UK adults spent a quarter of their waking day online during lockdown – a record high, according to Ofcom. During April, adults spent an average of four hours a day online, up from three-and-a-half in September 2019, the communications watchdog said. And seven in 10 people made video calls at least once a week during […]
Restricted to our homes for months now, many of us have been putting up with a persistent annoyance: a lousy internet connection. When we are working, a video call with colleagues becomes pixelated, with delayed audio. When we are relaxing, movies and video games take ages to download. In the worst cases, the connection drops […]
Today, though, the brands are mostly quiet. Like so many of our other creature comforts, from sports to concerts, they’ve taken the year off amid the coronavirus pandemic. It’s probably for the best. “It would just be seen as just so tone-deaf with people dying, and we’re not even at the peak yet,” said Donna […]
WASHINGTON — In late January, as China locked down some provinces to contain the spread of the coronavirus, average internet speeds in the country slowed as people who were stuck inside went online more and clogged the networks. In Hubei Province, the epicenter of infections, mobile broadband speeds fell by more than half. In mid-February, […]
Derek Pando rarely had problems with his home internet service — until last week. That was when he began working from his house because of the coronavirus. Mr. Pando, 35, a tech worker in Palo Alto, Calif., immediately started using work applications like video conferencing that ate up a lot of data. And he shared […]
Peak time for being on the internet in Britain is 21:00 on Wednesdays, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggests. By contrast 04:45 on weekdays is the quietest time, it says. The ONS has started analysing internet traffic volume for the first time, using publicly available data from one of Britain’s largest internet exchanges. However, […]
Even before the impeachment inquiry against President Trump was announced on Tuesday, the president’s re-election campaign blasted an email to supporters, urging them to defend Mr. Trump against the “baseless and disgusting attacks.” Facebook quickly filled with ads for impeachment-themed merchandise, including $ 3 “Impeach Now!” bumper stickers and $ 35 “Impeach This!” T-shirts. In […]
Enlarge / Can the Mouse keep your house safe from the sketchy parts of the Internet? Aurich Lawson / Getty Filtering out the bits of human knowledge you don’t like and leaving all the bits you do is a deceptively difficult task; it’s one of the classic “I may not know art, but I know […]
(Alex Brandon/AP) July 18 at 10:55 AM Federal regulators this week began considering ways to update and potentially expand enforcement of the country’s online children’s-privacy law, questioning whether swift advances in technology have outpaced rules meant to protect children younger than 13. The effort by the Federal Trade Commission is in its initial phases, but […]
Amazon is moving forward with a plan to launch thousands of satellites into space in order to bring broadband internet service to the nearly all of the United States. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Thursday to obtain permission to launch 3,236 broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit. […]
(Reuters) — Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he spoke with Facebook Inc’s Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, inviting the social media tycoon to partner with him in a bid to promote universal internet access in Mexico. Lopez Obrador posted on both Facebook and Twitter a short clip of his video conference with Zuckerberg in […]
SpaceX stumbled at the first hurdle with its recent attempt to launch 60 satellites into space — which wound up being pushed back a day due to bad weather, and then called off yet again. It was an unfortunately inauspicious start for Elon Musk’s Starlink project, which aims to rain down internet from the heavens, […]
SpaceX chief Elon Musk has unveiled the first batch of internet satellites that the company plans to fire into space from Cape Canaveral in the coming days. The 60 satellites, packed on a Falcon 9 rocket and ready to go, will mark the initial deployment for Musk’s attention-grabbing Starlink project that over time will send […]
Aurich Lawson The year is 2009. YouTube, four years old, has become the Web’s leading video site. Though Internet Explorer 6 was far from current—it had been superseded by versions 7 and 8—it nonetheless made up some 18 percent of YouTube’s traffic. These were, after all, the dark days of Windows XP; corporations had overwhelmingly […]
Even by the nightmarish standards of the empire she oversees, Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive officer of YouTube, has had a dreadful start to 2019. During a single week in February, BuzzFeed reported that her company was running advertisements alongside anti-vaccine content; there was a nationwide panic over the platform abetting child suicide; and a […]