Internet & Media

When Winston Churchill decided to make a stand against tyranny, he spoke these famous words: "we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

The world has moved on a little since Churchill's day. So perhaps you, too, will experience a curious motion in your surroundings when I tell you of a report that Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, has decided to fight the scourge of terrorism with similarly grand determination.

For Bloomberg is reporting … Read more

The criminal investigation into Apple's errant iPhone prototype took a new twist this week, when Gawker Media claimed that the warrant used by police to search an editor's home was invalid.

It's clear that federal and state law generally provides journalists--even gadget bloggers--with substantial protections by curbing searches of their employees' workspaces. But it's equally clear that journalists suspected of criminal activity do not benefit from the legal shields that newspapers and broadcast media have painstakingly erected over the last half-century.

No less an authority than a California appeals court has ruled that the state's … Read more

Did you renew your driver's license or pay your last parking ticket online? If so, you're part of a growing number of people in the U.S. taking advantage of government services on the Internet.

A poll of more then 2,000 American adults late last year found that 82 percent of Internet users, or 61 percent of all U.S. adults, looked up information or made a transaction on a government Web site in the past year. The results of the poll, conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and released Tuesday, also discovered that … Read more

Google on Monday augmented Google Maps with a feature called Earth view that brings the Google Earth software's 3D perspective to the Web browser.

Earth view is available through the installation of a browser plug-in Google originally issued in 2008. With it, people can see the contours of world--canyons and mountains, most dramatically--using the Google Earth fly-through interface.

Places with 3D building models look more interesting from ground level, but if your suburb hasn't received that treatment, the perspective mismatch can be a bit awkward when viewing the scene from an oblique angle farther from perpendicular.

You can … Read more

The Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader shipped more than Amazon's Kindle in March, DigiTimes Research claims in a new study.

According to DigiTimes, it consulted "suppliers" of the e-readers to determine how many units shipped. Based on that information, the researchers found that the Nook "accounted for 53 percent of e-book readers shipped to U.S. vendors last month." The company didn't provide data on how much of the market the Kindle took, but based on the fact that the Nook accounted for more than half of all shipments in March, the researchers concluded … Read more

LONDON--Thanks to the volcanic ash pouring out of Iceland, I had some extra time in London last week, giving me an opportunity to try my hand at shuttle diplomacy between Facebook and a British police agency called the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center, or CEOP.

I came to London en route to a tech conference in Spain that was canceled due to the air travel issues and also to give a talk at a Family Online Safety Institute conference in Bahrain that starts Tuesday.

As I wrote recently, CEOP is pressuring Facebook to add a reporting button (some call … Read more

As acolytes sat in nodding wonderment listening to Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg tell them how the world really is (not very private at all) and how it's going to be (even less private), the people behind Gawker Media were enduring (or perhaps even enjoying) sometimes nasty critiques. They had, after all, revealed something terribly private about one of the world's great personalities, the iPhone.

Many lawyers have opined on the legality of Gawker's actions. I am sure that they are all right. Lawyers always are. At least that's what they tell me. I just wish some … Read more

It's an article of faith in the music industry that pre-release album leaks hurt sales. I don't have the statistics to argue the case in either direction, but it makes sense on a gut level: there's less reason for fans to run out and buy a new record, when they already have the uncompressed files on their hard drives.

As if the record industry hasn't tasted enough bitter irony lately, a bunch of album leaks over the weekend apparently came from a service used by music labels to share files with radio stations, media, and other … Read more

Google Maps is trying to make it easier to find businesses right around the block.

On Thursday, Google spread local search suggestions for Google Maps to more parts of the world. When you type in a kind of business and a city name in the "Search Maps" box, Google will offer ideas for places based on the location.

If you type in sushi and Tokyo, for example, suggestions for restaurants in Japan's capital filter up. If you type in sushi and your city's name, names of sushi restaurants citywide show up. Or if Google's map … Read more