Since American authorities took a hardline stance against torrent and file sharing sites, as exemplified with the recent arrest of Megaupload.com’s CEO, many similar websites and online services started to look for ways to escape arrest and prosecution. Some of these sites found solace in the Philippines, most notably KissAssTorrents that has moved to a kat.ph domain last April 2011. Another popular torrent ...

In an effort to provide education to the poorest parts of India, a group of grandmothers from the United Kingdom responded to a newspaper advertisement and became volunteers for the “granny cloud” project. Formally called SOLE (Self-Organised Learning Environments), the granny cloud is the brainchild of Professor Sugata Mitra. The work is being supported by the Newcastle University’s School of Ed...

Sergey Brin (pictured), one of Google’s founders, has warned about “very powerful forces” set to threaten the openness of the internet and is unabashed naming them. In an interview with the Guardian, Brin said that these forces have “line up against the open internet on all sides and around the world.” “I am more worried than I have been in the past around the increasingly tight ...

The Digital Age has ushered in a lot of changes in the world as we know it. Some of the technologies it brought in have led to some age-old but still popular standards in several aspects of life to go through a challenging period of change. Unfortunately some of these age-old standards have failed to recover or find renewed significance in order to remain, well, significant in today’s world. Print media may be o...

Google’s team of engineers says that Internet users leave web pages they find too slow, even if the delay is just milliseconds too long. In an interview with The New York Times, the engineers say that a delay of 400 milliseconds–as fast as a blink of an eye–would make people navigate through the web site in a much lesser time. “Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” says Googl...

Reddit, a popular user-generated content aggregation site, has been pretty adamant when it comes to advocating free speech in its website, including allowing its members to post links and photos that can be considered child pornography. The website, which is even more popular than media sites in terms of number of visits, claims it does not want to impose theirs or anyone else’s opinions to its members. How...

Looks like SOPA advocates would not like this recent study about online piracy. Researchers at the University of Minnesota and Wellesley College report that piracy does not affect Hollywood’s domestic box-office revenues. Its study shows that the presence of BitTorrent file-sharing software since early 2000s, had no effect whatsoever on U.S. receipts. “Consumers in the U.S. who would choose between the...

The tenth version of Mozilla Firefox browser rolls out today, where most of the updates are done under-the-hood. The only physical sign of the update is the “invisible” Forware button that only appears once you press Back. The new Firefox 10 comes with new API that provides full-screen viewing of web apps, anti-aliased WebGL graphics, and an “extended support release” that enables enterpris...

If you have been wondering why Megaupload.com takes so slow to load, it is because the site is under arrest. Well, not the site itself but the companies that run it along with sister site Megavideo.com. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted seven people and two companies for widespread criminal copyright infiringement and money laundering, or what DOJ likes to call it the “Mega Conspiracy.&...

Advocates of Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act raise eyebrows over the massive shut down of websites, with Wikipedia leading the way, as protests over the two bills. Texas congressman Lamar S. Smith, the author of SOPA, lambasted the Wikipedia blackout as mere “publicity stunt” that promotes “fear instead of facts.” “It is ironic that a website dedicated to providing informat...