The Internet, from The Economist

YAHOO has bought Tumblr for a hefty sum, but users fear the takeover will result in the blog site losing its distinctive style

WI-FI beggars can't be choosers. The wireless internet provided by Amtrak, America's government-subsidised interstate passenger railway, is slow, unreliable and often infuriating. But unlike slow, unreliable and often infuriating in-flight Wi-Fi, at least Amtrak's service is free. And it is getting better: the company appears to have heard the "silent, hash-tagged screams." Last week, Amtrak announced that it was upgrading the cellular-based wireless internet throughout its fleet to run on 4G technology. Passengers still won't be able to watch streaming video, listen to internet radio, or download more than 10 MB at a time. But the service will, at least, be a bit faster and more reliable.Amtrak says it's already implemented the upgrades on its high-speed-for-America Acela trains that run along the north-east corridor between Boston and Washington. It has also upgraded the Wi-Fi on several of its massively money-losing long-haul routes. Further upgrades to its North-east Regional trains will continue throughout the summer.I've yet to try out the new Amtrak Wi-Fi—I usually take the North-east Regionals, not the Acelas. Many of the early reviews have been positive—if you trust Amtrak's media relations department. But your best bet for reliable wireless internet on an Amtrak train is still using your own broadband modem, or a tethering service on your phone. That's how I ...

ON MAY 20th Yahoo announced that it was buying Tumblr, a popular blogging platform, for $1.1 billion in cash. Blog-hosting websites date back to 1998 and 1999, when the concept of a personal journal organised as a list of posts in reverse chronological order, combined with the inexorable expansion of internet access, triggered a boom in confessional self-publishing. By 2007, however, the various blog-hosting platforms had matured considerably, along with the medium of blogging itself. Blogging software had become both powerful and complicated. Tumblr, which launched that year, took a different approach in an effort to make blogging simple again—and succeeded, which explains in part why Yahoo has now decided to buy it. So what exactly is Tumblr?The first generation of blog software, including Open Diary, EditThisPage, LiveJournal and Blogger, made it easy to post text, essentially providing a large box into which a blog post could be typed or pasted, and a "post" button to publish it. A second generation, led for many years by Movable Type and now dominated by WordPress, offered users the choice between installing server software onto their own (or leased) machines, or relying on a hosted service run by the software-makers on their own hardware. These second-wave products matured into full-featured publishing systems that could be used to build company websites with ...

AT A recent conference, Ken Goldman, the chief financial officer of Yahoo, admitted that the internet giant had an ageing audience and was looking for things to “make us cool again”. The firm's senior executives appear to think Tumblr can give it a shot at rejuvenation. According to various media reports, Yahoo is likely to announce tomorrow that it is paying $1.1 billion for the popular blogging service. (Editor's update (May 20th, 12pm GMT): Yahoo announced the deal on Monday morning.) Other companies like Facebook are said to be interested in Tumblr, but Yahoo is thought to be the preferred bidder.

AMERICANS have grown accustomed to North Korean nuclear petulance. Now they are learning to live with its cyber sabre-rattling. Earlier this month the Department of Defence delivered a report to Congress accusing the hermit kingdom's expanding army of “cyber-warriors” of using foreign infrastructure, such as broadband networks, to launch cyber-attacks on American allies, most notably South Korea.Kim Jong Un, North Korea's fresh-faced dictator, is said to have 4,000 loyal cyber-warriors at his disposal. Brightest sparks at the sharp end of Songbun, the North’s rigid social hierarchy, are plucked from school to train as elite hackers. Following graduation they are often posted in China and Europe to wreak digital havoc, says Sun Chul Kim, a cyber-security expert at Korea University in Seoul.According to American report, cyber-warfare is a cost-effective way for North Korea to boost its military capabilities, which may explain the keen interest Mr Kim has taken in it. Prominent web security analysts such as Rob Rachwald of FireEye, an American firm, agree that the tools used in a recent cyber-attack on South Korea could have cost just tens of thousands of dollars, compared to the estimated $1.3 billion the North spent on its rocket programme last year.On March 20th thousands of South Korean banking and broadcasting systems were paralysed by a devastating cyber "time ...

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Wall Street is back Fly Title:  Online video Rubric:  YouTube is becoming more like normal television Location:  SAN BRUNO Main image:  20130511_WBP003_0.jpg ONE of the most popular videos this month on YouTube, an online video site, is a commercial by a bottled-water firm, Evian. In it, adults walking by a shop window see their baby lookalikes reflected, and start dancing with their former selves. The grown-up YouTube, however, looks nothing like it did in its infancy. Once a warehouse for pirated clips and amateur footage of cats, YouTube has been trying to transform itself into a sleeker, more sophisticated site that can compete with television for advertisers. It will soon look even more like television. On May 9th it is expected to announce that it will charge users for subscriptions to some “channels”. Novice clips have attracted a tonne of views, but not a tonne of money, because ...

IN THIS week's programme our correspondents discuss the ECB's latest efforts to revive the European economy and Google's investment in a peer-to-peer lender

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Xi Jinping and the Chinese dream Fly Title:  Internet retailing Rubric:  Online retailers may soon have to collect sales tax. Amazon, oddly, is gloating AMAZON, which became America’s biggest internet retailer by selling things more cheaply than anyone else, used to go to great lengths to avoid collecting sales tax from its customers. It issued a map showing employees which states to avoid lest they give the authorities a target for enforcement (some of the biggest states were coded red). In 2011 it shut down a warehouse in Texas after the state’s government demanded $270m in back taxes. The taxmen are now catching up. On May 6th the Senate is expected to approve a bill requiring internet merchants to collect sales tax due in other states. The House of Representatives may follow. Politicians are heeding howls from bricks-and-mortar retailers that current law gives Amazon and its kind an unfair advantage. State governments reckon that tax avoidance by online retailers costs them roughly $11 billion a year. If the Marketplace ...

TWITTER is blocked in China. And yet, the Chinese are probably the most active tweeters in the world. They share their banalities (and, on occasion, profundities) using Weibo, a microblogging service run by Sina, a Chinese internet firm. Although the majority of Weibo’s more than 500m user accounts are inactive, many millions use the service every day.

THE NETHERLANDS gets a new king, a new €5 banknote enters circulation, Barack Obama addresses White House correspondents and Apple's iTunes store celebrates its tenth birthday

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Generation jobless Fly Title:  The Twitter crash Rubric:  A hacked tweet briefly unnerves the stockmarket Location:  NEW YORK Main image:  20130427_FNP010_0.jpg IT WAS over in less than three minutes. At 1:08pm on April 23rd a fake tweet from a hacked Associated Press account asserted that explosions at the White House had injured Barack Obama. Stock prices immediately dropped, wiping more than $130 billion off the value of the S&P 500. That understates the severity of the episode, since in many cases liquidity simply disappeared altogether. It was the first Twitter crash and, as is often the case with Twitter, it was brief and superficial. The Associated Press itself was quick to clarify that the original report was false. This was echoed by the White House. Markets recovered, ending up for the day. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army took credit for the attack, but ...

THE first e-mail sent from China, on September 14th 1987, was optimistic: "Across the Great Wall we can reach every corner in the world." Few of China's 560m internet users now have such reach, however, because China tightly controls its people's use of the internet. The "Freedom on the Net 2012" report, issued by Freedom House, an American organisation that tracks global trends in political freedom, ranked China as the third most restrictive country in the world when it comes to internet access, after Iran and Cuba (though this ranking excludes those places, such as North Korea, where ordinary people are not allowed to use the internet at all). How does China censor the internet?The Chinese central government has two main ways of controlling what its citizens see on the web: the Great Firewall, as it is called by foreigners, which is a system of limiting access to foreign websites which started in the late 1990s, and the Golden Shield, a system for domestic surveillance set up in 1998 by the Ministry of Public Security. Separate government departments, along with local and provincial administrations, also have their own monitoring systems. China began by blocking a list of foreign websites, including Voice of America, human-rights organisations and some foreign newspapers. But its filters have since become more sophisticated and can now selectively block specific ...

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Clean, safe and it drives itself Fly Title:  Online media Rubric:  Back from the dead, AOL is reinventing itself as a media company Location:  NEW YORK MOST Thursday afternoons at AOL’s New York headquarters a bell rings to announce “happy hour”, and staff flock to a keg in a meeting room. They hope they at last have cause to celebrate. “If you look at the analyst models, they had AOL never getting back to growth,” says Tim Armstrong, the firm’s boss. But in the fourth quarter of 2012, AOL’s revenue rose for the first time in eight years. Its share price has surged by more than 50% in the past year. Could AOL be back from the grave? Mr Armstrong, a former Google executive whose first job was running a small newspaper in Boston, has tried to turn a flagging dial-up internet firm into a content company. Formerly known as America Online, the firm merged with Time Warner, a media giant, at the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000. Jeff Bewkes, Time Warner’s boss, has ...

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Clean, safe and it drives itself Fly Title:  Mobile telecoms in America Rubric:  Mega-bids are set to transform America’s wireless industry Location:  SAN FRANCISCO Main image:  20130420_WBD001_0.jpg BANKERS involved in mergers and acquisitions have been checking their phones more often than text-crazy teenagers recently, to keep up with a flurry of offers for American mobile-phone companies. On April 15th DISH Network, a satellite-TV operator, became the latest bidder to enter the fray when it launched a $25.5 billion offer for Sprint Nextel, the country’s third-largest wireless firm. DISH is not the only suitor for Sprint. Last October Japan’s SoftBank offered to buy 70% of the wireless operator for just over $20 billion; and this week it boasted that its agreed deal promised “superior” benefits to DISH’s unsolicited one. Sprint, in turn, is seeking to take full control of Clearwire, ...

WHEN Kevin "KAL" Kallaugher drew his first cartoon for The Economist, in March 1978, he was making ends meet by sketching tourists in London's Trafalgar Square. 35 years later, KAL has produced more than 4,000 illustrations for the paper, and drawn some of its most memorable covers. Fans eagerly await his weekly cartoon, which has appeared in the opening pages of each new issue since 2001. On Thursday April 18th KAL will be answering readers' questions via webcam, using the Hangouts feature of Google+. If you would like to participate, please fill out this form (you will need a webcam, and a Google+ account, to take part). The discussion will take place at 4pm in London and 11am in New York. Readers may watch the conversation on this page.

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  Freedom fighter Fly Title:  Virtual currencies Rubric:  Even if it crashes, Bitcoin may make a dent in the financial world Main image:  20130413_FND001_0.jpg IN 1999 an 18-year-old called Shawn Fanning changed the music industry for ever. He developed a service, Napster, that allowed individuals to swap music files with one another, instead of buying pricey compact discs from record labels. Lawsuits followed and in July 2001 Napster was shut down. But the idea lives on, in the form of BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer filesharers; the Napster brand is still used by a legal music-downloading service. The story of Napster helps to explain the excitement about Bitcoin, a digital currency, that is based on similar technology. In January a unit of Bitcoin cost around $15 (Bitcoins can be broken down to eight decimal places for small transactions). By the time The Economist went to press on April 11th, it had settled at $179, taking the value of all Bitcoins in ...

THE internet browser you are using to read this blog post could help a potential employer decide whether or not you would do well at a job. How might your choice of browser affect your job prospects?When choosing among job applicants, employers may be swayed by a range of factors, knowingly and unknowingly. In one experiment, attractive women who included photos of themselves with their curricula vitae, for example, were less likely to be offered an interview than those who did not. Recruiters may also frown upon messy handwriting, body piercings and tattoos, even though these have no bearing on people's ability to do particular jobs. Psychometric tests claim to offer an alternative to these methods of selection by measuring a candidate's personality objectively. And yet such tests are as likely to mislead as to inform.Evolv, a company that monitors recruitment and workplace data, has suggested that there are better ways to identify the right candidate for job. It analysed 3m data points from over 30,000 employees, comparing traits of applicants with those of existing employees, to determine which traits are most indicative of reliability, trustworthiness and suitability for particular jobs. Among other things, its analysis found that those applicants who have bothered to install new web browsers on their computers (such as Mozilla's Firefox or ...

FOR many shop owners, e-commerce remains a riddle. Each step, from creating an online shopfront that lures in customers to taking payment for goods, can flummox retailers selling their wares online. In many cases, intimate knowledge of such technical wizardry as Perl, PHP and MySQL databases is needed.

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  A giant cage Fly Title:  China's internet Rubric:  The internet was expected to help democratise China. Instead, it has enabled the authoritarian state to get a firmer grip, says Gady Epstein. But for how long? Main image:  20130406_SRD001_0.jpg THIRTEEN YEARS AGO Bill Clinton, then America’s president, said that trying to control the internet in China would be like trying to “nail Jell-O to the wall”. At the time he seemed to be stating the obvious. By its nature the web was widely dispersed, using so many channels that it could not possibly be blocked. Rather, it seemed to have the capacity to open up the world to its users even in shut-in places. Just as earlier communications technologies may have helped topple dictatorships in the past (for example, the telegraph in Russia’s Bolshevik revolutions in 1917 and short-wave radio in the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991), the internet would surely erode China’s authoritarian state. Vastly increased ...

UK Only Article:  standard article Issue:  A giant cage Fly Title:  The Great Firewall Rubric:  Chinese screening of online material from abroad is becoming ever more sophisticated ON FEBRUARY 9TH, Chinese New Year’s Eve, Fang Binxing, known in China as the father of the Great Firewall, wished his followers on Sina Weibo a happy Year of the Snake. As always whenever Mr Fang tweets, thousands of fellow microbloggers sent messages along the lines of “get lost”. They could not reply directly: Mr Fang gets so much abuse for his role in engineering China’s censorship technology that the “comments” function on his microblog page had to be disabled long ago. Nor can users easily find the comments on the 35,000 retweets of his new-year post: Sina has blocked access to those as well. Mr Fang is used to being, in the parlance of the system he helped create, a “sensitive keyword”. He is one of the most important figures in the history of the Chinese internet, and perhaps its most reviled. In 2011 several students in Wuhan, in central China, said they threw eggs and a pair of ...