Category: Websites (Page 4 of 23)

      Fighting anti-piracy by moving DNS off “the grid”

      November 30, 2010 /

      Domain name seizure.US authorities made more domain name seizures this month, prompting a bit of a panic among the file-sharing web. While torrent services are mostly associated with illegal content (for good reason), they are also used for all sorts of legitimate tasks.

      As such, the growing ease with which the US government has been seizing domains concerns torrent users, to the point that some are ready to fight back. I’m not talking about the courts either. As TorrentFreak reports, a group of enthusiasts has started to develop a P2P-based DNS system that would make domain seizures a whole lot more difficult.

      The details get a little technical from there, so I’ll refer you to TorrentFreak to sort through it at your leisure. What’s clear, though, is that technology and those who are passionate about it will continue to stay strides ahead of the people that aim to control the web.

      News, Websites

      What to make of Facebook’s new messaging system

      November 17, 2010 /

      Zuckerberg speaking this week.Earlier this week Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce a new messaging service. I say service because it’s not the email program that everyone was expecting. That’s part of the package, but it’s a small part and an optional one.

      This new system is actually about conglomerating all of your message services – email, SMS, chat – in one place. The big issue, as Facebook sees it, is that we have too many places to look for our text-based communication with one another. By building the system into Facebook, Zuckerberg hopes Facebook can become your complete social hub for the web.

      It’s more than that, though. While working on this project, Zuckerberg talked to high school students about the way they’re using email. Turns out, they aren’t. It’s too formal, which I can totally understand. I can get upwards of a hundred emails a day, and that’s a far cry from the deluge that other tech professionals will see. I don’t need to see, “Hi Jeff,” or “Hello Jeff,” or “Jeff, how are you today?” from promoters and marketers or even my coworkers. I need information, and I prefer that it’s short and to the point.

      Zuckerberg is obviously pointing at the end of email, or at least the kind of formal, subject-line message system we understand as email today. He can’t say that, though, if only because he’s Mark Zuckerberg.

      Digital Media, Lifestyle, News, Websites

      Amazon buys Diapers.com for $540 million

      November 7, 2010 /

      Diapers.comAmazon got set to announce another acquisition this weekend. The target this time is a company that uses complex algorithms to deal with baby poop. Amazon is looking to buy Quidsi, the company that owns Diapers.com, for $540 million.

      I don’t have any children, but I still know that diapers are about as hot a topic among new parents as the impending Call of Duty launch is among fifteen year-old boys. Quidsi is of particular interest to Amazon because of its technical approach to problems like stocking shelves. One of the company’s founders told Inc. last year:

      So before we launched, we built proprietary software from scratch. We built software with computational algorithms to determine what the optimal number of boxes to have in the warehouse is and what the sizes of those boxes should be. Should we stock five different kinds of boxes to ship product in? Twenty kinds? Fifty kinds? And what size should those boxes be? Right now, it’s 23 box sizes, given what we sell, in order to minimize the cost of dunnage (those little plastic air-filled bags or peanuts), the cost of corrugated boxes, and the cost of shipping. We rerun the simulation every quarter. Using the right box probably adds close to 1 margin point.

      Sound familiar? That’s exactly the kind of thing that helped Bezos make a name for himself. It’s also how Zappos, which Amazon also acquired not so long ago, ran their online shoe store.

      The crazy part of the deal, though, is that Amazon paid $200 million over the company’s most recent venture valuation. I’m not sure why, unless they really wanted to be sure they were the ones to get it. Apparently Wal-Mart had also been sniffing around Quidsi.

      Source: CNN Fortune

      News, Websites

      Facebook serving as an election predictor?

      November 3, 2010 /

      Facebook election results.There’s some interesting data around this year’s election results and the number of people who became “fans” of the winning candidates on Facebook. According to All Facebook, 74 percent of the House and 81 percent of the Senate victories were accurately predicted by the number of fans the winning candidates received.

      Obviously this stat is a bit anecdotal without all the supporting evidence required to back it up (Did the fans actually vote? Did they vote for that candidate? etc.), but it’s interesting to see how Facebook engages the political spectrum. So much of what happens on Facebook is drivel, but everyone has that friend, you know, the one constantly sending you cause invites and voting reminders and all that. Those people, at least in my experience, tend to behave the same way in public – constantly talking politics and causes, so maybe it’s not so different.

      At any rate, give a looksee to All Facebook and their awesome election tracker for more intimate details on each race and the Facebook correlation.

      social, Websites

      What will it take to bring down Facebook?

      November 1, 2010 /

      Facebook icon.A few months ago I went through and cleaned house on my Facebook account. My big problem with the service is exactly what makes it so popular – the prioritization of broad, largely meaningless connections over close, intimate ones. I dumped my broad connections, and it felt great.

      That’s where Facebook falls short, and where there’s room for a serious competitor. As Facebook pushes ever closer to a billion users, there’s really no way anyone will unseat it – not immediately, anyway – but someone could easily steal a lot of time from Facebook users by simply creating a more closed and intimate network. It’s a strategy that venture capitalist Dave McClure covers in detail on his blog, Master of 500 Hats.

      A quick excerpt:

      I’ve got too many goddamn friends on Facebook.

      yeah, that’s right: i’ve got over 2,000 “friends” on FB, and it’s fucking KILLING me. Now admittedly most normal folks don’t have *that* many Facebook friends — true: i’m tremendously insecure, an only child, & a pathetic people pleaser — but regardless a lot of “normal” people have the same problem with only a few hundred friends. and i’m guessing neither they nor i want to share our most jealously-guarded deep dark secrets with *everyone* on Facebook. but they might just share it with a smaller subset.

      Read the full post here.

      Websites

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