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Sunday, March 28, 2010

Google Says 600 Communities Seek Broadband Project

Google is planning to build a local broadband network as a test project, has received more than 600 responses from communities interested in the effort.

The company announced plans to build a fiber optic network that would serve between 50,000 and 500,000 people, providing connections that are 100 times faster than current networks. The proposed network set off a frenzy of lobbying by cities and towns across the U.S., with some holding rallies and sending gifts to Google’s headquarters.

After urging the Federal Communications Commission to expand broadband access, Google is developing the network to show the potential of high-speed Internet service. The company already offers a wireless network in its hometown of Mountain View, California.

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Thursday, March 25, 2010

No More Go Daddy Domains for China

Go Daddy is joining Google in its fight against China's Internet control.The company has announced it'll no longer register new domains in the People's Republic. There has been an apparent change in Chinese law that requires Go Daddy to now collect color headshot photos of all users trying to register new domains. In addition, the company must obtain business identification documents and physically signed registration forms from all of its Chinese customers. All that data has to be forwarded on to China's government-run Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) for "review."

Go Daddy has been told to apply the new rule retroactively, obtaining photo identification from every existing China customer and supplying it to the government.

According to CNN, U.S. lawmakers at Wednesday's hearing praised Google and Go Daddy's efforts and slammed others for not following suit.

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Monday, March 22, 2010

Chinese Media Launches New Attack on Google

China's state-run Xinhua news agency launched a new broadside against Google saying in an angry commentary that the company had reneged on promises to abide by Chinese law.

Speculation is swirling that Google will soon announce a decision to pull out of China, or at least shut down its Chinese search engine.

Two months since Google said it would no longer agree to abide by Beijing's censorship rules even if that meant shutting its Google.cn site, some Chinese Internet users and state media are baying for the company to pull out.

Xinhua, in a signed commentary, said Google had promised when it entered the Chinese market to filter its search engine for "harmful content," in accordance with the law.

A Global Times editorial cited online surveys as showing 80 percent of respondents said they could not care less if Google withdrew from China, the world's largest Internet market with an estimated 384 million users. Currently, Google offers Google Maps, Gmail and free music downloads to Chinese users, all of which could be in jeopardy if the company leaves.

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Friday, March 19, 2010

New IE9 won't run on Windows XP

Microsoft has given developers a glimpse of its next Web browser, Internet Explorer 9. When the software eventually ships, it will not run on Windows XP.

The browser, which will not be available for at least a year, will support HTML5, a Web protocol which makes it possible to play videos and other embedded content on Web pages without the need for a specialist plug-in, such as Adobe Flash.

IE9's inability to run on Windows XP will prevent it from becoming widespread until the nearly nine-year-old OS loses significant share to Windows 7. No other major browser maker has announced plans to stop supporting Windows XP, but several have dropped other operating systems or platforms.

Nevertheless, analysts believe that IE9 could help Microsoft to arrest the slide in its browser share, which has seen nearest rival Firefox slowly increasing its footprint in the browser market.

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Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Facebook traffic outpacing Google

Facebook is beginning to eat into Google’s dominance of web traffic, edgeing ahead of the search giant as the most visited website in the US, according to data released by Hitwise.

Facebook has been rapidly accelerating its market share among internet users. The social networking site also took the top ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. Facebook still has some catching up to do in order to overtake Google on a consistent basis.

Google has unveiled Google Buzz, which uses its search technology to sift through social media information with real-time updates of tweets, status updates and media streams. The programme is closely linked with Gmail, Google’s e-mail service that has about 176m monthly users.

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Thursday, March 11, 2010

Intel Core i7 980x Brings Six-Core Power to Desktops

Intel unveiled its newest flagship processor for the desktop market, the Core i7 980x Extreme. The CPU pushes the envelope by including six physical cores, and hyperthreading technology to virtualize twelve cores, its almost like having twelve computers in one.

The Core i7 975 Extreme, the quad-core processor that was Intel's previous flagship CPU for desktops, matches the new Core i7 980x with a 3.3GHz core frequency, 3.6GHz turbo boost frequency, triple-channel DDR3 memory controller, as well as a 130-watt TDP.

The main differences between the two processors is that the Core i7 980x has six physical cores as opposed to the four cores in the Core i7 975x, and that the Core i7 980x has a 12Mb cache rather than the 8Mb cache of its predecessor.

Those six cores, or twelve cores once they're virtualized with Intel's hyperthreading technology, won't do much good, though, in most cases. While Intel and AMD continue to push the processor envelope and evolving technology to higher performance standards, most software development has not kept up. With the exception of the high-end processing tasks, most businesses will have little to no reason to upgrade to the new processor.

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Sunday, March 07, 2010

YouTube adds video captions for deaf

YouTube is making the tens of millions of videos it hosts more accessible to the deaf and hard of hearing by putting automatic captions on them. The Google-owned company said this use of speech recognition technology is probably the biggest experiment of its kind online.

Initially the feature will apply to English language videos, with other languages being added in the coming months. The technology behind speech recognition has been around for about 50 years, said Google engineer Mike Cohen, and has finally become good enough to be used on a large scale.

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Tuesday, March 02, 2010

New Google Chrome Beta Instantly Translates Web Pages

Google introduced new language translation and privacy tools for its Chrome browser. Chrome now includes a beta feature that will instantly translate Web pages that are in a language different from your preferred language setting.

Chrome will display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate. The new features are available via the Chrome beta release. Those already running the beta channel will be updated automatically, and those on the stable version will be updated in the coming weeks.

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