Technology News

Google's Action Angers China, Divides Web Users

Source: All About Jazz
March 23, 2010

Google Inc.'s partial withdrawal from China brought condemnation and signs of pressure from the government Tuesday.

Meanwhile leaving Chinese Web surfers to wonder whether the company's new offshore search engine site would be blocked by censors. Google's decision to move most of its China-based search functions from the mainland to Hong Kong opened a new phase in a two-month-long fracas pitting the world's most powerful Internet company against a government that tightly restricts the Web in the planet's most populous ...

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Cracks in Great Chinese Firewall, Even Without Google

Source: All About Jazz
March 23, 2010

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are out, but in China's vast and bewildering online universe you can freely read the New York Times or visit a favorite porn site. People outside China who have read about Internet censorship -- thrown into the spotlight by Google's decision on Monday to close its mainland Chinese-language portal -- often imagine online life there is bleak and boring. The reality is very different. China's 384 million Internet users, the world's biggest online population, enjoy everything ...

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A Judge May Google to Confirm Intuition: Court

Source: All About Jazz
March 23, 2010

Jury members are still barred from trying to research a case in progress.

But lazy or clueless judges in New York get the benefit of the doubt and are legally allowed to whip out their phones to hit a search engine for a common sense question, according to a recent ruling.

Why would they need to Google something if it's common sense? The mind reels. We give props to Reuters for this deck: “It is the case of Curious Judge ...

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First Looks: Magazines on the iPad

Source: Michael Ricci
March 22, 2010

Last week, a video of online magazine VIVmag's iPad app made the rounds on the web. Featured in The New York Times as a taste of digital reading's future, this extraordinary, interactive video-infused 'zine was beautiful to watch, but left many others questioning if the expense of creating tablet-ready content like this was actually feasible.

For some, that answer - surprisingly - may be yes. According to Jeanniey Mullen, CMO of the magazine's distributor, Zinio, the cost was not as ...

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Inventor of the Web Gets Backing to Build Web of Data

Source: Michael Ricci
March 22, 2010

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and prominent researcher Nigel Shadbolt will lead a new British Institute for Web Science with $45 million in government backing. The announcement was not without its critics, but the Institute could have a world-wide impact.

The two men collaborated in helping build the excellent data.gov.uk and will now expand upon that work. Prime Minister Gordon Brown said of the move: “We are determined to go further in breaking down the walled ...

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Chinese Get Google Search Results, but Can't Click Through

Source: Michael Ricci
March 22, 2010

With Google redirecting users to its Hong Kong search engine, powerful new results now show up for sensitive subjects such as the June 4 Tiananmen crackdown, Taiwanese independence and the Dalai Lama.

But opening those links is another matter.

Connections to the banned search results are denied, much as they are for any foreign website under the purview of China's censorship machinery, known as the Great Firewall.

Search for a forbidden term one too many times, and the connection to ...

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Google to Move from China to Hong Kong

Source: All About Jazz
March 22, 2010

Web giant ends censorship of Chinese search engine. Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country.

It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market.

On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said, according to a Google translation, ...

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SXSW is a Bands' Social Network Like No Other

Source: All About Jazz
March 22, 2010

AUSTIN, Texas -- Don't expect the bands and labels gathered at the South by Southwest Music Festival to forsake MySpace, Twitter and Facebook anytime soon. Most musicians and industry players find that none of these virtual connections replace the need to shake hands, look one another in the eye or bond over a couple of Lone Star beers -- all the ways people traditionally networked socially before the internet enabled what we now call “social networking." “It started on the ...

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