This image has been circulating the Internet to show what could happen if Net Neutrality legislation is not signed into law. They say that if Net Neutrality is not passed, ISPs will be able to start charging additional fees for bandwith usage by consumer users, which will lead to only the wealthy being able to access all of the Internet because they can afford to purchase the top tier of service and access to a wide array of websites. The phone and cable companies oppose Net Neutrality.
The graphic by a pro-Net Neutrality group shows new, additional fees being assigned for websites and web services. It's sort of like how cable companies assign different fees for bundles of cable channels, in addition to your basic cable bill. You can see a larger version of the graphic here.
Facebook announced that they are redesigning the Facebook Gift Shop. New categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers are being added.
We're continuing to enhance the Facebook Gift Shop so you have more ways to express your appreciation for the people in your life. A couple months ago, we took a first step by testing new types of gifts created by developers, including e-cards, charity donations and even real-world gifts where you can buy a friend a physical gift along with a virtual one.
We now are unveiling a newly stocked and redesigned Gift Shop, with new categories of gifts and additional gifts for charity, music and sports from developers. With so many gifts available, we also introduced a new design to make it easier for you to browse and purchase gifts with different gift categories. We will be rolling these changes out to everyone in the coming weeks, so don't worry if you don't see them just yet.
Remember, in order to buy Facebook Gifts, you must purchase credits on the site using a major credit card. Credits cost 10 cents in U.S. currency, and they are available for purchase in 15 currencies. After you select your gift, click "Buy," and we'll walk you through the rest.
Some of the gifts tie-in with actual gifts while other virtual gifts do nothing but appear on a Facebook user's profile. It is unclear why anyone would want to spend money to have a tiny graphic appear on someone's profile but people are buying them. Virtual good sales are poised to hit the $1 billion mark in 2010. However, that total includes virtual games. The exact amount spent on silly Facebook virtual gifts is unknown.
A new study by UCLA scientists
proves that Internet use alters human brains. And at least for older adults that's actually a very good thing. Older adults who had never used the Internet had their brains scanned using a functional MRI before and after weeks of doing tasks using the Internet, such as doing searches and reading articles. After the training, the adults showed increased neural activation which could potentially enhance brain function and cognition.
It only took one week of using the Internet for the changes to be seen in the brain. Mental stimulation has been shown to help slow the degenerative processes that lead to Alzheimer's and other types of dementia in the elderly. In other words, using your brain more as you age will help you retain a higher level of cognitive functioning.
The UCLA team worked with 24 neurologically normal volunteers between the ages of 55 and 78. Prior to the study, half the participants used the Internet daily, while the other half had very little experience. Age, educational level and gender were similar between the two groups.
The participants performed Web searches while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans, which recorded the subtle brain-circuitry changes experienced during this activity. This type of scan tracks brain activity by measuring the level of blood flow in the brain during cognitive tasks. While the study involves a small number of people and more research on this topic is needed, small study sizes are typical of fMRI-based research.
After the initial brain scan, subjects went home and conducted Internet searches for one hour a day for a total of seven days over a two-week period. These practice searches involved using the web to answer questions about various topics by exploring different websites and reading information. Participants then received a second brain scan using the same Internet simulation task, but with different topics.
The first scan of participants with little Internet experience showed brain activity in the regions controlling language, reading, memory and visual abilities. The second brain scan of these participants, conducted after the home practice searches, demonstrated activation of these same regions, but there was also activity in the middle frontal gyrus and inferior frontal gyrus – areas of the brain known to be important in working memory and decision-making.
Thus, after Internet training at home, participants with minimal online experience displayed brain activation patterns very similar to those seen in the group of savvy Internet users.
"The results suggest that searching online may be a simple form of brain exercise that might be employed to enhance cognition in older adults," Teena D. Moody, the study's first author and UCLA researcher, said in a statement.
When you search Google for information on the flu or which store has your size in your favorite shoes, your brain is using the ability to hold information in working memory and to quickly process multiple inputs of data. As you search through photos and discard irrelevant results, you are enhancing and preserving the decision-making and memory functions of your brain.
The conclusion is obvious: the more time you spend on the Internet buying shoes the smarter you'll be. Okay, fine, that's not what the scientists said at all. We're extrapolating a bit.
The researchers made it clear that these findings only apply to older adults (those in the study were aged 55-78) and does not apply to children whose brains are in a different state of development. Some educators and researchers are concerned that too much Internet time may impede the development of children's own imagination and creativity, if they don't also participate in activities that don't require a video screen, such as reading and playing "let's pretend" type games such as dolls and Legos.
The BBC reports that criminals are making millions from fake antivirus software. The software known as scareware or scamware frightens users into downloading it. Sometimes consumers are even tricked into paying for the software by the frightening virus warnings that appear in pop-up messages on their computers.
Symantec says more than 40 million people have fallen victim to the "scareware" scam in the past 12 months.
The download is usually harmful and criminals can sometimes use it to get the victim's credit card details.
The firm has identified 250 versions of scareware, and criminals are thought to earn more than £750,000 each a year.
The scareware not only charges users to download but it also may install a malware program that steals your passwords and credit card information. The BBC says some of the downloads will even take over your computer. In some of these scareware cases the con artists are holding people's machines at ransom and not giving them back control of their computers until they pay a fee.
"[They] could hold your computer to ransom where they will stop your computer working or lock up some of your personal information, your photographs or some of your Word documents.
"They will extort money from you at that point. They will ask you to pay some additional money and they will then release your machine back to you."
The scam is hard for police or other agencies to investigate because the individual sums of money involved are very small.
A report from Symantec says 43 million people fell for scareware scams from July 2008 to June 2009. The bottom line here is do not download software just because a pop-up message tells you to do so. A website called Get Safe Online provides helpful information about how to protect your PC. They also have an article on anti-virus software here, which lists some reputable brands.
The New York Timesreports on Facebook's new happiness index. It's an attempt by the social network giant to ascertain patterns about when its users are happy or sad. The Facebook index tracks when its users use happy or negative words to build the index. The index found that Mondays are sad days and happy days are Fridays and holidays. These are the results you would expect to find. The Times says the index also found sadness on days celebrities passed away.
There is a 9.7 percent increase in happiness on Fridays compared with the worst day of the week, Monday. That is among the discoveries made by Facebook researchers with access to two years of anonymous “status updates” from 100 million users in the United States.
Another conclusion: holidays like the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving and Halloween make Americans happy, while days when celebrities like Michael Jackson or Heath Ledger die make Americans sad. Such insights — obvious though some may be — leap out from the new Gross National Happiness Index, unveiled last Monday by Facebook.
Sometimes people may say they are happy on holidays because they are expected to by friends and family members but for the most part it sounds like it tracks fairly correctly. You can see Facebook's United States Gross National Happiness Index here.
Google has replaced its logo with a barcode today. TechCrunch says the barcode probably says Google and was created with some type of barcode image processing tool. The reason Google is doing this today is to celebrate the 57th anniversary of the barcode.
Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994 (pdf), on October 7, 1952. The original patent was for a system that would encode data in circles (a bulls eye pattern), so that it could be scanned in any direction.
There is another recent story that is relevant to bar codes. Willard Boyle and George Smith won the 2009 Nobel prize in Physics for their invention of a light-sensitive chip that converts patterns of light into digital information. This technology is used in barcodes.
A more advanced type of wo dimensional barcode called the QR code is used widely in Japan. The QR code, which debuted in 1994, makes it possible to includes characters, images and photos, instead of just dull black and white lines. This colorful example below is a QR code created by artist Takashi Murakami for Louis Vuitton.
The BBC reports that Microsoft's Hotmail email service was hacked and thousands of passwords were posted online.
Microsoft, which owns the popular web-based e-mail system, said that it was aware of the claims and that it was "investigating the situation".
BBC News has seen a list of more than 10,000 accounts, which technology blog Neowin.net said had been posted online.
The blog suggested the accounts had been hacked or had been collected as part of a phishing scheme.
A spokesperson for Windows Live Hotmail said, "We're actively investigating the situation and will take appropriate steps as rapidly as possible."
Neowin says the email passwords were comprimised form a hack or phising scheme. Neowin is recommending Hotmail users change their passwords immediately.
12-year-old Nickelodeon star Aria Wallace (Roxy Hunter, iCarly) has challenged herself to go mostly unconnected for forty days. Aria Wallace will have support from the creators of the tween book series, Temptation of a Generation. From October 12 through November 20, 2009, Wallace will be stripped of her cell phone and texting privileges and limited to only a few minutes a day online for school and business related work.
"The Temptation Series has inspired me to help promote real-time communication!" said Wallace. "I want to take teens back to the days when we had face-to-face interaction and expressed emotions in person! Teens today need to know how awesome it is to actually see emotions rather than an emoticon, and be able to laugh instead of just saying LOL!"
"Aria Wallace is Going Old School: Unplugged for 40 Days," will consist of the following rules;
No cell phone use or texting,
Home phone use for 10 minutes per day,
Payphones are allowed,
No social networking,
Internet use is limited to daily blog/vlog and schoolwork as necessary.
You can follow Aria's blog to see if she survies the harrowing ordeal. The blog will include daily video diaries and blog entries.
Google is celebrating its 11th birthday today. Google has a logo today on Google.com that shows two 1s instead of an "l." ABC News reports that Google celebrates a birthday that falls sometime in September depending on when its employees feel the need for cake.
The corporate history says Google has sometimes marked both Sept. 7 and Sept. 27 -- today -- as its birthday.
Sept. 4 also has been bandied about as a birthday of sorts -- connecting as it does to a fairly mundane event in Google's history. On Sept. 4, 1998, the company filed papers establishing it as a California corporation.
Google gave up on the specifics a few years ago and posted a page saying, "Google opened its doors in September 1998. The exact date when we celebrate our birthday has moved around over the years, depending on when people feel like having cake."
Today must be cake day.
The founders of Google Larry Page and Sergey Brin first met in 1995 and begin working on a search engine in 1996. You can find Google's corporate history here.
Google Mail suffered another outage today. You can see a chart of the outage here on Google's website. It was resolved for most users within an hour but lingered for another hour for others. Google also suffered a brief worldwide crash on September 1st.
A post on Digits says Gmail is still more reliable that many corporate email systems.
Google has widened its search bar. Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products & User Experience, wrote is a blog post that the longer search bar uses a larger test size and makes it easier to see Google's search suggestions.
For us, search has always been our focus. And, starting today, you'll notice on our homepage and on our search results pages, our search box is growing in size. Although this is a very simple idea and an even simpler change, we're excited about it — because it symbolizes our focus on search and because it makes our clean, minimalist homepage even easier and more fun to use. The new, larger Google search box features larger text when you type so you can see your query more clearly. It also uses a larger text size for the suggestions below the search box, making it easier to select one of the possible refinements. Over the past 11 years, we've made a number of changes to our homepage. Some are small and some are large. In this case, it's a small change that makes search more prominent.
The longer search bar could mean that people are using more keywords when they search than they used to. It's the smart way to search because using multiple keywords can help narrow down search results.
Google has a doodle of a UFO today and no one seems to know exactly why. If you click on the logo you are taken to a search results for Unexplained Phenomenon.
Articles here, here and here throw out a few theories for the logo such as boredom, a promotion of a UFO festival or the promotion of District 9. None of these theories seem to be sticking.
TechCrunch reports that Google also tweeted a cryptic tweet today that when deciphered says, "All your o are belong to us." That's a clear reference to an Internet meme that developed from a strange Japanese game that contained poorly written English. No one seems to know why Google decided to do this today.
Search Engine Land reports that Google has issued the following statement about the logo.
"We consider the second 'o' critical to user recognition of our brand and pronunciation of our name. We are actively looking into the mysterious tweet that has appeared on the Google twitter stream and the disappearance of the "o" on the Google homepage. We hope to have an update in the coming weeks."
Some people have been so annoyed by Facebook that they have left the service. Those that like the service and continue to use it find they have to think carefully before posting a new status update. Facebook has changed the way couples break news to friends and family members. As you can see in this video, couples that use Facebook have to make a joint decision about when to share news about events like engagements and pregnancy. The couple in this clip go to the extra trouble of calling family members and close friends before posting an update about a big life event on Facebook. Take a look:
Bloombergreports that eBay has sold Skype to an investor group led by Silver Lake for about $2 billion. EBay CEO John Donahoe said Skype does not fit with the rest of eBay's business.
The sale lessens Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe's dependence on a unit that he has said doesn't fit with the rest of EBay's operations. His predecessor bought Skype for $2.6 billion in 2005 and wrote down its value a year later. Private investors will probably push Skype beyond the consumer market, said Vanessa Alvarez, a Frost & Sullivan Inc. analyst in Boston.
"They've really been making an initiative to move into the business space," Alvarez said. "That's the next step for this market."
The other investors in the group are Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm headed by Internet pioneer Marc Andreessen; Index Ventures, a firm that invested in Skype before EBay bought it; and Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, which invested $300 million. The others didn't disclose how much they paid.
There was confusion as to why eBay wanted Skype in the first place but it was related to the company's PayPal business and ecommerce goals at the time of purchase. Skype is an internet phone service that lets PC users talk to each other free of charge. Skype makes money selling voice mail accounts and when users sent text messages or call regular phones. eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype in 2002 and wanted to create a "an unparalleled e-commerce and communications engine."
The BBC 
Google Mail suffered another outage today. You can see a chart of the outage 
Bloomberg 
