Hasta La Gadget!

When you think about it, does anyone really know what’s going on behind the scenes of the internet? While you’re attempting to figure out how “42” is the obvious answer to that, French regulator ARCEP is moving ahead with an investigation into Verizon and AT&T. Specifically, the two have failed in an attempt to block the aforesaid entity from investigating interconnection agreements.

For those unaware, these types of deals are widely viewed as being able to undermine net neutrality, and we’ve seen the FCC look into similar matters here in the United States. The long and short of it is as follows: with high-bandwidth services growing rapidly, ISPs far and wide are contemplating the move to extract additional revenue out of backbone providers by charging them to deliver heavy traffic to end users. It’ll be interesting to see what ARCEP digs up — something tells us the findings will be known well beyond the borders of France.

Filed under: Internet, Verizon, AT&T

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Via: GigaOM

Source: ARCEP

Amazon’s spent quite a bit of time in court as of late; in addition to a recently settled trademark dispute with Apple, a row with an Austrian copyright collection agency is keeping the e-tailer busy. Today, the European Court of Justice ruled that, in some cases, EU countries can collect a levy on blank recording media to ensure that musicians are compensated for their work.

The key phrase here is “in some cases,” since establishing whether CDs, memory cards, cassette tapes and other media have been used for public consumption isn’t exactly easy — and it’s not yet clear whether Amazon will have to pay the 1.9 million euros in question. The next step will be for the Austrian supreme court to decide whether it can even be determined whether Amazon customers used such blank media for anything other than home videos and mix tapes. After all, some would argue that burning a French-electro mix to torment your coworkers on a nine-hour drive is hardly a crime.

Filed under: Internet, Amazon

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Via: Reuters

Google Drive updates might be few and far in between, but they usually add welcome changes to the service — take for example its recently improved copy/paste function. You can now paste tables from spreadsheets into Gmail with their formatting intact, and it doesn’t even matter what browser you use. Chrome users get a bit of extra, of course, like bringing shapes from drawings into presentations and copying slides from one presentation to another. While minor at best, these upgrades do make it easier to share data from Drive — when it’s online, anyway.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Source: Google Drive (Google+)

Each week Joshua Fruhlinger contributes This is the Modem World, a column dedicated to exploring the culture of consumer technology.

I’m going out of my head right now. I came home hoping to find my cool new Santa Cruz mountain biking jersey all wrapped in plastic thanks to UPS via Chainlove.com, my crazy-discounted gear site of choice. We’re not talking anything expensive — I think the thing cost me $20, but I was psyched to have a team jersey from my favorite bike company. I’m a bike dork, what can I say?

I should have been skeptical when I tracked my package from the office to learn that it had been left at my “front door” at exactly 2:00 PM. While it’s possible the driver hit the 2 PM mark on the head, it’s unlikely that he or she left anything at my “front door” given that it’s three stories or 76 stairs — my mom counts and complains every time she visits — above the street. In fact, every single delivery I’ve ever received here was tossed over my little wooden fence. But in my head, everything was fine. The jersey was waiting for me, my future as a Santa Cruz team member assured. Victory was mine.

Filed under: Misc, Internet

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Depending on your point of view, today’s either the 66th anniversary of an Air Force experiment gone awry or an alien landing. With tongue firmly in its cheek, Google is celebrating the Roswell incident, the most (in)famous of alien encounters with one of its interactive doodles, in which you help an extra terrestrial rebuild his spaceship after it breaks apart in New Mexico. Once you’ve done that, you can then kick back with an X-Files box set or two — assuming you’re not into the adventures of doe-eyed alien teenage romance.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: The Guardian

Source: Google