Michio Kaku took to bigthink to address the doomsday prophecies for this year. He discredits any ideas that suggest there will be comet impacts or planet alignments. He does, however, say that a solar flare would cause unimaginable chaos to the world today.

Now we get solar flares every few years and they never cause much harm. What Kaku warns against is something similar to the Carrington Event.

The Carrington Event was a famous solar flare that occurred on September 1, 1859. Richard Carrington, one of England’s foremost astronomers, noticed an enormous group of sunspots. As NASA explains, just before dawn of the next day, skies all over planet Earth turned red, green and purple in a massive aurora that could even be seen in tropical environments.

Telegraph systems went completely haywire. Telegraph operators were shocked and paper in telegraph offices was set on fire. The telegraph systems were disconnected and the solar flare itself began operating the lines.

This all comes back to the idea that a solar flare on the scale of the Carrington Event could happen in 2012. What would that mean for us? Kaku explains that a solar flare of that magnitude would knock out most of our satellites, telecommunication systems and even the Internet.

Thankfully, it appears that such a solar flare happening again within our lifetime is unlikely. Whenever the sun ejects solar flares after flipping its magnetic poles every 11 years, the Earth dodges most of the energy due to its small size.

The chance for another Carrington Event is still possible, however, so NASA and other firms are petitioning for money to upgrade current systems to withstand massive solar flares.

Oh, and before you ask, the film Knowing is not an accurate representation of solar flares.

Atul Salunkhe, a local farmer had a great idea. He had just recently opened a Facebook account and he knew some other growers who were connected to the site as well. He contacted some of them and suggested that they cut production for a few days. This was a huge sacrifice because they all depend on their crops to earn a living.

The plan ended up being that no one should attend the local auction to sell their goods in an effort to drive up demand for the product. 35 local growers were initially contacted, but what ended up happening was the news spread to over 25,000 growers. Essentially the auction that week was empty and no growers were in attendance.

The boycott had avoided a price crash and market value actually increased. It was a huge success for growers. Facebook brought something invaluable to the community: communication and coordination. No doubt, social networking of this variety will play a crucial role in Indian farming in the future.

I mean with all the content that’s on the internet from porn to instructions to make a bomb, the internet is essentially a brainwashing tool, right? Well, that seems to be the case according to a report released by the UK on the House of Commons official website. According to the report, “many of our witnesses cited the internet as the main forum for radicalization”. Sir Norman Bettison of The Association of Police Officers’ Lead for Prevent said:

“The internet does seem to feature in most, if not all, of the routes of radicalisation”

According to these guys, essentially, every minute you spend on the internet desensitizes you, eventually to the point where you want to kill people and join Al-Qa’ida. Now, these old English dudes want ISPs to take down some of their content that can be seen as material that could possibly “radicalize” you, meaning it’s material that makes you want to kill the President and take over America.

Really to a point there is some truth behind the matter with so much violent content becoming easily accessible on the internet, but who’s to say that video games and violent TV can’t do the same? With that logic, no matter what you do, you’re eventually going to become a terrorist and there’s nothing you can do to stop it…unless you just quit using all mediums of media.

Now, with that being covered, do you think the report is nonsense, an over-exaggeration of fear if you will, or do you feel there could be some sense to this mess after all? I mean really if you think about it, the way or direction current media is heading, aren’t we all becoming a little desensitized? Sex used to be a forbidden word to even speak, now it’s the only thing in television and movies that people want to see. A movie isn’t good unless it has plenty of killing and pervasive language. So, if you think about it, even before this report, Americans were slowly becoming “radicalized” so to speak. What do you guys think? Let us know in the comments.

According to StatCounter.com, mobile internet usage has sky-rocketed up to 8 1/2 percent this year; way up from only 4.3 percent last year comparatively. The graph below shows what it looks like compared to desktop use.

CEO of StatCounter.com, Aodhan Cullen had this to say:

“While global internet usage through mobiles is still under 10%, the pace of growth is remarkable.”

Cullen went on to say:

“Following repeated requests, we’ve decided to make our new mobile vendor stats publicly available. As the mobile space is constantly evolving, we keep our detection under constant review.”

The website has been gathering and compiling data for some time now to present this information. Nokia is a front runner due to its popularity in India, they say. Globally speaking, Apple is in second place, but they remain on top in US and UK markets.

The Next Web is reporting that Russian mobile carrier MegaFon not only has unlimited data, but they encourage their users to download as much as they can. They even offer prizes for those who downloaded the most data over a given period of time.

Between November 1, 2011 to January 31, 2012, MegaFon customers who bought a 3G moden were asked to download as much data as they could. The person who performed the herculean task was rewarded a $5,000 holiday overseas trip.

The winner downloaded a whopping 419GB of 3G data in one week. He won the contest, but MegaFon used the event to showcase their data network.

The company covers 80 percent of north-Western Russia with its 3G service. According to the company, the second and third place winners come from small Russian towns. MegaFon used this to flaunt their ability to offer 21Mbps download speeds in rural areas.

This is the kind of unlimited data plans that need to happen in the U.S. Our Internet infrastructure is so pathetically behind every other country now that it’s kind of embarrassing. It would go a long way to give users unlimited data again. The majority of users would still use the same amount of data like always while still allowing those who need to download a lot the ability to without data throttling or extra charges.

Here’s a look:

Patrons use the web to adjust the table, the music, the lighting, etc. Here’s the description from the KlausK Hotel, Helsinki:

WDC Helsinki 2012 opened a remote controlled café at the Forum shopping centre. The café is used to illustrate the significance of good design in everyday life.

Café Kauko, www.youdesign.fi website and the TV clips are part of the awareness campaign which also consists of outdoor notices and online visibility. The campaign has been designed by hasan & partners and produced by Perfect Fools from Stockholm.

Is the future of the Internet café? For that matter, of dining? Imagine being able to control your dining experience with your smartphone.

The Telegraph is reporting that BT has concluded a trial run in Cornwall that offered high-speed fiber broadband to any home or business. They hope to make the technology, and speeds, available to the entire country by Spring of next year.

The current high-speed product is called “BT Infinity,” which upgraded the connection between a local telephone exchange and street telephone. The new process will upgrade the copper wiring between houses and street phones increasing the speeds.

BT makes the hefty claim that their new service has “the potential to transform the UK broadband landscape.” They will be able to offer speeds of 300Mbps to anywhere in BT’s fiber network area.

Those that want the service will have to pony up the upgrade cost for the new hardware. BT is also upscaling their existing broadband infrastructure so that those on BT Infinity will get 80Mbit/s instead of 40Mbit/s.

BT is currently upgrading its national broadband network and claims that two-thirds of the UK will have “superfast broadband” by 2014. With the help of government money, they can make that number rise to 90 percent.

The UK is investing £630 million in public money so that Britain will have “the best broadband network in Europe.”

An infographic coming to us from the Slots of Vegas blog details their Internet usage predictions for 2012. Some of the predictions may surprise you and some may not.

The big attention grabbers are definitely the prediction of more than half of Internet users will suffer from “e-anxiety” from not being able to check Facebook or e-mail and that Internet users in the U.S. will expand to 239 million people, or 75.6 percent of the population.

It’s predicted that mobile Internet users will grow to 113.9 million with 106.7 million of them being on smartphones.

They predict that 143.4 million U.S. internet users will be on Facebook with two-thirds of all Internet users on a social networking site. Ninety percent of those two-thirds will choose Facebook as their primary social media site.

They also predict that tumblr will become the second most visited social media network.

It’s predicted that 169.3 million people will view videos online in 2012 with 51.2 million viewing videos on smartphones.

As far as online gaming goes, they predict that over 407 million hours will be put into online gaming in 2012.

Finally and suprisingly, books will be the number one selling item online making up 44 percent of all online sales.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/internet-usage-2012-2012-02/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/fcc-broadband-poor-2012-01 http://www.webpronews.com/fcc-broadband-poor-2012-01#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:37:03 +0000 Zach Walton http://www.webpronews.com/?p=94097 The FCC is reforming and modernizing their Lifeline program that provides telephone service to poor families across the nation.

On their Web site today, the FCC detailed the planned changes to the Lifeline program. For those unaware, the Lifeline program “fulfills Congress’ mandate to ensure the availability of communications to all Americans.” The program prides itself on providing millions of low-income Americans basic phone service.

While the program has raised the rate of households with phone service from 80 percent in 1985 to 92 percent last year, there’s still more to be done according to the FCC. They say that the program contains rules that have “failed to keep pace as consumers increasingly choose wireless phone service.”

The FCC plans to save $200 million in 2012 and force themselves to adopt a budget for 2013 after reviewing a six-month report. They are to create a National Lifeline Accountability Database to “prevent multiple carriers from receiving support for the same subscriber.” There is also the creation of an eligibility database to cut down on fraud. The group is lastly establishing a one-per-household rule that would define a household as an “economic unit” so that multiple low-income families living at the same address can get connected.

The FCC will be phasing out support for services like Toll Limitation – “subsidies to carriers for blocking or restricting long-distance service” and ending Link Up – “subsidies to carriers for initial connection charges.” They do, however, say that Link Up will continue in tribal lands.

The more interesting part is that the FCC will be modernizing Lifeline to include money that will help low-income families afford broadband Internet.

They will establish the “Broadband Adoption Pilot Program” using $25 million in savings from other reforms. They will start soliciting applications from broadband providers this year and will select a number of projects to fund. They want to clarify that this is not a free meal. Lifeline will help reduce the monthly cost of broadband, but applicants will have to pony up for the cost of the devices and become digitally literate.

They also propose digital literacy training at libraries and schools. This will build on FCC efforts to “close the broadband adoption gap and address digital literacy.”

Lastly, they want to provide Lifeline support for “bundled services plans combining voice and broadband or packages including optional calling features.”

It’s about time that the FCC brings the Internet to low-income households. The Internet has become so ingrained in our culture that not having it essentially puts a person out of the job market and reduces access to information and education.

Is this playing into the idea of the Internet as a basic human right? Or is the FCC just, as they say, modernizing their program? Let us know in the comments.

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/fcc-broadband-poor-2012-01/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/country-specific-blog-urls-2012-01 http://www.webpronews.com/country-specific-blog-urls-2012-01#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 18:57:36 +0000 Billy Thomas http://www.webpronews.com/?p=94050 Recently Google has found an awesome way to defend blogs against local law. Say you’re in the UK reading a blog, normally the URL would read (blogname).blogspot.com, but now with this new trick the URL can read (blogname).blogspot.com.uk. Pretty cool, right? According to Google, when a ccTLD appears, it corresponds to the current country location of the reader.

An unofficial source had this to explain:

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD.” That means [blogname].blogspot.com will continue to exist, but it’s not clear if the users from that specific country will still be able to access it. Blogger will start to use country-specific domains, just like many other Google services. If you’re in Australia and visit google.com, you’ll be redirected to google.com.au, but you can opt-out by clicking “Go to Google.com” or visiting google.com/ncr. The same option is available for Blogger: “Blog readers may request a specific country version of the blogspot content by entering a specially formatted NCR URL. NCR stands for ‘No Country Redirect’ and will always display [blogname].blogger.com in English, whether you’re in India, Brazil, Honduras, Germany, or anywhere. For example: http://[blogname].blogspot.com/ncr – always goes to the U.S. English blog.”

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