Page views served to #Syria via @ CloudFlare over a 15-minute period an hour ago: 6628. Page views served in the last 15 minutes: 3. — Matthew Prince (@eastdakota) May 07, 2013 War-torn Syria is reportedly experiencing massive Internet outages. Both Google’s transparency monitor and security firm Cloudflare are reporting near zero levels of traffic out of the area. This isn’t the first time the beleaguered nation has experienced Internet issues. Back in 2012, the Syrian government, in attempt to paralyze opposition rebels, cut the entire country off from the rest of the world . “Syria has largely disappeared from the Internet,” writes security firm, Umbrella, about the abrupt traffic stop today. Umbrella describes how such a cutoff is possible, “Routing on the Internet relies on the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) Read more »
Backed Or Whacked: Bridging Worlds Without Words
Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive . Each column will look at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin . One of the hottest areas of tech right now is the Internet of Things, wherein everyday objects communicate with each other. As doorknobs and clothing learn to communicate, we can only hope that they will protect their language better than the humans who have seen English reduced to abbreviated gibberish in the face of texting and Twitter. If Kickstarter campaigns are any indication, though, objects have a lot to say without speaking at all. Whacked: Lively Read more »
After Eight Years On Facebook’s Board, Jim Breyer Exits To Focus On His New Harvard Board Seat
Venture capitalist Jim Breyer is giving up his seat on Facebook’s board in June, which he’s held since April 2005. The split is amicable and stems from his desire to concentrate on his new seat on the Harvard University Corporation Board. Breyer joined the Facebook board after his venture firm Accel became one of Facebook’s earliest investors, leading its $12.7 million Series A. Breyer will stay on Facebook’s board until its yearly director’s meeting on June 11th. In a departure note, Breyer wrote, “It has been a genuine honor to serve as an investor and board member since April 2005 as Facebook has grown from an emerging social network for U.S. college students to a global service that connects over a billion people. After over eight years of board service, it’s time to step aside in light of my other responsibilities, including my recent election to the Harvard University Corporation Board Read more »
Movile Helps Users Get Connected With Apps To Find And Share Access To Free Mobile Hotspots
Mobile content company Movile has over the last several years distributed content and applications for a primarily Latin American audience. But what happens when a mobile user isn’t connected to a wireless data network? To help solve this problem, Movile has introduced a pair of applications that will help users connect to free Wi-Fi networks. The apps are named Free Zone and WifiPass, and both are designed to let users know when they’re near Wi-Fi hotspots that they’re able to connect to. But they differ in that Free Zone focuses on connections to open public hotspots, while WifiPass enables users to more easily get access to networks which are password-protected. Movile is increasingly making its products available in other markets, such as the U.S. Read more »
ProfitBricks Shows It Can Take On AWS With 2.0 Infrastructure
The infrastructure-as-a-service-providers (IaaS) market is starting to exhibit a deeper diversity. Call it the “Cloud 2.0″ era if you will. ProfitBricks is one of these companies showing its muscle in this new arena with the announcement of the world’s largest instance size. These large instance sizes scale to 62 cores and 240GB of RAM and reflect how the company is trying to differentiate against reigning cloud giant AWS. ProfitBricks pairs these giant, flexible instances with pricing granularity and super-fast InfiniBand networking technology. The new instances are designed for companies that run large databases and multiple compute nodes in a cluster, or those that are looking for compute power to help run big data implementations. ProfitBricks U.S. CEO Bob Rizika said it offers high-performance networking by combining the large instance sizes with the InfiniBand networking that can run at 80 gigabytes per second. Read more »
Google Translate For Android Gets Offline Mode With Support For 50 Languages
Google Translate is a very useful tool for when you are travelling internationally but sadly, that’s also the time when you are least likely to have an always-on connection to the Internet. Obviously, there are a number of offline translation apps available, but if you are partial to Google Translate and you use an Android phone, you’ll be happy to hear that the latest version of the Google Translate app for Android (2.3+) now lets you download offline language packages for about fifty languages. You can now simply select [Offline languages] in the app menu and see all the language packs available for download. You just need to download the language packs for the two languages you want to translate between and you are good to go. Google notes that these packs are “less comprehensive than their online equivalents,” but even a smaller dictionary is more useful than not having one at all. Google also offers a Translate app for iOS , but it’s not clear when (or if) this version will get an offline mode, too Read more »
Facebook’s Riskiest Bet Yet. Can It Uproot A Billion People’s Behavior?
“Fortune Favors The Bold” reads a 20-foot-tall poster in the room where Facebook unveiled its redesigned news feed . It’s possibly the most looked-at page on the Internet, and if we don’t like the changes, traffic and ad revenue could plummet. Despite a slow rollout where it will watch for our reactions and make tweaks, Facebook’s never put it all on the line like this. Panicked erupted when Facebook first overhauled its homepage with the launch of the news feed in 2006. But in the end, Facebook won that bet. We all realized the feed didn’t violate our privacy. It just collected what we could already see on Facebook, and we discovered that constant stream of information was highly addictive Read more »
CloudOn 4.0 Brings Microsoft Office To Android Phones
CloudOn , the popular free mobile productivity app that gives its users access to Microsoft Office on their smartphones and tablets, was only available on iOS and for Android tablets like the Nexus 7 until now. Starting today, however, Android smartphone users , too, will be able to use the company’s service to create, review, edit and share their Office documents from devices like the Galaxy Nexus 4 and Galaxy Note. CloudOn tells us that it is currently seeing an average of 540k new downloads per month. So far, the company says, December 20 was its best day ever with over 90k. In addition, CloudOn also updated its FileSpace – a kind of news feed for all the activity that happens around a given file. This feature brings together all the annotations, edits and notes other may have added to a document and which, as CloudOn argues, usually get lost as files get shared back and forth via email. For the Android smartphone version, CloudOn also introduced a revamped version of the Microsoft Office ribbon that makes it easier to use on a touch-enabled device by spacing icons out a bit and making them larger so that “functions like selecting font size, turning on track changes or creating a table are dead simple for users across all editing options.” Just like the iOS and Android tablet version, Android smartphone users will also be able to view their documents in landscape mode, add notes and comment to any file and access their files on Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive and other cloud-storage services right from the app (CloudOn doesn’t want to be in the strorage business, so they fully rely on third-party services for that). “We are thrilled that CloudOn is now available across the entire Android ecosystem, and are excited to be able to reach more of our loyal customer base,” said CloudOn CEO Milind Gadekar in a canned statement today Read more »
Facebook Employees Do The “Harlem Shake”
Multiple Facebook employees just shared this clip of a bunch of Facebookers doing the “Harlem Shake” at their HQ. Apparently some of the Instagram team and COO Sheryl Sandberg participated, but I can’t spot them (oh, but please try your best to). I wonder if Zuck’s the Smiley Face lemon balloon guy ..? Of course this made our own team jealous. “Just as with ‘Shit Tech Reporters Say,’ ‘Call Me Maybe,’ and ‘Gangnam Style,’ TechCrunch was slow on the draw to produce its own gag-inducing meme-following viral video,” our own Ryan Lawler sullenly remarked, “Let’s change that next time, people!” If you don’t know what the Harlem Shake is, you should a) befriend more people with the access and desire to use the Internet b) read this simple Buzzfeed guide on how to replicate the phenomenon. Here’s the video that started it all, via “Know Your Meme.” Read more »
Google’s Schmidt: ‘Twitter Can No More Produce Analysis Than A Monkey Can Type Out A Work of Shakespeare’
Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s upcoming book, The New Digital Age , isn’t pulling any punches. From the “irrelevance” of anonymity to some juicy thoughts on Twitter, the Wall Street Journal published some thought-provoking quotes from the book slated to be released in April. On Twitter “Twitter can no more produce analysis than a monkey can type out a work of Shakespeare.” Without more context, we don’t know if this means he means it’s impossible to compose something thoughtful in under 140 characters, or if he’s making a dig at the product itself. Either way, in fairness, Twitter founder Biz Stone had a sense of humor about the occasional silliness of his creation in a Stoli Vodka ad (below): On Search Engines : “ Within search results, information tied to verified online profiles will be ranked higher than content without such verification, which will result in most users naturally clicking on the top (verified) results. The true cost of remaining anonymous, then, might be irrelevance.” This one is likely to send digital civil rights groups into a fit of blogging rage. Anonymity is often thought of as an essential component of privacy Read more »