Internet

Finally, Chrome has given me a way to turn work into a game.

Chrome World Wide Maze is a nifty experiment from the Google Japan crew that syncs the mobile Chrome browser to a tab on the desktop, turning your smartphone into a controller that navigates a digital pinball on the desktop screen around a 3D rendering of any site on the Web.

Sounds like an odd concept at first, but once your device and desktop are synced up via HTML5 WebSockets (it took me a few tries, as I got a couple of "null" responses on the … Read more

Google is getting more serious about mapping Canada's north, deploying photographers in winter to map the city of Iqaluit.

As temperatures hit a chilly 8 degrees, walkers equipped with Google's Trekker backpack cameras fanned out across Nunavut's capital, located along Frobisher Bay on Baffin Island.

The effort to image the city of 6,700 marks the first use of the Trekkers in the Canadian north. It's prohibitively expensive to send vehicles there, and some roads are difficult in winter, or nonexistent in summer. … Read more

The Internet is a busy place. Usually, we're all just puttering along online, watching silly cat videos, checking e-mail, and occasionally getting some work done. If you truly were to comprehend everything happening on the Internet at any given moment, it would drive you mad, much like Bowman in "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"The thing's hollow--it goes on forever--and--oh my God--it's full of Internets!"

Fortunately, Intel has broken down what happens in an Internet minute into an easy-to-digest infographic. First, let's look at the big-daddy number. Every minute, 639,800GB of global IP data is transferred. That's a little hard to really wrap the mind around, so let's get into some of the telling details.

In a single minute of Internet time, 204 million e-mails are sent. Online denizens view 20 million photos on Flickr. Twitter processes 100,000 new tweets and 320 new Twitter accounts are created. That's more than five new Twitter users per second. No wonder it's so hard to keep up with all that tweeting.… Read more

The U.K. budget was leaked on Twitter today, granting politically minded surfers a sneak peek at George Osborne's number crunching ahead of time.

The key aspects of the chancellor's new measures -- including plans for the U.K.'s Internet speeds -- emerged early when London's Evening Standard newspaper tweeted its front page, which detailed the most crucial aspects of the annual ploy to make the U.K. more economically healthy.

The Standard posted an apology on its site, with editor Sarah Sands saying, "An investigation is immediately under way into how this front page … Read more

Some subjects, like communism, zippers, and our long absence from the moon, can be a little hard to explain. That's when people turn to "Explain Like I'm Five," a Reddit group dedicated to breaking complex ideas down into understandable terms. While the group has been geared for adult readers, it has now morphed into a video series featuring real 5-year-olds.

The YouTube series kicks off with three entries. The topics covered are Syria, existentialism, and the stock market. If you can make a group of bored 5-year-olds understand these topics, you should be good to go for most adults, too.… Read more

If the media is to believed, the new Pope Francis is an extremely modest man.

Eschewing the life of palaces in Argentina, he lived modestly and even cooked for himself.

Such frugality, reticence, and identification with the poor of the world isn't often associated with lawyers.

Yet one member of Chicago's legal faith is offering up an act of generosity akin to just chatting with Mary Magdalene.… Read more

Will it be Han Solo? Jabba the Hutt? Yoda? Chewbacca? Or possibly Luke Skywalker or Princess Leia?

Or will Darth Vader run away with the competition?

Today, Lucasfilm announced "This is Madness," its first-ever "Star Wars" NCAA basketball-style tournament, an effort to determine who is the world's favorite "Star Wars" character. Mashable was first to report the story.

There are four regions, two from the Light Side, and two from the Dark Side. StarWars.com plans on announcing the winner on April 9. There will be four rounds of voting before the winner … Read more

When the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church were sequestered in the conclave to choose a new pope, they were instructed to give up their cell phones. No texting! Revealing the secrets behind the election of the successor to Pope Benedict XVI, they and their attendants were told, would lead to excommunication.

Jammers were also installed in the Sistine Chapel to prevent electronic communication.

For an institution that has suffered its share of leaks, the Vatican maintained its storied traditions as it voted for a pope for the second time in the 21st century.

But while the announcement that a new pope had been chosen was made via a cloud of white smoke -- a tradition that has continued since the election of Pope Benedict XV in 1914, and a symbol of the cardinals' cloistered proceedings -- the introduction to the world of Argentinean Jorge Bergoglio as Pope Francis was made on live TV and Internet, via Twitter and Facebook, and by the countless smartphone and tablet photos snapped in St. Peter's Square. … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--At Google, the future of search looks an awful lot like something out of one of the iconic science fiction franchises of the past.

At least that's the impression given by Google's Amit Singhal when he was interviewed on-stage by Guy Kawasaki at South by Southwest Interactive in Austin recently.

No matter how much Kawasaki prodded Singhal for insights into the inner workings of Google's algorithms, the senior vice president of search seemed far more interested in talking about his apparent obsession with the computer from "Star Trek."

"For those of you who have never watched an episode of 'Star Trek,' please go do that," Singhal implored the audience at one point.… Read more