Tuesday, May 12
By Brad
Via alexkinch.com comes word of new report supplied by the firm Pyramid Research that estimates that mobile in Europe is set to explode in popularity. How big will the explosion be? From the report:
Thanks to the right conditions existing in Europe — including the wide availability and high quality of mobile broadband, attractive pricing, and user-friendly devices — the number of European mobile broadband users will reach 116.6 million in 2014, up from 24.3 million in 2008.
By Brad
Chances are you’ve at some point received a poorly worded email from a troubled Nigerian official promising you piles of money. And while most people smartly send such missives to their junk folder, some people continue to fall for the scam.
Now, Ars Technica reports, the problem has led to a new online game that’s rising in popularity: Nigerian Scammer Baiting:
Scam baiters are the vigilante enforcers who come together to waste hours, weeks, or months of 419 scammers’ lives for nothing more than the satisfaction of knowing that they are distracting them from real victims. Though the world of 419 scams has existed since long before the Internet, people continue to fall for scammers in droves—certainly, scammers are making millions of dollars every year by promising money, goods, and romance that they never deliver on. That’s part of why scam baiting has actually become a somewhat popular pastime online, with thousands of users flocking to scam baiting forums to share stories and ideas on how to string along more scammers. And hey, why not? Most of us end up spending too much time screwing around on the Internet anyway—these folks just use that time to make scammers miserable.
Monday, May 11
By IIA
Roughly one-third of households in rural America cannot subscribe to broadband Internet services at any price.
Peha, Jon M. “Bringing Broadband to Unserved Communities.” Part of The Hamilton Project, Advancing Opportunity, Prosperity and Growth. (Washington DC: The Brookings Institution). May, 2008.
More facts about rural broadband.
By Brad
TechCrunch has an interesting profile of the online video streaming service Kyte and its new iPhone app. Included is a staggering number:
In April, Kyte streamed 50 million videos across the Web, mobile devices, and social networks. Just to put those 50 million video streams into perspective, that is half the number of videos streamed in March, 2009 by AOL, the tenth ranked video site in the U.S. (Hulu, which is No, 3, streamed 380 million videos).
50 million videos in a month. That’s a lot of data. Also worth noting: As with most everything, it’s America’s obsession with celebrity that drives the streaming engine:
Of the 215,000 video channels on Kyte, nearly all are created by consumers, but only about 1,000 account for more than 90 percent of the mobile videos streamed via the service. And those 1,000 channels are invariably the work of professionals or the cell-phone videos of famous people such as musicians Lady Gaga and Soulja Boy.
By Brad
Speaking of the recent Benton Foundation broadband event, App-Rising has an extensive recap of the discussion. The full thing is worth reading, but this observation from Seattle CTO Bill Schrier stands out:
The most powerful statement Bill made was the observation that virtually the entire US is unserved. He says this because if a community were fully served it’d have fiber, yet the vast majority of Americans do not have access to this level of world-class broadband. He then took it a step further, arguing that the reason telework doesn’t work is that we don’t have universal access to high-speed, symmetrical broadband, the kind of connectivity that fiber delivers. Then he drove the point home with a series of rhetorical questions: With the stimulus are we going to build roads? Are we going to build copper? Or are we going to build fiber?
As they say, read the whole thing.
By Brad
Wi-Fi is everywhere nowadays, and as the New York Times notes, its ubiquitousness is making some pricing schemes seem outright arcane—specifically, those used by upscale hotels:
Free in-room Internet access ranked as the most desired guest-room amenity in a national survey of 800 affluent travelers conducted in August by Ypartnership, a travel marketing firm in Orlando, Fla. That was above premium bedding and flat-screen TVs. A January survey of 6,300 people across 10 countries by the research firm Synovate found that 47 percent of respondents said a hotel must cater to their technology needs before they book it, with wireless access a top priority.
“We are finding that it is now no longer an added feature to have wireless Internet in hotels, but rather it is expected,” Sheri Lambert, a Synovate senior vice president for travel and leisure research, said in a statement. “Travelers, whether for business or leisure, need to be connected.”
With some high-end hotels charging up to $17 for 24 hours of online usage, many travelers—especially in the current economic climate—are sacrificing luxury in favor of being able to be online.
By Brad
While America’s Internet remains chock full of anonymous commentators—sometimes to the detriment of society as a whole (see any comment thread on YouTube)—South Korea is cracking down on the freedom to namelessly gripe:
[E]ffective April 1 anonymous posting became illegal under certain circumstances. The new law is called the “Cyber Defamation Law.” The law provides that any Internet user making a comment or upload to a website that has over 100,000 unique visitors a day must append their real name to the comments they make. Sites must identify whether they meet the number of visitors threshold. If they do, the registration process must require the visitor wishing to post something to enter his national identification number.
By Brad
Recently, the Benton Foundation held a discussion on independent broadband. And as Ars Technica reports, rural broadband providers wanted to clear the air about rural areas and demand—namely, that despite reports to the contrary, there is a demand:
“It clearly is a myth,” declared Gary Evans of Hiawatha Broadband Communications, a rural ISP based in Minnesota. “We are not a low priced provider in any community that we serve, but we are a broadband provider.” In one rural region, Evans noted, 60 percent of the population signed up with the company “before we put a shovel in the ground.”
“Now, I would suggest to you that if there’s no demand out there, that simply would not be the case,” he insisted.
By Brad
A new report out of Britain finds that devices such baby monitors can make wi-fi pokey:
The report smashes the myth that huge congestion on overlapping Wi-Fi networks is responsible for the poor performance of Wi-Fi in urban areas. Instead, it points the finger of blame at the raft of unlicensed equipment operating on the 2.4GHz band.
“There is a view that some domestic users generate excessive amounts of Wi-Fi traffic, denying access to other users,” claims the report from wireless specialists, Mass Consutling. “Our research suggests that this is not the case, rather the affected parties are almost certainly seeing interference from non-Wi-Fi devices such as microwave ovens, Audio Video senders, security cameras or baby monitors.”
Dense areas are hardest hit by lagging, though the report goes on to note that low-density areas can also be affected—sometimes by a single device.
Friday, May 08
By Brad
Ars Technica has a fascinating report on how online auction sites like eBay—long considered detrimental to archeology due to the ease in which looters can hock their stolen goods—is actually helping to save archeological sites. The reason: The constant stream of archeological fakes has proven so lucrative that looters are no longer bothering to steal the real things.
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