As we all know, Black Friday is the time where people looking for great deals run to stores at 4AM to take advantage of 50%-off sales. However, this year, it took a particularly high toll on the internet, which does not require you to be at the store at 4AM to take advantage of deals. As people rushed to such sites as Lowe's and Macy's to buy stuff, servers crumpled under the load. And when they crumpled, they crumpled where it hurt users most: at transaction points. Some sites suffered a ridiculous 400% slowdown as a result of Black Friday sales, which caused some customers to abandon their product search/purchase. Some sites were even temporarily shut down due to Black Friday traffic, such as esteemed technology retailer Newegg.

Any member of techPowerUp! that currently attends or has attended a public school, and done a research paper at said public school, knows that using Wikipedia as a source is a huge no-no. New Jersey librarian Linda O'Connor decided to take the verbal no-nos and grading penalties on papers citing Wikipedia a step further. She designed, purchased, and distributed "just say no to Wikipedia" posters all around the local high school that she works in. O'Connor of course has the backing of several teachers that do not like to see students too lazy to find and cite the sources themselves.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons behind banning a well-meaning website from research papers. One student nearly wrote a Martin Luther King Jr. report based on information found on a white-supremacist version of the Wikipedia article on the black man. Another student found a drastically lowered casualty count when researching the Vietnam war. Wikipedia of course does not tolerate these instances when found, and deals with them by locking the articles to editing by new/untrustworthy users. Teachers argue that such methods are too little, too late.

While the RIAA and CRIA (the respective American and Canadian anti-piracy firms) work hard to shut down piracy sites and sue every old man and college student with a pirated "all your base are belong to us" clip, France has a slightly different approach to getting pirates off the map. The SNEP (Syndicat National de l'Edition Phonographique) recently unveiled plans to cut off internet to anyone that ISPs decide are pirating. ISPs will give their customers "three strikes", and then their internet is cut off. The SNEP believes that this is a much easier and fair way to eliminate piracy, as opposed to the RIAA's infamous search-and-sue methods. French president Nicolas Sarkozy claims that this is a "decisive moment for the future of a civilized Internet." While this move received much fanfare from the various artists and media industries, politicians aren't so sure this is a good idea. Some politicians feel that this move is "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history." The main incentive behind this maneuver is to counter the 40% drop in music sales noted since 2002.

Ever since Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 was released to the public, people have been wondering whether or not memory usage was any better. An independent tester decided to take it upon himself to investigate. Running a Windows Vista Home Premium system with 2GB of RAM that had never had Firefox installed on it before, the man put each browser under three different testing scenarios (that were equivalent between the two systems). First, he loaded five web pages into the browser. Then, he loaded a single page and let the browser idle for 10 minutes. Finally, he loaded 12 pages and waited five minutes. The results are very interesting.

Firefox 2.0.0.9 used 35,640KB of RAM on the first test, 47,852KB on the second test, and a staggering 103,180KB on the last test. Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 at first did not seem to be doing much better, using 38,644KB and 63,764KB of RAM on the first and second tests, respectively. However, on the final test, Firefox 3.0 Beta 1 required only 62,312KB, over 40,000KB less than what Firefox 2.0.0.9 required. For comparison, Internet Explorer 7 used 89,756KB on the final test. Please check out the source link for screenshots and more detailed test results.

A new study by Nemertes Research Group, released on Monday, suggests that consumer and corporate internet use could overload the current web capacity and lead to problems such as online blackouts in as little as two years. This comes after a sudden rise in the popularity of new web content such as video sites like YouTube, music downloads and peer-to-peer file sharing. Internet users are expected to create 161 exabytes of new data this year - to put that into perspective, one Exabyte is approximately equivalent to 50,000 years of DVD-quality video. The group's co-chairman Bruce Mehlman said the following:

Video has unleashed an explosion of Internet content. We think the exaflood is generally not well understood, and its investment implications not well defined.

The research suggests that internet providers need to invest as much as $137 billion in new capacity (double what was already planned), with investments of $42 to $55 billion needed in North America alone in the next three to five years.

As one of the strangest nations on earth, Korea is now taking care of youths who have internet addiction. The Jump Up Internet Rescue School, is the first camp of its kind in South Korea destined to help young kids addicted to the Internet. In South Korea, ninety percent of homes connect to cheap, high-speed broadband, online gaming is a professional sport, and social life for the young revolves around the PC as they have practically universal Internet access. Up to 30 percent of South Koreans under 18, or about 2.4 million people, are at risk of Internet addiction, said Ahn Dong-hyun, a child psychiatrist at Hanyang University in Seoul who just completed a three-year government-financed survey of the problem. To address the problem, the government has built a network of 140 Internet-addiction counseling centers, in addition to treatment programs at almost 100 hospitals and, most recently, the Internet Rescue camp, which starts now. Find out more here.

American citizens can be glad in the fact that once again, the government will not be charging them for the privilege of using the internet. American internet customers have not been taxed for their internet use since 1998, and the moratorium has been renewed in 2001 and 2004. The senate is considering a permanent tax moratorium on the internet, due to strong opposition from Internet Service Providers on an internet tax.

Comcast, one of the largest providers of cable television and internet in America, decided recently that they were fed up with the huge amount of file sharing traffic on their network, which was beginning to affect the speed of other users connections. And so, they've snuck a little code into their cable internet services. Subscribers of Comcast can download all the BitTorrent/P2P content that they desire without a problem. However, when they in turn try to upload it to other BitTorrent/P2P users, Comcast forbids the file transfer from completing. Whether this is done via hardware or software is unclear. Regardless, this certainly puts a damper on file sharing. While this does stop potential pirates in their tracks, an independent film maker or artist hoping to share their content via BitTorrent will have to find a different service provider to share their content on.

When someone loses something valuable or close to them, chances are they will pay handsomely to hold what is dear to them again. This is clearly the case in New Zealand, where a brewery is offering a lifetime supply of beer (a 12 pack a month) to whoever returns their laptop to them. The computer owned by the Croucher Brewing Company, in the central North Island city of Rotorua, contains very important designs, contact details and financial information. The company is offering smaller quantities of beer to anyone with clues leading up to the laptop.

Western Union, one of the easiest ways to send money from one place to another, will soon find a new office: your mobile phone. Western Union recently announced that they are working with roughly 35 cell phone operators around the world to bring Western Union services to phones. Western Union has already tested this across America, and hopes to bring it to the public in Q2 2008. To make sure that there are no Nigerians trying to get you to cash fake checks, Western Union made it so that no transaction can happen without connecting the user "to a company operator to complete the transaction".

When GMail was first unleashed in 2004, its 1GB of storage space quickly put it ahead of the competition. Now, GMail is looking to further that previous lead, by booting storage space up to 3GB. The reason behind GMail's new storage space is a simple lack of space in some GMail accounts. Google saw a problem, and quickly found a way to fix it. Google Apps will also have storage space increased to 3GB, and Premier Google Apps members will get between 10 and 25GB of storage space.

A simple blunder in an E-mail server's code recently caused the Department of Homeland Security to give itself a miniature DDoS attack. Here's the low-down on what happened: a reader of the DHS' daily Open Source Intelligence Report replied to the list address with a request for a change. The message quickly found itself E-mailed to all subscribers of the newsletters, which numbers in the thousands, for reasons unknown. Unfortunately, once those subscribers got the request, they also got the list of recipients. When the good subscribers tried to report this problem, the same problem happened to the server, and every subscriber quickly found themselves knee-deep in E-mails asking for an un-subscription. That's not the only E-mail passed around the DHS network, though. Subscribers also received requests to cease replying, urgent requests from the Department of Defense and DHS officials for recipients to "kindly stop now please," a "vote for me" political ad, job offers and updates on the local weather. All in all, the server sent, received, and otherwise handled 2.2 million E-mails over the course of an hour, causing a mini-DDoS. The problem is resolved now, and the DHS is ensuring that such a problem will never happen again.

Seeking a new way to bring customers to McDonald's, McDonald's now is the proud owner of the largest free wireless internet provider in the United Kingdom. Every McDonald's restaurant within the United Kingdom will give their customers free access to wireless internet in the store. This is a vast improvement from the regular way to access wireless internet in the UK, which generally involves a contract/pay-as-you-go service, which can add up to 5 pounds per log-in. After the 1,200+ McDonald's restaurants all have free wireless internet, they will own 10% of all wireless coverage in the UK.

For the second time ever, the leaders of North and South Korea met to talk about the state of the country. The conversation at one point or another turned to the leader of South Korea asking for internet access for South Korean companies operating in a North Korean industrial district. Kim Jong-Il's response:

I'm an Internet expert too. It's all right to wire the industrial zone only, but there are many problems if other regions of the North are wired. If that problem is addressed, there is no reason not to open (web access).

Kim Jung-Il did not elaborate on what those problems were, but it might have something to do with the explicit ban on any citizen of North Korea to access the internet or use a mobile phone, outside of the government.

Recently, UC Berkeley started uploading videos of their lectures to YouTube for the masses to view, free of charge. YouTube now is a host to over 300 hours of lectures on bioengineering, peace and conflict studies, and physics, according to the UC Berkeley. As time goes on, UC Berkeley hopes to upload more lectures to YouTube, and on more topics. "UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life - academics, events and athletics - which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," according to Christina Maslach, the vice provost for undergraduate education.

Wikipedia prides itself in being the only open source dictionary with the approximate accuracy of the Encyclopedia Britannica that anybody at all can edit. Unfortunately, the noble cause of Wikipedia is sometimes out-shined by the immature vandalism of punks. This would be one such case: the entry for George W. Bush (the current president of the United States of America) was recently vandalized to show the anti-Bush views of an un-named editor. Before the article even begins, it reads...

Quite Simply, The Worse President In History! A Terrorist HimSelf, and a truly "stupid" Mother F*cker who we all wish would leave this country for ever befor he starts another war and kills us all, he's just in it for the money, Watch ZeitGeistmovie.com "pt2" to see what really happened on 9/11/01

Needless to say, Wikipedia will get this sorted out very soon, and will also probably lock this article to editing in the future. For those of us who want a quick giggle before this happens, I saved a screenshot of the vandalism for our entertainment.

The United States may be the world's largest economy, but when it comes to Internet connections at home, many Americans still live in the slow lane. By contrast, Japan is a broadband paradise with the fastest and cheapest Internet connections in the world. Nearly eight million Japanese have a fiber optic line at home that is as much as 30 times speedier than a typical DSL line. But while that speed is a boon for Japanese users, industry analysts and some companies question whether the push to install fiber is worth the effort, given the high cost of installation, affordable alternatives and lack of services that take advantage of the fast connections. "The Japanese think long-term," said Matteo Bortesi a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo. "If they think they will benefit in 100 years, they will invest for their grandkids. There's a bit of national pride we don't see
in the West."

The internet is a wonderful place, especially when you consider that at least 60% of it is of a pornographic nature. Most parents, not wanting their children to be jaded by the porn, decided to install web filters to eliminate all but the sneakiest porn. However, Rheinegold, the author of The Virtual Community, thinks that this is not the best approach. He tells a compulsive community of people who devote all their time and money to sheltering their children that the best protection against the evils of the internet is not to eliminate it. Instead, he says, parents need to talk to children about what they can see online, and take an active role in their online habits. Censoring kids from the real world does more than leave these kids unprepared for the barrage they will face when their parental protection is relinquished. Censoring these children form the real world also puts them in a bad relationship with their parents.

Some people play RPG's like World of Warcraft to escape reality. Some play them for the online community. However, the World of Warcraft ex-guild "Abhorrent Taboo" took the latter reason a little too far. The interests of the group could be summed up in three letters: ERP ('erotic roleplay'). Among other strange pleasures that should not be mentioned for the sake of decency, the guild indulged in what they call "extreme ageplay", which is where members pretend they are ages they are not. Concerned World of Warcraft players decided to take a closer look at the clan, and promptly found a twelve year old girl engaging in "erotic roleplay" with a man much her senior, who did not stop "erotic roleplay" even when she stated her real age. Blizzard took a valiant stand against this, and Abhorrent Taboo is now an ex-guild. However, they have reformed themselves under the name "Vile Anathema". Whether or not they've learned not to have ERP with a 12 year old girl remains to be seen.

In the fight against terror, Germany is trying to gain the upper hand by spying on potential terrorists. They can already tap phone lines and use most forms of electronic surveillance. However, the German government wants to go even further by watching all internet activity on a suspect's computer. While a direct installation was recently prohibited by German courts, a "sneak attack" has not yet been forbidden. German officials are proposing a bill that would allow police agencies to send E-mails loaded with trojan horses, in an attempt to bug a suspect's computer. If a terror suspect was foolish enough to download attachments from the "Finance Ministry" or "Youth Services Office", a government official could read the contents of his hard drive or spy on his internet activities at any time. However, this idea is under much scrutiny. The likeliness that such a practice would become legal is very unlikely. And even if it did become legal, most terror suspects are smart enough not to install simple virus protection, and are probably running Mac OS X/Linux anyways to avoid such a problem.

Ten years ago, a man who only refers to himself as "Maddox" started a website. He claimed that his website was the best page in the universe, and filled it with countless rants, cartoons, and hate-mails. And while it's hard to say whether or not Maddox really does have the best page in the universe, he certainly has one of the more popular ones. Happy 10th anniversary, Maddox. Keep it coming!

Some Internet service providers (ISPs) in Europe use Linux machines to distribute service. A small-town company in Sweden did just that. However, this led to a problem when the servers met Windows Vista customers. The ISP blames a bug in Windows Vista for the inability of Vista users to connect to the internet (possibly related to Vista sending out Internet Packet requests in IPv4 and IPv6 at the same time?).

Microsoft says they would probably be able to fix the problem if Lund officials would get in touch with them.

In an attempt to keep Australian minors from being jaded by the massive volume of X-rated material on the internet, Australia recently invested $70 million USD into a download-able porn filter. Unfortunately, it seems that this investment might have been a poor one. When deployed in a real-world scenario (like, say, a high school), teenagers were able to bypass the filter with relative ease, and were streaming steamy pornographic material in roughly 30 minutes.

TechPowerUp! is a source for a lot of things in the computer world. You can get reviews of the latest hardware, articles telling you how to build/mod said hardware, tools to overclock that hardware, an information repository, and a close, loving community. We're proud to announce that there is an addition to what techPowerUp! brings you. Forum user Ben Clarke recently started his very own web comic, which he called "Front Side Bus". The comics are co-developed with user "PVTCaboose1337", and are shaped by the ideas of several users. You can see the development team at work here.

The official website of 'Front Side Bus' is here. All of us here at techPowerUp! Hope that this comic becomes just as popular, if not more so, than Cyanide and Happiness.

Anyone who's ever subscribed to AOL dial up service knew how hard it was to cancel. Sales representatives would pick up the phone, spend hours offering customers free hours, arguing with them, and doing all sorts of stuff, just to keep an AOL account open. Sales representatives might have even got paid for every account they kept alive. However, these low-ball tactics have come to an end. AOL has reached a settlement with 48 states (the only two excluded were New York and Florida) that makes AOL promise never to use such tactics again. AOL is paying $3 million dollars to each state in order to avoid the massive lawsuit that AOL would otherwise face.