Internet | featured news

Douglas Rushkoff says Facebook's new app just increases disorientation and isn't getting rave reviews from users... And when I looked up Facebook Home online to try to find out just what it was, the first search results that came up were from users sharing how to disable it. This way, consumers can buy the discounted phones on which Facebook Home ships, and turn them back into a regular Android smartphones, where Facebook is just another app we can use in our own good time.

Google Inc is experiencing a small outage of some of its popular applications such as Gmail and Google Drive, the search engine said on Wednesday.

The Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm Warg has been charged with hacking into several Swedish companies and stealing personal data.

Yahoo said its profit rose 36% as the struggling Internet pioneer showed signs of continuing its slow but steady rebound under Mayer. But its shares fell after-hours on signs of decay in sales of display ads.

Google Fiber has a lot going for it, both as an ISP and a pay-TV platform. There was was one gaping hole in the service though: no HBO. Lets be honest with ourselves, its the big geeks that are looking to hop on that 1Gbps service first. And what do geeks love almost as much as blazing-fast Google-branded internet? Game of Thrones. Now Kansas City (and soon Austin) based nerds will be able to watch Joffrey become an even bigger monster live, rather than wait for some torrent site to get an illegal copy of it up (or, if they're smart, mooch off of someone's HBO GO account). Alongside HBO, Google Fiber has also added Cinemax: Home Box Office's less cool sibling. The branded families of channels are both available today for $20 a month or $10 a month respectively. Or, if you're a real premium TV fan, you can get both, plus STARZ and Showtime for $40 a month. Hit up the source for a few more details.

What's the difference between Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services? Very little – or so says Microsoft, which has made a new commitment to match the web bazaar's pricing for basic cloud services. The price-matching announcement was made by Microsoft on Tuesday, alongside news that Redmond thinks its infrastructure-as-a-service cloud is now ready for general consumption.

As a company whose business proposition has gone from kind of weird to utterly commonplace in the space of a few years, OK Cupid has always been comfortable with novelty. Now it's embracing a new technology that strikes a lot of people as too futuristic for comfort: Bitcoin.

Fifteen-year-old Audrie Pott got drunk at a party and passed out. What happened next, according to her family, was that she was sexually assaulted by multiple young men, who took photos and circulated them in their high school of more than 1,000 students. Not long afterward, Audrie, devastated and hopeless, committed suicide.

Twitter like all other social media is a virtual Aladdin’s cave. It is a gateway to riches. But just like in the story, this Aladdin’s cave is also booby-trapped. Use it right and you will come away with the genie of knowledge ready to do your bidding. Use it wrong and you will be a casualty of wasted time. So, ‘rub’ it just right.