Parents Worried About Pornographic Websites

The children's online security has always been a problem, even if their computers were protected with all sorts of software solutions. And nobody can guarantee 100
percent that the kids are secure, since dangerous websites appear every day and new threats rise up every hour. But even so, the parents are not able to monitor their children's online activity, a recent survey conducted by MoneySupermarket.com revealed, according to Web User News. "No less than 46 percent of the parents avoid checking the websites visited by the kids while only 21 percent installed software technologies to monitor the activity," the same source continued.

With continuously growing up social networking solutions, children must be protected because the threats are all around these websites. Not only can they be exposed to all sorts of dangers, but this kind of webpages connect people from all over the world.

Some time ago, the authorities discovered thousands of sex offenders who created accounts on MySpace and on Facebook to find teenagers and to demand from them explicit photos and adult material. Moreover, some of them attempted to meet the young users which is pretty dangerous since they usually provide false information and pictures.

"The results show parents are aware they need to monitor how their child is using the Internet but could do more. I would suggest setting rules and expecting children to obey them, especially teenagers, is not enough. At the very least the computer should be in a communal area. However, putting parental control software on your home computer, such as Net Nanny or WebBlocker would offer more security as well as give parents extra peace of mind that their child is safe when surfing the net," Rob Barnes, head of mobiles and broadband at MoneySupermarket.com said, according to Web User News.

€10,000 from Intel for the Winner of University Notebook Challenge

Intel launched in April, in the spirit of innovation toward energy-efficient technology, a challenge to European universities to design a device that would be capable of powering laptops by using sustainable and renewable energy sources. After seven months of creative work from the participants, the winners of the Intel University Competition On Renewable Energy (CORE) were rewarded yesterday.
The winners were given €10,000 as funding to support scientific research.

The three members jury had to judge entries from universities in Belgium, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. The three members, Nir Tessler, professor at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Eszter Morvay, IT analyst, and Ofri Wechsler, Intel employee, judged each entry according to several criteria, as ecological value, ingenuity of design or commercial viability.

The winner of the competition was the Spanish team, which presented a solution based on a pedal machine powered by human motion. The energy produced by the cycling action is turned into electricity by a power electronics converter and this way can power the laptop. The jury considered that this solution dealt with all aspects of the challenge, from ease of implementation to innovative quality of its components and also that it allows for a realistic usage model. The device is user-friendly allowing the user to adopt a flexible rhythm and take any breaks necessary. The power electronic converter is specifically designed to minimize charging time and to keep the energy flow at a constant level.

The Polytechnic of Milan from Italy and Delft's University of Technology from Netherlands, the runners-up will be recognized too for the merits of their designs. The Italian team designed a system that uses hydrogen fuel to power a laptop. This solution is noteworthy for its duration and also for being environmentally clean. Although it can not be found on Earth in its elemental form, hydrogen can be obtained through electrolysis from water. The Netherlands team presented a project consisting mainly of a rocking motion pedal mechanism. Both runners-up received a top of the line laptop.

Google External Hard Disks Released

Google is rumored to be secretly working on an operating system but no one was willing to fully deny or confirm it. A "not yet" is all I could come up with as an answer after asking somebody working there and that will never be good enough.

But it seems that Google is going to the hardware market before that, and the picture on the left says the whole story. "Google compatible" is what the box
reads and, believe you me, it’s a strange thing to find written on a box. The picture was sent by Markus Renschler to Philipp Lenssen of blogoscoped.com and it really shows just how big the Mountain View based company has become over the past 7 years or so.

The moment you, as a search engine and as a company dealing solely with the Internet, get to have your brand on the box of a hardware component is the moment you know you own the Internet. When your competition uses your advertising platform in order to advertise theirs, you own that specific area. When you are the standard to which everything moving online is measured, you own. Basically, Google owns us and it is actually taking care of us at the same time, providing each and every one of us with personalized ads.

OK, I might have exaggerated a bit, but the fact remains that if a company thought it would be benefic for its business to be stamping a "Google compatible" sticker on the boxes of its products, the Great Search Engine is pretty damn big, as if we didn’t already know it.

Oh, don’t worry, it’s nothing serious, the only problem still in question is Google’s alleged Operating System, there’s nothing hardware-related brewing… Yet. At the rate things are going, I don’t know if next year I’ll be able to say the same thing.

Skype = Internet Telephony

It's well known the fact that Skype has millions of users from all over the world, and no other company involved in the Internet telephony competition manages to challenge
Skype and to gather so many customers. A recent research conducted by Ipoque revealed that "Skype is by far the most popular Internet telephony application" but the VoIP technologies are used only by 30 percent of the total number of web users. Sure, it might sound less important but, when we think that Skype has almost 95 percent of these users (which obviously means almost 30 percent of the total Internet consumers), it may catch your attention.

In comparison with the VoIP market, the instant messaging battle records impressive numbers, as lots of users from all over the world are communicating via Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger or any other instant messenger. And according to Ipoque's study, 60 percent of the Internet users in the Middle East use such tools. "In Germany, however, it is only 17 percent."

Another important Internet competition is represented by the video sharing technologies which record impressive audience. In fact, it's well known that Google's YouTube lures millions of users to its page every day, so I guess it's no secret this type of technologies are quite popular among the Internet consumers. Joost, the recently released platform described as a potential YouTube killer, didn't manage to gather so many users so the Google technology is still the leader in a category with several other famous players such as MSN Video, Dailymotion or Metacafe.

"Joost does not yet have a significant relevance, despite its high media presence. Quite the opposite can be said about Flash movies embedded in Web sites like YouTube, which produced considerably more traffic. This and other forms of video streaming generated eight percent of the Internet traffic during the measurement period," it is mentioned in the research.