technologies used by Microsoft and other online advertising outfits to analyze user behavior threaten privacy and must be curbed, a pair of advocacy groups said Wednesday.
The Washington-based U.S. Public Interest Research Group and the Center for Digital Democracy have asked the Federal Trade Commission to review--and ideally restrict--what they describe as a growing online business model dependent on technologies that "aggressively track us wherever we go, creating data profiles to be used in ever-more sophisticated and personalized 'one-to-one' targeting schemes."
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Storage giant EMC announced plans Wednesday to acquire Avamar Technologies in a $165 million cash deal, furthering EMC's efforts in the data retrieval and retention arena.
Avamar, a privately held company based in Irvine, Calif., will be integrated into EMC's storage product operations. The 7-year-old company develops software designed to remove redundancies in data before it is backed up to disk.
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Paul Flessner, who leads Microsoft's data storage and platform division, will step down from his daily duties after the new year.
Flessner, a senior vice president, is credited with the success of Microsoft's SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2000 database software.
Employees were informed of the change in an internal memo from Bob Muglia, the senior vice president of server and tools business, on Tuesday, Microsoft confirmed. Flessner is leaving to spend more time on personal endeavors and family, a company representative said Wednesday.
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Google is giving friendly bug hunters an ego-boost.
A new page, quietly added to Google's corporate Web site last month, gives information on security and safety of the company's Web properties. It also includes a list of people and organizations that Google wishes to thank for reporting security vulnerabilities to it.
That's a first among major Web companies, security researchers say.
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As of tonight, upstart photo sharing site Zooomr has increased its monthly photo upload limits for free and pro accounts. Free account holders will be allowed 100 MB of photo uploads per month and pro accounts 4 GB per month. The company emphasizes that this means Zooomr is offering 5 times as much upload for free accounts as Flickr does and is doubling Flickr’s pro account size. Pro accounts at Zooomr have been free for bloggers since July.
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An explosive device left outside of PayPal headquarters exploded last night. The explosion was powerful enough to knock out one of their plate glass windows but thankfully that was the only casualty of the blast. Perhaps they should have offered employee protection instead?
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ATHENS, Greece--When the pioneering engineers who invented the Internet began crafting the modern domain name system, they came up with a rule that was reasonable at the time: Domains must use only English-language characters.
A November 1983 specification proposed that domain names would have "only letters, digits and hyphen"--which meant that Cyrillic, Arabic, kanji or Chinese letters and characters could not be used in domains. Not even diacritical marks employed in German, French and Spanish were permitted.
On Wednesday, delegates to a United Nations summit here complained that the ASCII-only choice was representative of an Internet culture that is far too English-centric and that fails to respect other languages.
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Scrybe, the online/offline calendar and organizer with the awesome YouTube demo video we wrote about earlier this month, has launched into beta tonight. We’ve kicked the tires and can report that the parts of the service available now do deliver as advertised (see video again below). Accounts are being opened slowly but hopefully Scrybe won’t leave too many disappointed in the short term. It’s impressive and we hope that the full functionality comes online soon.
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Level 3, the supposedly secure back bone provider, has lost all services at its Braham Street data centre thanks to a robbery.
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Sony has launched what it today claimed is the world's lightest 12.1in notebook, an 898g machine constructed out of carbon fibre, though the weight pushes past 1kg if you want a machine with a bigger battery capacity and an optical drive.
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Apple Computer announced on Tuesday that the second generation of its iPod Shuffle will be available globally on Friday, Nov. 3. The 1-gigabyte screenless iPod, which retails for $79, has been the subject of much fan speculation because of Apple CEO Steve Jobs' claim that it's the world's smallest digital-audio player--it's half a cubic inch in volume.
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IBM will set up two new IT solutions centers in China and India, underscoring the Asian countries' continued importance as a hub for outsourcing.
The new centers--one in Beijing and the other in Pune in western India, will each employ 500 people, Jeby Cherian, director of IBM's global business solutions center, said Tuesday.
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Oricon on Wednesday announced its exit from Japan's PC music download market, becoming the first victim among local players to the surging popularity of Apple Computer's iTunes music store.
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As the news networks come to grips with the digital revolution, ABC News is merging the old and new world every day with an original newscast whose primary audience have video iPods.
Each of the networks has carved out a news presence on the Web. NBC News was the first among the Big Three, putting "NBC Nightly News" onto the Web and recently adding the "Early Nightly" video blog. "CBS Evening News" is simulcast on the Web.
But only ABC News creates a 15-minute daily newscast, separate from "ABC World News" though often using the same anchor, Charles Gibson. "World News Webcast" airs live at 3 p.m. ET on www.ABCNews.com and the ABC News Now digital channel. It's available for downloading on iTunes a little more than an hour later and it's popular: In September, there were 5.2 million downloads via ABCNews.com and iTunes, according to ABC. So far this month, there's been 5.2 million.
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Zend has signed a partnership with Microsoft to improve its open-source PHP software for creating dynamic Web pages, the companies announced Tuesday.
At the Zend/PHP conference Tuesday, Zend will demonstrate improvements to the PHP software that raise reliability and that double or triple its speed on Windows servers, said Andi Gutmans, the company's co-founder and vice president of technology. "We're pretty much on par with Linux," where PHP more commonly resides, he said.
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Microsoft is setting up a European business support center for mobile technologies in the Czech Republic, the U.S.-based software company said on Tuesday.
Microsoft said the new center would be the company's first of its kind in the world and would provide services to leading European mobile phone providers and manufacturers of mobile equipment from January 2007.
"Should this model prove successful, we will follow it also in other regions on other continents," Jan Sebek, the center's newly-appointed director, told a news conference.
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Notebook drives are going to get spiffed in 2007.
Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, the hard-drive division of the Japanese electronics giant, will sell hybrid hard drives that cut battery consumption for notebooks in 2007, as well as include a function that encrypts data automatically, said Larry Swezey, director of mobile hard-drive product strategy and marketing at Hitachi.
Capacity on notebook drives will increase as well. In the first half, the company will release a 2.5-inch-diameter 200GB drive that spins at 7,200 revolutions per minute, and follow it up in the second half with a 2.5-inch-diameter notebook drive that will spin at 5,400 rpm and hold about 250GB. Hitachi's largest 7,200-rpm notebook disk now holds 100GB, while the 5,400-rpm model tops out at 160GB.
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The U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secretive version of Wikipedia, saying the popular online encyclopedia format known for its openness is key to the future of American espionage.
The office of U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte announced Intellipedia, which allows intelligence analysts and other officials to collaboratively add and edit content on the government's classified Intelink Web much like its more famous namesake on the Web.
A "top secret" Intellipedia system, currently available to the 16 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, has grown to more than 28,000 pages and 3,600 registered users since its introduction on April 17. Less restrictive versions exist for "secret" and "sensitive but unclassified" material.
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In a bid to get into the black, "Second Life" publisher Linden Lab has unveiled a new pricing structure for private islands in the virtual world.
The move has angered some community members, since Linden Lab gave early warning of the price change to some developers.
Until now, anyone who wanted to buy a small private island of about 16 acres could do so by paying $1,250 and a monthly maintenance fee of $195. But as of Wednesday, the company plans to bump those fees to $1,675 and $295, respectively, for all new sales.
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Nintendo on Tuesday announced that there will be 62 titles available for its forthcoming Wii video game console within five weeks of the device's expected Nov. 19 launch.
In a statement issued late Tuesday, the Japanese company said there will be 32 new titles for the $250 Wii by the end of the year, as well as a roster of 30 classic games.
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Facebook, the No. 2 U.S. social networking site that is phenomenally popular with college students, is seeking to make it easier for other sites to appeal to its audience.
The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company on Tuesday introduced new features that allow its 11 million users to collect scraps of published content from affiliated sites--photos, news, videos--and paste these items on their own Facebook profile pages.
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Growing more food on land may be depleting the oceans of fish.
The United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) issued a warning on Oct. 19 that the number of "dead zones" in the world's oceans and seas--areas devoid of oxygen and marine life--has increased from 149 in 2004 to 200 in 2006.
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NASA said on Tuesday it would extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope until at least 2013 in a decision that involves a potentially risky space shuttle mission.
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