Internet

School Official Sues Facebook

The social-networking site may have to give up the identities of some high school jokers who impersonated a dean online

This probably seemed really funny until they heard about the court order.

A few anonymous Facebook users—most likely students—created a fake profile for the dean of Roncalli High School, a Catholic prep school in Indianapolis, then sent out messages and images from the account to other students. The profile has since been pulled down, but the dean sued Facebook to find out who created it.

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Broadband over Power Lines

An innovative plan to bring high-speed Internet through electrical outlets may not see the light of day

Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, is a technology developed to send data over lines also used for electric power transmission. Simply put, it's high-speed Internet through your electrical outlets. Right off the bat, the appeal of a system like this is attractive for a lot of reasons. It could provide broadband service to rural areas without the physical infrastructure for DSL or cable and would require only minimal hardware installations by the power utilities.

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Wikipedia Moves to Bookshelves

The online community-generated encyclopedia will be testing out a print version in Germany

Bertelsmann AG announced plans to release a single-volume, printed and bound version of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, in September. And it's already out of date.

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The .su Boom

Tucked away in one of the Web's dark corners, the Soviet Union continues to thrive as an internationally recognized entity.

The Soviet Union has been history for going on 17 years now, but there is one place where the former superpower continues to live on, even with the semi-endorsement of a major international standards agency. That place is of course the Internet, where for 500 rubles (around $25) per year, it is still possible to own a little chunk of Soviet real estate by parking your website at an official ".su" domain name.

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Rickrolling the Mets

Baseball feels the brute power of Internet nerdom

Ah springtime: trees blooming, bats cracking, nerds ROTFLTAO. Last week, the Mets announced that their (filched) year-old tradition of an eighth inning, stadium-wide sing along of "Sweet Caroline" would be updated. They gave fans 10 pretty lame choices and, in true 21st century fashion, let them utilize the power of the Interweb to voice their preference. Of course, the following happened:

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The Flying Pickle Solution

As newspapers struggle to breach the print-Web gap, a small community blog succeeds with an innovative approach

Newspapers are still struggling to find their place in a world increasingly overwhelmed by digital media. Readership is down, ad revenues are down, even revenues on the Web editions of many papers are down. Some papers—the Guardian and Telegraph in London, for example—have even experimented with a printable PDF version of their sites in an attempt to reach those who browse online but ultimately want a paper copy in their hands. At this intersection of print and Web comes another concept, one which is proving both popular with its readership and economically successful: the Flying Pickle.

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Woe is the Web: April Fools' Day on the Internet

We run down all the hits and misses from this (in)glorious day

Woe is the Internet on April 1. For it is on this day where sites large and small rack their brains for the perfect Fools' Day prank, briefly vindicating those that continue to hold the belief that the Web serves as nothing more than a sloppy ocean of untruths and nonsense.

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Man Constructs Suicide Bot

An elderly Australian man kills himself through a home-built, armed robot

An 81-year-old man constructed a machine that allowed him to remotely fire a .22 semi-automatic pistol, then set it up in his driveway and killed himself. Reportedly, the man's relatives had been encouraging him to move out of his home and into a care facility.

Instead, he did some research on the Internet and built what was only described as a complex machine—the local paper that broke the story is keeping wraps on how it actually worked.

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Yahoo Says it Won't Come Cheap

The search giant forecasts strong revenues for the next two years, and says it’s worth more than Microsoft has offered

Yahoo surprised analysts yesterday, announcing that it is on track to meet its expected earnings for 2008. This changes the fight between the Sunnyvale-based company and Microsoft, which recently offered to pay $42 billion to swallow it up. Now Yahoo has a bit more leverage, and may be able to convince investors that it’s not in such bad shape after all. The company says it expects to double its cash flow and increase its revenue by 50 percent, mostly from banner and video advertising.

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The Internet is for Porn, Not Voting

Is the Internet's prime audience worth enfranchising?

Former prime minister of Poland Jaroslaw Kaczynski told members of his conservative party that people should not be allowed to vote online because the Internet attracts those who like to watch porn while drinking beer. Why is he talking about this? Poland is considering new schemes to get more people involved in the election process, and online voting is one possibility.

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