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China official tells Web firms to control content (AP) : Technet |
- China official tells Web firms to control content (AP)
- What Does Steve Jobs' Retirement Mean for the Future of Apple? [VIDEO] (Mashable)
- Under NYC's streets, power lines stayed safe (AP)
- Samsung launches mobile instant messaging tool (Reuters)
- Irene takes out some East Coast cellphone service (AP)
- Hurricane Irene Now Has a Twitter Account (Mashable)
- Will Amazon's Tablet Kill the iPad? (ContributorNetwork)
- Peggle HD tops iPad Games of the Week (Appolicious)
- Irene could leave many without power for weeks (AP)
- Get tips and tricks for Smarter Shopping at the supermarket (Appolicious)
- Spin out panoramic photos with ease using 360 for Android (Appolicious)
| China official tells Web firms to control content (AP) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 09:02 PM PDT BEIJING – A Communist Party leader has told China's Internet companies to tighten control over material online as Beijing cracks down on dissent and tries to block the rise of Middle East-style protests. The party secretary for Beijing, Liu Qi, issued the warning following a visit this week to Sina Corp., which operates a popular microblogging site, according to the party-published newspaper Beijing Daily. Internet companies should "strengthen management and firmly prevent the spread of fake and harmful information," Liu was quoted as saying after the visit Monday to Sina. He said companies should "resist fake and negative information." Communist authorities encourage Internet use for education and business but are uneasy about its potential to spread dissent, especially after social networking and other websites played a key role in protests that brought down governments in Egypt and Tunisia. Beijing is in the midst of one of its most sweeping crackdowns on dissent in years and has detained or questioned hundreds of activists, lawyers and others. The government tries to block access to foreign websites deemed subversive and Chinese operators of websites where the public can post comments are required to watch the material and remove any that violates censorship rules. The government's censorship rules prompted Google Inc. to close its China search engine last year. Mainland users can see Google's Chinese-language search site in Hong Kong but access is slower and the company's China market share has shrunk. The report on Liu's warning gave no details of how Internet companies were expected to change their management. Employees who answered the phone at Sina referred questions to a spokeswoman who did not answer her phone. With Liu during the visit were Sina CEO Charles Chao and Kai-fu Lee, a former boss of Google's China unit who runs a technology investment company, according to the Beijing Daily. Chao told Forbes magazine in March that Sina's microblogging site, Weibo, has at least 100 employees monitoring content 24 hours a day. The company said in May that the number of Weibo users had passed 140 million. Also this week, the Beijing Internet Media Association, a government-sanctioned industry group, called on its 104 member companies to police Internet content, possibly prompted by Liu's order. "Propaganda guidance to the public should be led toward a correct direction," the appeal said, according to the Beijing Daily. "Online news should be trustworthy and should not spread rumors or vulgar contents." Liu, the party secretary, also visited the headquarters of Youku.com Inc., a video portal, and talked with CEO Victor Koo, the report said. China has the world's biggest online population, with 485 million Internet users as of June 30, according to the government-sanctioned China National Internet Information Center. Meanwhile, a major Chinese Internet commerce platform, Taobao, has told merchants that use its service to stop selling virtual private network and other software that allows Web surfers to avoid government filters. Taobao, part of Alibaba Group, said it acted after finding VPNs were being used to visit foreign websites illegally. A company spokesman said Tuesday it took the action on its own without receiving government orders. |
| What Does Steve Jobs' Retirement Mean for the Future of Apple? [VIDEO] (Mashable) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 06:46 AM PDT Technology expert Scott Steinberg is the CEO of high-tech consulting firm TechSavvy Global, and a frequent keynote speaker and media analyst for ABC, CBS and CNN who's covered the field for 400+ outlets from NPR to Rolling Stone. A celebrated author and entrepreneur, he also hosts video series Gear Up and Game Theory, hailed as "the smartest take on the video game industry." [More from Mashable: Apple Cancels iTunes TV Rentals]
With Steve Jobs stepping down from the CEO position at Apple, consumers, gadget fans and investors alike are wondering: How will this affect the direction of what was briefly the world's most valuable company? [More from Mashable: New Apple CEO Tim Cook Gets $383 Million Stock Bonus — In 10 Years] We break down what's at stake in the video above.
Do you have a question about the tech industry?Leave a question in the comments section below, and we can answer it in our next video episode. This story originally published on Mashable here. |
| Under NYC's streets, power lines stayed safe (AP) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 05:19 PM PDT NEW YORK – Below the streets of New York City, a network of pipes, cables and tunnels up to 200 feet deep transports power, gas, water, Internet traffic, trains, sewage and more. When Tropical Storm Irene hit the city Sunday, this underground network was largely protected from major damage. On the island of Manhattan, only a handful of the 1.6 million residents lost power. And roughly 50,000 households in the city's outer boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island lost power. Elsewhere, Irene left millions of East Coast residents without power, as winds knocked trees into above-ground power lines. The city's buried infrastructure is safe from wind, but it is vulnerable to flooding. Some experts say the city simply got lucky that the flooding wasn't more severe. Its vast subway system, with 735 stations and 2,000 miles of track, is especially at risk. That's why transportation officials preemptively shut it down and it remained closed Sunday evening. Forecasters feared Irene would deliver a surge twice as high as the 4 feet extra of water that washed over parts of the southern tip of Manhattan. "If the surge had been three feet higher, there could have been huge damage," said Martin Bowman, professor of oceanography at the Marine Sciences Research Center of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Bowman heads a group at Stony Brook that studies storm surges. A large storm surge, like one that hit nearly 200 years ago, could flood crucial parts of the subway system and cripple a transportation network that delivers 5 million passengers every weekday. Power plants and airports near the city's extensive shoreline could be knocked out. Wall Street could be flooded. Directly beneath Manhattan's streets lie 21,000 miles of power lines used by Consolidated Edison to deliver electricity. The lines and equipment are accessed through 60,000 manholes and service boxes. Most of the equipment underground is sealed and not vulnerable to flooding, said Arnold Wong, a project manager for high-voltage transmission at ConEd. But ConEd warned that it might need to cut off power to 17,000 customers in Lower Manhattan, home to the financial district, because saltwater would have been more damaging to equipment if power were still coursing through wires. Hair-thin optical fibers run underground near the electrical wires. They carry the city's phone calls and Internet traffic and data crucial to the financial markets. Optical fiber isn't as sensitive to flooding as power lines, though it does rely on power to operate. In the 30 feet of ground below the power and telecommunications lines lies a mesh of steam, water and gas lines. ConEd shut down steam service to some customers before the storm, but no other services were disrupted and little damage appears to have been done. Far below those lines — and below the famous subway system — the city's sewer system runs. It is an antiquated system that carries sewage and storm runoff together to water treatment plants. Even moderate storms overwhelm the system and force officials to release untreated sewage into the city's waterways. In preparation for Irene, officials began releasing sewage days ahead of the storm. By far the biggest concern before Irene was that a storm surge would send seawater cascading into subway entrances, flooding tracks and ruining control equipment. Subway tunnels can be as deep as 180 feet underground or just one story below the street, but they generally sit below the power, cable, water and gas lines, and above the sewer line. Water is a constant problem. On a typical day, 13 million to 15 million gallons of water is pumped out of the subway system. But that is only a tiny fraction of what could be brought by a major storm surge. If a surge of water began to pour into a subway entrance or through grates that line the sidewalk, the pumps would be overwhelmed. That would destroy the subway's electrical and hydraulic systems, and the water damage would be compounded by the corrosive nature of sea salt. Water would also flow downhill into the long, deep tunnels that pass under the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn and Queens, further crippling the system. If water rises to a track's third rail, where electric power is delivered to the train, trains cannot run. Lower Manhattan contains a high concentration of subway stations that serve nearly all the city's lines. Throughout the system, Bowman counts 25 subway stations whose entrance stairways are about 15 feet or so above sea level, while most are on higher ground. In the end, Irene did not deliver as strong a blow as feared. Transportation officials declined to predict Sunday when the subway system would be back up and running. Inspectors are checking the tracks and pumper trains have been sent to places where flooding from rainwater occurred. After that is finished, trains without riders must be sent through the system to test it. Still, Irene offered a troubling glimpse of what might be possible if a future storm brings more intense flooding. While a storm like Irene is a rare event in New York, it is not unheard of. In 1992, a winter storm drove an 8-foot surge that flooded the entrance of the underground commuter train station in low-lying Hoboken, N.J., just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Half a mile of track was inundated, and the train system was out of service for ten days. An 1821 hurricane drove an even higher surge. The exact extent is not known, but the water rose 13 feet in one hour at Manhattan's southern tip, according to the city government's website. Hurricane expert Jeff Masters cites a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration model predicting that a Category 2 hurricane could drive a 15- to 20-foot surge into New York. That would flood JFK Airport and Manhattan as far north as Canal Street. Bowman says New York should build flood barriers to protect the city, much like London has had since building the Thames Barrier in 1982. Bowman believes threes such barriers are necessary to protect New York: one across the upper East River, to shield against surges funneled through Long Island Sound; one across the narrow waters between Staten Island and New Jersey; and most dauntingly, one spanning from New York's Rockaway beach community across five miles of water to New Jersey's Sandy Hook. "It's not as big of an engineering problem as you might think," Bowman said, because apart from shipping channels, the water of the Lower New York Bay is only 20 feet deep. He puts the cost of the entire project at $5 billion to $10 billion. ___ Jonathan Fahey can be reached http://twitter.com/JonathanFahey. Peter Svensson can be reached at http://twitter.com/petersvensson. |
| Samsung launches mobile instant messaging tool (Reuters) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 07:40 PM PDT SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Electronics Co said on Monday it would launch a mobile instant messaging tool in its latest push to attract more consumers to its handsets and challenge rivals such as Apple and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. The new service, called ChatON, will be available from October and preinstalled in Samsung's feature phones as well as smartphones running on its own bada operating system and Google's Android software, it said. With the move, Samsung enters an already crowded mobile messaging market, which telecoms carriers fear will hit revenue from profitable text messaging services. Apple plans to roll out iMessage, enabling the millions of iPhone and iPad users to send messages to one another over the Internet at no cost, and RIM aims to leverage the popularity of its BlackBerry Messenger with a new music service. Samsung's messaging tool will work across all major smartphone platforms including iPhone and BlackBerry and will allow users to send text, images, and hand-written notes, as well as chat in groups and share video clips. It plans to expand the offering to all Android-based smartphones and tablets, and it will also be available for download to consumers using rival Android, iPhone and BlackBerry models. (Reporting by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Jonathan Hopfner) |
| Irene takes out some East Coast cellphone service (AP) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 04:45 PM PDT NEW YORK – Wireless networks fell quiet Sunday in some coastal areas of North Carolina and southern Virginia, but calls were going through in most areas affected by Tropical Storm Irene, the Federal Communications Commission said. In Lenoir, Greene and Carteret counties of North Carolina, 50 percent to 90 percent of cell towers went offline, said Rear Adm. Jamie Barnett, head of the public safety bureau of the Federal Communications Commission. About 400 cell towers were offline in North Carolina and Virgina, with power outages the chief reason. Another 200 towers were running on backup power by Saturday night and could go silent as their backup batteries or generators run dry, Barnett said. Landline phone service failed for about 125,000 households on the coast, the FCC said. Another 250,000 have lost cable service, and some of them could have phone service from the cable company, which would then also be out. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the 911 system has held up well. There were no reports of call-center outages or call congestion, he told The Associated Press. Public-safety networks for police, firefighters and ambulance crews also were working. Networks in the biggest population center in the path of the storm, the greater New York metropolitan area, were largely spared. And Verizon Wireless spokesman Thomas Pica said most of its customers haven't experienced any disruptions. "The Verizon Wireless network continues to perform well all along the East Coast, including in the many affected communities," Pica said in an emailed statement. "Some cell sites in communities that have lost commercial power are operating on our own emergency backup generators to help us continue providing wireless service to our customers." In New York City itself, Barnett said, only 1 percent of cell towers went off the air. Time Warner Cable Inc., one of the city's two cable companies, said it had reports of sporadic outages. Verizon Communications Inc., the local phone company, was running some switching centers on backup power. |
| Hurricane Irene Now Has a Twitter Account (Mashable) Posted: 27 Aug 2011 05:50 AM PDT Want to know what's going on with Hurricane Irene? Twitter account and generally making herself useful. [More from Mashable: Hurricane Irene: Social Media Shows Calm Before the Storm [PICS]] Here's a sampling:
[More from Mashable: Top 10 Twitter Trends This Week [CHART]]
This story originally published on Mashable here. |
| Will Amazon's Tablet Kill the iPad? (ContributorNetwork) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 03:18 PM PDT Contribute content like this. Start here. It's bound to happen, they say. Sooner or later, the iPad will be knocked off its lofty perch by an Android tablet ... like, say, the one now being designed by Amazon. After all, the iPad's like the Mac and Android tablets are like Windows, and we all know how that one turned out. Or do we? If you count iPads, which cost more than most budget laptops, Apple is now the world's top PC vendor. What's more, it leads not just by market share but by profit, too. The fact is, Microsoft Windows PCs owed their dominance mostly to two factors (besides Microsoft's ruthlessness): The price advantage, and the app advantage. But neither of those factors apply to the tablet market. To wit: Apple leads in competitive pricing And the iPad is very competitively priced. Sure, you can find Android tablets discounted to $399 with a $100 gift card thrown in or something. But almost none of them start out that way, because that's pushing the limits of how much they cost to make. They get discounted so heavily because there's no other way to move inventory, because almost nobody wants them. The most extreme example of this is actually a non-Android tablet, the HP TouchPad. It was recently discounted to $99, prompting a feeding frenzy which was so quick that if you didn't check Yahoo! that weekend you probably missed it. But the reason it sold out so quickly is because it was a $399 tablet priced at $99, not because people want cheaply-made tablets. Tablets that cheap are slow and awkward, and have almost no apps. Both factors apply to a lot of today's Android tablets. Apple has more apps than anyone else The Android Market for smartphones has grown by leaps and bounds, but the iPhone still has the edge when it comes to both quantity and quality. And when it comes to tablets? Android's got almost nothing for them. Here's how this applies to Amazon Amazon knows about both of these factors, so it's not even going to try to compete with the iPad on its own terms. That way lies either Xoom-style obscurity or TouchPad-style annihilation. Instead, as Marco Arment explains, what Amazon's likely to do is make a competitor to the Nook Color -- a Kindle Touch, or what-have-you. It'll be a cheap, lightweight, color multitouch device, that buys games and apps from the Android Appstore and books from the Kindle bookstore. And it won't compete with the iPad, because the people who buy it either won't be able to buy an iPad or will, in fact, already have one. Taken on its own merits, the upcoming Amazon device looks like it holds a ton of promise. But it won't replace Apple's iPad, any more than the MacBook Air does. |
| Peggle HD tops iPad Games of the Week (Appolicious) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 02:30 PM PDT |
| Irene could leave many without power for weeks (AP) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 04:36 PM PDT It could take weeks to restore power to millions of people left in the dark by Tropical Storm Irene. The lights went out for more than seven million people and businesses from Folly Beach, S.C., to Portland, Maine. And thousands of utility workers have begun the race to restore power. Getting the lights back on will be an enormous job for crews fanning across the East Coast. Irene ripped down power lines and crushed critical equipment near power plants. It flooded coastal cities with seawater, dousing electrical stations and threatening underground wires. Crews are still assessing the damage. "We're dark across the whole map," said Theresa Gilbert of Connecticut Light & Power. Irene blacked out half of the utility's 1.2 million customers Sunday, making it the biggest outage in Connecticut history. More than five million people and businesses remain without power, and the storm had led to the deaths of at least 20 people in eight states by Sunday evening. Some areas in its path, like Manhattan, were relatively unscathed by the weekend storm, while other areas will need days, or even weeks, to recover. The outages could be critical for the elderly, disabled and others who rely on community services. "What if we're without power for days?" asked Pat Dillon, 52, who is partially paralyzed from a stroke. Dillon's senior care facility in Milford, Conn., lost power when a generator failed. As she sat in the dark, Dillon worried that her wheelchair's batteries would run out. Even worse, she needs to keep her diabetes mediation chilled. "Once the refrigerator gets warm, my insulin goes bad," Dillon said. "I could go into diabetic shock. It's kind of scary." Power companies say they'll try to get critical services running first. But many are just starting to understand the full extent of damage to the grid. Utility workers must traverse thousands of square miles to find out what's down before they can start repairs. "It's going to be several days at least for our most severely damaged areas" to get power back, said Mike Hughes, a spokesman for Progress Energy in North Carolina, which serves about 3.1 million customers. Gilbert, with Connecticut Power, said it took two weeks to restore power after Hurricane Gloria knocked out service to 477,000 customers in 1985. "And this definitely blows those numbers away," she said. In Virginia, Irene knocked out power to more than 300 critical services, including hospitals, emergency call centers and fire stations. Dominion Resources expects half of those facilities to be restored by the end of the day and most of the rest fixed by Monday. Most public health and safety facilities have backup generators, Dominion spokesman Dan Genest said. "For those that don't, we're asking them to take care of their people as well as they can. We'll get them up as soon as possible." Lights were already flickering back on in the South, where the storm hit first. Crews have started clearing uprooted trees and reconnecting electrical lines. Power is returning to more than a million homes and businesses in the region. In southern Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland, utility companies said they'd restored power to more than 1.3 million customers as of Sunday afternoon. "A number of rivers in northern New Jersey are under an extreme flood watch," said Ron Morano, a spokesman for Jersey Central Power & Light. He said the number of outages would keep going up today. Some of the storm's damage will be easy to spot: a tree smashed into a power pole, for example. Other problems will be tougher to figure out. Sometimes power has been cut off but there's no apparent damage. That's a tougher situation because crews need to move slowly down power lines to find the sections without electrical current. That can take days. Power companies will focus on parts of their system where they can restore power to the most people at once. They'll start with massive transmission lines that supply entire counties. Then they'll deal with smashed utility poles that serve individual neighborhoods. After battering the East Coast on Saturday and early Sunday, Irene weakened and headed toward eastern Canada. Fifteen people from seven states died in the storm. Measuring by power outages, Irene was more significant than the last hurricane to make landfall in the continental U.S. Nearly 3.9 million people lost power in 10 states back in September of 2008 as Hurricane Ike carved a path of destruction from Texas to Illinois, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. New York City appeared to escape with relatively little damage. Irene weakened to a tropical storm just before it pushed over Coney Island Sunday morning. It knocked over trees and washed the southern tip of Manhattan with seawater. But with just 121,000 power outages, the city fared better than it did during a March 2010 nor'easter. City officials had worried that flooding would seep into underground lines that power the New York Stock Exchange and thousands of other Wall Street businesses. But the seawater didn't rise as high as feared, and it receded quickly. The main stock exchanges were set to open as scheduled Monday. New York City's biggest power company, Consolidated Edison, said it should have the lights back on by Tuesday evening for most of its customers. As skies clear, Progress Energy said it is ramping up power to its nuclear generating units in Southport, N.C. and expects to be at full power within 24 hours. The nuclear plant was powered down before Irene hit as a precaution. Constellation Energy Nuclear Group said one of two nuclear reactors at Calvert Cliffs, Md. went off-line automatically because of Irene's winds. Constellation said the plant was safe. As they switch off nuclear power plants, the utilities turn to other energy sources like natural gas-fired generators to keep the power flowing to customers. ___ Chris Kahn can be reached at http://twitter.com/ChrisKahnAP Tom Krisher in Detroit and John Christoffersen in Connecticut contributed to this story. |
| Get tips and tricks for Smarter Shopping at the supermarket (Appolicious) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 10:30 AM PDT |
| Spin out panoramic photos with ease using 360 for Android (Appolicious) Posted: 28 Aug 2011 11:30 AM PDT |
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