Twitter Back Up In Paki...

A temporary solution to the drama that unfolded this morning when Twitter was blocked in Pakistan — some believe over representations of the Prophet Mohammed and Twitter’s refusal to block these images; and some believe while it was testing an image filtering service. Whatever it was, the site is now back up –after an order from Prime Minister. Pakistan’s Express Tribune  is reporting that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani made the decision after the site was down for the day on a mandate from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. But it is still not clear why the authorities shut down access in the first place. As we reported earlier today, some reports — still unconfirmed directly by any Pakistani authorities (we have reached out on this) — said that the government was concerned about images of the Prophet that were being tweeted as part of an activist campaign in support of the freedom of expression among Muslims and in Muslim countries. A move to quash sites that facilitate Muslim activism is not unprecedented , so it is very plausible here. However, others have raised an issue about whether it might be something else: they allege that authorities were testing an image-blocking service . In other words: potentially equally restrictive, but different from the specific Prophet drawing campaign. The whole event sparked off a huge amount of negative response both within Pakistan and further afield. In the country itself, more technically savvy / better equipped users were able to continue accessing the site: it still worked on the Opera Mini browser via the mobile internet, according to several reports. But otherwise, access across the country was denied. Since we still don’t know why accesses was denied in the first place, it’s hard to say whether the public outcry had a role to play here. Nevertheless, it’s a very encouraging sign when you see people coming together so quickly around an issue. We’ll continue trying to figure out what exactly happened and for those in Pakistan returning to the Twitterverse, welcome back! [Image: TakeBackPakistan , Flickr]

Twitter Now Honors Mozi...

Mozilla’s Do Not Track feature, which allows users to tell websites that they would like to opt-out of being tracked by third parties, is starting to gain some traction among both users and publishers. According to new data shared by Mozilla today , 8.6% of Firefox desktop users and 19% of mobile users now turn this opt-in feature on. The latest company to announce  that it will honor Do Not Track is Twitter. As Do Not Track isn’t so much a technical solution that just blocks tracking cookies and more like a gentlemen’s agreement between sites and their users, its success completely depends on being supported by publishers and developers. As for the major browser developers, Microsoft and Apple are already on board (and IE9, it is worth noting, already offers a somewhat more aggressive “tracking protection” tool). Google, too, plans to support Do Not Track later this year and Opera is building it into its upcoming Opera 12 release. A number of major online companies, including our parent company AOL, as well as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have already pledged support for Do Not Track. For Twitter, which doesn’t rely on tracking and third-party advertising as much as other sites, pledging support for Do Not Track was probably not a very hard decision. The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT. — Twitter (@twitter) May 17, 2012

Ikea’s Upcoming Uppleva...

Taking the term home theater in a box to a new level, Ikea made waves a few weeks back when it announced plans to start selling a self-branded HDTV and home theater system with a starting price under $1000. However, the company didn’t out all the tantalizing details at the time. Gigaom managed to get a bit more info on the system including the type of apps included on the rather impressive HDTV. The Uppleva system, as it’s called in traditional Ikea fashion, allows buyers to customize their whole entertainment system starting with the screen size but also including the type and size of cabinet and so on. The approach takes the focus away from the TV and instead on the owners space. Each Uppleva system will ship with a Blu-ray player, 2.1 audio system with a wireless sub, and some sort of media cabinet. As detailed in the original announcement, the HDTV isn’t a slouch. The 1080p display has a 400Hz response time and built-in apps. GigaOm learned that the system will launch will at least 15 apps including YouTube, Vimeo, Dailymotion, TuneIn Radio, and a browser (possibly Opera for TV). That puts this Ikea set on the same level as sets from Sony, Samsung and LG. The original plan is to systemically roll the HDTV system out starting in select European stores this year followed by a broad launch in 2013 that includes the US. If this system lives up to its potential, it could be the most disruptive force in home theater since the advent of buying from Internet vendors. Best Buy better have an answer in place.

Opera Mini Now Has 169 ...

On the desktop, Opera ‘s browser is only a minor player compared to Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari, but as a mobile browser, Opera competes head-to-head with Apple and Google. Worldwide, depending on which statistics you believe, it is either just ahead of the competition or a close runner-up. In developing countries, Opera is generally far ahead of the competition. According to an interesting new white paper by Opera, in which the company took a look at how its users around the world actually use the browser, it’s hard to underestimate the importance of mobile browsing in developing countries. The study, which was conducted between November 2010 and November 2011, found that globally, 56% of Opera users and 43% of those who use another browser only access the Internet via their mobile devices. In some countries, including Egypt (72%), Bangladesh (69%), Brazil (65%) and South Africa (61%), these numbers for Opera users are significantly higher. At first glance, these numbers look very high. Given that traditional wired Internet access in many of these countries is rather limited, though, mobile phones are often the easiest and cheapest way to get online for many of these users. This being an Opera report (so take this data with a grain of salt), the company also compared what its users do on the mobile web to users who use other browsers. The company, for example, found that its users are 35% more likely to purchase music and games via their mobile devices than those who use another browser. In most countries, Opera users are also younger, better educated and report higher satisfaction with their mobile Internet experiences. According to the report, these users are also “eight percentage points more likely than average to spend more than an hour online in one session and 12 percentage points more likely than non-Opera users.” As for Opera itself, the company also today announced that it now has 168.8 million Opera Mini users (up 64% from March 2011). These users viewed over 117 billion pages. That’s up 96% from last year and up 8.1% compared to February 2012. In total, Opera Mini users generated over 1,918 million MB of data worldwide.

Opera 12 Beta Launches,...

Opera is launching the first official beta of the next version of its desktop browser today. As usual, the Opera 12 beta includes a number of new features and enhancements, but this release also marks the end of some of the company’s more ambitious projects. With Opera 12, the company is ending support for Unite, the browser’s built-in personal cloud/streaming media platform that made its debut in 2009, and Opera Widgets. Opera is also phasing out support for its built-in speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML technologies. This release isn’t just about removing features, though. Far from it. Among the new features is a new engine for writing and displaying browser themes (Opera previously called these ‘skins’). In addition, this version now runs plugins as separate plugins, similar to what most of its competitors are doing already. Thanks to this, a crashing plugin can’t take the whole browser down anymore. Other new features include support for HTML5 drag and drop, support for the Do Not Track header and opt-in hardware acceleration and WebGL. Opera is also making some low-level changes to improve the browser’s load times and launching 64-bit versions for Windows and Mac. Among Opera’s more ambitious recent projects is definitely Opera Reader , which aims to create a new reading experience for the Web and make it look more like traditional books. With this release, Opera is opening this project up for standardization as CSS3 Generated Content for Paged Media . For developers, this version adds improved support for CSS3 animations and transitions and cross-origin resource sharing . This new version now also supports getUserMedia to access the browser’s camera.