Democrats Push Internet Sales Tax

(NEWSER) - Online pay service PayPal was down for about five hours today, the Wall Street Journal reports, potentially derailing millions of transactions. A rep for parent eBay attributed the outage to an “internal network hardware issue,” and couldn’t say how many customers were affected; PayPal has previously said it processes about $2,000 in transactions each second. More»

New ones are being laid around Atlantic in mammoth engineering projects

(NEWSER) - Our Internet age didn't just happen; it required thousands of miles of cables crisscrossing the ocean like veins and arteries (or, as Neal Stephenson put it years ago in Wired , turning the Earth into a computer motherboard). After a huge boom-and-bust cycle in the 1990s, the world's telecommunications cables are full, so once again ships are braving the oceans to lay new batches of the mammoth fiber optic wires that undergird the modern economy and allow you to order all sorts of useless stuff. Author Andrew Blum, who has a new book on the subject (Tubes), offers an overview in the Wall Street Journal . More»

Despite $70M project, access still terrible

(AP) - It was all sunshine, smiles, and celebratory speeches as officials marked the arrival of an undersea fiber-optic cable they promised would end Cuba's Internet isolation and boost web capacity 3,000-fold. Even a retired Fidel Castro hailed the dawn of a new cyber-age. But more than a year after the February 2011 ceremony, and 10 months after the system was supposed to have gone online, the government never mentions the cable anymore, and Internet here remains the slowest in the hemisphere. People talk quietly about embezzlement torpedoing the much-ballyhooed $70 million project, but nobody has explained exactly what happened. More»

Yahoo will sell back up to half its 40% stake in Chinese company

(NEWSER) - It's a resolution for what All Things Digital's Kara Swisher calls "perhaps the longest running global cat fight in Internet history": In a $7.1 billion deal, Yahoo is selling back up to half its 40% stake in China's Alibaba , the Wall Street Journal reports. For the US internet giant, that means $6.3 billion cash and $800 million in preferred Alibaba stock. Most of the $4 billion Yahoo ultimately takes home after taxes will go to shareholders, many of whom are still smarting over Yahoo's 2008 rejection of Microsoft's bid to acquire the company for $33 per share, reports the AP . Yahoo's sagging stock traded at $15.42 on Friday. More»

Info boxes will pop up next to your search

(NEWSER) - Google is rolling out a major new change to its search engine today—the Knowledge Graph . When a user searches for a famous person, place, or thing, a box will pop up on the side of the screen offering a concise list of relevant facts, reports ABC News . Google's database for the new tool includes 500 million people, places, and things combined with 3.5 billion items of information and connections. More»