Internet

It's possibly one of the less pleasant experiences in life to come home after a night with your boyfriend to discover someone is using your laptop.

Yes, sitting right there in your living room, browsing her Facebook page as if this was, in fact, her house.

This, sadly, is what apparently happened to a 33-year-old resident of Athens, Ga.

As the Athens Banner-Herald has it, the homeowner got back to her house Sunday lunchtime to find an unknown (and currently unnamed) blond woman allegedly browsing Facebook.… Read more

My dear sweet Internet, you have been the light of my life for nearly two decades, so why must you choose now to impart so much darkness and sadness?

Last week, my editors spotted and passed on an adorable project on Kickstarter attempting to raise 800 bucks to send a 9-year-old girl to a weeklong camp where she would learn to design her own role-playing game. Backers who pledged $10 or more would get a copy of the game she produced. The heartwarming sentiment resonated, and the project quickly caught fire and has so far raised more than $20,000, or more than 20 times its target.

So we published a brief write-up of the campaign's success on Friday and began our weekend in good spirits, our faith in the world reaffirmed and visions of a new generation of empowered gamer girls dancing in our heads.

Then came the trolls.

… Read more

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