Jewish & World News

New York City is getting its own Internet domain. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Tuesday the new .nyc web domain will be available for New Yorkers and local businesses later this year. A website touting the new domain said localizing a web address will make it easier for people to search for New York City businesses, organizations and content.

A federal judge is allowing a multi-million-dollar class action against an alleged cellphone spammer to go forward. Wise Media is accused of charging millions of consumers for services they didn't want or order. The plaintiffs filed their case in October 2012, saying they had received unsolicited text messages from Wise offering flirting tips, horoscopes, celebrity gossip and weight loss advice, Courthouse News Service reported.

A new player has emerged at the forefront of mobile banking with the hopes of capturing the nation's youngest banking audience and setting the tone for what it means to bank virtually. Launched to the public on Tuesday, GoBank is the first bank designed specifically for mobile use. All functionality is available through its app, everything from opening your account to paying bills to managing your budget.

Americans are so fixated on social networks that they spend an average of 16 minutes out of every hour on them, according to a study by Experian Marketing Services. In the U.S., 27% of users' time online is spent on forums and social networks, like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Experian said.

Microsoft is working on designs for a touch-enabled smart watch, joining a number of other large competitors like Samsung Electronics and Apple who are said to be working on similar devices, a newspaper reported. Executives at suppliers to Microsoft told The Wall Street Journal that the company was sourcing components for the prototype of what could potentially be a "watch-style device."

A French Jewish group that sued Twitter for hosting anti-Semitic content lodged a fresh complaint against the social networking service. The latest complaint by the Union of Jewish Students of France, or UEJF, was filed on April 12 with the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office against Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. UEJF and another group, J’ACCUSE, said in the complaint that Costolo was “responsible for racial defamation and publicly inciting to discrimination, hate or violence toward Jews.”

Twitter, in an effort to make its site more useful to an ever-increasing number of people, is rolling out its Trends topic discovery feature in 160 new locations. Trends, which launched last year, is designed to display popular topics on the site tailored to individual users, based on their location and who they follow. Originally available in 150 worldwide locations, the feature is now active in 160 additional locations, in countries including Belgium, Greece, Kenya and Poland, including 130 new cities in countries that already have Trends, Twitter announced Thursday.

Microsoft's Windows 8 took another knock Wednesday as research firm IDC laid much of the blame for the first quarter's historically-horrible PC numbers at the feet of the beleaguered operating system. Yesterday, IDC and rival Gartner released their estimates for 2013's first-quarter PC shipments. The former painted a gloomy picture of the industry, saying that the 14% decline, year over year, was the largest ever in its nearly two decades of tracking. Gartner pegged the global downturn at 11%.

As soon as Google Maps Street View was rolled out in Lithuania earlier this year, tax authorities were ready. Sitting in the comfort of their own offices, inspectors used the free Internet program for a virtual cruise around the streets of some of the Baltic country's big cities, uncovering dozens of alleged tax violations involving housing construction and property sales.

Congress’s top auditor said Tuesday that the Commerce Department has been charging other government agencies millions of dollars for reports that the other agencies could just as easily have gotten online, for free. The Government Accountability Office, releasing its third annual report on duplication in the federal government, said 74 percent of all the reports held by the National Technical Information Service were available elsewhere, usually for free — and often just by a simple Google search.

The trend toward browsing from phones and tablets has helped some browser makers, dramatically in one case, but hurt others in the battle for usage share, data from a metrics firm showed. According to Net Applications, 12% of all browser use last month originated on mobile devices, which the Web analytics company defined as smartphones and tablets.

City Comptroller John Liu said this week that over a third of Bronx households have no Internet access or computer. Liu told 1010 WINS the situation really puts the borough’s children at a disadvantage in the classroom. “We have 37 percent of households in the Bronx without Internet access, and significant percentages in the other boroughs as well,” Liu said. “This is the 21st century, and in order for our kids to get a real solid education, we need to get them access to computers and the Internet.”

Israel's Prime Minister's Office launched an app to follow President Obama's visit in real time. The app, which is available though Israel's Apple store, will assist journalists covering the visit and allow Israelis to receive real-time updates, including video streaming. It will be available shortly for Android.

While Israeli representatives failed to take home an Oscar this week, an Israeli company won top honors at the international mobile industry's prestigious award ceremony. Israeli navigation application Waze was named the Best Overall Mobile App in the Global Mobile Awards competition, held as part of the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.

An advertising agency has created what it's calling the world's first billboard that converts air into drinking water. The billboard—a collaboration between agency Mayo DraftFCB and Peru's University of Engineering and Technology—was placed in Peru's rain-starved desert capital, Lima.

Twitter is urging its account holders to be smarter with their passwords following two recent attacks by hackers directed at Burger King and Jeep that took control of those accounts. The accounts for Burger King and the Chrysler-owned car company were broken into on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. Both accounts have since been restored, but not before the hackers posted tweets about fictitious acquisitions and embarrassing photos to the companies' respective feeds. In Burger King's case, for example, one message read that the company had been sold to McDonald's because the Whopper, the chain's flagship sandwich, flopped.

Think you're not getting the download speed your broadband provider promised? You might be right but a study by the Federal Communications Commission finds many providers are not only meeting but exceeding their advertised speeds.

Google is hanging onto its dominant share of the search market, while its competitors inch up and down. Google edged a bit further ahead in January, going from 66.7% of the search market in December to 67%, industry tracker comScore said.

A camera in a pill, given in the emergency room, is a sensitive way to detect upper gastrointestinal (GI) bleeding, researchers reported. In a pilot 25-patient study, the camera – about the size of a large vitamin pill – was both accurate and well tolerated by patients who were suspected of having acute upper GI hemorrhage, according to Andrew Meltzer, MD, of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues.

Devices used by many radio and TV stations to broadcast emergency messages as part of the U.S. Emergency Alert System (EAS) contain critical vulnerabilities that expose them to remote hacker attacks, according to researchers from security consultancy firm IOActive. The EAS is a national public warning system that can be used by the president or local and state authorities to deliver emergency information to the general public. This information is transmitted by broadcasters, cable television systems, wireless cable systems, satellite digital audio radio service (SDARS) providers, and direct broadcast satellite (DBS) providers.