K9 Web Protection to Control Internet Activity

I switched on my laptop to pay my credit card bill. The firefox opened saved tabs of my last internet session- gmail, facebok and twitter. The new internet session started. Twitter and the tweets that contained tiny links made me landed up in various sites and pages. Then facebook, many friends, many activites, a number of photos took much of my time. Then chatting with friends in gtalk made it 12.30 in the night. I had forgotten why I was online. I remembered I had to pay the bill when I received reminder message from my old bank. Then I thought of having some kind of controlling software in my laptop to control my internet activity. Now I have k9 web protection software which is a good parental lock kind of system which gives you full control to your activities on the web.

Now I have allowed the social networks not more than one hour a day. No browsing allowed after 11PM to 7AM in the morning. By default it will not allow any porn or adult site until unless you put the administrative password to change the settings. There are number of website categories which you can block all the time or restrict the usage. You can allow facebook like social networks for just one hour or even just fifteen minutes. Emails, humors/jokes, trading anything can be given controlled access. Anyone who has feelings of some kind of websites wasting his/her time can have great advantage using this software.

The K9 protection has a wonderful database that during my test it never slipped out of protection. The most advantageous matter is K9 home edition is free of cost and anybody can use it in there system after getting free license which will be sent to your mail ID.

If you have children using internet at your house, I strongly recommend this software. Because according to the data provided in the K9 website-

• 1 in 4 youth have unwanted exposure to inappropriate pictures each year
• Nine of 10 kids aged 8-16 have viewed pornography on the Internet, often in the process of doing homework.
• One in five children ages 10-17 have received a sexual solicitation over the Internet
• 74 percent of commercial pornography sites display free porn images on the homepage and are linked through some other sites.
• Cyber-sex reinforces and normalizes sexual disorders.

At the time of writing this 2,262,007 homes are protected including mine.

Download the free Parental lock, porn filter software from http://www1.k9webprotection.com/

Funny audio transcribe in Youtube

Recently I noticed another feature added in Youtube, largest online video server to transcribe the audios of the videos. This is based on Google's voice recognition.

You can notice a button marked CC at the bottom of the player as shown in the picture. Clock on this and select transcribe audio beta, you will be able to see the captions at the bottom as you see in movies. There are quite a many language options are also there under translate captions I have not tested. The above picture is taken from the movie Before Sunrise. I have observed a lot many mistakes in the captions. Youtube tells this feature is under test.

But this transcribe feature is far from perfect yet. More than 75% of the texts are wrong and funny. It gives some unrelated word as captions and makes it funny. Many a times it just gives some random words which are really funny. You can also experience it once. Click on the picture above to see it enlarged and you will get to know how to get the captions.

Now it is Bing Vs Google

Bing- if you wish to insult it you can expand it as ‘But, It’s Not Google’. But certainly it is not true. Bing is a new search tool from Microsoft which looks like next version of Google, but with some added features. While Google is taking over Microsoft’s monopoly with release of new tools, it is now Microsoft’s turn to shock Google and its supporters.

Bing is much like Google, that’s why I called it as next version of Google! There is a search box with all the options for specifying search for image, maps, shopping, videos, news etc. Difference could be felt once you enter some thing for search and hit search button.

Here in Bing, no need to click on the result link to see what is inside. Just point on the result link, a pop up balloon shows the first few lines of the content. You need not to leave the result page to see what is there in it.

Bing gives a number of options to get what you looking for. Like in Google, if you search for Katrina you get the options for image search for the celebrity along with the search result. Here in Bing if you search for name of the celebrity you will be given option to choose news, image, quotes, biography etc. Similarly if you search for a disease, you can later choose to go for causes, treatment, remedy, news.

Similar to Google, Bing also allows you to search images. In Bing you can customize the size of the thumbnail. Also, there is no need to go to next page to view more images. You feel like you are viewing image from your own system. Details like sources, pixel are hidden and will be shown in balloon when you point to it.

Unlike Google video search, you can preview the video in Bing search for few seconds by pointing cursor to the thumbnail. Again you need not leave the result page to preview video.

Bing is just a child. It lacks a lot of features that Google offers. But for a normal search use it is now preferable along with Google. Bing makes searching more easy.

MyToday is no more reliable

I started using MyToday SMS alert services by subscribing to few services two years back. It was very much reliable in the beginning. Time sense was so appreciable that it was sending alerts at exact time. But now, it is not older MyToday.

Kalnirnay- daily calendar alerts may not reach you most of the days. Some days you will get it in the morning, on other days you might get it in the evening for next day. It is just an example. So I don’t read the SMS that tells it is from MyToday most of the time. SMS alerts from Google are found more accurate and friendly. Not even with a single disturbing ad. I have subscribed to few Google SMS alerts that start with Google like GoogleNews, GoogleNewsTechnology and so on. They all come at a time thrice a day, so that I need not to look at my inbox every time when every message comes. Once you open the inbox, about five different alerts will be ready to read.

I am happy with the Google alert, so tried to stop MyToday alert. There I found another way of fooling the users. MyToday often changes its number. I could not even unsubscribe for the alerts. When I tried to do so, it reverses back with the message ‘this service is not available’.

Another interesting incident should be shared with you. I got a message from MyToday that if I subscribe for REC44, I will get my mobile freely recharged. So I sent the message START REC44 to 9945499454 to see what it is. Immediately I was replied with a message that my mobile will be recharged within 72 hours and with a request to tell it to my friends. Already MyToday has lost its reliability, I decided to wait for 72 hours and then can tell to everyone if it really works. It was not recharged even after a week. Instead they started sending promotional messages at midnight 1.30am of some fake, span websites related to earn 100$ per day using your internet connection. Later I came to know this is a Mob and not a controlled alert. But as subscribing to mob or a alert is same one may not differentiate what it is. Fed up with this, when I tried STOP REC44 to the same number just after a week, it did not work. Think before subscribing MyToday.

Related Article: Google SMS channels thrash MyToday?

Google SMS channels thrash MyToday?

MyToday and SMSGupshup are the ony players in the informative group SMS field. They offer SMS free daily on various topic and their revenue generated by putting oneliner ads at the bottom of such SMS. MyToday really lead the rally with 4 million subscribers and 11 millions subscriptions with a very simple website MyToday.com. Gupshup came second in the field and now the Internet giant Google also entered into SMS channels.

Google SMS Channels is a service that enables channels/groups on SMS. It's a free service that enables you to get premium content published by Google publishing partners, Google popular products (Google News, Blogger and Google Groups) and websites with RSS/Atom support for free. SMS Channels allows you to create your own channel(s) to publish content that other users can subscribe to. You don't pay anything to send or receive messages using Google SMS Channels. When you post a message to your channel, all the members of your channel get the message forwarded for free.

The main difference is that the Google allows the user to create their own channel and put it forward for the subscribers and also you can configure your interested channels online visiting to Google SMS channels. Hence you don't need to spend even a single sms to configure the sms channels.

I'm using MyToday from last 2 years and the quality of the service is not so good as it was earlier. This could be due to infrastructure problem. Google SMS channels are very systematic and it took hardly 5 minute to register, verify, search and subscribe to the services. Hence to service in this race both MyToday and SMSgupshup might have to change their complete strategies. Let us wait and see.

Related articles: MyToday is no more reliable

Cuil, newest in search engine race, will survive?

.com is the newest in the search engine race. It was released on July 28, 2008. is a search engine that organizes web pages by content and displays relatively long entries along with thumbnail pictures for many results. Cuil is managed and developed largely by former employees of Google: Anna Patterson, Russell Power. Currently it has 124,426,951,803 web pages in it which is the highest number that is there in any search engine. Though it sometimes fail to search sites which google, yahoo or msn does.

Features of Cuil as they are told in Cuil site:

1. “Explore By Category” with a list of subjects related to your search. If you roll-over a category, it will open and show refinements related to your search. If you click on one, Cuil will direct you to this additional information. Comment: Yahoo introduced more friendly solution Glue Page search which shows news about the query, blog search by google also and you can also switch between the classic search.
   
2. Cuil will show you “Tabs” that suggest ways to clarify your search. For example, if you search for “Jaguar,” there are a number of things you could be searching for, like Jaguar cars, Jaguar cats. Comment: Google shows the same suggestion to clarify in more easy way at the top of the search, without the tabs
   
3. When you type a query, sometimes you'll see a search suggestion with an icon representing a website. Comment: Most of all the search engines have introduced this search suggestion.

Present and future: According to Alexa Cuil had 0.2% of worldwide internet users in late July 2008 and by September 12, 2008, it had dropped to 0.02%. Traffic ranking is also fluctuating; it was ranked as the 5,340th site by traffic in Sep 2008, by October dropped to 21,960, now it is 13,210th site by traffic as on 20 Feb 2009. In India it is 9,205th site by traffic. But the three months global internet users trend to Cuil is down by 53%. So now the question is will it survive in google dominated search engine world?

Human Error Caused Google warning "This site may harm your computer"

Saturday, I was using Google search, suddenly a search result started showing every site "This site may harm your computer". I was shocked. Then repeated search with the name of some reliable sites, again same message. Then I typed Google in query box and hit search. Astonished to see the result. It was too "This site may harm your computer". I thought something happened to my computer. I took a snapshot of the result page and turned off the computer. After sometime when I again logged in into Google the error was not there. It comfirmed it was some error caused by Google. However it disturbed me for a while. I came to know about the error next day in news paper reports. Here is the snapshot of the page. It could be a rare snapshot. Click on image to view it clearly.
Google explained it "Google flags search results with the message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. We work with a non-profit called StopBadware.org to come up with criteria for maintaining this list, and to provide simple processes for webmasters to remove their site from the list.
We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here's the human error), the URL of '/' was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and '/' expands to all URLs. Fortunately, our on-call site reliability team found the problem quickly and reverted the file."

Airtel.com, Airtel.in and Domain squatting

Before going in detail I have to tell you what is domain squatting. Domain squatting is registering, trafficking in, or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else. Now the question is whether the following case a domain squatting?
Let us analyse the situation. Click on Airtel.in. You will be taken to India's popular cellular service provider Airtel. Airtel is largest cellular service provider of India with more than 79 million subscribers as of November 2008. Now click on Airtel.com. You will be navigated to Vodafone Spain site. It may be a Spanish, where Airtel has no service, it still is the competitor’s website. Airtel has tough compitition with Vodafone in India. Whoever types Airtel.com and looks for Airtel detail he will be taken to Vodafone's website. Vodafone gets free traffic from Airtel.
What could be legal action? Before tell it I should also inform how I can write about this. I am a student of Post Graduation Diploma in IPR Laws in National Law School of India University, Bangalore. Now come to the case. By the definition of Domain squatting or Cyber squatting, if domain name Airtel.com is registered with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else that is well established Airtel, then Vodafone could be asked to transfer the domain name according to the WIPO Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy. WIPO takes care of transfer of domain names to the true trademark owner.
But this case is quite different. Look at this information:

Domain name: AIRTEL.COM
Host IP 212.73.32.153
Created on: 1998-12-15
Updated on: 2008-09-29
Expires on: 2009-12-14
Registrant Name: AIRTEL MOVIL, S.A.
Contact: AIRTEL MOVIL, S.A.
Technical Contact Address: Psg. Lluis Companys, 23
Technical Contact City: Barcelona
Technical Contact Postal Code: 08010
Technical Contact Country: ES
Contact Phone: +34 935074360
Contact Fax: +34 933102360

The domain name is registered very long back in 1998, when cellular service called Airtel was there in Spain. But later it is acquired by Vodafone and they took the advantage and started redirecting the traffic from Airtel.com to their Spanish site. So Airtel-India can not do anything on this issue. But the domain name Airtel.com will get expired on 14 Dec 2009. Hope Vodafone will not re-registeres the domain name and continue to use it.
What happens if Vodafone re-registeres Airtel.com even though now it does not own trademark Airtel? I have to ask our lecturer, IPR expert, advocate J Suresh to answer this question. If you know the answer you are free to write a comment.

How to download YouTube video? Here is the best way.

How to save video from YouTube?
How download YouTube video like torrent file download?
Why YouTube down loader is not working now?
Is there any free YouTube down loader software?

Do you have a question like this?
You have landed to the page which gives you a complete solution.

YouTube: YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. In November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google Inc. for US$1.65 billion, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. Now it is the largest video sharing site. The videos are published in ".flv" file extension.

How to download .flv files?
Now I'll tell you step by step procedures to enable your computer to download YouTube videos:

1. Get a latest FireFox browser (If you already have one, go to step 4)
2. Download FireFox from Mozilla.com
3. Install Mozilla settings restart your system if it asked to do so
4. What all you need is an add-on which detect the .flv or other media file and makes you download them easily.
5. Get DownloadHelper add-on set up from Mozilla (recommended) or DownloadHelper
6. Click on add to FireFox, then click on install.
7. Restart FireFox (remember- not necessarily your system)
8. Open a YouTube video in your FireFox browser
9. You will see an animating image like this
10. Clicking on this you will get the list of the file you can download.
11. Click on the file name and start downloading
    
12. It will be saved to DownloadHelp folder in your my document by default
    
13. More help go to user manual

How to play downloaded .flv files?
Simple get a Gom player and enjoy. It is free-ware. You can download it from GomLab. Small size (withing 5 mb) and easy to access.

"Satyam"- not Shivam nor Sundaram.

Satyam- a former construction company turned a Indian software giant, 4th largest IT exporter from India now at trouble. It is seeing a very tough time recently when market people did not accept Satyam's acquisition of Maytas Infrastructure and Maytas Properties where both companies are in the hold of family of Satyam's chairman B Ramalinga Raju. Satyam's this deal disturbed the basic confidence of Indian investers. You can look at the chart given here and observe more than 40% loss in just 1 week where the prices of 24th Dec compared with 16th Dec, the day before the Maytas- Satyam deal saw the red eye of investers.
The company dropped the plan to buy the two firms within hours after investors reacted angrily. But it didn't helped because it encountered another unfortunate moment- The World has barred Satyam, its top computer software services provider, from conducting any business with it for eight years. The WB has given the reasons "improper benefits to bank staff" and "lack of documentation on invoices" for taking this action. This again raised selling pressure of the Satyam shares.Even today (24 Dec) market drop and Satyam share fall are non comparable- Satyam was down 14.6 percent at 119.85 rupees at the time Mumbai market was down 0.9 percent.

Apart from these stories there are also strong reasons that Satyam's further fall that may not be able to acquire in this strange economic situation. Satyam clients General Electric, Nestle and Qantas Airways, cut its sales forecast in October. Satyam became a live example of bad corporate governance. There is no hope of Satyam becoming Shivam(auspiciousness-favorable quality of indicating successful) and Sundaram(beauty).

Internet providing new platform in freelance journalists

Freelance journalists are those who are not the internal part of the publishing houses, but without whom both the print and electronic media won't survive even for a single day. Difference between a regular journalist a freelance journalist are that a freelance journalist writes whenever he wishes, on whatever he likes but a regular journalist has a commitment of writing, he has a deadline. Freelance journalist has to arrange his cost of reporting his own where a regular journalist sent by the media unit will be prepaid by it.

Advantage of being a freelance journalist is that he can write whatever he wishes, whenever he finds himself free to write, he can publish whichever magazine or media and also can earn money from it. If you have a passion for hunting new information and analysing them to make a paragraph or two you too become a free lane journalist.

When it comes to Internet era, free lance journalists have a good opportunity and exposure never seen earlier. You can get information on your own or get from the net, add your own views and publish your own. Blogger are the best example for freelance journalists. A blogger is a writer, editor and a publisher of his own. He can be a designer if he has a little knowledge of html and some other web languages. He can also earn money by publishing ads which google or yahoo like sites provides or can get paid from some websites directly if he is a serious writer. If you are new to the field you can get noticed by others by writing to those who are already noticed by others. Internet just works by links.

For this what one has to do is write more original contents, get linked by some high page ranked sites, write something interesting and be active. I started my career as freelance journalist 8 years ago, entered blogging 3 years ago and changed some blogging sites until I find myself satisfied with the services provided, started earning(though not a significant amount) through blogging 4 months back. Why late, you too be a freelance journalist.

Browsers to challenge search engines?

What is the relation between browsers and search engines? How could browser take over search engines? You may think I'm making fool. But if you carefully observe the developing trend of the browsers it seems to do this job early. Just look at this picture: you can see how the trend has changed.
Little ago I was depending on google (my favourite search engine) for everything I browsed. To go to YouTube or simply to yahoomail I was typing the query as YouTube or yahoomail in search box. It was the easier way I had to enter into any sites. But now? I use search engines only for those queries on which I would like to know the presence of more than a website or simply when I want to do some research on some topic.
Now, if I need to browse Indian Railway, I simply type India in URL tab, it generates some option which consists of "...India...". Select the site I'm looking for and just hit enter. I am done. This is now available on most of all the latest versions of browser software including Mozilla, chrome. Ultimately it reduced about 50% of my search engine usage. That means it simply reduced the hit on search engines.
This is what Mozilla FireFox people defines about this feature: "The new FireFox 3 location bar learns as you use it—it’s so highly evolved that we like to call it the “Awesome Bar”. Over time, it adapts to your preferences and offers better fitting matches. Type in a term and the auto complete function includes possible matching sites from your browsing history, as well as sites you’ve bookmarked and tagged in a drop down. For example, you could enter the tag: “investments” to find “www.fool.com”. Matched terms are highlighted, making the list of results easy to scan." It claims it will show the matching from browsing history, but chrome shows the matching sites even never visited. But days are not far away that it shows matching that represents your taste by scanning whole www.
If you look at search engine history it always had a rapid change. I strongly believe this new feature of the browsers could be a challenge for search engines.

Reliance broadband goes back to 108 AD

Reliance Broadband has a small programming error, but the result is taking you 100 years back !! It is similar to that of Y2K problem which most of us forgot. It is nothing but displaying year as 108 instead of 2008. This is observed when I tried to create a new account with Reliance broadband home page as a customer of Reliance broadnet. Here is a view of this funny mistake.

Eye defender- A simple answer for CVS

EyeDefender is a freeware rest reminder designed to prevent Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS) resulting from working on a computer for hours. CVS symptoms include eyestrain, blurred vision, delayed focusing, headaches, back and neck aches, dry and burning eyes, light sensitivity, distorted color vision, forehead heaviness, and sore eyes.

CVS is impossible to get rid of but you can reduce and even eliminate most of its symptoms. The recommendation is simple – take a short rest break from your computer every hour. The difficulty lies in scheduling a regular break and keeping to it. That's where EyeDefender can help you. It'll remind you to take a break and relax eyes at fixed intervals.

Download free from eterlab

Computer vision syndrome (CVS) is a temporary condition resulting from focusing the eyes on a computer display for protracted, uninterrupted periods of time. Some symptoms of CVS include headaches, blurred vision, neck pain, fatigue, eye strain, dry, irritated eyes, and difficulty refocusing the eyes. These symptoms can be further aggravated by improper lighting conditions (ie. bright overhead lighting or glare) or air moving past the eyes (e.g. overhead vents, direct air from a fan). CVS has not been proven to cause any permanent damage to the eye.

CVS is caused by decreased blinking reflex while working long hours focusing on computer screens. The normal blink rate in human eyes is 16–20 per minute. Studies have shown that the blink rate decreases to as low as 6–8 blinks/minute for persons working on the computerscreen. This leads to dry eyes. Also, the near focusing effort required for such long hours puts strain on ciliary muscles of the eye. This induces symptoms of asthenopia and leads to a feeling of tiredness in the eyes after long hours of work. Some patients present with inability to properly focus on near objects after a short duration. This can be seen in people aged around 30–40 years of age, leading to a decrease in the accommodative focusing mechanisms of the eye.

How is Google Chrome?

     
Google Chrome (beta) is a newly launched web browser to join the group of already existing number of browsers. Because it is from Google, it will not be one among them. It looks good, browse faster.... but I feel little complicate to handle. It gives a widened space for web window, where others viz. internet explorer 7, mozilla (3), netscape will sometimes eat half of the screen for useless informations.

When it comes to speed of browsing I felt it is equivalent to mozilla. There is another browser Safari (3.1) from Apple which claimed it is faster than Mozilla, but I saw it slower than that. I sincerely agree that it is much faster than Explorer from microsoft. Even though Internet explorer is slower you have to keep it in your PC if you run oj windows, because some Web applications ask for it.

But safari and Chrome are not supporting entry of indic scripts while they display indic scripts better than any. Internet explorer is good if you write a blog entry in Indic scripts like Kannada or hindi.

If you are addicted downloader prefer use of Chrome or mozilla as it does this task smoothely. Some MP3 or video couldn't be downloaded using these. When I clicked on the link there browser tried to open it in new window intead of saving it to drive. It does not have option "save terget as" like explorer.