Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on April 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

It was just last Friday that Demonoid was resurrected, and staying true to our promise we’re giving away the 5 invites that we have! Demonoid is a private invite-only BitTorrent service that has an amazing community, and we’re happy to offer some of our readers a chance to be a part of it.

Here’s what you have to do for a chance to receive an invite:

1. Leave a comment below, and be sure to include your email address in the appropriate field. (If you’re a registered user you can edit the email address on your profile page)
2. We will randomly pick 5 winners out of the first 20 comments on this article. Invitation codes will be sent to the email address you provided in the comment. Winners will also be announced on this article so be sure to check back!
3. Once you get an invitation code you’ll want to head on over to this registration page.

Good luck!

And the winners are… MetaMan, Max, Trip, Talkajp, and Katrin. Invites have been sent to the email address you provided! Be sure to check your spam folder, or use our contact form if you need us to resend it.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on June 11, 2006 by CyberNet.

A lot of people felt bad when The Pirate Bay was raided and their site was down for 3 days. We all began to wonder if they could recover and become as strong as they were before. Well, they have proved that they can!

By looking at the Alexa statistics for The Pirate Bay’s traffic you will notice that their traffic has more than doubled since they were taken down! I think that would mean that the RIAA/MPAA had their plan backfire on them. Oops!

News Source: Digg

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 31, 2008 by CyberNet.

Back when Wikipedia first launched (formally) on January 15, 2001, it grew faster than anyone even imagined. By the end of the first year, people around the world had contributed to over 20,000 articles that were written in 18 different languages. Both the number of articles and the number of languages were impressive. By the end of 2003, just two years after Wikipedia first launched, there were articles written in over 46 different languages. Now we’ve gotten to 2008 and in all, there are articles written in over 255 different languages. More impressive is that they just hit 10 million articles Worldwide!

The Wikimedia Foundation says that this is a “Significant new milestone” for them, and it is.  The lucky 10 millionth article was posted on the Hungarian Wikipedia site (here’s the English version) and it was about Nicholas Hiliard who is a 16th century English goldsmith and painter. The amount of human knowledge out there is amazing which is why Wikipedia has turned into such a great resource.

While there are over 255 different languages, many of the languages aren’t represented very well quite yet which means that there is a lot of room for growth. It’s very easy to tell the top 10 languages represented on Wikipedia because they’re shown on the Wikipedia logo. As shown below, you can see that the language with the most articles is English followed by German, French, Polish, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish. If you look at the image below, you’ll see roughly how many articles have been written in those languages.

In their press release, the Wikimedia Foundation also pointed out some interesting information regarding the accuracy of the collaborative encyclopedia. They say:

In December 2007, the German magazine Stern announced in an independent study of 50 articles that the German Wikipedia was more accurate, complete and up-to-date than the longstanding print encyclopedia Brockhaus. In April 2007, a study conducted by the Hewlett Packard Information Dynamics Laboratory found that the best articles on the English Wikipedia are those that have been edited the most frequently, by the largest number of people. It concluded that the correlation between article quality and the number of edits validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Similar studies around the world continue to point to the increasing accuracy and quality of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that is written, edited and maintained by a global community of thousands of volunteers.

Any guesses on when they’ll hit their 20 millionth article?

Source: TechCrunch

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on April 27, 2007 by CyberNet.

Pingdom is big on monitoring websites for downtime and is truly an amazing service. You can pay a monthly fee to have Pingdom monitor your own site, but they also have a service called Pingdom GIGRIB that currently monitors 2,000 websites across the Web.

The GIGRIB service is unique in how it works, and is actually free. The reason it doesn’t cost anything is because you have to setup your computer to run the software, which will monitor other websites for downtime. For every one hour that your server does checking for downtime on other sites, you receive five hours of checking from other servers. I like to compare it to the BitTorrent network where the work is distributed across thousands of computers.

This is the same service that we mentioned a few weeks ago that monitored the downtime of the top 20 sites on the Internet. If you use the GIGRIB service, your downtime stats are also made publically available, which makes it fun watch for downtime on some sites like YouTube (who has been down for 3 hours and 15 minutes so far in April).

On the Pingdom blog they did a little bit of an extrapolation to get the total downtime of all active sites on the Internet. The average downtime for 2,000 of the sites on the GIGRIB service was 1 hour and 59 minutes for March alone. Then they used the estimated 51.3 million active sites on the Internet (according to Netcraft) to come out with a whopping 4,239,375 days of total downtime. That is 11.614 years worth of downtime in just one month!

Remember, if a hosting company boasts a 99.9% uptime guarantee that means there can’t be more than 44 minutes of downtime in a single month. If you do have more downtime than that you could be eligible for some sort of refund.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on September 18, 2007 by CyberNet.

Most people aren’t willing to pay for the news content that they view on the Internet, and it appears the New York Times is realizing this.  As of midnight tonight, the NYT will no longer charge users to view their TimesSelect content. TimesSelect was a paid service that gave subscribers access to the Op-Ed columnists, and The Times Archive. Those who wanted to view any of that content had to pay $7.95 per month or $49.95 per year.

In a letter to their readers, Senior Vice President of the NYT, Vivian Schiller said the change came because "since we launched TimesSelect in 2005, the online landscape has altered significantly.  Readers increasingly find news through search, as well as through social networks, blogs and other online sources." Schiller mentioned search, and it’s an important topic.  Over the last two years since the TimesSelect program started, many people were directed to articles at the New York Times (via blogs, other sites, etc.) which they found to be unavailable to them unless they paid. And who really wants to pay to see just one article?

The NYT now realizes that there’s a lot of money to be made via advertisements from all the people trying to view articles in The Times Archive. Sure, they managed to make around $10 million per year off of their subscribers, but they only had 227,000 of them willing to pay. Many, many more people than that surely tried to access their content.  Now the NYT will be able to make more money by opening their content to everybody and advertising, versus limiting their content to only paid subscribers.

Thanks to the prevalence of programs like Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher which give news mediums a way to make a profit, we’re seeing subscription services go down the tubes which just means we have access to more information and more content. The New York Times wasn’t the first media source to ditch the concept of paid content, and they surely won’t be the last.  Now all I’d like to see is Consumer Reports take this route, but that’s probably just wishful thinking…

Source: Download Squad

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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