web - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• The Web vs the world: 9 epic battles

  Is the Internet ruining our lives or making them better? When you consider epic struggles like these, it's hard to say for sure.

• Server scripts, Web calendars and form handlers

  One of my recent projects has been designing and building a Web platform for Community Emergency Response Teams. CERTs are local organizations that exist to provide emergency services such as fire suppression, medical assistance and search and rescue as both first responders as well as a backup to or, if things are really bad, a replacement for official services in times of disaster.

• 200,000 BitTorrent users sued since 2010

  Since the beginning of 2010, a whopping 200,000 BitTorrent users have been sued in mass file-sharing lawsuits by copyright trolls, according to TorrentFreak.

• Facebook edges Google as most-typed URL domain

  Faceboook.com is the domain to have (count the 'o's) if phishing scams are your game. That's because it's the most popular mistyped entry into a browser URL bar, according to data collected and analyzed by Chris Finke from his browser add-on, URL Fixer. The site misleads errant visitors to believe they've won some sort of contest for Facebook users.

• SEO peddlers see value in Google's +1

  Search engine optimization companies have started targeting Google's +1 feature -- you can now pay companies to "+1" your website.

• Google websites get official URL shortcut: g.co

  URL shortening services that allow you to truncate lengthy Web addresses into shorter links have been around for a while now, but today Google announced g.co, a new URL shortener that links only to official Google products and services.

• World's first virtual heist? BitCoin user loses $500,000

  Online theft is a fact of life nowadays, but yesterday a BitCoin user woke to find his haul of virtual currency had been plundered.

• Apple sued by iCloud

  Looks like Apple finds itself in the middle of another trademark dispute over a recently revealed product.

• Cloud storage services keep data safe and accessible

  Your PC's hard drive may have half a terabyte of data on its platters, and you might not remember the last time you backed any of it up. In all likelihood, though, you use only a few gigabytes' worth of files on a regular basis. With a combination of cloud-storage services, you can keep that data backed up and synced among all of your computers automatically, and access your most essential files whenever you want.

• 'Hurt Locker' lawsuit targets 24,583 BitTorrent users

  Voltage Pictures, producers of the Oscar-winning 2009 film "The Hurt Locker," is suing 24,583 BitTorrent users for downloading the film.

• Internet 'Health Map' tracks data flow on Web

  Compuware Gomez is debuting Internet Health Map, a tool that provides nearly real-time visual data on the flow of data through the Internet. The map is so accurate that it not only covers the Internet's backbone, but also goes down to the last mile of fiber-optics in neighborhoods.

• Facebook backstabs Google and you lose

  Thanks to an anti-Google smear campaign ordered by Facebook and carried out by a PR agency, the relationship between Facebook and Google is unquestionably broken beyond repair. And that's bad news for users of both services.

• Music Beta by Google to launch without licenses

  Google's long-awaited cloud-based music player, Music Beta by Google, will launch today at the company's Google I/O conference, according to Billboard. The service will be free for US users lucky enough to get an invite from Google, with priority given to those with the Verizon version of the Motorola Xoom tablet and to attendees of the I/O conference. Unfortunately, Google didn't come to a license agreement with the major music publishers -- much like Amazon failed to get publishers' blessings with the launch of the Amazon Cloud Drive -- so Music Beta is essentially just a massive remote hard drive.

• Mozilla refuses to help censor the internet

  Mozilla, maker of the open source Firefox browser, recently told the Department of Homeland Security that if you want to censor the Internet you better have a good reason or at least a legal justification.

• Google, Samsung to announce first Chrome system at I/O?

  I/O, Google's development conference, hits San Francisco next week, but don't expect any big Chrome OS announcements. Well, not technically, at least. Samsung and Google will be hosting an event as the conference is wrapping up on the evening of May 11th at a nearby location, reportedly to launch a new Chrome-powered netbook.