Networking & Internet

On Friday, Yahoo purchased del.icio.us, the social bookmarking website. While I’m curious as to how much they paid, I’m more curious as to what Yahoo’s plans for it are in the long-term, as they’ve stated that del.icio.us will continue to run its own website. What I’d like to see is integration of the del.icio.us bookmark tagging and sharing capabilities with the rest of Yahoo’s personalization and data storing services. After all, del.icio.us *only* has 300,000 users. I’m actually surprised; I would have thought that they had many more users due to the usefulness of the site, but I guess that may be just by virtue of me being a geek.

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Yahoo Buys Del.icio.usRead More »

As more people’s e-mail Inboxes get flooded with phishing attempts on their bank accounts, banks are being forced to rethink and upgrade the security used to access their online account systems. Most banks are turning to 2-factor authentication where you not only need to enter your traditional password or PIN, but another code typically automatically generated by a different piece of hardware. One such example of this kind of device is RSA’s SecurID and one example of a bank that is testing out this type of technology is Lloyd’s of Britain. 30,000 of their customers (out of 2 million online ones) are in the test group.

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Time to Upgrade Internet Banking Security?Read More »

First showing up on the scene about 10 years ago, BPL (Broadband over Power Lines) is finally gaining some traction. Over 50,000 homes in the Cincinnati area are connected to the Internet via power lines and all of the citizens in Manassas, VA have the option, although only 500 homes actually have a BPL connection. BPL deployment has been slowed by the criticism that transmitting data over unshielded power lines can interfere with other important radio transmissions, such as police and fire broadcasts. But BPL is very attractive – users would just have to plug a BPL modem into an electrical wall socket and can get up to 130Mbps using the HomePlug AV standard.

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Broadband over Power Lines Gains MomentumRead More »

Google and Sun announced today that they are teaming up to promote their software, specifically these free products: Sun’s Javaâ„¢ Runtime Environment (JRE), the Google Toolbar and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Soon, the Google Toolbar will be incorporated into the JRE, and OpenOffice will get a Google search box. Sun and Google will do some research, development and marketing together. Additionally, Google will be buying more Sun servers in the future. Hopefully, this partnership with Google will mean that Sun’s isn’t quite ready to go down just yet.

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A Little Google NewsRead More »

By John Battelle

When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Page’s dissertation topic led naturally to the birth of a search engine and his name was the basis for an algorithm that is still hotly debated on the Web today, PageRank. Google started life on Stanford’s network in 1996 and its crawler once consumed nearly half of Stanford’s entire network bandwidth, not to mention bringing down Stanford’s Internet connection regularly.

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Page meets Brin: A Brief History of GoogleRead More »