Articles written by Lucian Parfeni |
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LUCIAN PARFENI
The web's been changing our lives for almost two decades now, and it still seems like things are only getting started. With the latest wave of web technologies, HTML5 and friends coming into their own, things will only get more interesting.
I've been interested in computers and anything related to them as far as I can remember, when the web was just getting started.
Watching it grow from a few pages of text, links and images - that you had to wait tens of seconds to load, to something that is close to replacing traditional operating systems and to something where you can find all of man's knowledge, any movie or song you'd ever want to watch, or friends you haven't seen in years, has been fascinating. Getting to write about it is even better.
Still, there comes a time when you need to 'log off', which for me means either trying to create something resembling music with only the help of '0s' and '1s', or getting out and snapping photos of anything I find interesting, which, for me, means a surprising amount of things.
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Facebook's Timeline had plenty of critics when it was first introduced, but that's true for all new Facebook features. But one criticism stood out, namely the annoying two-column layout.
Thankfully, that look has been completely eradicated, as Facebook has finished rolling out the improved single-column Ti... |
14 May 2013
22:51 UTC |
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Firefox 21 is here, bringing with it a new experimental feature which has the potential of making life a lot easier for Firefox users.
The Firefox Health Report, as the name suggests, keeps track of the browser's status and will eventually provide means to improve performance or fix issues.
For now, all it do... |
14 May 2013
22:00 UTC |
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Firefox 21 has reached the stable stage. As with most releases these days, there are only a few notable additions, but each new feature only makes the browser better.
One of new features that stands out is support for more providers added to the Social API. Mozilla started experimenting with the Social API late las... |
14 May 2013
20:54 UTC |
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Two-factor authentication is becoming increasingly used, generally a good thing. It's clear that passwords alone won't protect most users, especially when it comes to important accounts that are used by other sites and services for authentication, like email accounts or even Facebook.
Google's been a ... |
14 May 2013
20:21 UTC |
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While one of Google's programming language, Go, has just gotten a major update, the other, Dart, is seeing some action as well. It's now easier than ever to test Google's JavaScript replacement since there's now a Dart compiler written entirely in Dart.
The compiler can be compiled to JavaScript,... |
14 May 2013
19:11 UTC |
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This seems to be happening over and over again, no matter how hard Google fights it. This time, it's a court in Germany that has ordered it to remove autocomplete suggestions.
The Federal Court of Justice turned a decision by a lower court and forced Google to remove suggestions.
The lawsuit comes from the f... |
14 May 2013
15:41 UTC |
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The latest Internet traffic report from Sandvine shows, again, just how big Internet video has become. Netflix alone accounts for almost a third of traffic in the US. YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, and general video traffic makes up a huge percentage of the total bandwidth consumed, be it upstream or downstream. But, whil... |
14 May 2013
17:11 UTC |
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Privacy laws in Europe are already a lot tougher than in the US. In some countries in particular, like Germany, privacy is taken very seriously, and plenty of US companies, used to the American way of handling users, have found themselves in trouble. But privacy rules in the EU are about to get even tougher, at leas... |
14 May 2013
13:37 UTC |
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Most people have moved on beyond email for their personal use, but email still dominates in the work environment. It's no surprise, as businesses are slow to adopt new technologies, for one, and, unfortunately, there's simply no better tool for the job at this moment. According to one study by Opinion Matt... |
14 May 2013
13:01 UTC |
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France's Hadopi anti-piracy scheme has been an abysmal failure. The government, meaning taxpayers, has spent tens of millions of euros on the plan to bring pirates to justice, a one-sided type of justice at least. However, it has very little to show for it. Just one person has been fined during the entire time.... |
14 May 2013
12:17 UTC |
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Google has released Go 1.1, the latest spec of the programing language the company has been working on for a few years now.
There will be plenty of people arguing that the world doesn't need yet another programming language, but Go fills a rather specific niche.
Go reached 1.0 in March last year, and the team... |
14 May 2013
10:41 UTC |
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Google I/O is right around the corner, and Google has been preparing for the yearly developer conference.
While most Googlers have been working on the products they're about to unveil or the sessions they're holding with developers, some have put together a plan to record everything that happens at the co... |
14 May 2013
09:20 UTC |
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The three astronauts part of Expedition 35 on the International Space Station are now safely back on Earth, as the Soyuz spacecraft that took them up in December also brought them back safely. The three astronauts spent a total of 146 days in space, 144 of them aboard the International Space Station. Exp... |
14 May 2013
07:57 UTC |
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Mozilla has been working on Australis for more than a year, but it's only now getting to the point where it can show off what it's been working on. Development of the Australis UI revamp has been moved to the UX Nightly branch, where user experience experiments are usually run. This means you can now grab... |
14 May 2013
07:24 UTC |
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Facebook tries to be as accommodating to developers as possible, but it doesn't like apps that can mess with people's accounts.
So the fact that an app designed to randomly delete one in six accounts, fittingly named Social Roulette, was blocked shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
The app has only be... |
14 May 2013
06:39 UTC |
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Ad blockers have been around for years, but they continue to be controversial. On the one hand, users should be able to control their experience; on the other, publishers need to make a living.
Several major German newspapers, namely Spiegel Online, Sueddeutsche.de, Faz.net, Zeit, Golem.de, and RP Online, have start... |
13 May 2013
20:45 UTC |
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Chris Hadfield's five months aboard the International Space Station are over – unfortunately for space photo lovers –, and he's now heading back down to Earth along with the two other members of Expedition 34/35 he came up with last year. The three astronauts, Expedition 35 Commander Chris Hadf... |
13 May 2013
20:17 UTC |
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It's not just regular Google users that get unified storage, as Google Apps users now get 30 GB shared between Google Drive and Gmail. For Apps users, the change isn't that big, they already had 25 GB of storage for Gmail.
What's more, this isn't technically free storage, since Apps users pay fo... |
13 May 2013
21:51 UTC |
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Google has announced that it is finally merging storage space for its main products. Google users will get 15 GB of free storage shared across Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos. Previously, all three offered various and limited amounts of space for free. The change won't be going live at once, but over the next ... |
13 May 2013
19:38 UTC |
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Google's Android has taken over the mobile world, but the war is far from over. Yet, for the past few months, there's been another general in charge, after the departure of Android creator Andy Rubin.
What's more, the new leader also headed Chrome and Chrome OS, perhaps a competitor to Android, in so... |
13 May 2013
17:51 UTC |
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Google has been working to extend Google+ since it was introduced two years ago at Google I/O. But even as it grows, there still is a sense that Google is not quite sure what to do with Google+ or what it's for. It wants a big social site, but it can figure out what to do with it later. An example of that, perh... |
13 May 2013
14:00 UTC |
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There's been a lot of talk about Wikipedia's apparent decline in edits and editors. The narrative is that new users are finding it harder and harder to start contributing, leading to a reduction in the number of people actively adding to the site. There have been some studies, but most data is anecdotal. O... |
13 May 2013
13:30 UTC |
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Astronaut Chris Hadfield is heading home, as his five-month stay aboard the International Space Station is essentially over. But he's not going back down without leaving us with a gift, and what better gift than a song. Not just any song, but a cover of David Bowie's Space Oddity, a great match considering... |
13 May 2013
12:49 UTC |
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Google is not the only one trying to move past the password. In fact, it found quite a few like-minded groups and companies in the FIDO (Fast Identity Online) Alliance which it joined earlier this year.
PayPal is another important member of FIDO so, unsurprisingly, it too believes passwords should be relegated to t... |
13 May 2013
12:22 UTC |
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Facebook updates almost always annoy some people, and sometimes they annoy most people. Facebook rarely listens though. If it backed off every time someone complained, nothing would ever change. Still, plenty of users are happy with what works and would rather Facebook not "fix" what isn't broken. But as Facebo... |
13 May 2013
11:05 UTC |
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Google has made it official, it's replacing the Scratchpad app for Chrome with Google Keep. This one is a no-brainer, as both apps do the same thing and Keep is obviously the more expansive service. Keep is cross-platform, it works on the web, so in Chrome, but there are also mobile apps for it. If you are a ... |
13 May 2013
09:50 UTC |
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Mother's Day is already over and if you spent your day with your mother, as you should have, you probably missed the Mother's Day Google doodle. Don't worry though, you'll find it in Google's archive. It's an interactive doodle; the idea is to mimic something handmade and the results ar... |
13 May 2013
09:27 UTC |
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GeoGuessr has a simple concept behind it. You’re dropped in a random place anywhere in the world, as long as there are Street View images there, and you get to guess where you are. The more accurate the location you provide, the more points you get. There are five rounds, and your score from each round is adde... |
13 May 2013
10:41 UTC |
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Pirates seem to have a sudden urge to see "Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters," as it was the most pirated movie of the week on BitTorrent, despite not being a new release. It could be that the movie landed on BitTorrent late the week before, when it only managed to reach the sixth spot, and most people only got around ... |
13 May 2013
08:10 UTC |
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Google Glass has been gaining plenty of attention now that the first devices have ended up in the hands of developers and a few people Google deemed worthy. Several apps for Glass have already been launched, and Twitter clients have been popular, as is always the case with a new platform. More and more developers ... |
13 May 2013
06:56 UTC |
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