Telecommunications giant Optus managed to convince the Federal Court in Sydney this week that there’s a legal blindspot in relation to its download pay-per-view service. Telstra – given its business relationship…
The big copyright news overnight was not the continuing protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), but the shutdown and seizure of Megaupload.com, a popular “cyberlocker…
The fight against potential internet censorship will reach a milestone this evening (AEST) when some of the most popular destinations on the web – including the English language version of Wikipedia…
In what has been labelled a “bad day for the internet”, Google last week changed its search engine to include personalised results from Google+. The introduction of Google Search plus Your World has led…
At 11 o'clock this morning (Melbourne time), the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) started accepting applications for custom top-level domain (TLD) names. Simply put, this means…
At approximately 1pm on Friday, a customer of Telstra BigPond – Australia’s largest internet service provider – posted on a forum that: “If you do a Google search for that number [the number for Telstra’s…
If you typed “pins and needles” into Google, what kind of results would you expect to find? According to a recent study from Bupa Health, the search engine could diagnose you with anything from a completely…
Creating a 30 second YouTube movie that goes viral is the holy grail of marketing. So how is it done? Ensuring the success of a viral-produced movie is still largely hit-and-miss. Some of the more well-known…
A pair of bills currently making their way through US legislature has set off alarm bells among internet technologists and users worldwide. The aim of PROTECT-IP, in the Senate, and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy…
Social media provokes some of the most voluminous and heated responses in two key areas of contemporary society – democracy and privacy. Promoting the first and threatening the second, social media is…
Last week, the English High Court ordered British Telecom (BT) to block access to a members-only website that offers links to pirated films. NewzBin2, the site in question, offers links to pirated films…
In one vision of the future, every “thing” is connected to the internet. This “Internet of Things” will bring about revolutionary change in how we interact with our environment and, more importantly, how…
Last night, SBS screened the first instalment of a three-part documentary by Adam Curtis, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. The program attracted intense debate when broadcast in the UK earlier…
David Salt, Australian National University and David Harvey, Australian National University
The information revolution is hurtling towards Antarctica in the shape of a 20 centimetre cube weighing less than 10 kilograms. It can’t come soon enough. Not because Antarctic scientists (numbering more…
This month’s launch of the .xxx internet domain, a new section of the internet dedicated to pornography and erotica, is getting people hot and bothered. The global body coordinating internet addresses…
Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and Deputy Dean Research at Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of Melbourne