How connected is the UK to the internet? Very, it seems. A recent report has placed Britain in 8th place in terms of the planet’s most well connected countries. This was an improvement on last year’s figure, as the UK passed both Japan and Hong Kong in the last year. First place is still held by South Korea, while Sweden, Iceland and Denmark all come in the following places. At the other end of the table we have Niger and the Central African Republic. It is estimated that 40% of the people who live on the planet will be online before...
You Are Browsing ‘Internet’ Category
How many adults who live in the UK do you think have never, ever used the internet? You might be surprised to learn that there are apparently over 7 million people in the country who fit into this category. This surprising fact discovered during research from the Office of National Statistics. They say that 43.5 UK adults are now online, which is an increase of a million over last year’s numbers. However, the elderly and disabled remain among the most likely to stay away from the internet. Graham Walker is chief of executive of the...
The latest sustained internet attack to reach the news has affected sites which run on the WordPress platform. This hugely popular platform runs around 17% of all of the websites in the world, with its 64 million sites being read by approximately 371 million people every month. Just over a week ago WordPress increased its security measures by adding the option of a two step log in and authentication procedure. Shortly after this change was brought in a worldwide attack targeted tens of thousands of computers, according to reports from...
Have you noticed the internet going really slowly in the last few days? Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you did, as it has been under attack. In fact, it has been described as the largest cyber attack in the history of the world. It apparently all kicked off with a fight between a Dutch hosting firm called Cyberbunker and an anti spam organisation called Spamhaus, which has bases in both the UK and Switzerland. The attacks are so serious that there are currently police forces in 5 different countries involved in the investigation. How...
It might seem rather harsh to say that junk mail tends to emerge from certain countries but a recent study has confirmed that this is indeed the case. The person who carried out the investigation is based in the Netherlands and he discovered that around half of the junk mail which is out and about on the internet comes from just 20 internet service providers. Some of the Worst Countries He checked out over 42,000 ISPs to reach this conclusions and some of the figures are quite astonishing. For example, the ISP called Spectranet covers...
If you were a robot and didn’t know what to do where you turn for help? That’s right; you would go online and look for some robot buddies or some sort of robot help site. Well, now you can do exactly that. If you are a robot, of course. The helpful chaps at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have come up with an invention called Rapyuta, which has been described as an online brain. It is just the first in what is expected to become a web based information database which will help robots cope with life in the real world....
A new initiative by Facebook will result in younger users of the site being less visible to people searching under the social graph facility. The people who will be impacted by this are those who are between the ages of 13 and 17. The age and location of the youngsters will only be given to their friends and friends of their friends who are in the same age group. So, for example, if an adult were to look for 16 year old females on it they would get no results back, while a 16 year old will get results for the same search provided that...
If you are a Facebook user then you probably click on the “Like” button now and then; probably when you see something you like, if we are being honest. This might not seem like a big deal but it has been reported that legal action is going to be taken against Facebook for offering this facility. The problem is that a deceased programmer from Holland seems to have taken out patents which Facebook have allegedly infringed upon. The programmer in question was called Joannes Josef Everardus van Der Meer. A company called Rembrandt Social...
Anyone who has spent hours of their life communicating with friends and family on Windows Live Messenger may want to shed a small tear on the 15th of March. This is when the hugely popular messaging system will be switched off for good. The official word from Microsoft is that users should now move onto Skype, and they have already sent out an email of the Messenger users to this effect. The Chinese Can Keep on Messaging The Microsoft communication went on to suggest that people start to get used to the Skype service before the Messenger...
2012 was the year in which we all spent most money on downloading games, music and films from the internet. In fact, the total for the year which recently ended was a staggering £1 billion. This was an increase of just over 11% from the previous year and, perhaps more intriguingly, means that a quarter of the entertainment purchases we now make are digital. Of course, the flip side to this is that as we make more digital purchase it means that the retailers make less physical sales than before. High street shops have reported big drops...