Netflix on Wednesday lost almost 1,800 titles from its streaming library as licensing deals with studios like MGM, Warner Bros. and Universal expired. Titles now removed from the catalog include all 15 seasons of South Park, classic James Bond films like Dr. No and Goldfinger, and Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories. A Netflix spokesperson told The Verge that “Netflix is a dynamic service, we constantly update the TV shows and movies that are available to our members.” He added that as of May 1st, the company added more than 500 new titles such as ParaNorman and The Hunger Games. The spokesperson said that a “vast majority” of the expired titles were older features from an expired deal with Epix, noting that “this ebb and flow happens all the time.” More →
Today marks a hugely important day in the history of the Internet: On April 30th, 1993, Al Gore published the world’s first ever public website. Ok, so perhaps Mr. Gore wasn’t involved, but today is indeed the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web becoming available to the public. Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN headed the WWW project and published the world’s first public web page at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. To celebrate the 20-year milestone, CERN decided to bring the page back online in its original form. The resurrection of the world’s first web page is part of a larger effort at CERN to revive the web’s early history, and the page is now live for everyone to enjoy.
Many subscribers will be in for a surprise when the latest issue of Forbes Magazine arrives on doorsteps and newsstands. Microsoft has embedded a Wi-Fi router in select copies of the May 6th print edition of the magazine, which gives users 15 days of free Wi-Fi through T-Mobile. The free Wi-Fi is part of Microsoft’s latest campaign to promote its subscription-based Office 365 service. The router lasts for three hours before it must be recharged using the included microUSB cable. Once activated, up to five devices at a time can be connected to the hotspot until the free service expires.
As someone who pays Time Warner Cable more than $50 each month for Internet service that promises 30Mbps down and just 5Mbps up, I would welcome Google Fiber’s $70 gigabit Internet service with open arms. Forgetting for a moment that TWC doesn’t even provide me with service that reaches the speeds it promises, I’m just tired of paying the company so much and getting so little in return. But in a world where cable companies are allowed to build mini-monopolies in cities and towns across America, I have no choice — I can either keep paying for bad service from Time Warner, or I can pay almost as much for even worse service from a DSL provider. More →
Spanish officials have arrested a Dutch citizen in northeast Spain for his involvement in what has been called the biggest cyberattack in Internet history. The suspect is said to have operated a hacking bunker in a van that was equipped with “various antennas to scan frequencies” that he used to evade authorities. The unnamed individual, who was only identified by his initials S.K., is accused of launching several large denial-of-service attacks on Internet servers in the Netherlands, United Kingdom and the United States, and also of attacking Spamhaus, a Swiss-British watchdog group that blocks spam advertisement for counterfeit Viagra and fake weight-loss pills from reaching Internet inboxes. The Associated Press reports that the 35-year-old male was arrested in the city of Granollers on Thursday by Spanish authorities acting on an arrest warrant issued by Dutch authorities. The suspect is expected to be extradited from Spain to the Netherlands where he will stand trial.
Imagine a world where the Nasdaq, the Nikkei and the FTSE all failed within the span of a week and you have an idea how crazy the world of virtual currency trading has become. Wired reports that a new study from computer scientists Tyler Moore of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University has found that 45% of Bitcoin exchanges end up shutting their virtual doors while leaving their users’ money in limbo. However, this doesn’t mean that the Bitcoin exchanges that have survived so far are safe havens, since the study also shows that they’re under constant assault from cybercriminals who are working around the clock to hack users’ transactions. More →
Google’s ultra-high-speed Google Fiber Internet service won’t be accessible to most Americans for quite some time, but the revolutionary service’s impact is already being felt even by those who don’t subscribe to the service. As noted by MIT’s Technology Review blog, Akamai’s annual state of the Internet report was released recently and it does a great job of highlighting Google Fiber’s ripple effect. More →
A study published this week by the USC Annenberg Center for the Digital Future found that young adults don’t care as much about online privacy as older Internet users. Individuals between the ages of 18 and 34, known as Millennials, were found to be more willing to hand over their personal data or web behavior to online businesses. Although 70% of young adults agreed that companies should never be allowed to access their personal data, compared to 77% by those older than 35, Millennials were more willing to give up some privacy if they benefited from it, such as receiving coupons or other business deals. More →
Data caps for home broadband services have been one of the less popular innovations ISPs have rolled out over the past couple of years and now one activist group is demanding that the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission conduct a formal investigation into ISPs’ practice of capping how much data their customers can consume per month. The group, which is sponsored by Public Knowledge and includes representatives from the National Film Society and several online content creators, has launched a new website called “Don’t Cap That” that urges lawmakers to “insist that the next FCC Chair commit to making a detailed examination of data caps a priority during his or her tenure.” The group says that it opposes broadband data caps because they are “an easy way for existing pay television providers to make their online video competitors less attractive to viewers” and that it wants the next FCC chairman to “recognize the threat that data caps pose to the future growth of the internet, and to the growth of online video specifically.”
Apple’s iTunes has long dominated the market for online music purchases and it seems that it holds a similar stranglehold on the market for online movie and TV show purchases as well. New data from the NPD Group shows that iTunes accounts for 65% of all online movie downloads and 67% of all online TV show downloads, putting it significantly ahead of both Amazon Instant Video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 8% of TV show downloads, and Xbox video, which accounts for 10% of movie downloads and 14% of TV show downloads. NPD analyst Russ Crupnick says that iTunes has stayed on top of the online video market because “Apple has successfully leveraged its first-mover advantage and of iTunes, iOS and the popularity of iPhone and iPad” to secure an enduring market advantage.
Akamai published its quarterly State of the Internet report on Tuesday covering global Internet speeds and Internet security from the last quarter of 2012. South Korea remained the leader in terms of Internet speeds, averaging a connection of 14 Mbps, TechCrunch reported. Speeds have fallen in the Asian country, however, by 4.8% since the third quarter of 2012 and by a whopping 13% since 2011. The United States ranked eighth in the world with an average connection speed of 7.4 Mbps, an increase of 28% year-over-year and of 2.3% since the third quarter of 2012. More →
The Internet isn’t the outlet of freedom and prosperity it used to be. The truth of the matter is that big name companies such as Google, Apple and Microsoft control and censor what we see online. As noted by Tristan Louis at Forbes, an individual can’t reach a majority of Internet users without the approval of a large company. If Google or Apple deem an application isn’t suitable, they can keep it out of their mobile app stores — and the same can happen with a webpage if it’s unlisted on Google or even Bing. More →
