The internet's biggest names - Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple - have not joined online protests, or otherwise moved to mobilise their users in favour of new rules

Farhad Manjoo: In net neutrality push, internet giants on the sidelines

There were a few things that were sweetly grandmotherly about Patricia Duncan Moran's Facebook post to her great-granddaughter, Devyn, on her birthday. For starters, Moran had posted it to her own wall instead of Devyn's. She named but did not tag her great-granddaughter. But most striking was the signer: "Happy birthday to my beautiful great-granddaughter," the message read. "See you soon. Love, Great Grandmaster Flash."Great Grandmaster Flash?!It was the PG version of what's come to be known as the autofail, the accidental autocorrection from which many a blog and book have spawned. In this case, Facebook's autocomplete feature had made the assumption that "Grandma" was short for "Grandmaster" and adjusted accordingly, tagging the hip-hop pioneer in the process. "It became quite the family joke,"  Moran, 83, says on phone from Montreal. "I kept saying, 'Who is that?' because I had never heard of Grandmaster Flash. But now everybody calls me Great Grandma Flash."Botched autocorrects a

When autocorrect goes horribly right

The era dominated by consumer electronics - what most of us call gadgets - is in turmoil

In a world of phones, gadgets must adapt

Late in 2012, when Tim Cook was relatively fresh on the job as Apple's chief executive, he made a sudden and potentially risky shuffle in the firm's executive ranks. He fired Scott Forstall, who had been in charge of Apple's mobile operating system, the most important piece of software Apple produced. Forstall had long been one of Steve Jobs's favoured lieutenants, but in addition to presiding over a couple of prominent failures - including Apple's Maps app - he was known for his combativeness within the company.Cook had little patience for that attitude. As he later explained in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, the reshuffling was meant to "get us to a whole new level of collaboration." In public appearances since, Cook has repeatedly returned to this idea of cohesiveness. Apple, he likes to point out, is alone among tech firms in producing the entire collection of digital technology that people use daily, from the devices we crave to the operating systems that power them to

Apple strengthens pull of its orbit with each device

Business Standard

Over all, seven out of 10 people who work at Google are male

Google aims to fix its diversity problem

A light-field camera can capture much more data, including information about the direction in which rays of light are travelling through a scene

A camera that never loses its focus

Ten years from now, we'll look back on this week as the moment federal regulators broke the Internet as we know it.Or we will look back on it as just another time they managed to push through a fragile, hodgepodge compromise that kept the Internet just barely functioning fairly, at least until the next telecommunications giant initiates a court case that once again casts the future of the network in doubt.In other words, whatever happens, it's hard to see a really great outcome to the proposal on so-called network neutrality rules that the Federal Communications Commission moved to adopt this week.Network neutrality is the most important sleep-inducing topic around. At its heart is a question that anyone who uses the Internet ought to care about: Will the future of the Internet resemble that of cable television, a service in which business deals between content companies and providers influence which content you see on your devices?Or will it function more or less like the free-for-all

Did regulators break the internet or did they save it?

In the two and a half years since Timothy D Cook took over as Apple's chief executive, the company's annual revenue has grown by 58%, and its profits by 40%

Farhad Manjoo