Motherboard: How Shock Sites Shaped the Internet. “To talk about shock sites is to talk about the internet, understanding how the latter couldn’t exist in its modern form without the former. And they’re far from a relic of the past. Shock site creators, meme historians, and psychologists say they’ve reshaped pop culture, defined the modern era of the internet, and informed how we use it today.”
Slashgear: YouTube Was Designed To Be A Dating Site (But Pivoted After No One Used It). “YouTube launched in 2005 and quickly became a special place on the internet. It was the first platform that allowed users to easily upload video to the world wide web (and without having to pay for the privilege). The site rapidly gained a huge following, and has since grown into the second-most-visited site on the internet globally, behind only Google.”
BusinessWire: FOSSDA Project to Record Open Source History (PRESS RELEASE). “The Free and Open Source Stories Digital Archive Foundation (FOSSDA), a not-for-profit foundation to engage open source software pioneers and share their legacies, today launches the FOSSDA Project to create digital recordings and archives of open source history.”
WIRED: Meet the Superusers Behind IMDb, the Internet’s Favorite Movie Site. “In an era when many have become pessimistic about the state of the internet, Wikipedia is often held up as a rare miracle of collaborative, crowdsourced knowledge-gathering for the public good—a lonely holdout for the early web’s utopian ideals. But IMDb has been doing much the same for five years longer than Wikipedia.”
The Conversation: What happens to our data when we no longer use a social media network or publishing platform?. “My peers and I built personal websites on GeoCities, blogged on LiveJournal, made friends on MySpace and hung out on Nexopia. Many of these earlier platforms and social spaces occupy large parts of youth memories. For that reason, the web has become a complex entanglement of attachment and connection. My doctoral research looks at how we have become ‘databound’ — attached to the data we have produced throughout our lives in ways we both can and cannot control. What happens to our data when we abandon a platform? What should become of it? Would you want a say?”
Tubefilter: In 2022, 65% of all internet traffic came from video sites . “Each year, intelligence firm Sandvine identifies the websites and applications that gobble up the most bandwidth. In 2022, Sandvine’s Global Internet Phenomena Report reinforced an ongoing trend: Data usage from video sites increased by 24% year-over-year, and video now accounts for 65% of all internet traffic.”
Arizona State University: More internet matches are leading to happy marriages. “According to a 2013 study by social psychologist J. T. Cacioppo, the internet is responsible for roughly one in every three marriages. And those who use online dating end up being slightly more satisfied with their relationship and marriage than those who met in more traditional ways.”
CNN: The year that brought Silicon Valley back down to earth. “On the first trading day of 2022, Apple hit a new milestone for the tech industry: the iPhone maker became the first publicly traded company to hit a $3 trillion market cap, with Microsoft and Google not far behind. As eye-popping as that valuation was, there were headlines speculating about how long it would be before Apple and its rivals topped $5 trillion.”
KXAN: Texas bill would ban social media for those under 18. “If passed, any Texan under the age of 18 would not be authorized to hold a social media account. Further, social media companies would have to verify the age of the account holder, which would require the account holder to prove their age with their driver’s license. The bill doesn’t specify if an account holder can use an alternate form of I.D. if they don’t have a driver’s license.”
9to5 Google: Google redesigns Family Link with Material You, web app, and ‘Today only’ limits. “Announced just over five years ago, Google Family Link is getting a redesign that offers a streamlined experience for parents by bringing controls to the forefront, as well as Material You and a web app.”
CNN: US defeats Russia in a battle to control the future of the global internet. “The United States has soundly defeated Russia in an election to control a United Nations body responsible for shaping global internet development, a contest viewed as geopolitically symbolic amid wider US-Russia tensions and an answer to fears of growing censorship online by authoritarian regimes. On Thursday, members of the International Telecommunication Union voted to appoint Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the US-backed candidate, as the group’s secretary general.”
Politico: Digital great game: The West’s standoff against China and Russia. “The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) — a 150-year-old body that sets rules for how much of the global telecom and tech infrastructure works — will gather at end of September in Bucharest for a three-week conference. The more than 190 member countries will elect a new secretary-general and other top brass, as well as set the policy goals for the U.N. agency for the next four years. The two candidates for the top job, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, an American, and Rashid Ismailov, a Russian, have crisscrossed the globe to rally support from telecom policymakers and regulators.”
MakeUseOf: 5 Sites to Teach Children How to Use the Internet Safely, for Kids and Parents. “These websites offer different ways for children, parents, and educators to learn best digital practices and good online behavior. They address basics like security, privacy, and even behavioral patterns like cyberbullying through online games, interactive storytelling, quizzes, and detailed guides.”
News@Northeastern: Unprecedented Data Collection Project, ‘A Huge Missing Piece Of The Study Of The Internet,’ Now Underway. “Thanks to a $15.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the team has begun to recruit volunteers for the online data collection project, which will involve monitoring the online experiences of tens of thousands of volunteer users through a web browser extension researchers are building, then documenting and analyzing the results.”
Daily Beast: Feds Nab Louisiana Woman Who Tried to Rent a Hitman on RentAHitman.Com. “A Louisiana woman found herself on the wrong end of an FBI sting operation after attempting to hire a contract killer via a parody website ‘linked directly’ to the bureau’s internet crime squad, according to a federal complaint first obtained by The Daily Beast.”
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