Federal authorities unsealed indictments against the operators of some of the world’s largest online gambling sites and moved Friday to seize their U.S domains. The charges come amid renewed efforts to legalize online gaming in the United States, and as U.S. authorities increasingly invoke asset-forfeiture statutes to seize the American online domains of sites deemed illicit.

Wired Top Stories

Continuing our focus on the Internet (it is, after all, 40 years since the Internet started to exist as the ARPANET): the ICANN recently approved non-Latin web addresses. In layman’s terms, web addresses will no longer be limited to characters within or similar to the English alphabet, or numbers. We’ll probably see website domains in Arabic, Chinese, and Russian scripts.

It’s news that should please the Internet’s non-English users and domain name speculators alike. The former will now enjoy a web that’s no longer limited to English, potentially opening it up to new users. The latter will now have more names to grab online, in the hopes that they can sell it later on for a higher price. I have no idea how to spell “house” in Arabic, but you can bet someone will secure that word once it can be registered as a domain name.

Personally, I think making the foundation of the internet—domain names—more internationally will help the Internet go beyond its heavily-English origins, but at least one reader of the BBC source article shared a great insight: “There is a danger that the internet – a tool for culture, information – sharing and dialog on a non-national level, may become irreversibly fragmented”.

What the reader meant was that, with web addresses set to become more friendly to locals throughout the world, the need to understand what’s currently the universal language of the net (English) diminishes. Why bother exploring the world wide web when there’s already a lot available in your own language/script? Ironically, this push to make the web more universal may end up making it more fragmented.

What do you think? Feel free to comment below.

Post from: The Gadget Blog

Technology is critical for any home-based business, especially for online marketing businesses. Frequently newbies to the field of internet marketing don’t really understand the required technologies or how they will affect the home-based businesses.

Implementing these five technologies are critical to the success of your online business.

The Basics

1. If you’re going to do internet marketing (IM), you’ll clearly need a computer of some sort – preferably one of your own, either a desktop model or a laptop.Your computer should have plenty of memory, speed and internet connectivity.  Broadband preferred over dial-up.
2. A domain name that you own, so that you can begin to establish your own brand.Some advertisers require that you have your own domain and not use an Affiliate website.  A good domain name will be short (30 characters or less), meaningful to the eye and the ear, and reflective of your business or product.  The most popular names end in “.com” and such names are preferred for home-based businesses, if available.
3. You’ll need a web hosting service to provide a “home” for your website.There are many web hosting companies on the market to service home-based businesses.  Their services do vary somewhat, as do their costs, so be sure to shop around before making your decision.
4. You’ll also need good security for your systems and data.  This can take the form of physical security, plus technologies such as firewalls, and security programs like McAfee or Norton.
5. Another necessary, but frequently overlooked, need is for backup of your locally stored programs and data.Regardless of the best security programs you might have, there will come a time when you suffer a system crash, with either complete or partial loss of data and key programs.  Consequently, you will also need a rigorous backup and restore capability.

Murphy’s Law being what it is, you need to prepare for the eventual breakdowns and system crashes that will occur.Implementing these basic technologies will help your business succeed internet business .

Wolfram Alpha is a search engine that you can use to compute systematic knowledge immediately. You can put in anything you would like to know and you can compare multiple results with each other. There is no need to know how to search; just type in what you want to know.

The population of San Diego for instance. Or the population of San Diego compared to Los Angeles.

Wolfram Alpha contains 10+ trillion of pieces of data, 50,000+ types of algorithms and models, and linguistic capabilities for 1000+ domains. You are free to try Wolfram but since this is a test version you can expect a heavy load.