Internet

Verizon has admitted to slowing down connection speeds for users watching online video. But it insists it was part of a test and was not a deliberate attempt to penalize Netflix. Users noticed the slowdown last week thanks to Fast.com, a special ... website Netflix launched last year to let people test their connection speeds. Multiple sources reported getting slower figures on this site than on other speed testing sites. That's significant, as Fast.com tests the speed by sending data to and from Netflix's servers, unlike other speed testing sites. That led some to infer that Verizon was ... (view more)

Microsoft wants to use unused TV frequencies to provide Internet service in rural areas. It believes its size could help bring down the costs of the technology. The system is known as white-spaces technology and uses wireless frequencies that are in ... the band reserved for over-the-air TV broadcasts but aren't currently being used. While Microsoft plans to use some of these frequencies, it wants the government to reserve at least three frequencies in each local area for use with the technology. (Source: nytimes.com ) Tech Works Like WiFi In principle, wireless Internet signals can be sent ... (view more)

Reports that accepting a friend request from a "Jayden K Smith" on Facebook will get your account hacked are a hoax. It's still a smart idea to take care with Facebook friend requests, however. As often happens, the hoax warning is circulating ... widely, likely being shared by people who believe doing so will help inform and protect their friends and family on the site. One version of the hoax message reads "Please tell all the contacts in your messenger list not to accept Jayden K. Smith friendship request. He is a hacker and has the system connected to your Facebook account ... (view more)

Political discussion on social media is often driven and manipulated by automated "bots," a university department claims. The word "bots" is a short form for "robot," and refers to online activity carried out using an automated program. The Oxford ... Internet Institute says it studied events in nine countries and found the bots played a role in every case. However, social media groups have questioned such studies saying they are often based on flawed research methods. The study looked at activity on Facebook and Twitter among users in Brazil, Canada, China, Germany ... (view more)

Facebook has announced four changes to its Safety Check feature for dealing with local crises. The changes will offer more detail about what's currently happening, coordinate local help, and help make fundraising easier. Safety Check is a feature ... that lets people in the geographic area of a natural disaster, terror attack or other crisis quickly mark themselves as "safe." The idea is that this saves people exchanging a plethora of messages in order to check if somebody is OK. That's particularly important with voice calls and text messages, which can easily overload local ... (view more)

A newspaper has published details of Facebook's secret rules about what is and isn't allowed on the site. It shows the extreme difficulty of balancing free speech with privacy and responsibility issues, as well as the sheer scale of moderating ... posts. While Facebook publishes general guidelines about content it considers inappropriate, it doesn't reveal the precise criteria its staff use when removing content. The Guardian newspaper says it has seen more than 100 documents that are used by Facebook moderators when training and when doing their work. (Source: theguardian.com ) Violent language ... (view more)

Facebook says it will no longer accept advertisements that link to "low-quality" web pages. It's also going to reduce the likelihood that people see user-posted links to such pages. The system Facebook uses for identifying such pages will be ... automated but is based on guidelines developed from manually reviewing "hundreds of thousands" of pages that Facebook had linked to. After staff decided which of these sites were low quality, its computers looked through those pages to spot patterns of common characteristics. (Source: fb.com ) Toenail Fungus Unwelcome Facebook isn ... (view more)

Facebook is rejecting claims that it let advertisers target users based on their current mood. It says research into the technology was carried out, but not used for advertising. "The Australian" newspaper report was based on leaked internal data ... that says Facebook could figure out mood swings based on combined data from user posts and pictures, the interactions they had with other users, and other activity on the site. Some of the moods which Facebook could reportedly discover included feeling anxious, defeated, nervous, overwhelmed, silly, stressed, stupid, useless or a failure. ... (view more)

The man behind Wikipedia is to launch a news service based around the goals of being factual and neutral. Wikitribune will combine elements of Wikipedia and traditional news reporting. Jimmy Wales says the key to the site is that it will neither ... charge a subscription fee nor chase advertising. With the majority of ad revenues based on page views, Wales believes the the big problem now is that reporters deliberately skimp on accuracy for the sake of sensationalism, or provoke readers with inflammatory headlines as they "chase clicks," which in turn creates more page views. (Source: ... (view more)

Facebook has admitted it needs to do more to monitor content after a video of a murder was on the site for just over two hours. Shockingly, it took more than 100 minutes for a user to report the video to Facebook. The video was one of three produced ... by the killer, Steve Stephens, who later took his own life while being pursued by police. Stephens posted a video to Facebook saying he planned to commit murder. Two minutes later he posted another video showing his killing of 74-year-old Robert Godwin. Shortly after that Stephens used Facebook's live broadcast feature to both confess to the ... (view more)