Nehmen wir nur CourseSmart, den unangefochtenen Branchenführer bei Lehrbüchern und Unterrichtsmaterial in digitalisierter Form. Dieses Unternehmen, 2007 von Pearson und McGraw-Hill Education und anderen Verlagsgiganten gegründet, hat über zwanzigtausend elektronische Lehrbücher im Angebot, das sind etwa 90 Prozent aller in Nordamerika verwendeten Lehrbücher. Diese Texte können online und offline am Computer, auf Tablets oder Smartphones gelesen werden. CourseSmart verfolgt globale Ambitionen. Wie kürzlich bekanntgegeben wurde, expandiert das Unternehmen in den Nahen Osten und nach Afrika, so dass seine Produkte auch in Ländern wie Saudi-Arabien und Zimbabwe erhältlich sind. Anfang November wurde seine jüngste Innovation namens CourseSmart Analytics vorgestellt, ein Trackingsystem, mit dessen Hilfe verfolgt werden kann, wie lange sich Studenten auf jeder Seite eines elektronischen Buchs aufhalten, welche Kapitel sie überspringen, welche Passagen ihnen Mühe bereiten und so weiter. Aus all diesen Informationen wird für jeden Studenten ein „Engagement Score“ ermittelt, den Dozenten abrufen können.

Sometime in the late 20th century a naked man bent over, spread his ass and took a picture. Eventually that picture, known as Goatse, became one of the most venerable memes in internet history. Who is this man, and how did his ass take over the internet?

To cover London in CPUs roughly as powerful as the brains of the Android tablet I'm reading this talk from, to a density of one per square metre, should therefore cost around €150M in 2040, or €20 per citizen. To put this in perspective, in 2007 it was estimated that councils in London spent around £150M, or €190M, per year on removing chewing gum from the city streets. So for the cost of removing chewing gum, a city in 2030 will be able to give every square metre of its streets the processing power of a 2012 tablet computer (or a 2002 workstation, or a 1982 supercomputer).

MP3s are so natural to the Internet now that it’s almost hard to imagine a time before high-quality compressed music. But there was such a time—and even after "MP3" entered the mainstream, organizing, ripping, and playing back one's music collection remained a clunky and frustrating experience. Enter Winamp, the skin-able, customizable MP3 player that "really whips the llama's ass." In the late 1990s, every music geek had a copy; llama-whipping had gone global, and the big-money acquisition offers quickly followed. AOL famously acquired the company in June 1999 for $80-$100 million—and Winamp almost immediately lost its innovative edge.

If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family photos, and records of road trips, births, marriages, and deaths all stream into the company's servers and lodge there. Facebook has collected the most extensive data set ever assembled on human social behavior.

Then there's "Girls Gone Bitcoin." In this reddit subforum [...], women post naked pictures of themselves along with Bitcoin addresses, in hopes of receiving tips. [...] Andresen calls this "the high-tech equivalent of putting a dollar in a G-string."

My brief, backbreaking, rage-inducing, low-paying, dildo-packing time inside the online-shipping machine.

In the face of this social disintegration, we have essentially hired an army of replacement confidants, an entire class of professional carers. As Ronald Dworkin pointed out in a 2010 paper for the Hoover Institution, in the late ’40s, the United States was home to 2,500 clinical psychologists, 30,000 social workers, and fewer than 500 marriage and family therapists. As of 2010, the country had 77,000 clinical psychologists, 192,000 clinical social workers, 400,000 nonclinical social workers, 50,000 marriage and family therapists, 105,000 mental-health counselors, 220,000 substance-abuse counselors, 17,000 nurse psychotherapists, and 30,000 life coaches. The majority of patients in therapy do not warrant a psychiatric diagnosis. This raft of psychic servants is helping us through what used to be called regular problems. We have outsourced the work of everyday caring.

That was about two years ago, and ever since, he's been buying an average of 300 names a day and selling them through his company, DomainMarket.com. That business, he said, brings in about $400,000 a month.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a person in possession of a fast internet connection must be in want of some porn. According to Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner, which tracks users across the web with a cookie, dozens of adult destinations populate the top 500 websites. Xvideos, the largest porn site on the web with 4.4 billion page views per month, is three times the size of CNN or ESPN, and twice the size of Reddit. It’s probably not unrealistic to say that porn makes up 30% of the total data transferred across the internet.

When James Cameron’s “Titanic” gets its theatrical rerelease in 3-D next week, it will emerge into a very different world for movies than when it first came out. It can be hard to notice how much has changed since 1997 just by watching a contemporary blockbuster like “Transformers” or “Twilight.” But the shifts have been massive, and significant. The emergence of digital technology has given audiences more entertainment options than ever, while simultaneously opening up new ways for fans to find each other and discuss pieces of pop culture. As the Web provides ever-more information at an ever-quicker pace, new tools for making movies have allowed filmmakers to cut up and recombine images and sound at the furious pace our entertainment consumption now seems to require. And all of these changes are visible in a single piece of film marketing: the movie trailer.

From this analysis emerged records of 18,520 sub-950-millisecond crashes and spikes — far more than they, and perhaps almost anyone, expected. Equally as striking as these events’ frequency was their arrangement: While market behavior tends to rise and fall in patterns that repeat themselves, fractal-style, in periods of days, weeks, months and years, “that only holds down to the time scale at which human stop being able to respond,” said Johnson. “The fractal gets broken.”

Why does it matter, if Invisible Children was funded by controversial donors? Two reasons - one, we can assume those donors thought IC aligned with their agenda - which is antagonistic to LGBT rights. Two, it fits an emerging pattern in which Invisible Children appears selectively concerned about crimes committed by Joseph Kony but indifferent to crimes, perhaps on a bigger scale, committed by their provisional partner, the government of Uganda - whose president shot his way into power using child soldiers, before Joseph Kony began using child soldiers. Like Kony, the government of Uganda was also indicted by the International Criminal Court in 2005, for human rights abuses and looting in the DRC Congo. Like Kony, the Ugandan army preys upon civilians and is currently accused, by Western human rights groups, with raping and looting in the DRC Congo, where it is hunting for Kony. In the late 1990s, Uganda helped spark a conflict in DRC Congo that, by the middle of the next decade it is estimated, had killed up to 5.4 million civilians, more than any conflict since World War Two.

The country's largest Internet service providers haven't given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops. Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures. But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers here today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 12. "Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."

In Prenzlauer Berg eskaliert der Streit um die Öffnungszeiten der Spätverkaufsläden: Ein 58-jähriger Bauarbeiter hat nach eigenen Angaben 48 Geschäfte ausfindig gemacht, die sonntags bis in die Nacht ihre Lebensmittel, Alkoholika und Zigaretten, Zeitschriften und Haushaltswaren verkaufen. Die Adressenliste ging dem Ordnungsamt und dem Gewerbeaußendienst beim Landeskriminalamt (LKA) zu. Der Bauarbeiter betont, ihm gehe es um „Gerechtigkeit“. Die Verstöße habe er bei Fahrradtouren notiert. Der Laden „Kollwitz 66“ in der Kollwitzstraße startete eine Gegenkampagne: „Wir bedauern, dass die bisherige liberale Praxis gegenüber ,Spätis‘ in Berlin dank einer Einzelperson offenbar beendet werden soll“, stand auf einem Aushang im Schaufenster. Dieser enthielt auch den Namen des Beschwerdeführers samt Telefonnummer, obwohl diese nicht im Telefonbuch steht. Ein Foto des Aushangs gelangte ins Online-Netzwerk Facebook. Seitdem „klingelt die ganze Nacht das Telefon“, beklagt G., der die Polizei alarmierte. Das Protestschreiben wurde aus dem Schaufenster entfernt, kursiert aber noch immer im Internet.

One of the most insidious aspects of recent Internet policy-making is that much of it is taking place behind closed doors, with little or no consultation -- think of SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and TPP. But there's another dangerous trend: the rise of "informal" agreements between the copyright industries and Internet service providers. What is being proposed is out-and-out censorship and doctoring of search engine results through the use of blacklists and whitelists: "The blacklist is of websites accused of infringement. These sites will never appear in search results. That's the whole site, not just the pages from the site with infringing content. And this is not a court process, it's a notification system allowing studios to tell search engines directly who the bad guys are. A white-list of "approved" online music and film services will be artificially promoted for music/film oriented searches."

Im Protokoll des Koalitionsausschusses vom Sonntag ist nachzulesen, dass "Verlage im Online-Bereich (...) nicht schlechter gestellt sein sollen als andere Werkvermittler". So steht es auch schon im schwarz-gelben Koalitionsvertrag. Deshalb sollten "Hersteller von Presseerzeugnissen ein eigenes Leistungsschutzrecht für die redaktionell-technische Festlegung journalistischer Beiträge oder kleiner Teile hiervon erhalten". Um die Gelder einzuziehen und zu verteilen, soll eine Verwertungsgesellschaft in Analogie zur Verwertungsgemeinschaft Wort oder der Gema eingerichtet werden. Die Schutzdauer soll ein Jahr betragen. Dass die deutschen Presseverlage schon seit Jahren versuchen, ein derartiges Gesetz durchzusetzen, ist kein Geheimnis. Kritiker der Idee eines Leistungsschutzrechtes, etwa die von Google finanziell unterstützte Initiative IGEL, befürchten negative Folgen. Beispielsweise könnten ihrer Meinung nach die Rechte der eigentlichen Urheber - im Fall der Verlage die Journalisten, die Artikel schreiben - beschnitten, das Urheberrecht vom Leistungsschutzrecht überlagert werden. Außerdem könnten kurze Textschnipsel, wie sie etwa von Google News angezeigt werden, künftig nicht mehr einfach als Zitat gelten und damit kostenpflichtig werden. Ein "Monopolrecht", heißt es auf der Igel-Website, "das kleine Textausschnitte, kurze Wortfolgen wie einzelne Sätze oder Überschriften erfasst, wird unweigerlich den Umgang mit der Sprache an sich einschränken."

Twitter users are about to become major marketing fodder, as two research companies get set to release information to clients who will pay for the privilege of mining the data. Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc and DataSift Inc, based in the U.K. and San Francisco, are licensed by Twitter to analyze archived tweets and basic information about users, like geographic location. DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days. Twitter opted not to comment on the sale and deferred questions to DataSift. In 2010, Twitter agreed to share all of its tweets with the U.S. Library of Congress. Details of how that information will be shared publicly are still in development, but there are some stated restrictions, including a six-month delay and a prohibition against using the information for commercial purposes.

As for Fab.com, the design site on Feb. 21 announced its acquisition of a German non-Samwer facsimile, Casacanda. “They’re less of a copycat and more a group of people who came up with a similar idea,” says Goldberg. “There are other clones that copy Fab very closely out there, but at least they use different colors,” says Goldberg, who’s sitting at his desk flipping back and forth between Fab and the Samwers’ Bamarang site. He points out the similar font and word choices on the “About” pages. “We even saw a job posting they had that was basically copied and pasted from Fab. It’s kind of flattering, but come on: If you’re going to do something about design, at least design your own website.”

The study by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project also found that men were nearly twice as likely as women to have posted content online that they later regret. Sixty-three percent of social network users have deleted people from their friend lists, according to the study, up from 56 percent in 2009. Sixty-seven percent of women who maintain a social networking profile said they have deleted friends compared with 58 percent of men.When it comes to privacy, 58 percent of social network users set their profile to private so that only friends can see it. Nineteen percent allow friends of friends to view their profile and 20 percent keep their profile public. Women are significantly more likely than men — by a 67 percent to 48 percent margin — to set their profile to private, the study said. The study found that men are nearly twice as likely as women to have posted updates, comments, photos or videos that they later regret. Eleven percent of social network users say they have posted content they regret with 15 percent of men saying they have done so and just eight percent of women. The survey of 2,277 adults was conducted in April and May of last year and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percentage points.

According to the six-page indictment filed by Rosenstein, Ayre worked with Philip, Ferguson and Maloney to supervise an illegal gambling business from June 2005 to January 2012 in violation of Maryland law. The indictment focuses on the movement of funds from accounts outside the U.S., in Switzerland, England, Malta, and Canada, and the hiring of media resellers and advertisers to promote Internet gambling. “Sports betting is illegal in Maryland, and federal law prohibits bookmakers from flouting that law simply because they are located outside the country,” Rosenstein said in a statement.

Viele lästern über die BILD und Springer, die manipulativen Medien und die unter der Regie von strippenziehenden Boulevardzeitungen stehenden Politikern, aber selbst sind wir so naiv und lesen Fefe’s Blog, und sagen uns immer wieder, dass wir seine Polemik erkennen. Dass wir seine Falschinformationen richtig interpretieren. Dass die Kommentare ja absichtlich überspitzt sind und seine Lügen ja nicht böse gemeint sind, sondern zur Medienkompetenz der Leser beitragen. Das ist, mit Verlaub, Bullshit. Fefe ist alles was wir an der BILD verachtenswert finden und er benutzt den Einfluss den wir ihm über Jahre als Leserschaft gegeben haben jetzt willkürlich.

Die Öffentlich-Rechtlichen, die Gema und andere kritisieren die "sogenannte Netzgemeinde" und fordern die Regierung auf, das Handelsabkommen Acta sofort zu unterzeichnen. Sie sprechen von "einer Generation, in der viele ohne jedes Unrechtsbewusstsein für 'digitalen Diebstahl' aus Schule und Elternhaus in die große Welt des Internets entlassen worden" seien und fordern die unverzügliche Unterzeichnung des umstrittenen Handelsabkommens Acta sowie eine zukunftsorientierte Reform des Urheberrechtes: Unter dem Dach der A stellen sich ARD, ZDF, der Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, die Gema, der Bundesverband Musikindustrie und andere gegen diejenigen, die vergangene Woche zu Zehntausenden gegen Acta auf die Straßen gegangen waren.

The Brazilian government has filed a lawsuit against Twitter and its users in a bid to stop publication of messages alerting drivers to police speed traps and drunk-driving checkpoints. Brazil has asked for the “immediate suspension of all accounts that give information about the location of police radar,” the office of the Attorney General of the Union, said in a statement.