Google Changing the Internet yet Again

It would appear that someone over at Google got the hint that there was another industry where a heavy hitter like themselves could shake things up and pick up a larger share of the market.

Google is now going after Internet service providers by coming to the market with a faster, well.... much much faster Internet option, but only to an experimental select number of communities around the US. Google is issuing an open Request for anyone to identify communities or governments that would be interested in their experiment. To help bring it all together Google has put information and a video on this page explaining their intentions.


For all of us with Comcast at home feeding us 8 or 12 Megabits per second, Google may have just changed the way we see our Internet provider.

If you do the math...

1 Gigabit per second = 1,000,000,000 bits/second
12 Megabits per second = 12,000,000 bits/second

bits to bytes = bits/8

12 million bits = 1,500,000 bytes or 1.5 Megabytes per second
1 billion bits = 125,000,000 bytes per second or 125 Megabytes per second


Can anyone say "Power Boost"...

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Inmates Taunt Victims Using Facebook

On my drive in this morning, I was listening to Chris Moyles on BBC Radio 1 (ohhh yeah, hottest radio station on Sirius/XM Radio!), and they had a really interesting news story; at least 30 inmates in the UK were using Facebook to taunt their victims from inside jail! One prisoner wrote,

"I will be home one day and I can't wait to look into certain people's eyes and see the fear of me being there."

Holy... I can't imagine how terrifying it would be. Prisoners are allowed to use the internet for educational purposes and supposedly under very close supervision... so much for that. Thankfully Facebook has acted quickly and deleted those inmate's accounts.

I find it very interesting how social media sites are changing our world and connecting people. You don't have to know someone's e-mail to get a hold of them anymore, just their first or last name and go from there... Heck, 6-7 years ago, how on earth would someone in prison be able to taunt their victims from jail without directly calling them up? I've never even heard of that happening!

If someone bothers you on Facebook a lot and you don't know/like them, I'd recommend the Block feature. It basically makes you non-existent to that person and them to you (very handy for Ex's!).

Source via BBC Radio 1

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Apple Hates on Adobe; Adobe Bites Back!

If you have been wishing your iPhone, iPod, or the new iPad would have Flash, you aren't alone, despite what Apple would like you to think, people do in fact want Flash.

Here is a little bit of the action in case you missed out recently thanks to downloadsquad.com:

Adobe shouts "you're killing the open web" and Apple fires back with "your code is crappy and your plugin is responsible for half of Mac crashes." Adobe responds to potential iPad users, "enjoy your blue Legos." Apple replies under their breath, "Agreed. Enjoy your blue Legos."

The best part is, despite Apple wanting people to think YOU DO NOT NEED/WANT FLASH, over 7 million iPhone and iPod Touch users attempted to download Adobe Flash from their device in December alone. Imagine how much that would balloon if every user who wanted Flash on their device tried to download it, even knowing they couldn't get it. That number would probably jump tenfold or more!


When more and more competitors get full Flash support, Apple is bound to give in...er, let's hope they do.

Source via Downloadsquad

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What in the World?

Here is this week's installment of "What in the World?" I decided to make things a little harder this week. The first person to correctly answer in the blog comments gets a brand new 10' Cat6 Ethernet Cable courtesy of Cat5cableguy.com! That's right this bad boy can handle both data and VoIP traffic in one handy cable. Have a great weekend!

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Great Tool for Downloading Videos

Every so often, people ask us IT folks to download a video from a site like YouTube. I crossed upon this new site that works awesome and is very easy to use http://benderconverter.com/. It converts to a variety of formats instantly and requires no e-mail input or anything. Very handy!

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Advanced Persistent Threats: The Story of How Google Was Hacked

I hope you are all ready for a sweet little bedtime story about spiders, I mean viruses.

Advanced Persistent Threads, or APT, are a somewhat new kind of virus that has come out of China and is believed to be what was used to hack Google last year and countless other companies. Wired just did an article on this new breed of viruse that is down right frightening and well worth the read. It may be a bit confusing to some, so I have made a possibly more confusing bedtime story to help you understand. Ha...

Think of an APT's as an egg... let's call it a spider egg because I hate spiders. This little spider egg gets transferred to your computer when you accidentally click on a fake link in an e-mail, open a bogus .Zip file, or click on one of those nasty pop-ups trying to trick you into thinking you have a virus (and because you clicked it, you now do. Doh!).

It lays dormant on your computer for several months before hatching. Much like a baby spider, instinct sets in and the APT goes off to work, undetectable. It gives itself full access to your computer and soon the entire company network. Invisible, it quietly grins as it dangles the keys to your house in front of you. It finds all your sensitive information, digs through your files and e-mails and then sends a signal to China, which we will call Mama Spider, to let her know where it is. Well, Mama Spider quickly and stealthily connects to it's baby through the internet and the baby spider starts sending company and personal data it's mama.

Unfortunately for your IT folks, it's not easy to detect these viruses because the spiders make all the data look like legitimate e-mails and network data. Think of it like this... Buddy leaves for the day. "See ya Buddy. Have a good night!" - and Buddy walks out of the building. Not five min's later you see Buddy again. "Hey Buddy, I thought you were leaving? Anyhow, have a good evening." Buddy awkwardly waves, in an almost spider like fashion and you are like whoa... odd. Anyhow, Buddy heads down the elevator and out the door, la la..RIP, oh whoa! What the!? Buddy just tore off his face and he is really a spider hauling all our company files to Mama. "I knew that second Buddy waved like a spider!" you shout on deaf ears. No one will hear you because it's too late.

The end.

The moral of the story? Be careful!

Wow! Well, that got a bit off track and complicated. Basically, China hacked Google with the APT virus. No one knows how long their systems were infected, but it spread itself all over their computers and was churning out data long before Google realized. Wired says that thousands of companies have this going on and don't even know about it.

There is actually quite a bit more to these APTs, so I'd highly receommnd you check out the full article over at Wired.

Oh and thanks to Buddy for being my example :)

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Google to Drop Support for IE6

According to this posting on Google's Enterprise Blog, they will finally phase out support for IE6 over the course of this year. It's about time! I've been saying for a little while now that for IE6 to die, Google will have to drop support, and the rest of the internet will follow. Ok, maybe just most of the internet will follow, but a guy can dream, right? I look forward to the day when we no longer have to QA and retrofit our digital work to accommodate laggards and less than nimble corporations. IE6 no more!

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