Most people know Mark Zuckerberg as founder of Facebook. A lot fewer people know that one of his first projects prior to Facebook was a service called FaceMash. A new generation of Chinese hackers though, are much more interested in copying it than the 955-million strong social network. The site crudely pitted photos of Harvard's female student populace against each other and, just occasionally, farm animals. In order to get at those photos, his hoodiedness had to hack ...

So the web is 21 today, and what's a 21st without something unique to mark the occasion? This year, in celebration of this momentous occasion, a South African startup as created a tribute video to Sir Tim Berners-Lee to thank him for inventing the web. After many proposals to use hypertext "to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will", on 6 August 1991 Berners-Lee and Belgian computer ...

When the Curiosity Rover landed on Mars earlier today, it represented humanity at its best. The mission, designed to see if Mars ever supported microbial life, pushes to the technological boundaries of what is possible. So naturally when Curiosity touched down on the planet's surface, anyone in the know celebrated. And then Twitter got involved. Sure most of the tweets were appropriately celebratory, but as is the case with most celebrations there were a few jokers in the pack. Some ...

The internet, and specifically the recent meteoric rise of social media platforms like Twitter, has irreversibly disrupted the status quo with regards to journalism. Gone are the days of desks cluttered with coffee-stained research material, the "man on the beat", "the old hack" with a byline you could trust to produce the goods. Or have they? Milo Yapiannopoulos raises some telling points in his article deriding the role social media has played in journalism, the major one being that the anticipation ...

TED (the Technology Entertainment and Design conference) has expanded its brand across the globe over the past two years, with hundreds of local TEDx conferences, and more recently, with its own books imprint, TED Books. TED organisers always choose their speakers well and there is rarely a dud among them. It is excellent curation under the aegis of "Ideas Worth Spreading." But choosing which authors to publish under the TED Books brand appears to be more challenging than booking a speaker ...

We decided to delve into the World Bank's Economy Rankings for 2012, released earlier this year, to see which sub-Saharan African countries have economies that are the most conducive to startup growth. We also identified some aspects of economies in Africa that make it really hard for entrepreneurs to prosper. First let's take a look at the countries in the region that have aspects that are likely to attract startups. Be sure to have a look at the full detailed ...

When it comes to reviewing laptops I prefer to stay away because they’re basically all the same, with a few exceptions. So when it came time to replace my ageing Acer Aspire with Core i5, I had a long hard look at the options. I wanted Full HD display, the latest Quad Core processor, good graphics, Blu-ray and no plastic in sight. Then HP updated its Envy range and, since I work with these things, I had a few happy clients ...

Three now former employees of Chinese search giant Baidu have been arrested for accepting bribes to delete posts from the company's TieBa forum service. According to Global Times, the three are suspected of colluding with people outside the company to delete the posts. A fourth employee was also fired by Baidu but has not been arrested after also attempting to delete posts for cash. "Baidu has fired the four. If we discover such cases, we will severely punish staff. ...

The day has come. The masses who have switched from paper to an E Ink display are starting to influence Amazon's sales so significantly that the retail giant now sells more Kindle ebooks than 'real' printed books in the United Kingdom. According to The Guardian, the company has confirmed that it now sells more ebooks than paperback and hardcover books combined, just two years after launching in the UK. They hit the same landmark in the United States four years ...

"Touch down confirmed, we are safe on Mars." How thrilling was it to hear those words? Admit it, when you were a kid you wanted to space and see what wonders it had to offer. The men and women of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) work hard to fulfill those childhood dreams. It's all over the internet, the only thing more popular than Justin Beiber's hair and Lady Gaga's latest outfit is the one-ton rover that NASA landed on ...