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INTERNET SPACE
Italian professor launches challenge to Google
by Staff Writers
Rome (AFP) Feb 6, 2012


An Italian computer science professor whose research helped inspire Google launched a new search engine and social media network on Monday that he hopes will challenge the US technology giant.

The new site entitled "Volunia" allows users to view the components of particular websites to find the subject of interest more quickly and to interact with registered users who might be looking at the same web pages.

"The web is a living place," said Massimo Marchiori, who came up with the algorithm for the Internet page ranking service "HyperSearch" in the 1990s and used to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

"There is information but there are also people. The social dimension is already present, it just has to emerge," he said in an online demonstration.

Marchiori said he believed the functions available on Volunia would soon become normal on all the major search engines including Google and Yahoo!

He has been working on the project for four years and has been praised by Italian commentators for giving up a more high-profile career in the United States to return to Italy, where his salary is 2,000 euros ($2,600) a month.

Marchiori teaches at the University of Padua in northeast Italy.

He has been quoted as saying that future Google founder Larry Page approached him after a conference in which he presented HyperSearch.

Page "was fascinated by it and asked if he could use it. Since it was not patented, he used it in the best possible way," Marchiori said.

Volunia, which has a US copyright, was only launched to selected users on Monday and will be rolled out more widely and in 12 languages including Arabic, English, Japanese and Russian over the coming days.

Organisers said they hoped to fund it by selling advertising space.

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After Megaupload closure, BTJunkie shuts down
Washington (AFP) Feb 6, 2012 - BTJunkie, a popular file-sharing indexing site, said Monday it was voluntarily shutting down, less than three weeks after the US closure of Megaupload in a crackdown on piracy of music, films and other materials.

"This is the end of the line my friends," BTJunkie said in a brief message posted on the home page of the site along with the dates of its existence: "2005-2012."

"The decision does not come easy, but we've decided to voluntarily shut down," Britain-based BTJunkie said. "We've been fighting for years for your right to communicate, but it's time to move on.

"It's been an experience of a lifetime, we wish you all the best!" it said.

BTJunkie provided a search engine for Bit Torrent files and was one of the top five torrent sites with "dozens of millions of users a month," according to TorrentFreak, a website which covers file-sharing news.

TorrentFreak quoted the unidentified founder of BTJunkie as saying that BTJunkie's decision to close down stemmed partly from recent legal actions against Megaupload and The Pirate Bay, which faces legal action in Europe.

Megaupload was shut down by the US authorities on January 19 and seven people were charged in connection with what the Justice Department and FBI described as "among the largest criminal copyright cases ever brought by the United States."



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INTERNET SPACE
Technology that translates content to the Internet protocol of the future
Madrid, Spain (SPX) Feb 06, 2012
A new protocol, IPv6, is being introduced across the Web. Researchers at Universidad Carlos III of Madrid (Carlos III University - UC3M) who are participating in the Trilogy project have defined technology that allows users of this protocol to access Internet contents that are currently only available to users entering the Web using IPv4 protocol. The protocol that any device uses to conne ... read more


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