internet

Social music site offers easy access

Webware is always happy to see new competitors challenge the status quo.

Jango attempts to combine Pandora's simple interface, Finetune's control over playlists, Facebook's ease with profiles, and the music community of Last.fm.

While this latest DIY Internet radio Web site doesn't open to public beta until November 12, we're sharing it with you now. It adds nice social-networking features in a simplistic way that others just don't have yet. (We've also managed to get some early invites to Jango for CNET readers before the site officially goes public.)

"What we … Read more

Senate OKs 7 more years of tax-free Net access, e-mail

Scarcely a week before an existing ban on Internet access taxes is set to expire, the U.S. Senate late Thursday voted to let the prohibition live on for seven more years.

The compromise bill, which was approved by a voice vote, would prohibit state and local governments from taxing any service that enables users to connect to the Internet and some related services through 2014. That's three years longer than the version passed by the House of Representatives last week.

The bill won't go to the president's desk just yet. First, the House must approves the … Read more

Coming next week: A tax on your e-mail?

Editor's note: Click here for Friday's update on the Senate's Internet access tax vote.

When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last week extending a ban on Internet access taxes, it may have opened up the possibility of previously forbidden taxes on paid e-mail and other Web services.

That's what a Congressional Research Service attorney concluded in a two-page memorandum (click here for a PDF) released on Thursday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), the author of the original tax ban in 1998. The CRS is a federally funded sort of "think … Read more

So, are you and the Internet a thing?

If only the Internet had been around to comfort Rear Window's Miss Lonelyhearts back in 1954.

A new poll shows that nearly 1 in 4 Americans say the Internet could be a stand-in for a significant other for a period of time. Among singles, the percentage was even higher: 31 percent. (One wonders how popular such responses as "reading a good book" or "playing with my cats" were to the question of substitutes.)

The poll examined people's attitudes about the Internet. Results of the online survey, conducted by Zogby International and 463 Communications, were … Read more

NoiseFree VoIP hushes the rabble on Skype, Yahoo, Google calls

NoiseFree VoIP has just launched a fresh all-software solution to those often noisy VoIP calls. Skype, Yahoo Messenger with Voice, and Google Talk are great ways to save money on long distance, but if you're calling anywhere near civilization, you're bound to get interference. A noisy line can undo the advantage of free Internet calls.

Until December 31, 2007, NoiseFree VoIP is offering a free beta of its noise-canceling software to registered users. I gave it a go at CTIA (coverage), and was impressed with the demo. There was noticeable improvement in call quality when I toggled the … Read more

Reports: China 'hijacking' Google, Yahoo, Microsoft search sites

Ticked off that the United States gave the Dalai Lama the prestigious Congressional Gold Medal this week, China may be taking out its aggression by "hijacking" American search engines.

Over at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reports that numerous users trying to access Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft search engines from within China or using Chinese Internet service providers are being redirected to Chinese-owned search engine Baidu.

Sullivan says it's not exactly clear how that process is working, but he cites a news report from 2002 that indicates this sort of thing has happened in China before. At … Read more

SoundSnap serves up royalty-free sounds for everyone

When I was in college, I took a film class. When it came time for postproduction on our action movie, my group and I scrambled to come up with some decent sound effects and ambient music without having to go back and rerecord new sounds, or create something catchy in Garageband. Most of the Web resources we ran into just didn't cut the mustard when it came to finding copyright credit. Our solution was to use the small assortment of audio CDs from the school library that contained short, public domain sound effects--a process that required first loading and … Read more

Driving It: Implications of the Internet-connected car

Someday soon, cars will be rolling Internet access points. Different technologies that exist today could make it happen, such as an iPhone-like connection that picks up Wi-Fi when in range of a hotspot, then switches over to a cellular network when necessary. Or it could be through WiMax, a solution I've heard mentioned by automotive parts suppliers. There are a lot of obvious benefits, such as keeping navigation system maps and points of interest up to date, or having cars serve as traffic probes, reporting to a central database where traffic is slowed or stopped.

But what about the … Read more

Killer Download: Better ways to download the big files

Anybody who downloads software knows that the size of the file is going to effect the time it takes to download. The bigger the file the longer you wait, right? For those of you who are on a dial-up connection (I know you're still out there), the size of the file can be the difference between downloading and moving on to something else. Even with a fast connection, some of the popular game demos and larger software apps can mean an all-night download party for your computer--particularly when that download is in high demand.… Read more