The UN propped International Telecommunication Union (ITU) began its World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) on December 3 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, aptly named ‘wicket’. Notably, the panel of 193 national delegates was to include Internet giant Google, which decided to protest the regulation of the Word Wide Web in person. Seven days into the eleven day conference both Facebook and Google Internet services crashed. In the closing moments of the WCIT, the USA, UK, Canada and Australia walked out on proceedings that counted a show-of-hands as a binding constituent resolution.

The day after the Google/FB crash, the NYC Post announced Google’s new holding company in Bermuda, shielding the Online giant from some two billion dollars of global tax deficit. The following day, Google admitted to shutting down its Shopping service in China. Meanwhile, within the conference, voting blocks had formed: India, Japan, Germany, Italy lead Europe in a rally maintaining a deregulated Internet. Almost half of the 193 nations, including Russia, China, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia went on to ratify a treaty that boasts strong African, Arabian, Asian and Latin-American membership. Some fifty nations reserved the right to ratify at a later date while some nations simply abstained.

The conference was to mitigate the over one thousand three hundred proposals that critics attest will aid and abet government crack-downs on free speech. Censorship isn’t the only issue; some blocks believe in charging Internet providers for providing free content, while zeroing in and taxing international content to mitigate the specter of confusing multiculturalism in fragile societies.

American developers see these UN tariffs as nothing less than forced economic redistribution of good and services focused on empowering individuals to commune through communication: “Engineers, companies and people that build and use the Web have no vote. The billions of people around the globe that use the Internet, the experts that build and maintain it, should be included,” stated Google Online.

ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré readily admits to targeting the world’s mobile-phone population (90% of the world by his account) and converting two-thirds of the Earth – the offline population – to an Internet lifestyle. Obviously, he’s talking about leveraging the current market dominators to accelerate market penetration as a UN policy; the preamble of the WCIT treaty certainly states so much in legalese.

While the doctor claims to be fighting for the rights of the developing world, his agency’s using development to separate the bestowers of this technology from their clients by standing against a free and unregulated multicultural Web. The proposition floated by some Europeans to fund developing-market intrusion by taxing international services underlines this point. Information Society politicians seeking to mass the market of the majority of the Earth’s population as an international politic to promote appeal is a founding philosophy of the Internet to be sure. Now it stands for politicians’ grab to price-fix, promoting foreign lobbies in a vicious circle that rewards volume and seeks to grant the voluminous ingenuity over protestations of leading companies.

Despite a unanimous vote resolving USA Congress opposition to the WCIT philosophy of a government-controlled Web December 5 – two days after the start of the WCIT – the USA must admit that it is only due to government facilitation that its miracle machine is organized by the non-for-profit giant Internet Corporation for Assigned Names And Numbers (ICANN).

While Westerners decry governed regulation of the ultimate portal into multiculturalism, the arguments against subordination to stultifying bureaucrats and against UN regulation of App-oriented browsers have wilt before the principal accusation: cultural Fascism. But corporations must be most fearful of increased global competition and powerful ITU regulations that can standardize international telecommunication equipment, championing a myriad of local entrepreneurs to introduce the Americans to the margin-cutting global realities of that nation-state controlled thing: free-speech.

Americans touting to possess the ultimate machine in free speech stand the most to lose as a brand.

But no-one mentions what UN presence represents more than anything else to free-market governments: a biting hindsight that can sue even the intelligence community for human rights’ violations by promoting free-speech in violation of hate-crime legislation.

Surely, the USA could benefit from an international body of inquisitive souls who would like to know how in the GPS-age could the awkward master-mind of the Aurora massacre manage to kill an Airforce Sergeant among his victims in a Colorado movie-house.

UN restrictions against prosecuting neglect may melt in the face of over-sight reality: an out-manned capitalist economy that no-longer polices itself with integrity but only as some Nation-State that is neither Fascist nor Communist nor watching nor political – simply disturbed.

Perhaps this is why a group of WCIT experts showed up in Stanford a week before the Dubai meeting to take part in the discussion: ‘Sticky WCIT: Is This the End of the Internet?’

WCIT marks the setting of the World Wide Web behind the accessible Web and the State-controlled ubiquity of the Internet. Perhaps all three were once synonymous. Now, like a nation-state of three minds, like a Common Wealth of Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, each community answers for itself to the benefit of the engineered whole.

Perhaps this is why long after the WCIT vote should have been published at the top of engine searches Online, discrepancies rather than harmonies leapt to the fore. ITU spokesperson Sarah Parkes reportedly contended that Google did not attend WCIT as it chose not to participate as an IT member.

So it was a haughty observer?

Google is now listed as the top Congressional lobbyist to 118 Congress members on OpenSecrets.org. So on my Internet search at the end of ITU WCIT, rather than finding a published vote tally, all that was readily available were links to the thirty page agreement and consensus on English outrage. After hours of contradictory reporting, a WCITleaks.org site rose to the helm, linking leading voices of the 4th Estate: the NY Times and Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Vanity Fair.

Follow up news was immediately inconclusive: the English-speaking world had spoken; nothing happened.

The Intellectual Property now isn’t a language – isn’t a code – it’s coding which is only something from nothing according to latest wicket.

Image Courtesy : Itupictures

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London, U.K. — Recent data released by Bingoport.co.uk, the UK’s independent authority on online bingo, has shown that Google is the most popular non-bingo website for online bingo players, narrowly ahead of Facebook.

The data, released in Bingoport’s most recent Quarterly Bingo Trends Report, was compiled through surveying Bingoport’s extensive database of online bingo players, representing a broad and unbiased section of the online bingo playing market.

According to the survey, 70% of online bingo players regularly use Google, compared with 69% who regularly use Facebook. This is in contrast to the greater UK online population, where reportedly, 77.7% are Facebook users and over 90% use Google search.

The lower Google share can be attributed to higher usage of other search engines, with 16% of online bingo players using Bing/MSN and 22% using Yahoo, markedly higher market shares than in the greater online population.

As for the lower rate of Facebook usage, Bingoport’s Operations Manager, Andrew Housego, believes it is indicative of the social nature of online bingo sites. “Although most online bingo players use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family, there are plenty whose sole point of online social contact is their favourite bingo site. In fact, there are plenty of online bingo players whose only activity on the internet is accessing their favourite bingo site.”

Other non-bingo sites frequented regularly by online bingo players included Amazon.co.uk, eBay and YouTube, along with banking sites, news and travel websites.

Image Courtesy of  niallkennedy

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While Facebook and Tuenti, its Spanish equivalent, hold the duopoly of the entertainment in Spain, Twitter is becoming a new source of journalistic information, though it still has a long way to go.

September 18; Pedro J. Ramirez, the editor of the national newspaper ‘El Mundo’, twitted  “3 injured by falling helicopter in the heart of Puerto de Santa Maria (Cadiz) I learned from tweeters. They might have + details”. This demonstrates that the social network has stopped being only an informative source for citizens and turned into a source of immediate first hand information for different mass media outlets.

But what happens with the educational function? Even though social networks are usually more orientated towards information and entertainment, Twitter is turning into a tool that helps tweeters form critical opinions about diverse matters of current importance — all thanks to the possibility of dialog and interaction among mass media, professionals and users.

The clearest example in Spain is the role gained by Twitter in the expansion of the movement #15M, derived from the union of the platforms #nolesvotes and #democraciarealya, that arose as a protest against the big political parties in Spain.

First, all the comments, reflections, complaints, requests and suggestions were articulated around successive hash-tags, which served to summarize the spirit of the protests. Secondly, Twitter become the principal tool to promote and organize the protest campaigns all over Spain and even in other countries.

Thirdly, all conventional media used Twitter as one of their principal sources of information to fully encompass what was happening. And finally, Twitter acquired a political character for the Spanish people ever since. The use of Twitter like a forum of debate and a tool to form public opinion has politicized the social network in Spain.

Soon, everyone with something to say hurried to show his or her support or rejection to the movement. The account @acampadasol started to gain followers by the second and in a few days went above the number of followers of the principal Spanish political parties. The Spanish elections are closed by now.

In retrospect, not all found Twitter to be the political answer — During the first two days of being online, Mariano Rajoy, leader of the principal opposition party, saw his Twitter profile get bombarded with silly comments and questions. Moral: In spite of its power, Twitter is not the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/__fito__/

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In our age, the difference between real and virtual life is often blurred — but while technology does not replace what makes us human beings; when we use it, it tend to add value to our sense of self-being. Professor Robert Dunbar of Oxford University spoke about a predefined number of 150; this is the average number designed for human beings’ capacity of close friends.

Whether you know it or not, 150 is the number of friends we can actually call friends and it is a number which is dependent on our neocortical area. 150 are those with whom we are not just saying hello or sharing jobs, but those of whom we can ask for help or share deep details of our lives. They are the ones we can distribute time and energy to, without handling it as a burden or a cost of opportunity.

Those 150 people are the average the human brain can manage. The number can vary between 100 and 230, and only the extent of our brain capacity or of our available time would let us deal with more friends, as Robert Dunbar delicately describes in interviews and in his writings. The number is not equivalent to our Facebook friends though.

Professor Dunbar explains that a human touch, a real one, is worth a thousand words and until technology can simulate virtual touch, we still have to put a line between Facebook friends and ‘real’ friends. Facebook statistics shows that the average number of friends for the average Facebook user is 130.

It seems that, although many of us live in a virtual world for more than half of our daily lives, we seem to remain in touch with reality, or maybe our brain obliges us to. We might declare 500 virtual friends because we work ourselves into a world where we are obliged to keep track with hundreds of people, but our real life is limited to the 150 number in practice.

Technology and the social networks are only tools that extend our capability to work beyond the limit. Our brain and cognitive capacity is adapted to and confirmed by the 150 number — even while we become addicted to globalization through technology. The development makes us more intelligent and more evolved as human beings.

We have to manage our time according to the technological progress, and meanwhile, we have to shape our relationships in the same pace. Life is defined by numbers. Dunbar, as well as Fibonacci, puts our lives in numbers. Instinctively we feel these numbers; our brain is limited to them, even though sometimes technology, globalization and life by itself show us that limits and numbers can be recreated.

In this way, technology brings added value to what human capacity cannot handle at this point.

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Social media websites in United States are almost half a decade old now and the statistics that broke news lately proves that social media websites have beaten porn in terms of traffic. The distance between the porn sites and social networks has remained steady over this time, despite a number of innovations by the former which are intended to attract visitors.

Similar results were presented by Hitwise, a UK-based web analysis platform which spotted that the average British web surfer spend more time on social media websites than on porn sites. According to the netcraft.com 2011 report of “Most visited websites” or the report of toptenreview.com, all social media websites are in the top 10, leaving porn behind in the competition.

The popularity of adult films cannot be denied as a form of entertainment. According to cnbc.com the porn business is so big that every second: $3,075 is spent on it, more than 28,000 internet users are viewing it and 372 internet users are using search engines to find it. Online, porn sites make up about 12% of all sites, taking in approximately $2.4 billion a year.

Developments in porn distribution includes credit card sales, web video and driving up the development of such technologies as 3D TV. According to David Amerland, a British NUJ journalist, editor and author of the best-selling “SEO Help: 20 steps to get your website to Google’s #1 page”, the main drive behind the consumption of porn online has to do with deep-rooted feelings of isolation and loneliness.

There is an explanation on the Toptenreview.com 2011 report of ‘Most Popular Websites’ why social networks are so popular:

Through social networking, people can use networks of online friends and group memberships to keep in touch with current friends, reconnect with old friends or create real–life friendships through similar interests or groups.

Besides establishing important social relationships, social networking members can share their interests with other like–minded members by joining groups and forums. Some networking can also help members find a job or establish business contacts. Most social networking websites also offer additional features.

In addition to blogs and forums, members can express themselves by designing their profile page to reflect their personality. The most popular extra features include music and video sections. Members can read bios of their favorite music artists from the artist’s profile page as well as listen to their favorite songs and watch music videos. The video section can include everything from member–generated videos from hundreds of subjects to TV clips and movie trailers.

Amerland expresses a similar opinion on socialmediatoday.com. He noticed that social media networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are personally invested and built online interaction. They are there to fulfill a human need to connect with new people, retaining friendshops, finding partners and lead a digital lifestyle.

He also noted that ECG studies of subjects carried out while accessing porn and social networks has shown that many of the same areas of the brain light up while visiting these websites. It suggests that the same form of addictive and compulsive behavior arises whether it be from adult films or social media platforms.

On August 15, 2011 the American Society of Addiction Medicine issued a public statement defining all addiction in terms of brain changes. “Addiction is a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry.” Porn addiction is included on the list. Should we ask the question, when will social media addiction appear in this ranking?

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Facebook recently made a statement that former White House chief-of-staff Erskine Bowles has joined its board of directors. Bowles was recently appointed as the co-chair of President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform in 2010.

Together with his co-worker Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming, he had released a proposal to greatly reduce government spending which called forth a lot of criticism from the Democrats. Another blow from the Democratic Party: He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004 on the Democratic ticket.

Also a former president of the 17-campus University of North Carolina (2006 to 2010) and a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton (1996 to 1998), Bowles serves on the boards of several other companies, including Morgan Stanley, Cousins Properties Inc., Norfolk Southern Corp. and Belk Inc.

His appointment expands Facebook’s board to seven members.”Erskine has held important roles in government, academia and business which have given him insight into how to build organizations and navigate complex issues,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in a statement.

“Along with his experience founding companies, this will be very valuable as we continue building new things to help make the world more open and connected.” Reuters reported on Wednesday that the company, which is expected to go public at some point next year, doubled its revenue to $1.6 billion in 2011′s first half.” Facebook has clearly emerged as a transformative force in the world,” Bowles said.”

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Rumors started back in July that Facebook was preparing to launch a new music streaming service. This new platform is expected to be officially announced on September 22 at Facebook’s f8 developer conference in San Francisco.  This service will allow users to listen to music for free without leaving Facebook.com.

Facebook will not directly stream the music itself but rather rely on partners to provide the musical content. These partners would supply music platforms from their server to play on an embedded music player on users Facebook page.

Currently Facebook is initialed partnered with three third party music service providers, Spotify, MOG, and Rdio. Similar to “liking” a Facebook page these companies will be allowed to publish users’ activity on their Facebook pages. Facebook is expected to partner with more companies in the future.

It appears that Facebook’s music platform will be a way for users share a song or playlist with Facebook friends. Playlist and song can be shared from one streaming music site to another. This music platform will make it easy for users to discover new artists based upon ones that their friends have “liked.”

If Facebook launches globally it will be providing more than 750million people with free music.  Although it is possible for this service to fail, it seems highly unlikely.  Who doesn’t love free music?

It is rumored that Facebook will not only provide music streaming, but also allow movie and video game streaming services as well.  Currently a limited number Warner Brothers and Miramax films are available to rent via Facebook.  However these limited number movie rentals don’t even compare the number of movie rentals that Netflix does.

One big question is how will this affect the future of Netflix?

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Recently Facebook Inc. has been working with the state of California concerning incarcerated prisoners who were illegally updating Facebook pages through the use of contraband cell phones and friends outside the prison.

Facebook has agreed to take down the Facebook page of any prisoner who has had his or her account updated either by that individual or by friends outside the prison. Any prisoner who had an existing account prior to being incarcerated will not have their pages deleted.

Prisons do not allow inmates to have cell phones, but, according to the NY Times January 2, 2011 article on the subject, they are often able to obtain these devices by bribing prison guards with up to $1,000 for a single phone.

While visitors are searched both on the way in and out of the prison, guards are not subject to the same searches. Currently, if a guard is found smuggling contraband into the prisoners, the guard is usually fired but no criminal charges are brought.

This has led Senator Alex Padilla to try to have Bill 26 passed in the next few weeks. If it is signed into law, it would make any corrections officer or civilian that provides a prisoner with a cell phone a crime punishable with up to a $5,000 fine and up to six months in jail. Additionally, the inmate who is found with the device would lose “non-restorable loss of time credit.”

This would increase the amount of time the inmate has to spend in prison before he can get out early on good behavior.  If the cell phone was involved in any crime that was committed, an additional 2-5 years would be added to the individual’s sentence.

The main motivation for prohibiting inmates from being able to maintain their Facebook accounts is to prevent continuing criminal activity and to protect any possible past victims from being contacted or stalked by their perpetrator.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) recently explained in their periodic newsletter on August 8 that a California inmate had sent accurate, up to date drawings of one of his victims to her home. He had been convicted of child abuse involving the victim seven years prior when the victim was ten years of age.

It was later determined that he had illegally acquired a phone with internet access and used the device to view his victim’s Facebook and Myspace pages, and then used the photos for his drawings.

This problem with prisoners illegally accessing the internet while incarcerated has only become a serious problem in the last few years. The CDCR newsletter reported that while in 2006 only 261 contraband phones were found in the possession of inmates, in 2010 that number jumped to over 7,284.

The increase in the availability and speed of portable internet through the use of smart phones is what has led the CDCR to elicit help from Facebook Inc. This intended to limit the criminal activity that is occurring within the prison system while they work to reduce the number of cell phones that fall into the hands of the incarcerated.

If you suspect that a Facebook account is being updated by an inmate or another person on behalf of the inmate, you can contact the CDCR’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights & Services toll free at 1-877-256-OVSS (6877) or e-mail victimservices@cdcr.ca.gov.

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A huge victory for Facebook after Sanford Wallace, 43, surrendered himself to the FBI after facing lawsuits with Facebook announced Attorney Melina Huaag  on August 4.

Wallace will be looking at 40 years in prison and $2 million in fines if found guilty, on six accounts of electronic mail fraud, three counts of intentional damage to a protected computer and two counts of criminal contempt on the indictment handed down on July 6.

Prosecutors said that the indictment was followed by a two year investigation on the Wallace, also known as “The Spam King”. According to the indictment, Wallace would send phishing messages, which are messages used to deceive people into revealing private information, to trick users into disclosing their password information from their Facebook account.

He would retrieve the information, then log onto their accounts and post spam messages on friends’ walls. After the spam was posted on their respective walls, they would then click on the link and be directed to the websites that paid Wallace for internet trafficking.

This took place between November 2008 and March 2009. The attack compromised 500,000 Facebook accounts and sent 27 million spam messages.

This was not Sanford’s first appearance in the Spamming business; back in 1990 Sanford became Spam’s biggest vocal defender. Cyber Promotions was a company led by Sanford, which sent out about 30 million junk emails a day in the 90’s.

The Federal Trade Commission accused Wallace and his spybot.net company of running an operation that administered spyware and was ordered by the New Hampshire Court Judgment to pay $4 million in fines in 2006 In addition to that court case, Myspace won $230 million in 2008, over junk messages sent to their members, applying the same tactic he utilized on Facebook members.

In 2009, Wallace was restricted from accessing any social networking site, after being sued by Facebook for crimes under the CAN-SPAM Act, Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the California Anti-Phishing Act and was facing a hefty fine of $711 million along with an agreement forbidding him from the Spam business.

He violated that restriction and disappeared after his trial to flee from the punishment appointed to him. The charges brought before him today originated from this case two years ago.

Chris Sonderby, a lawyer for Facebook said “We will continue to seek and support the civil and criminal consequences for those who generate spam and others who try to harm Facebook or people who use our service.”

This has generated good feedback from Facebook users, knowing that their accounts will be safe from spammers and that Facebook is doing everything they can for justice.

After posting a $100,000 unsecured bond, Sanford was released. His next appearance in court is scheduled for August 22 at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in San Jose. Wallace was banned from usage of any social networking sites yet again.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanthatcher/

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