Even though I knew about Reddit for as long as I knew about Digg, I never really used it for a longer period of time. This changed recently when I started to use my account more actively. I personally like two things the most, next to a big list of smaller things. Reddit first and [...]

I just read about Operation Black March on Reddit which suggests to boycott all media, and in particular film, music, books and magazine companies, in the whole month of March. The operation aims to be a counter-movement against the lobbying of media companies that try to censor the Internet and act openly against the freedom [...]

Megaupload was one of the most visited sites on the Internet before its take down earlier this month. No one up until now looked at the consequences of that takedown in regards to the traffic the site received. Did it just go *poof* or did users flock to other sites instead to do whatever they [...]

When the Megaupload servers were taken down, no one bothered to distinguish legitimate data from data that infringed on the copyright of others. Users who had been using Megaupload as a host for their own files were now in a position where they were denied access to those files, even though they were in many [...]

Cebit, the world’s largest computer expo, is held each year in Hannover, Germany. It is an international expo that is attracting companies and trade experts, as well as tech savvy visitors from all over the world. This year’s Cebit is taking place from March 6 to 10. Single tickets and full-event tickets can be ordered [...]

Instagr.am is a popular photo taking and sharing application for Apple’s iPhone. You can basically use it to take snapshots with the phone’s camera and send them directly to sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Flickr. It comes with other social features that make it that more enticing to a crowd that likes to socialize [...]

The FBI is looking to develop an emergencies early warning system that works by “scraping” information in real time from social networks.  The US policing and intelligence bureau has asked contractors to suggest possible solutions and to come up with ways in which this might work.  In a post on the Federal Business Opportunities website [...]

Megaupload, one of the world’s top file sharing and storage sites, has been taken down on request of US authorities on Thursday. Arrests have been made in various countries and assets as well as the service’s websites and servers have been seized. No files were accessible anymore on the servers after the takedown, which had [...]

The popular file hosting site Megaupload has been shut down by US authorities on Thursday, and the site’s leaders have been charged with widespread online copyright infringement. According to an US Department of Justice press release, Megaupload generated more than “$175 million in criminal proceeds” and caused more than “half a billion dollars in harm [...]

Remember last year’s IPv6 day ? No? Last year’s test day was designed to see how well and effective the new technology works when it is enabled on core Internet sites and services. Back then major Internet service providers, websites and companies enabled IPv6 on their servers for a one day trial of the new [...]

Grooveshark’s ride to popularity has abruptly ended, at least in Germany. German users trying to access the website of the popular music streaming service Grooveshark are now greeted with an informational page telling them that the service has ended its operation in the country. According to the information, cost of operation reached a level in [...]

Rather than discuss software or trends, tweak, tricks and tips, this article is about a great site called JimmyR.com . This site is packed from page to page with all sorts of tech news, information, other news, coding tips for programmers and much more. How is this useful to you? Just go check it out [...]

Have you ever asked yourself why it is not possible to automate basic tasks on the Internet? I’m not talking about opening your favorite homepage in your web browser, but about tasks that rely on different services. Ifttt is a new service that lets you create if then actions on the Internet. It basically lets [...]

A court in the US might have to decide just how much a Twitter follower is worth after a Californian man took 17,000 followers with him after leaving a job.  Noah Kravitz, a writer was working for mobile phone website Phonedog.  While there he began tweeting under the name Phonedog_Noah about the company and its [...]

If you are living in the United States, you should have heard about SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and Protect-IP, which, when passed, would give companies rights that they should not have. If it passes, IP rightsholders (a term vaguely defined) could send notices to payment processors or ad services like Google Adsense to force [...]

Premium Usenet provider Giganews has added several new services that are free of charge to Diamond account users in recent years. Diamond users not only get one of the fastest most complete Usenet experiences on the Internet, but also access to a virtual private network, a free Usenet browser and now also to 30 Gigabytes [...]

PayPal is a popular payment processing system that is used by millions to make purchases and transactions on the Internet. Much of PayPal’s appeal stems from the fact that its system supports user to user transactions. New PayPal accounts are limited automatically until they are verified. Limitations block certain site features and limits the amount [...]

Nothing is ever 100% completely secure, let’s get this settled from the off.  Whatever security anybody or any company ever puts in place there’s either some way to crack it, or some flaw in the system that will allow people to circumvent it.  Thus it’s not really a shouting a Facebook moment to discover that [...]

Cloud hosting, or online hosting in general, is not a new technology. Your emails hosted on your email provider’s server are as much cloud hosting as storing website files on content distribution networks or important documents with the help of a provider like Dropbox. When you look at the services that Dropbox offers, you will [...]

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has for many years now had one of the biggest and most visited websites on the whole Internet.  The company has taken great pride over the years and in 2002 a leaked document, still available online called “The Glass Wall” provided a masterclass in website usability that many people still consider [...]

If you are following the chatter on social networking sites such as Google+, Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed that YouTube is currently testing a new homepage design. Clever folks found out a way to enable the new design right now with a cookie. The advantage of this method is that you can clear [...]

I have to admit that I’m pretty biased when it comes to Giganews and Usenet access in specific. I have been a happy Giganews customer for years, even though I pay a premium price for a premium service. Giganews did a lot to improve their service and product in past years. I’m talking about the [...]

It’s been announced that US government is about to expand its scheme to get broadband and PCs into low-income households across America.  It’s a similar scheme to others that have been run and that continue worldwide.  As part of the deal Microsoft will provide $250 laptops and desktops pre-loaded with Office and Redemtech will offer [...]

Over the last two years one of the biggest complaints I’ve had to make against tablet computers is that the Internet has simply not kept the same pace of change.  If you go to any wbesite you’ll still find hyperlinks stacked closely together, drop down menus that only appear when you hover over them and [...]

Time is valuable. For some, it is more valuable than anything else. If you run a business like I do, you will encounter tasks that need to be done but waste lots of precious time. A basic example would be comment moderating, checking for broken links or answering emails. While it is not always possible [...]

If you thought it could not get worse with all the tracking and personalization on the Internet, then you have just been proven wrong. According to The Wall Street Journal and other sources, both Visa and MasterCard are planning to tie credit card purchases with personalized online advertisement. What does it mean? You recently bought [...]

One of the things that I do not like that much about YouTube is the fact that several key pages and services are not linked directly on the main page of the video hosting portal. This includes the music group page and also the charts page on YouTube. YouTube Charts, which you can access here, [...]

When you are on the Internet you face a dilemma. You do not know an awful lot about new sites that you visit. You do not know much about the company or people that operate a website for instance. That may not be a problem on sites that you just access for information, but what [...]

Many websites nowadays offer to send updates to the visitor either with the help of RSS feeds or email. Some websites on the other hand that you may find useful come without those options. If you want to stay up to date, you need to find a way to create custom email alerts or feeds [...]

In the latest Orwellian move to restrict the rights of their citizens, the UK government has come to an agreement with the four largest Internet Service Providers to censor explicit contents on the ISP level. The standard – it is for the best of the children – argument has been made to justify the censorship [...]

We all know that you can practically buy anything on the Internet, from bulk email accounts over credit card information and even PayPal accounts. Brian Krebs in a post on the Krebs on Security blog sheds some light on the latter. He identified websites were PayPal account data, and sometimes linked email account information, were [...]

I’m very cautious when I see sites making claims that they offer a service for free for a lifetime. There is usually a catch, just like there is when you see hosting providers offer unlimited bandwidth, but that’s another story. The Dutch Usenet provider XSUsenet is currently offering free lifetime accounts to access the Usenet. [...]

Having a virtual private network (VPN) at your disposal can be very handy not only for business use but also for other purposes. Probably the most important aspect is that establish a secure connection to protect your data from spying eyes. But VPNs can also give your computer an IP address in another country which [...]

All videos that you view on the popular video hosting website YouTube are logged by the service if you are logged in on the site during the time you are watching the video. While that may be great at times if you want to find that one video again that you watched a couple of [...]

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of file hosting sites that offer their services on the Internet. The popular ones offer both free and premium accounts, and limit the maximum size of files that can be uploaded. A new player in the file hosting niche needs to either come up with ingenious features that the [...]

Virus Total is a wonderful service for users who want to scan a file for malware before executing it. The core benefit of using the malware scanning service is that it scans the selected file or archive with dozens of antivirus engines. This puts more weight on the results that are produced. The popularity of [...]

Myp2p.eu went offline less than a month after I reviewed their service here on Ghacks. The site was basically a live sports aggregator. It collected live links from a variety of sources, bundled them neatly as game and match listings to make it as easy as possible for its users to find live streams of [...]

My story on Cnet’s Download.com installer that the company added to many downloads on their website has sparked the interest of other websites and software developers. Users who download software from download.com now download an installer first that comes bundled with a toolbar. This web installer then offers to download and install the installer of [...]

Back in 2010 I wrote a piece about reviews on software download sites. In it I discovered that some developers manipulated the public perception of their program by adding fake reviews, usually in the form of a five-star rating for their programs. The problem here was that some developers went overboard with the fake reviews [...]

The majority of file hosting websites make use of captchas when free account users or guests try to download files from their servers. For me, that’s more of a way to make the downloads less convenient to convince more users to upgrade to a premium account. Still, there is not much you can do if [...]

I just tried to make a credit card payment at a merchants website that was using 2Checkout as the payment processor. The process on first glance looked like any other checkout process on the Internet. I first had to enter my personal information, and then on a second page my credit card number, verification code [...]

I have to admit that I’m not downloading many files from Cnet’s download.com software portal. I usually prefer direct downloads from developer sites. Sometimes however developers link to the downloads on download.com instead of offering the downloads on their sites. This can make sense from a business perspective, but removes some of the controls they [...]

I have to admit that I’m not a LinkedIn user. I probably should have an account with my Internet business and all, but then again, it feels to me like yet another network that I have to spend time on. So, no LinkedIn for me. I recently stumbled upon a story over at Connection Agent. [...]

You may recall that YouTube started rolling out a new player and site design not so long ago. The redesign, announced about a month ago, made several changes to the video hosting website. Probably the change with the biggest impact was the switch from a light themed played to a dark themed player. Back then [...]

I have reviewed Chrome Live Sports yesterday, a Google Chrome extension to watch live sports in the browser. I was asked if there was a comparable extension for Firefox, and while I was not able to come up with one, I have the next best thing: A football, and other sports, live stream aggregator. When [...]

The UK newspaper business must be wondering what’s going on these days. Only a few weeks after the News of the World was forced to shut up shop for good amongst phone hacking scandals, it’s now been reported that The Sun has suffered a serious breach of security with details of customers stolen and re-published [...]

When I research a domain or website, I sometimes want to find out about other websites that the company or owner maintains. Why can this be important? Lets say I want to buy a website about Grand Canyon Helicopter Tours. With a reverse lookup I can make sure that the guy who is selling the [...]

It seems that the popular file syncing and hosting service Dropbox cannot break the negative news pattern of the last weeks. The company announced a change to their policies on Friday which they received lots of flak for. The original news post on the Dropbox company blog has been updated twice to clarify the issue. [...]

I received my Google+ invite this morning and have been playing around with Google’s “answer” to Facebook since then. The thing that I like about it most is the circles feature which allows you to create groups of friends or contacts. One of the problems that Facebook currently has is that you do not have [...]

PayPal users from the European Union are receiving emails these days with the subject “Additional information required by 29.9.2011″. What first looks like another phishing email is in fact a legit PayPal email. According to PayPal, users from the European Union need to confirm account information because of a new EU law. Users who fail [...]