Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Google is tweaking its China website in a last-ditch effort to save its search business in the world's largest Internet market after butting heads with Beijing over Web censorship.
The move comes ahead of a Wednesday deadline for China to renew Google's operating license. Google said Beijing had made it clear it was unhappy with the company's three-month old system of re-routing Chinese Web surfers to google.com.hk.
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Senator Stephen Conroy has survived a cabinet reshuffle from newly crowned Prime Minister Julia Gillard, retaining his role as the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
Gillard revealed details of her new ministry at a lunchtime press conference today, noting that she had made "limited changes" in order to achieve "maximum stability in the team".
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Nearly everyone has something to say about BP’s oil spill, and from a public relations perspective, the company is floundering. Both its stock price and brand value have taken a deepwater dive, and it is struggling to make its own voice heard.
When you Google "BP PR" or "BP public relations the top organic result is @BPGlobalPR, a parody account on Twitter with more than 175,000 followers.
In contrast, BP’s official account, @BP_America, has only 15,000 followers. The satirical @BPGlobalPR is dominating the online conversation. It is an object lesson in how social media can shape and control a company’s message during a crisis...
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Did Apple really not know about the problems with the iPhone 4's Antenna system which, particularly when the device is held with skin touching the bottom left of the steel antenna surrounding its case, can cause signal degradation and even dropped calls?
It's possible, and it's possible that its own paranoia, as well as its BFF, AT&T, are at fault.
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Between the iPad’s blocking of Flash earlier this year and the huge wave of ad campaigns, open letters, and debates that followed, it seems that everyone has an opinion on the merits (or lack thereof) of Flash on the modern web.
YouTube software engineer John Harding took to the site’s official blog to weigh on the current status of HTML5 video support. The gist of it: while HTML5 is great, it can’t do everything YouTube (or most mainstream video sites) need.
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Wednesday, June 16, 2010
This morning, news broke of a spiffy, and very powerful new feature on YouTube: a built-in video editor.
The JavaScript-based YouTube editor isn’t loaded with bells and whistles, but it can handle the basics just fine: it’s easy to trim and splice together the video clips that you’ve uploaded, and you can replace your video’s audio with any of YouTube’s library of 40,000 approved songs (you can’t upload your own audio yet, but YouTube is working on deals to make that happen).
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The media coverage surrounding Apple iPhone 4 pre-order inventory levels has been almost as crazed as, well, the whole pre-order frenzy. Not unpredictable for a new Apple product release -- and particularly a new iPhone design -- it didn't take long for the Cupertino company to exhaust its supply of devices for day-of-release shipments.
It's true that both AT&T and Apple have depleted their pre-order allotment, but according to Apple's website, new orders for both the 16GB and 32GB models will ship by July 2nd. That's a week and one day longer than the original ship date, which was previously listed as June 24.
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Almost half of all Tasmanian premises in NBN's stage one zones have signed up to fibre services that will launch in "a few short weeks", according to Communications Minister Stephen Conroy.
Addressing the Senate this afternoon, Conroy described a "huge amount of enthusiasm" in the community for stage one NBN services.
"The rollout in Tasmania is now well underway," Conroy told Parliament. "We are on track to deliver the first of these [NBN] services in a few short weeks."
Click here to read moreCommunications Minister Stephen Conroy has lashed out at opposition to the Federal Government's bid to filter the internet, and labelled those promoting the dissent as "dishonest".
He described claims the internet speeds would be slowed by as much as 87 per cent were "wild" and said the government's intentions were misrepresented by opponents.
"This has been a campaign quite dishonest in the way that it has talked about how speeds will be impacted," Mr Conroy said.
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Thursday, June 3, 2010
A Pakistani court on Monday lifted a ban on social networking website Facebook which had carried a competition to draw the Prophet Mohammad, but access to any "blasphemous" material will remain blocked, officials said.
Any representation of the Prophet Mohammad is deemed un-Islamic and blasphemous by Muslims, which constitute the overwhelming majority in Pakistan, and Facebook was blocked two weeks ago because of the online caricature contest.
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According to a new report, Chandra Rathakrishna (creator of the JooJoo), recently had a few choice words about the iPad, and while sales would obviously say otherwise, there's nothing like a little bitterness to chuckle over on a holiday.
Here's his quotes on Apple's first tablet:
"JooJoo delivers the entire Internet - including Flash-based websites. That means you can play full versions of games, watch full-screen HD video and not have to be constrained within the 'walled garden' of the iPad environment. [The iPad is just] another storage device with web capabilities."
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ISP iiNet issued a press release late yesterday to reassure customers and the industry that it does not support Senator Conroy's plans to filter the internet, refuting comments the Senator made in a Sydney Morning Herald article.
Senator Conroy had claimed his policy has been "approved by 85 per cent of Australian internet service providers, who have said they would welcome the filter, including Telstra, Optus, iPrimus and iiNet."
Michael Malone, CEO of iiNet, was outraged."Any claim that our participation in that consultation process is support for the Government's policy is an outright lie," he said in a statement.
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Foxconn thinks they have a solution to the mounting suicides that have rocked the company's China operations: pay the workers more money. According to reports, Foxconn plans to raise wages by 30 percent, which still isn't all that much, but it's a start. One report has the basic salary at Foxconn's China plants at about 900 yuan a month, or just over $130
Foxconn is the biggest supplier of OEM products in the world and builds a number of high-end products, including Apple's iPhones and iPads. But the company has come under heavy fire lately for frequent suicide attempts, most of which were 'successful.'
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As with most major corporations, Google's employees used Windows-based machines almost exclusively. It's sort of a given when major companies select Windows machines for their staff, so no one really paid it any mind.
But now, Google is reportedly "phasing out internal use of rival Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system
You're all well aware of the Chinese hacking incident from earlier in the year, which led to Google taking a stand and refusing to filter search results in mainland China. Now, Google is looking to Apple and Linux-based machines to replace their workstations.