Archive for Tech News

Why Pinterest isn’t just for girls

When I suggested I should write about Pinterest, the technology editor chortled in return: “Everyone says It Is For Girls. You are a Girl. Therefore you are Perfect to do it.” And that’s pretty much the perception of Pinterest, the latest social media hot thing. The company was founded in 2008, and the site launched [...]

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Facebook’s guidelines are laid bare

Facebook bans images of breastfeeding if nipples are exposed – but allows “graphic images” of animals if shown “in the context of food processing or hunting as it occurs in nature”. Equally, pictures of bodily fluids – except semen – are allowed as long as no human is included in the picture; but “deep flesh [...]

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Dotcom granted bail in Megaupload case

Kim Dotcom, the founder of the filesharing website Megaupload, has been granted bail and released after a New Zealand judge ruled that the authorities have seized any funds he might have used to flee the country. US authorities allege Dotcom facilitated millions of illegal downloads through his company. He had been in custody since his [...]

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Android most-used smartphone OS in UK

Android has taken over from Apple and now has the largest share of the installed base of smartphones among consumers in the UK, according to new figures provided to the Guardian by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. Google’s mobile OS has a 36.9% share of the smartphones in use among consumers in the UK, the company says [...]

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PlayStation Vita – the essential guide

Link to this video The first video game hardware launch of the year hits Europe on Wednesday. And while everyone seems to love the look and feel of the PS Vita, question marks remain over its prospects in a portable gaming market dominated by smartphones and tablets. So is the world still interested in a [...]

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The Pirate Bay to defy crackdown

The Pirate Bay is planning to defy an international crackdown on filesharing websites after the high court in London signalled that the site should be blocked in the UK. The filesharing giant said it will bypass attempts to shut it down with a more covert system for illicitly downloading films and music. The act of [...]

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Mark Bowden: war of the cyber worm

Even though it has become a part of daily life, the internet itself remains a cloudy idea to most people. It’s nebulous in a deeper way than previous leaps in home technology. Take the radio. Nobody knew how that worked, but you could picture invisible waves of electromagnetic particles arriving from the distance like the surf. [...]

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John Naughton: graphic designers are ruining the web

What happens when you click on a weblink? Here’s one answer: a request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server then locates the webpage in its files and sends it back to your browser, which then displays it on your screen. Simple. Well, the process [...]

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Angry Birds Space lifts off in March

Angry Birds is set to go galactic with a new game called Angry Birds space, due for release on 22 March according to developer Rovio Mobile. The company promises on its blog that it will be “the biggest game launch since the original Angry Birds”, while adding that it is “a completely new game with [...]

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Ask Jack: is it worth backing up to the cloud?

I have been looking at some cloud backup solutions, and for the time being I am using Memopal. Although they all give detailed descriptions of how you back up, none of them describes how to restore. If you lose your hard drive suddenly, but are backed up in a cloud application, can you restore the [...]

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