PayPal sets down stricter regulations for file-sharing sites

 Internet News  534 Responses »
Jul 112012
 

After cutting ties to Wikileaks in 2010, and after this year’s raid against Megaupload, PayPal is now imposing increasingly stringent conditions on various online file-sharing sites. According to TorrentFreak, PayPal has recently changed its terms of service, making requirements for file-sharing and newsgroup services far tighter than before.

The payment service, owned by eBay, now requires that “merchants must prohibit users from uploading files involving illegal content and indicate that users involved in such file transfers will be permanently removed from their service,” and that “merchants must provide PayPal with free access to their service, so PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy department can monitor the content.”

Not surprisingly, locker sites are already grumbling about the changes.

MORE: PayPal sets down stricter regulations for file-sharing sites | Ars Technica.

 

Firefox Developer: ‘Everybody Hates Firefox Updates’

 interface, Internet News  487 Responses »
Jul 102012
 

Mozilla’s Jono DiCarlo has come out to say what many a Firefox user has long been thinking: the rapid release cycle is killing Firefox.

DiCarlo has a long and well-argued post on how and why Firefox’s attempts to ape Google Chrome have not only made the browser less usable, but done the very thing Mozilla was trying to prevent — driving people to switch to Chrome.

The problem, argues DiCarlo, isn’t just the rapid releases, but the way Mozilla has handled them:

Ironically, by doing rapid releases poorly, we just made Firefox look like an inferior version of Chrome. And by pushing a never-ending stream of updates on people who didn’t want them, we drove a lot of those people to Chrome; exactly what we were trying to prevent.

That squares with the user feedback Webmonkey has received over the last year or so of rapid Firefox updates — comment after comment of fed-up users tired of the endless updates and dialog boxes. Less anecdotally, Webmonkey traffic from Firefox has declined from roughly 34 percent to roughly 30 percent since Firefox 4 and the rapid release cycle debuted.

MORE: Firefox Developer: ‘Everybody Hates Firefox Updates’ | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Is internet display advertising really dead?

 interface, Internet News, Marketing  341 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

In a recent blog post, John Battelle writes, “Display advertising is dead. Or put more accurately, the world of ‘boxes and rectangles’ is dead. No one pays attention to banner ads, the reasoning goes, and the model never really worked in the first place (except for direct response). Brand marketers are demanding more for their money, and standard display is simply not delivering. After nearly 20 years, it’s time to bury the banner, and move on to…well something else.”

As a director of digital media at Rosetta, a focus of my role is on display and its role within our clients’ media mix, so reading John’s article raised some questions for me. If he’s right, and “display is dead,” what’s the next phase of digital marketing? I think the answer to that question depends largely on the advertiser’s business objective.

MORE:  Is display really dead? – iMediaConnection.com.

 

6 Ways to Stay on Top of Social Media

 Education, Internet News  356 Responses »
Jul 092012
 

To be successful in social media and community management you need to keep track of the constant changes to that ecosystem. That’s because everything you know about Facebook, Twitter, and other social spaces today will somehow be different in six months. Layouts will be altered, features will be added or removed, and new social networks may pop up.

So how should you keep track of all these moving parts? Here are six tips for staying on top of social media.

MORE:  6 Ways to Stay on Top of Social Media.

 

LiveRail, Google Make Publisher-Side Ad Blocking Announcements

 Internet News, Marketing  276 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Presumably, no Democratic candidate wants to appear on the conservative Breitbart website, and no cruise line wanted its ad to accompany a story on the January Costa Concordia cruise ship disaster, but both have happened. Both Google and LiveRail, the the real-time video ad platform for publishers, networks and agencies, made announcements on Tuesday about ad blocking technology that allows publishers to filter “inappropriate” or simply ill-suited ads from ther pages.

LiveRail unveiled its “Checkpoint” tool that lets premium video publishers control which advertisers and video creatives are delivered within their private exchange or real-time bidding (RTB) environments, with the ability to block unwanted ads before serving them to a viewer.

The technology allows publishers to quarantine and block potentially inappropriate ads from categories like alcohol and tobacco, or those containing violent or risqué content, which may have otherwise been served to viewers from third-party buyers like ad networks and DSPs.

MORE: LiveRail, Google Make Publisher-Side Ad Blocking Announcements – MarketingVOX.

 

Google to Shut Down iGoogle

 Internet News  271 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Google has a long history of unceremoniously killing off its less-used services, having previously axed once-high-profile efforts like Wave, Buzz, Knol and Gears, among others.

The most notable Google service on the chopping block this time is iGoogle, the company’s customizable homepage. Similar to Netvibes, MyYahoo or the now defunct PageFlakes, iGoogle was a dashboard for the web, allowing users to embed gadgets like weather, email and news.

When iGoogle first launched in 2005 it was something of a me-too effort, duplicating features found in other services, but adding numerous Google-centric gadgets. Eventually iGoogle’s gadget selection grew to encompass everything from feed readers to web-based games.

Citing the growth of mobile and web apps that “put personalized, real-time information at your fingertips,” Google says “the need for iGoogle has eroded over time.”

Fans of iGoogle don’t need to panic just yet, Google doesn’t plan to completely shut the service down until November 1, 2013.

MORE:  Google to Shut Down iGoogle | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Twitter to unveil major search and discovery update today

 Internet News  376 Responses »
Jul 062012
 

Twitter could be planning a major update to its search and discovery feature later today, according to one of its employees.

Twitter’s Pankaj Gupta, who runs the company’s Personalization and Recommender Systems, sent out a tweet yesterday congratulating his team on an improvement to its search and discovery tools that, he says, will dramatically change the service.

“Search and discovery in Twitter [is] set to change forever after tomorrow,” Gupta tweeted. “Team — congrats and enjoy the enormity of your impact few understand today.”

Twitter has quickly realized that improving the user’s ability to access relevant information from the service is a key component in its future.

MORE: Twitter to unveil major search and discovery update today

 

Adobe Not Developing Flash Player for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

 interface, Internet News  179 Responses »
Jul 052012
 

Upcoming Android 4.1 Jelly Bean devices, starting with Google’s recently unveiled Nexus 7 tablet, will not receive official Flash Player support from Adobe. Moreover, Adobe announced plans to pull Flash Player from the Google Play Store on August 15 for unsupported devices, and while you can expect Flash updates to roll out for older hardware running Android 4.0 or earlier, it’s clear the future lies in HTML5.

“Devices that don’t have the Flash Player provided by the manufacturer typically are uncertified, meaning the manufacturer has not completed the certification testing requirements. In many cases users of uncertified devices have been able to download the Flash Player from the Google Play Store, and in most cases it worked. However, with Android 4.1 this is no longer going to be the case, as we have not continued developing and testing Flash Player for this new version of Android and its available browser options. There will be no certified implementations of Flash Player for Android 4.1,” Adobe confirmed in a blog post.

MORE:  Maximum PC | Adobe Not Developing Flash Player for Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

 

10 essential security tips: protect your site from hackers

 Internet News, Web Design  39 Responses »
Jul 042012
 

You may not think your site has anything worth being hacked for, but websites are compromised all the time. The majority of security breaches are not to steal your data or deface your website, but instead attempts to use your server as an email relay for spam, or to setup a temporary web server, normally to serve files of an illegal nature. Hacking is regularly performed by automated scripts written to scour the Internet in an attempt to exploit known security issues in software.

MORE:  10 essential security tips: protect your site from hackers 

 

The Internet died two deaths over the weekend

 Internet News, Tech News  378 Responses »
Jul 022012
 

The Internet died two short deaths this weekend. On Friday, a thunderstorm near Washington, D.C. knocked out Amazon’s servers (which also hosts Instagram and Netflix). Last night, a leap second knocked out a good bit of the Internet.

The thunderstorm story is pretty obvious. A storm knocked out a bunch of servers and left 1.5 million in the D.C. area without power.

The leap second story is more interesting.

Once in a while, all the atomic clocks across the world pause for one second. This time it was at 12:00a Greenwich Mean Time that all the atomic clocks paused, something that has happened 24 times since 1972. Not exactly common.

A lot of electronic devices link to the atomic clock, and these devices aren’t used to seeing the same second twice. And last night, when they did, things went to hell. Many sites, including Yelp, Reddit and the Gawker family were down.

One notable one wasn’t, though. This one inevitably prepared for months for a leap second no one else even knew about. This one is obviously Google.

MORE: The Internet died two deaths over the weekend | DVICE.

 

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