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Samsung and Google Extending Their Reach In Africa

March 27, 2013March 27, 2013

As Google announces its White Space plans in the Republic of South Africa, Samsung too is extending its operations across the the continent. Apple’s investments in Africa are more limited. Who will win the race for the next emerging electronics market? Google has announced experiments that will allow it to test and commercialize unused parts of the radio spectrum. It’s particularly interesting in light of Google’s expansion of its fiber network in Kansas. Google began expanding its Africa operations a couple of years back, and translating its search engine into…

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Facebook and Google Create Walled Gardens for Web Newcomers Overseas

March 25, 2013

With more than half the people in the world still not online, Facebook and Google are waging a battle to make sure that Internet newcomers get their first tastes of the Web from them. Each company is persuading wireless carriers in poor countries to offer customers free or very cheap online access that is limited to stripped-down versions of the Web giants’ sites. The idea is that once these new users get some experience in a walled garden of Facebook or Google, they will want more Internet access and pay…

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ICANN’s new CEO pledges to keep the Internet intact and open

March 21, 2013

ICANN’s new CEO Fadi Chehadé, who took over in October, is on a mission to help politicians around the world understand the importance of keeping the Internet intact and open, and is also working to bring home the addition of new generic top-level domains. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers coordinates the DNS (Domain Name System) and IP addresses, which are the cornerstones that keep the Internet going. “I sincerely believe that we have an opportunity in the next few years to keep the Internet as one Internet…

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300 UK domains pilfered, massive security lapse blamed

March 21, 2013

Exclusive What appears to be a glaringly obvious security hole has been blamed for the snatching of 300 domains hosted by one web-hosting firm last year, The Reg has discovered. A source told El Reg that anyone with a hosting package from 123-Reg, and hence an account control panel, simply had to change the final section of the URL manually (to, for example, /someoneelseswebsite.co.uk) to be able to gain access to another site’s emails, name servers and billing. With access to the admin panel, would-be domain thieves just had to…

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25 years on, Tim Berners-Lee wins ‘UK’s Nobel prize’ for siring the internet

March 19, 2013June 20, 2014 Staff Writer

Just the other day we were contemplating the tragic irony of the internet’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee having just 125,000 Twitter followers, while Jersey Shore’s trainwreck-in-chief ‘Snooki’ had over 6 million. Wasn’t it about time Sir Tim, who NBC’s presenters admitted they “hadn’t heard of” during the Olympic opening ceremony, got a little more recognition for his planet-altering creation of the world wide web? Well it turns out the judges for the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, our new answer to the Nobel prize, felt the same way and have…

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Time to Take Stock: Twelve Internet and Jurisdiction Trends in Retrospect

March 15, 2013March 18, 2013 Staff Writer

With the growing tension between the cross-border Internet and the patchwork of national jurisdictions, it becomes crucial to keep track of key global trends that drive the debate on appropriate frameworks. One year ago, the Internet & Jurisdiction Project initiated a global multi-stakeholder dialogue process on these issues. To provide a factual basis for such discussions, it established an Observatory, supported by a network of selected international experts, to detect and categorize relevant cases via an innovative crowd-based filtering process in order to identify high-level patterns. The following twelve trends…

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