Generacion Y: Yoani Sanchez Blog Blocked from Cuba

The Cuban Internet Police has blocked Generacion Y, one of the top blogs on Cuba that belongs to Yoani Sanchez.

The reason for the blocking is pretty obvious: criticizing the new big boss of Cuba - Raul Castro.

Censorship is acting up on the internet, and users from Cuba only get an error message instead of being able to normally visit “Generacion Y” and read the content. But since we’re talking about the internet, there is always a way to overcome the problem.

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If you haven’t been paying attention to the latest in technology news, you may not know that the big FCC auction has come to an end. The winners of the various 700 MHz spectrum blocks have been announced, and there is one name missing on the list of winners which is quite surprising.

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Google to offer hurricane alerts

What started as a “small” research project made by 2 students an University, ended up as being the giant of the internet, also known as Google.

They’ve been adding quite a big number of new features/services to the world since its creation, like the old-school Blogger, the 1GB webmail era a.k.a. Gmail, and many others.

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Video game sales increased on February

According to a market research made by the NPD Group, video game sales went up 34% on February and reached the high number of $1.33 billion. It doesn’t matter if there are gaming consoles in short supply, like the Nintendo Wii and Xbox 360, because people keep buying games.

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The inaugural Guinness World Records: Gamer’s Edition 2008 is pretty interesting as it features some of the nation’s best players of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock who came together in New York City for a mesmerizing record-breaking jam session. Needless to say, competition was intense and ultimately youth over experience prevailed. Chris Chike, age 16 from Rochester, Minnesota, was the winner when the dust settled, gaining a place in the Guinness World Record for the “Highest Score for a Single Song on Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock”, picking up a whopping 840,647 points (a 97% completion on Expert Level) for the song “Through the Fire and Flames” by DragonForce.

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Movie Clips on the internet thanks to Paramount

Most major studios don’t put their movies on the internet for free, but Paramount is following that route because the (old and new) clips will become available on Facebook via the VooZoo application. And obviously, Facebook is always a nice target for movies, or sports, or… you name it.

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At CeBIT, one of the biggest Information Tech events in the world, a text-to-speech program named IVONA made quite a splash.

IVONA is made by IVO Software, and the demonstration at CeBIT had four voices in three different languages. “Ewa” and “Jacek” spoke fluent Polish, and “Carmen” was Romanian. One of the most popular speakers was “Jennifer” who spoke fluent US English.

This demonstration is still going online. If you go to www.ivona.com, you can have a chance to try IVONA in the aforementioned three languages. The best part is you can type in any text you want, and then have it spoken back to you. I tried typing a few select phrases on Jennifer, and I found that “she” was able to speak with some interesting tonal inflections. Read the rest of this entry »

After a fourth straight year of projected losses reaching over $140 million dollars, electronics giant Pioneer has announced it will cease production of it’s own plasma HDTV design and will, instead, focus on HDTV plasma production using panels from another manufacturer, like Panasonic/Matsushita.

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