WORLD REVIEW
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| Minutes after the US polls began to report the election results, news sites began to peak. The Akamai monitor of news sites showed 7.5 million visitors per minute, a world record for Internet traffic for any news event. |
Internet coverage of the US election set a traffic record; news-site monitors Akamai said 8.5 million visitors per minute were hitting web news sites as vote totals piled up for Barack Obama - 1.3 million better than the previous record recorded for the 2006 Ghana victory over the US in World Cup football.
Speaking of numbers, the phenomenal Oprah Winfrey endorsed the Amazon Kindle e-book reader on her show one day, and because Amazon does not give sales numbers, here is how we guess the Oprah Effect, by analysing the Web, using Akamai and the like; on Kindle Endorsement Day, Web traffic from Oprah.com directly to Amazon.com went up 15,458 per cent, total traffic to Amazon.com increased six per cent, and searches for the word "kindle" at major search sites rose 479 per cent.
Here are some likely events in technology under US President Obama: There will be a national chief technology officer, maybe someone like Eric "I Know Jack" Schmidt of Google or veteran geek Vint Cerf; the US will have a technology master plan, and all indications are it will be a fast to come and as comprehensive as the Thai master plan; the US will grow more ruthless, relentless and, well, anti-Thailand in enforcement of anti-piracy measures and punishments for their close ideological buddies in Hollywood - not different from Bush so much in form as in intensity; free trade in technology and H-1B work visas will come under strong attack, and at least partly disappear; the US government will work to spread broadband Internet at home, but "Net neutrality" will be a dead duck, again because music and movie industries don't want it.
Finally, the Craigslist classified adverts agreed to stop running all those come-ons from women of pleasure, so that pretty well wraps up the fight against prostitution.
The Malaysian government had to be ordered by the High Court to release the dangerous desperado Raja Petra Raja Kamarudin - a man so dangerous that he actually has a blog, Malaysia Today, which frightened the government into jailing him without charges under the Internal Security Act; get off it, said Judge Syed Ahmad Helmy Syed Ahmad, the home minister is way outside his powers putting people in jail for having a blog; Raja Petra now will go on trial for sedition for pointing out in his blog that deputy prime minister Najib Razak was involved in the murder of a Mongolian woman in 2006, something Mr Razak denies.
Question of the week: Is there any chance that Yahoo! will survive twin heart attacks? Google threw the old Yahoo! fogeys under the bus, dropping a planned advertising linkup devised by the old guys at Yahoo! to save themselves from a Microsoft takeover; now the spurned Microsoft doesn't want Yahoo!, as the Google people turned away from Yahoo! and turned back to the glamorous young companies at the swinging single bars, Yahoo! went begging for Microsoft to take her back for a safe if unexciting marriage; Jerry Yang put on a push-up bra and pleaded with the always amiable Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, quote: "To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo! - I don't think that is a bad idea at all, at the right price whatever that price is. We're willing to sell the company." Advice to Yahoo!, 409 years ago: Scene V. Another part of the forest. Rosalind: Sell when you can: you are not for all markets. Cry the man mercy; love him; take his offer. (William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 1599).
Microsoft said that the worldwide threats from viruses, worms and other assorted malware have increased by precisely 43 per cent in the past year - and that is only because Microsoft was on the job with better security than ever, think how bad it would have been without all that Microsoft help; the company said 90 per cent of malware targets software, and just 10 per cent homes in the operating system.
"Change you can believe in," enthused, er, Microsoft, and unleashed a newer, faster, better site design for Hotmail and Live.com webmail - and it turned out that not everyone wants change after all; give us back our old design, whined a significant number of users.
The world held its breath as the Web 2.0 Summit 2008 began in San Francisco; and people around the globe found that it was as successful and memorable as the previous four; the meeting, which is not any sort of summit at all, showed off apps and products on global issues, like a network for carbon trading, a 3D map on the iPhone, and a great application that tells you every single harmful material in every food product you ever used to enjoy.
Prosaic if pithy web page of the week was arguably the one at the US Embassy in Libya, which begins: "It took you just a few mouse clicks to get here, but it took us close to a generation;" it is at libya.usembassy.gov/history2.html.
Crack hacker or hack cracker, you be the judge: 22-year-old computer engineering undergraduate Lee Tze-ho got into the McDonald's computer network that was running a contest in Hong Kong, and he changed the results so that he won all five mobile phones, the grand prizes; they he went into a McDonald's and claimed all five of them; then he wondered how he got caught and convicted by the criminal court of obtaining property by deception.
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