Not happy with only dominating the Internet, software giant Google is looking to expand into the television business, too. It won’t be producing content, but Google will be creating software in partnership with Sony and Intel that will help bring the Internet to TVs and set-top boxes all over the land.
With the just-announced Google TV, people will be able to access web features like downloadable games, Facebook, and streaming video on their TV as easily as if they were flipping channels. Some existing televisions and set-top boxes [already] offer access to Web content, but the choice of sites is limited. Google intends to open its TV platform, which is based on its Android operating system for smartphones, to software developers. The company hopes the move will spur the same outpouring of creativity that consumers have seen in applications for cellphones [The New York Times]. Google expects that products based on its software may be ready as soon as this summer.
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There is no escape.
If you thought you spent a lot of time tweeting and reading tweets before, that number could get even higher thanks to “@anywhere,” the site’s new feature announced at Austin’s South by Southwest festival (SXSW) this week. The platform is intended to allow third-party sites to integrate Twitter more deeply and smoothly than they currently can. The idea is to offer a more seamless experience to Twitter users navigating third party sites like the Huffington Post and the New York Times, giving them Twitter content without forcing them to jump off the page they’re currently viewing [TechCrunch].
Twitter CEO Evan Williams went fairly light on the specifics of the new system, and gave no release date, during his keynote Q&A at SXSW, but some details have come out. The way Twitter has described it, @anywhere will allow readers of articles at The New York Times and other sites to click and follow writers directly from their bylines, and—judging by what Evan Williams told Anil Dash on Twitter—will also let them click and see information about popular Twitter users who are mentioned on a participating site [BusinessWeek]. By expanding the microblogging site’s reach, @anywhere appears to be Twitter’s answer to Facebook Connect, but BusinessWeek complains that the feature—at least based on what people know about it right now—isn’t much to write home about.
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You never know who is checking out your Facebook profile, reading your tweets, or looking at your MySpace messages. But if you broke the law or are under scrutiny from the feds, then the FBI may already be “following” your online activities on different social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn.
A new internal Justice Department document obtained by San Francisco-based civil liberties group, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), details how federal agencies like the IRS and the FBI are now using social media to monitor suspects’ online activities and also track down their whereabouts. The document, obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, makes clear that U.S. agents are already logging on surreptitiously to exchange messages with suspects, identify a target’s friends or relatives and browse private information such as postings, personal photographs and video clips [AP].
The investigators are also using the sites to check suspects’ alibis with details of their whereabouts posted on Facebook and Twitter. And online photos from a suspicious spending spree — people posing with jewelry, guns or fancy cars — can link suspects or their friends to robberies or burglaries [AP].
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The Iranian government announced yesterday that Google’s email service, Gmail, will be permanently shut down in the country, and will be replaced by a new state-run email service.
The announcement from the Iranian telecommunications agency came on the eve of the 31st anniversary of the Islamic Republic, when anti-government protesters were expected to take to the streets. Less than a year ago, thousands of protesters came out in huge rallies protesting the disputed June presidential election. The protests plunged Iran into its biggest internal crisis since the victory of Islamic revolution in 1979 which toppled the Shah [Reuters]. The opposition rallies were watched across the world on YouTube videos, and protesters not only blogged about the events but were also very vocal on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Tehran insists locking down Gmail is meant to boost local development of Internet technology and to build trust between people and the government [Wall Street Journal]. Meanwhile, Google confirmed a sharp drop in traffic in Iran and announced that many Iranians appeared to be having trouble accessing Gmail. The company added that Google strongly believes that people everywhere should be able to communicate freely online.
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For folks who already spend most of their time updating Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts, here is one more site to add to the mix. None other than Google has decided to jump into the social networking fray by launching Google Buzz–a social networking tool that is also integrated with email and mobile phones.
Buzz can be accessed through any Gmail account and lets users share updates, photos, links, or anything else with their Gmail contacts. Bloggers have likened it to Twitter, except that it dwells within your Gmail. Google has already rolled out Buzz to some journalists, and Gmail users can expect to see it within their inboxes over the next couple of days.
The Buzz tab will be located right below your inbox tab. To get someone started with Buzz, Gmail is expected to pull info about the user’s contacts to create a list of people who the user frequently emails and instant messages with. This list becomes the blueprint for the people the user “follows.” The user can then “buzz” them, sharing pictures and links. When a user posts to Google Buzz, he can share publicly to followers and his Google profile, or privately to his existing Gmail groups or custom groups. Notifications of shares and comments will appear in a user’s inbox with a special Buzz icon next to those items. Comments will appear in real time [ReadWriteWeb].
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It’s been little over a week since the beginning of the spat between Google and China over censorship and hacking attacks. But that was more than enough time for the fracas to escalate into international political tensions and name-calling.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joined in today. In a wide-ranging speech in Washington, Mrs Clinton said the internet had been a “source of tremendous progress” in China but that any country which restricted free access to information risked “walling themselves off from the progress of the next century” [BBC News]. In taking a foreign policy stand on information freedom, she also singled out other countries that she says harass bloggers or promote censorship and called on other companies to follow Google’s lead in taking a stand against restrictive governments.
“A new information curtain is descending across much of the world,” she said, calling growing Internet curbs the modern equivalent of the Berlin Wall [Reuters].
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When your kid isn’t in class, he/she is probably listening to an iPod, flipping TV channels, or switching between tabs on their computer, which means they may be juggling between Myspace, Facebook, and YouTube–in other words, kids today are staying hyperconnected and wired through their waking hours. That reality is confirmed by a new study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which reveals that if your kids are awake, they’re probably online [The New York Times].
In the third of a series of large-scale national surveys, the Kaiser Foundation study found that kids between the ages of 8-18 years now spend an average of 7 hours, 38 minutes per day using entertainment media. That adds up to more than 53 hours of entertainment consumption in a week. And this does not include the time kids spending texting or talking on their cell phones.
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Are the world’s most popular search engine and the world’s most populous country headed for a breakup? That’s the word reverberating around the Internet today after Google said it would no longer put up with the Chinese government’s demands to censor the Internet and the rampant hacking attempts against it, which could result in the company ending its Chinese operations.
The announcement came as a stunning reversal for Google, which had capitulated to the government’s wishes to gain access to China’s fast-growing population of Internet users. Since arriving in 2006 under an arrangement with the government that purged its Chinese search results of banned topics, Google has come under fire for abetting a system that increasingly restricts what can be read online [The New York Times].
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There’s nothing like the launching a company from your college dorm room that achieves global Internet hegemony within a few years to make you think you can offer royal pronouncements about how the world has changed.
OK, so that was a bit melodramatic. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg earned some howls and guffaws in the last few days over his statements saying that, in a nutshell, people aren’t terribly interested in privacy anymore. Specifically, he said:
“In the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that’s evolved over time.”
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After a long weekend of Las Vegas fanboy salivating, another year of the Consumer Electronics Show has come to a close. Here are DISCOVER’s choices for the most important storylines among the flood of gadget-philia emanating from the desert.
1. OMG, It’s Coming Toward Us!
Between the unstoppable worldwide phenomenon that is “Avatar” and ESPN rolling out 3D broadcasts for this summer’s FIFA World Cup, 3D is back with a force not seen since the crazes of the 1950s and 80s. The bandwagon has close to universal industry ridership‚ almost every major manufacturer is launching 3D sets at CES this week, the Blu-ray format will support 3D and many gaming consoles should soon follow suit [Popular Mechanics]. But unless you’ve got a big wad of extra cash burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to wait a while before taking the 3D dive, tech experts warn. 3D TVs will come with plenty of sticker shock at first, there won’t be very much content to watch on them… and oh yeah, you’ll still have to wear those stupid glasses.
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The world’s largest network of fully wired undersea science stations has gone live off Canada’s western coast. The NEPTUNE network has begun streaming data from undersea instruments and sensors located on the Pacific Ocean floor directly to the Internet. The network is expected to produce 50 terabytes of data annually, all of which will inform scientists about everything from earthquake dynamics to the effects of climate change on the water column, and from deep-sea ecosystems to salmon migration [Scientific American].
NEPTUNE will also feature a deep sea rover nicknamed Wally that will measure the temperature, salinity, methane content, and sediment characteristics on the ocean floor. The $100 million project will produce more than pretty pictures and a fire hose of data—it can also provide advanced tsunami warnings that could save both lives and money.
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There’s nothing like a flashy statistic to get some attention, and scientists at the University of California, San Diego did just that by calculating the total amount of data consumed in the United States in 2008. The final tally? About 3.6 zettabytes (or 3.6 billion terabytes). That number works out to about 34 gigabytes per American per day. Put on paper, [the 3.6-zettabyte total] would be equal to 7-foot stacks of thick paperback novels placed side-by-side across the entire United States, including Alaska, said Roger Bohn, the study’s author and director of the university’s Global Information Industry Center [San Diego Union-Tribune].
Since the researchers excluded things people read for their work from the study, computers are only third in the total amount of time spent per information source. Most of this time is spent in front of screens watching TV-related content, averaging nearly five hours of daily consumption. Second is radio, which the average American listens to for about 2.2 hours a day [The New York Times]. Even without work hours, the researchers say, Americans log 1.3 trillion hours of information-gathering in a year, be it from print, online, TV, radio, or other sources.
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How long does it take to solve a nationwide scavenger hunt? If you’re a bunch of MIT whiz kids, just less than nine hours.
As DISCOVER covered last week, DARPA, the Defense Department’s mad scientists, devised a contest to study the spread of information with $40,000 of prize money for the winning team. The task was to be the first to find all 10 red balloons scattered at secret locations around the country and report them to the DARPA Web site.
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One year ago today, a brain-damaged man died peacefully at the age of 82, and neuroscientists the world over learned the identity of the man who was referred to in the textbooks only as “H.M.” Henry Gustav Molaison lost much of a brain structure called the hippocampus during an operation in the 1950s. The procedure was meant to stop his epileptic seizures. However, the hippocampus is critical to memory formation, so the surgery left Molaison unable to form new long-term memories [New Scientist]. By studying Molaison’s behavior over decades, researchers learned an enormous amount about memory formation.
Today, researchers at The Brain Observatory in San Diego are taking the next step in studying the workings of Molaison’s brain: They’re slicing it up. During Molaison’s life, he and his guardian agreed that his brain should be donated to science upon his death. So his brain was frozen, and beginning today it will be cut into about 2,600 very thin slices (think deli meat). Each slice will be photographed, and many will be studied microscopically to determine exactly which parts of Molaison’s brain were damaged in that long-ago operation. The slicing operation, which began about an hour ago, is being streamed live on the Internet, although it’s hardly a gripping action sequence (it looks more like scientists going about their business in a lab). In addition, the photos of the brain slices will soon be posted online for all the world to marvel at.
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To celebrate the Internet’s 40th anniversary, DARPA, often referred to as the mad scientist wing of the Pentagon, will award a $40,000 prize to the first person or group to find all 10 of DARPA’s big red weather balloons.
But the contest is not all fun and games. DARPA is studying the participants to learn more about how large online groups share resources and compete using social networks. During the DARPA Network Challenge, each of the 10 red balloons will be placed in hidden but publicly accessible locations during the daylight hours of December 5. Would-be balloon hunters can start registering for the challenge on December 1, and have until December 14 to submit balloon locations to the contest website [Popular Science]. The agency has dropped a few vague clues, but they are mostly leaving it up to the balloon seekers to figure out how to conduct their search. DARPA will stand by and observe the contestants, collect data, and interview those involved about their search methods.
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