Internet & Media

There's a way of doing these things, and this isn't it.

If you're a star, you're supposed to be supported by a hype machine that wipes the floor with organic palm fronds before you take a single step.

Then Thursday night, along comes Beyonce Knowles and shows the know-alls that you can direct your music at fans in a direct manner.

Without any marketing campaign or even a vague sniff of a planted rumor, Beyonce slipped a new album -- 14 songs and 17 videos -- onto iTunes.… Read more

We've all been there -- sitting on the couch, finding a great show, and watching as many of its episodes as possible in one sitting. And a new study seems to prove it's becoming awfully commonplace.

Netflix on Friday released the results of a survey conducted on its behalf by Harris Interactive, revealing that 61 percent of 1,500 TV streamers binge-watch shows at least every few weeks. So what precisely is binge-watching? According to the poll, 73 percent of respondents say it's watching between two and six episodes of the same TV show in a single … Read more

PARIS -- A French minister went behind enemy lines Thursday, defending his government's policies that critics said keep startups and high-tech companies away from the country.

The LeWeb conference here unabashedly celebrates startups, venture capitalism, and technology disruption, bringing some of the Silicon Valley ethos across the Atlantic. And several participants were keen to vent their frustrations to Arnaud Montebourg, the minister for industrial renewal.

The tension between business and government came up again and again, in part because it's a pet issue of entrepreneur, conference founder, and host Loic Le Meur, who has lived in both the … Read more

Amazon is developing a new retail business venture called Pantry that will offer the same package goods consumers usually visit big-box retailers to purchase, according to a USA Today report.

An expansion of Amazon's Prime shipping program, the service will offer about 2,000 products typically found at warehouse clubs Costco and Sam's Club, according to the newspaper. The service, which will offer items such as cleaning supplies, canned goods, and beverages, is expected to launch in 2014, according to the newspaper's report citing three unidentified sources described as being familiar with the effort.

The online retail … Read more

After ruffling the feathers of Twitter users with a controversial new user-blocking policy, the microblogging site appears to have heard the growing discontent and reverted to its original policy.

A new policy that came to light earlier Thursday changed the way blocking worked on the social networking site. Formerly, blocking someone on Twitter had meant that they could no longer see your tweets, but the change meant that blocked users could still see everything the blocker did.

"We have decided to revert the change after receiving feedback from many users -- we never want to introduce features at the … Read more

YouTube is turning up the volume on live streaming, allowing anyone with a verified YouTube account in good standing to stream live video to the Web.

The expansion includes the ability to launch a Google+ Hangout on Air directly from the YouTube Live events manager, allowing easier access to followers on the Web giant's social network, YouTube said Thursday.

"This gives you a simple way to reach your fans live and is the ideal way to invite participants to join your show," wrote Satyajeet Salgar, product manager, and Tim James, software engineer, in their company blog post. … Read more

With much trepidation, I must report that there is a pretty good chance that half the visitors to this story will not be human.

According to a recent study by Incapsula, more than 61 percent of all Web traffic is now generated by bots, a 21 percent increase over 2012.

Much of this increase is due to "good bots," certified agents such as search engines and Web performance tools. These friendly bots saw their proportion of traffic increase from 20 percent to 31 percent.

Incapsula believes that the growth of good bot traffic comes from increased activity of … Read more

A new Gmail policy that allows e-mailed image attachments to load automatically comes at a price, say two security researchers.

Google announced on Thursday that Gmail would once again load attached images by default. The feature had been disabled years ago, as a way of clamping down on malware and phishing attacks.

The news was accompanied by an explanation: Google proxy servers would host the images, thus preventing any malware they were hiding from surreptitiously showing up in the e-mail.

However, security researcher H.D. Moore determined that the proxy servers posed a tracking risk to e-mail recipients.

"If … Read more

An online petition urging Twitter to rethink its new blocking policy has garnered nearly 600 signatures in less than an hour.

Earlier Thursday, Twitter changed its policy, making it possible for blocked users to follow the blocker, who can no longer see any tweet activity by the blockee.

Almost instantly upon rolling out the change, Twitter users began to express their displeasure, with many saying that it was a dangerous move that enables stalkers. For its part, Twitter said that the new policy was implemented to discourage trolling, and that it had always been possible for anyone -- even someone … Read more