Posts tagged internet

Chrome feature transforms any web page into a playable game.

World Wide Maze is a ‘Chrome Experiment’ that transforms a given website into a 3D playable map, which can then be controlled by a smartphone (or keyboard).

Check it out at www.chrome.com/maze

Map: The world’s undersea cables.

A submarine cable is about 0.75 to 2.5 inches in diameter, or about the thickness of three ordinary garden hoses. The longest cable, called the Southern Cross, runs under the Pacific, stretching 18,500 miles.

Popular Mechanics has an interesting story up about how these cables are laid down and maintained, check it out here.

Seven Summits becoming available on Google Street View.

Some of the most famous mountains in the world have been captured with Street View cameras and are available to check out now. Included in the list is Aconcagua (South America), Kilimanjaro (Africa), Mount Elbrus (Europe) and Everest Base Camp (Asia).

Find them on Google Maps yourself of go check out this gallery.

Photo: The proliferation of mobile devices since 2005.

As the Today Show points out, this comparison of the announcement of Pope Benedict in 2005 and Pope Francis in 2013 shows just how much times have changed with regards to how events are enjoyed, captured, and shared - over only an eight year period.

Graphic: Email exchanges between countries.

A team of computer scientists at Stanford, Yahoo!, and Qatar’s Computational Research Institute created the map as part of a research paper entitled ‘The Mesh of Civilizations and International Email Flows’.

The closer two countries are on the map, the more e-mail exchanges take place between them. As for the colors, they represent “Huntington’s ‘civilizations’ “, which is a complicated sounding measure of economic and cultural similarities.

Google Now may be coming to Chrome browser.

References to Google Now have appeared in the Chromium backend recently.

The information suggests it is being brought initially to Chrome for Windows, and Chrome OS, with no mention of Chrome for Mac.

P2P music sharing declining significantly.

According to The NPD Group, illegal music file sharing declined significantly in 2012, mostly due to the legal availability of music from streaming services like Spotify. 

• According to NPD’s “Annual Music Study 2012,” 40 percent of consumers who had illegally downloaded music via P2P services in 2011 reported that they had stopped or downloaded less music from P2P networks. 
• The volume of illegally downloaded music files from P2P services also declined 26 percent, compared to the previous year.
• Music files burned and ripped from CDs owned by friends and family fell 44 percent.
• The number of files swapped from hard drives dropped 25 percent.
• The volume of music downloads from digital lockers decreased 28 percent.

Other reasons given by Bittorrent users for the decrease include worries about increasing amounts of spyware and viruses in shared files, or that their preferred sharing service had shut down.

Researcher claims “Internet connected by 19 clicks or less”.

Hungarian physicist Albert-László Barabási has published an analysis of the internet showing that a user could theoretically navigate between any two web pages using 19 clicks or less. The peer-reviewed paper aims to “understand the Web’s structure, development and weaknesses”.

According to the World Wide Web Foundation the internet has more than a trillion public-accessible pages, and 3.4 billion users, as of September 2012.

Cat to replace the Monopoly iron.

After putting it up for vote on the Monopoly Facebook page, the cat was chosen to replace the iron game token.

No surprises there, if there’s one thing that always rises to the top of the internet, it’s cats.