Internet

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Kim Dotcom, the controversial man at the center of an international intrigue that has more the flavor of espionage than that of copyright infringement, announced that he resigned as director of Mega, the encrypted and distributed file hosting service he opened in January 2013. His purpose is to follow the legal case of the old Megaupload and Megavideo and prepare for the opening of the new music service for now called Megabox but also to follow a new career in politics in New Zealand.

The nucleus accumbens circled in red in the MRI scan of a human brain

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A research carried out at the Free University of Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin) and published in “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience” analyzed the effects of Facebook on the human brain. 31 subjects were examined using magnetic resonance imaging while (MRI) while they watched pictures of themselves or other people accompanied by positive comments.

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Following a class action, the U.S. federal judge Richard Seeborg ruled that Facebook will pay a total of $20 million to compensate a group of users. Their faces were used without their consent as testimonials of the advertising program “Sponsor stories” in 2011. However, in the end each of the 614,000 users who entered the class action will receive $15 only.

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For the first time since May 2011, on July the Yahoo! portal was the most visited in the U.S.A. surpassing Google. This result was presented by ComScore, a company specialized in marketing research on the internet. The traffic measured doesn’t include visits to the pages of Tumblr, the service bought by Yahoo! a few months ago.

Graph showing the drop in the Internet traffic when Google's services went offline. Times are GMT (Image courtesy GoSquared Engineering. All rights reserved)

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In Europe it was night and in the Americas it was still Friday afternoon when Google services went off line for a few minutes. The immediate consequence was a drop of about 40% of the Internet traffic, which means that it almost halved. The various Google services have returned to work after a few minutes causing a spike in traffic but the drop shows the great importance of Google.