Pingdom has conducted a study on how today's two billion internet users around the world are spread over different time zones. Study found two time zones stand head and shoulders above the others in terms of the amount of Internet users they contain: UTC+8, which passes through eastern Asia, and UTC+1, which passes through Europe and Africa. more
Gordon E. Moore, the co-founder and former chairman of Intel Corporation, passed away on Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94. Moore was widely known for his 1965 prediction, which became known as Moore's Law. more
Businesses across Europe face a new and challenging situation not seen in generations. A mass lockdown of society due to the coronavirus pandemic with thousands of businesses having been forced to send employees home. The societal impact is broad and deep; however, for ccTLD registries, beyond changes to how staff work, other business effects so far seem minimal. One aspect of registry business may, however, be changing. more
Use of search engines on a daily bases has been steadily rising from about one-third in 2002 to current rate of just under 50% according to a recent report by Pew Internet & American Life Project. With this increase, the search engine use will soon be reaching that of email which is currently 60% of internet users. The study also points out that these "new figures propel search further out of the pack, well ahead of other popular internet activities, such as checking the news, which 39% of internet users do on a typical day, or checking the weather, which 30% do on a typical day." more
Celebrating the 30th anniversary of the internet Berners-Lee, the father of the internet, reiterated his suggestion for a radical change, which would improve the functionality of the internet for the benefit of society. He suggests a sort of refoundation of the web, creating a fresh set of rules, both legal and technical, to unite the world behind a process that can avoid some of the missteps of the past 30 years. While this most certainly would be an excellent development, I am rather pessimistic about a rapid implementation of such a radical change more
Germany's Justice Minister says Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech. more
DOTZON presents the fifth edition of the Digital City Brands study. After introducing the study in early 2017, DOTZON expanded further and enhanced the data to display how cities successfully use their Digital City Brands. The Digital City Brand is the digital dimension of the City Brand and mirrors the "Digitalness" of a city. However, the Digital City Brand is much more than a mere extension of the City Brand. more
The hiQ ruling erased legal protections against commercial scraping, leaving infrastructure providers to absorb escalating costs. Without federal action defining data misappropriation, a free-rider AI economy could undermine open networks, investment, and long-term data integrity. more
As news of the spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to emerge, CSC has undertaken the first in a series of studies looking at how the development of the crisis has affected online content. This first article looks at the numbers of registered domains with names containing coronavirus-related strings - "coronavirus" or "covid(-)19" (optional hyphen) - and analyzes the types of content present on the associated websites. more
Telnic Limited, the registry operator for the .tel top level domain (TLD), today announced that its regional partner TelChina and China Mobile, a leading mobile phone company, have entered into a strategic relationship to develop Mobile-Pay services on the .tel platform. ... On this platform, users will not have to log on to various websites for payment, but accomplish it through the clicking of a Mobile-Pay link on a .tel page. more
A Chinese law that went into effect six months ago required online service providers to file details of the algorithms they use with China's centralized regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). In mid-August, CAC released a list of 30 algorithms used by companies such as Alibaba, TenCent and Douyin, the Chinese version of Tiktok, with a brief description of their purpose. more
Connected devices need a free-to-use infrastructure that allows for innovation beyond the needs of a provider or other intermediary. An interface is best when it disappears and the user can focus the problem at hand. In the same way infrastructure, is best when it can simply be assumed and becomes invisible. With an invisible infrastructure as with an invisible interface a user can concentrate on their tasks and not think about the computer. Dan Bricklin and I chose to implement VisiCalc on personal computers that people could just purchase. more
Google announced on Monday that it has been working on an open-source browser known as Chrome and that it is going to release a beta version today in 100 countries. News about the launch of Google Chrome (originally planned for announcement after the holiday weekend) was accidentally emailed to outside sources according to reports. The new browser features include "isolated" tabs designed to prevent browser crashes and a more powerful JavaScript engine. Chrome is based on the open-source software Webkit which is also used to build Google's mobile software Android. more
Royal Pingdom has a post on the Growth of the Internet in the past decade. From the post: "There were only 361 million Internet users in 2000, in the entire world. For perspective, that's barely two-thirds of the size of Facebook today. The chart really says it all. There are more than five times as many Internet users now as there were in 2000. And as has been noted elsewhere, the number of Internet users in the world is now close to passing two billion and may do so before the end of this year." more
While smartphones were an integral part of our lives before 2020, now, as a result of the changes associated with COVID, our mobile devices are virtually "super-glued" to our hands. The worldwide pandemic has heavily influenced our lives. Based on our past experiences with digital brand protection and the trends we're currently seeing, we've made five predictions regarding the future of internet usage in 2021. more