Archive for June, 2009

In May, China told computer manufacturers that all personal computers sold in the country after July 1 must come installed with an anti-pornography software. A month later, it was forced to back down, telling PC users that use of the software - Green Dam-Youth Escort - would be optional. What the government had not anticipated was the strong reaction of the country's more than 250 million netizens to the new software, which they saw as another of the state's attempts to police cyberspace. While the Chinese government insists that the purpose of the Green Dam program was to block access to porn websites, critics say that the real purpose of what they consider to be "spyware" is to block websites that the government considers to be politically objectionable. A technical analysis of the software by the OpenNet Initiative (ONI), an organization promoting openness in cyberspace, concluded that it "is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed". The ONI found that "the functionality of Green Dam goes far beyond that which is needed to protect children online and subjects users to security risks. The deeply intrusive nature of the software opens up several possibilities for use other than filtering material harmful to minors". This how the software works, according to the ONI report. It blocks access to a wide range of websites - from porn and gaming to those with gay content - based on keywords and image processing.

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After Michael Jackson's shocking death has been reported to the public, loyal fans around the world streamed to social networking websites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to discuss about his death and praise how good his music were. Many were in a state of shock and praying tribute to the King of Pop. A few hours ago before he kicked the bucket, the number of fans in his Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/michaeljackson) was hovering around 800,000. However, as the message spreads rapidly to the entire social web, an increasing number of people has become his fan on the world's most popular social networking website and it has just surged past the 1 million mark. Increasing at a phenomenal rate of about 10 fans a second, it took "him" just over a day to garner nearly 200,000 Facebookers to become his fan. Not only does his Facebook page has attracted a lot of attention, his YouTube's video channel has also boosted from 100,000 to around 148,000+ subscribers. As for his MySpace page, he has close to 255,000 friends. Unfortunately, he doesn't owns a Twitter profile.

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If you feel that the search results you get on Google, Yahoo and Bing aren't relevant to you, I would suggest you to try out a user-powered social search browser add-on that improves your search experience on the Internet. Dubbed as a tool which "lets you stop searching and start finding the pages you want", Semanti harnesses the power of your personally saved sites, social networking websites such as Facebook and the entirety of the Semanti community to create a wonderful and smooth social search for users. Users can saved their favorite or frequently-visited webpages under "My Web" and these personalized pages will be displayed together with the original search results. Besides that, this impressive feature enables users to preview and Remove results from Google, Yahoo and Bing results, saving you time and effort in finding results you need. With this personalized and neat search engine, you need not to bookmark and check them out on a frequent basis too.

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It's relatively quite impossible to pester your entire network of friends around the world to check whether your blog or website is accessible in their countries or not on a frequent basis. For several reasons such as server errors, blocked in certain parts of the countries like China or India for sensitive content, your blog would not be accessible. Hence, this would result in a loss of potential readers and subscribers. Unless they inform you that your site is down in their locations, you wouldn't be able to know that by yourself. If you're a blogger or webmaster, this when a simple but useful service comes in really handy. Called "Just Ping", it's an online web-based Ping that remote ping a server or web site using our network with 37 checkpoints worldwide to help you check whether the site is accessible or not. Simply punch in your website URL or IP address into the textfield provided and hit "ping!".

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