The browser wars are back on in earnest. For the second time in three months, Internet Explorer made large gains, picking up almost 1 point of market share. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari all lost out, as Internet Explorer 9 won over new users.
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In 2010, South Yorkshire police showed up at the workplace of 26-year old Paul Chambers and arrested him. His crime: posting a frustrated joke to Twitter after his girlfriend’s flight was delayed due to snow at the local airport.
“Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed,” he wrote. “You’ve got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I’m blowing the airport sky high!!”
This was perhaps unfortunately phrased, but was it “menacing”? Even police didn’t think so. As Chambers’s lawyer describes the chain of events leading to his arrest:
[The tweet] was not sent to the airport, and when it was found in a search some days later it was graded as “non-credible” by the airport security manager. However, the process in place meant that it was referred to the airport police, who did nothing, and then to South Yorkshire police, who arrested Paul at his workplace for a suspected “bomb hoax.” The police in turn realised after interview that it was intended as no more than a joke; but they had to refer it to the Crown Prosecution Service for a decision.
The CPS agreed that it was not a bomb hoax offence, but they decided it was in the public interest to prosecute Paul under section 127. This seems the first time… that this offence had been used in respect of an internet communication.
Chambers was fined £400 plus costs (now over £3,000). But he has appealed the case, which was heard in London this week, and the ruling will set precedent as the first time an appellate court has considered this sort of issue related to social media.
The UK isn’t the only government not sure how to handle tweets. Two weeks ago, British tabloid The Sun interviewed a man and woman who had been sent back home after long flights to California, where Homeland Security agents pointed to a recent tweet from the man saying, “Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America.”
If it all seems a bit over the top—what person actually out to “destroy America” would write such a thing publicly, on Twitter, and in English?—it could be far worse if you live in Saudi Arabia.
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For the last several years, research funded by the National Institutes of Health has been subject to its public access policy, which ensures that resulting research publications are made open access within a year of their publication. For almost as long, some members of Congress have been trying to overturn that policy, which some publishers fear will cut into their revenues. The latest attempt, the Research Works Act, was introduced in January, and would allow any publisher to keep papers in its journals from being made open access.
Today, some members of Congress have introduced a bill that would not only support the NIH policy, but expand it. The Federal Research Public Access Act is being introduced in both the House and Senate, with a bipartisan group of sponsors in each body. The act would significantly shorten the waiting period between publication in a subscription journal and the point where a paper is made open access, dropping it from a year to six months. It would also expand the scope of the policy, applying it to any federal agency with a budget of $100 million or more.
The bill argues that “the research, if shared and effectively disseminated, will advance science and improve the lives and welfare of people of the United States and around the world.” To that end, each agency will be required to ensure that publication doesn’t interfere with their right to reproduce the paper, and create a online public repository that will house the works once they become open access. Preliminary data, such as lab notes and meeting presentations, are specifically excluded from this requirement.
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The latest survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project underscores how reliant users are becoming on their mobile devices. According to the report, 42% of adults aged 18-29 — a growing number — said that they have had trouble completing a task because they didn’t have their phone nearby. A majority of adults aged 18-49 use their phones as entertainment devices to stave off boredom.
And most surprisingly of all, 30% of adults 18-29 have pretended to be on the phone in order to avoid human interaction, the report says.
But that doesn’t mean we want to stay connected all the time. Nearly 1/3 of adults surveyed also reported that they sometimes turn their phones off for a period of time, just to get a break. This figure was equally true for smartphone and feature phone users.
The survey underscores the differences between smartphone users and regular feature phone users — differences in how they interact with their devices, as well as how different demographics use their phones.
The most common activities for both kinds of user include sending text messages and taking photos. For smartphone users, accessing the Internet is also one of the most frequent reasons to pick up their device. Other common tasks include sending and receiving email, playing games and downloading apps. Naturally, using a phone to look up urgent information is a consistently popular activity across age groups.
Video chat, which is slowly finding its way to more handsets, is one of the few areas with relatively low adoption across the board.
The data represents trends we’ve been seeing for quite some time. Users have an expectation of access to real-time information and have come to rely on their mobile devices to deliver that information. The high number of young people who use their phones as entertainment devices also underscores just how disruptive the smartphone has been in the portable gaming and portable entertainment space.
Still, we found it interesting that a third of users sometimes just shut their phones off to escape the world. Personally, I almost never turn my cell phone off. Sure, I’ll put it on silent and screen calls, but I’m far too afraid to actually shutting the device off except in rare circumstances.
How often to you shut your phone off to avoid the madness? Let us know.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, franckreporter
More About: Pew Internet & American Life Project, smartphones, stats
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Instant Pages, a feature that enables almost instantaneous loading of certain web pages, has made its way to the stable version of Google Chrome.
The feature, introduced several weeks ago through Chrome’s beta channel, preloads some of the Google search results before you click them, making the loading process much faster than normal.
The new stable version of Chrome brings a couple of other features too, such as print preview (for Windows and Linux users only), as well as improvements to omnibox (Chrome’s combination of the search box and address bar), which now makes it easier to go back to pages you’ve visited before by typing a part of the page’s address and finding the matching page via a drop-down menu.
To see how Instant Pages work, check out the video below.
More About: browser, chrome, Google, google chrome, instant pages, web browser
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