Berlin has many bragging rights, but the latest among them is a world's first: scoring the first city domain name. Starting March 18, applicable websites will be able to use the .berlin domain suffix, adding an element of description that gives browsers an immediate idea of the website's focus.
ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is the agency that gets to decide what top-level domains are added to the web. Those top level domains are things like .com, .gov, and .net for instance. In 2012, ICANN approved a bunch of new TLDs for the web including the controversial .xxx for pornographic sites.
Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. As he mentioned today in his Reddit AMA session (that’s Ask Me Anything, a popular method of popular people speaking to the internet), TBL "coded it up on a NeXT", while it was Robert Cailliau who was "the first convert to it" and later "wrote some code for a Mac browser called "Samba". As the creator of the WWW, TBL is (arguably) one of the best people to go to when it comes to considerations for how it might be handled now and in the future - thusly we devour his insight.
Mozilla has revealed an upcoming change to Firefox that may not sit well with all its users: advertisements. Specifically, according to details given at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's recent meeting, the company plans to point newly-installed browsers to websites and generate some revenue all the while using New Tab ads.
The recent deaths of prominent and inspirational personalities have probably led to the awareness of the brevity of life and of people's memories. In that light, this new WikiVIP project tries to improve the growing body of knowledge in Wikipedia by injecting voice clips of these notable people for present and future generations to cherish and remember.
Tis a mobile world we live in, one filled with apps that are, more often than not, updated frequently and a degree or two separated from their Web-based counterpart's design (should such a counterpart exist, that is). Such has been the case with Twitter up until today, with a simple announcement being fired off this afternoon ushering in a new Web design reminiscent of its latest mobile offerings.
A company called Solve Media has issued its quarterly update on the traffic generated on the web from fraudulent sources. The report is called the Quarterly Bot Traffic Market Advisory. The latest report looks at Q3 2013.
If you use the Internet, at one time or another, you've probably used Wikipedia even if you didn't realize it. For instance, if you ask Siri on your iPhone a question it often it pulls little tidbits of information from Wikipedia and other software platforms do the same thing. The problem with Wikipedia is that many of its entries are questionable and the staff of volunteers who maintain the site is on the decline.
New generic top-level domains have been announced today by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, more commonly called ICANN, with a world's first-ever: non-Latin character options. While none of them are yet available, a total of four additional options in three languages have been added, building upon the current, .com, .org, .net, and more offerings.
For the first time in over two years, Yahoo came in at number on on ComScore's list of Top 50 US Web Properties. The list, which was just released today, is a bit of a surprise, as Yahoo hasn't claimed the top position since May 2011. While initial speculation made it seem like the acquisition of Tumblr had something to do with this boost, that is not the case.
As with many free services, there's often a paid option to along with them that offers a handful of new features and benefits that aren't available otherwise to the free users. Feedly has so far offered a free version of its RSS reader, but today the company has unwrapped a paid version that gives users several new features for just a few dollars per month.
Right when you thought this whole NSA and PRISM debacle was just slightly slowing down a bit, things are picking back up, thanks to a new report. According to multiple anonymous sources, it's said that federal government officials are demanding websites to hand over user passwords in order to monitor individual users even more.