IT Masala

California-based Yahoo Inc., which already provides the has a huge userbase, is ready to shift from its existing ‘1GB per account’ to "Unlimited Storage" in response to its competitors Google which provides at present 2.8gb and counting , Microsoft which provides 1gb for all and 2 gb windows live account for us people.Users can now share greater amounts of imagery, music, and video media through e-mail from now on.

The lifting of Yahoo’s account sizing is expected to start in May of this year, and the changeover should take around a month, says the company.

“We have been closely monitoring average usage. We are comfortable that our users are far under 1 gig(abyte), on average,” said John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, before outlining that, “What we see are an increasing number of rich media files as consumers send more photos.”

“We are giving them [Yahoo e-mail account holders] no reason to ever have to delete old e-mails,” commented Yahoo co-founder David Filo via a phone interview with Reuters. “You can keep stuff forever.”

What do they mean by "You can keep stuff forever" ..nothing is permanent.. 

It would be useful to know whether they will also allow POP3 access to clients (e.g. Outlook) which is currently only available to subscribers of Yahoo Mail Plus (~US$20/year) This feature is free for Gmail.

The Internet porn industry generates $3 billion annually.More children and teens are being exposed to online pornography, mostly by accidentally viewing sexually explicit Web sites while surfing the Internet, researchers say.

Recently a federal judge dealt another blow to government efforts to control Internet pornography. The US federal judge ruled that a 1998 law called Child Online Protection Act is “unconstitutional”, leaving parents with the responsibility to protect their children from online pornography.

Frankly speaking children know more about computers than their parents. So obviously they are more smart and they watch porn on the net even after you put lot of restrictions on the child. No software or rules can stop the child , they break into everything !

David A. Milman, CEO - RESCUECOM Recommends to Parents : 

• Use Internet content filtering software such as the Net Nanny or CyberPatrol
• Locate your home computer(s) in the family room, living room or otherwise open area in your home. ( this rarely works )
• Limit the amount of time your children spend online.
• Educate your children to the dangers of online threats in the same manner you would about the dangers of talking to strangers. ( this might work)
• Make sure your Windows automatic updates are turned on and your content filters are up to date. ( this is a good joke )

The UNH study recommended that parents become more educated and get state- of-the-art Internet filters.

Some Facts :

- Most of the subjects who were exposed to unwanted online porn were aged between 13 and 17

- Among those questioned in the study, 42% have confessed that they have seen pornographic content (images or even short movies) in the last year.

- 66% of those who responded that exposure to porn occurred while they were Web-browsing have declared that they did not intentionally search for pornographic content and did not want it.

- Even though 48 percent of parents use some type of parental controls, still the problem continues.

- Britain now leads the world in tugging its collective todger to online porn. The official statistics is that Britain leads the world on porn downloads.

- Another study published in February’s edition of Pediatrics revealed that children and adolescents stumble upon more and more porn on the Internet, despite search filters.

Mozilla Corp. late yesterday updated the Firefox browser to patch a single security vulnerability and fix several bugs it unintentionally introduced in earlier versions.

Mozilla currently supports two branches of the open-source application, and the upgrades — Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Firefox 1.5.0.11 — are now available, according to the release notes posted on the company's Web site.

New for Firefox 2.0.0.3 is a single security fix that patches up a hole in the browser’s FTP PASV functionality. A malicious web page hosted on a specially-coded FTP server could use this feature to perform a rudimentary port-scan of machines inside the firewall of the victim.

The main purpose of the update, however, was to fix several "regressions" — unintended flaws introduced by changes to previous versions. Earlier this month, Mozilla said it was working on a fast-turnaround for 2.0.0.3/1.5.0.11 to correct regressions in the browser's password manager, automatic security certificate authentication feature and other areas.

The last time the Firefox was updated was less than a month ago when 2.0.0.2 was released to address issues with AutoComplete, how the "Save" dialog box displays for known file extensions, a bug where a mouse's scroll wheel would stop working, two memory leaks and a number of security-related concerns.

Firefox 2.0.0.3 can be downloaded from the Mozilla Web site in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 40 languages. Users can also update the browser using the Check for Updates command in the help menu.

[ Firefox 2.0.0.3 ] via [ Mozilla ] 

YouTube has launched the first ever YouTube Awards. Nominees in 7 different categories will recieve awards for most creative, most inspirational, best series, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary, and most adorable. Voting by users has started on March 19 at about 2 PM Pacific Time. Mashable appears to have blogged about the story first.(link not live as of Sunday night), according to various reports.

 This week viewers can vote to pick their favorites of 2006. It's kind of like the Oscars. Clicking on playlist shows a full listing of clips to vote.

There's much discussion highlighting that this isn't a new idea. In fact, the Vloggies did it last year and it was an complete excellent event organized.

Marshall Kirkpatrick from SplashCast has painstakingly taken the time to add all the nominated videos to a single SplashCast player, which I have embedded on the right side.. [via NewTeeVee] Video attached on the right..

This awards event should have taken place atleast in the first week of jan 2007 and not this late !! And I don't know why are they trying to make users vote again for the videos, already they have a rating system to vote for the best,by the users and even the editor's pick too.Dosen't it look unnecessary…. ..anyway ..who am i to comment on it !! go go.. Put your votes ..

Categories :

Most creative, Most inspirational, best series, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary, and Most adorable.

What do Winners get ?

Winners of this year's YouTube Awards will receive trophies and special promotion on YouTube's front page.

(Any Cash prizes waiting ?? it would be good if there were some ..! )

Deadline : Vote now and vote often. Every hour you can rank your favorites until Youtube freezes voting on March 23, 2007, at 3pm PT.

via [ YouTube Awards ]

Adobe will give developers a free preview of its forthcoming runtime code-named Apollo today by releasing an alpha version of the technology on its Adobe Labs site.

So,What is Apollo ?

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) to the desktop.

Developers can download the technology for free from the Adobe Labs site. The release includes a free software development kit that provides a set of command line tools to develop and work with Apollo applications. Web developers can use the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) of their choice to build applications for the runtime, Adobe said.

Apollo, like the Flash Player, is a runtime, but one in which applications built using standard internet development technologies - such as HTML, Flash and AJAX - can run offline. 

Also See a demonstration of how eBay is building an Apollo application to engage customers.

Check out : Technical Articles / Developer Videos / Sample Applications  from adobe labs.

This Offline internet app is going to threaten Microsoft's products.

[ Get Apollo ] via [ Adobe Labs ]

Google is making a few changes to bolster user privacy.

Google Inc. is taking steps to obscure details that could possibly be used to identify users surfing habits after 18 to 24 months. Google tracks the habits of its users by collecting information such as cookies, keyword queries, and Internet addresses. In a statement made public Thursday, Google said it previously "kept this data for as long as it was useful."

Google further stated that unless it is legally required to retain log data for longer, it will "anonymise" their server logs after a limited period of time. The company's pledge to make the vast amount of data anonymous after a period of up to two years is part of its response to concerns from the government and privacy advocates.

In the statement, Google said that by "anonymising" their server logs after 18 to 24 months, they believe that they will be striking the right balance between improvement of customer services and also provide more transparency and certainty about its retention practices. Google further said it will also provide an "off the record" feature in Google Talk instant message system that will let users temporarily disable the automatic archiving of conversations.

With a tiny 6.76% of the search market, compared with Google’s 60%+ search share dominance, Microsoft has decided it’s time to leverage their massive base of global Windows users with juicy wads of cash to switch search providers!

So Whats the deal ? 

Microsoft’s new program is called “Microsoft Service Credits for Web Search” and has been unveiled by John Batelle’s ‘SearchBlog’. The money on offer is significant, especially when multiplied across thousands of PCs. The deal means that companies can earn between US $2 and US $10 per computer on an annual basis, plus a US $25,000 “enrollment credit” which is a nice big wad of cash that will likely need a large-ish, strong and sturdy brown paper bag to hold securely while being passed under the table.  

For companies that have thousands of computers, this could translate into anywhere from US $100,000 to $200,000 per year, which is money that could be put to good use in the IT department or elsewhere in the company.

Bad part of the campaign :

Microsoft will use a ‘Browser Helper Object’ installed into IE7 to track search queries and send information on search back to Microsoft, so they can use the information to improve the results that Windows Live Search delivers. Because of this, IE7 must be used – it doesn’t work with Firefox, Opera or older versions of IE browsers.

Really this is heights !! Is Microsoft so very irked by open source successes ?? anyway..read on.. 

Robert Scoble comments - "Microsoft sucks": 

“What Windows Live lacks, specifically, is an identity. No one can describe it, no one from Microsoft has even tried.”

Former Microsoft employee and blogger Robert Scoble who served as the online face of Microsoft during his three years at the company is not impressed with Microsoft’s moves in deciding to offer companies money to use search.

PS: Each search at click4thecause.live.com results in a financial donation from Microsoft to provide help with education programs to the refugee kids around the globe.

We all know that Google doesn’t need to pay anyone to use its search services – people use them voluntarily because of the quality of the results.

So, is Microsoft really that spooked by Google's dominating success in search, and why is Robert Scoble so unimpressed with the deal? - The answer is quality !

It will be a loooong time until Micro$oft Live search reaches the level of Google searches..Till then keep trying..Good luck, Microsoft, you’re going to need it!

via [ itwire ] 

Via Indian Express, a story about a unique attempt to address student problems at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai:

One of India's top engineering schools has restricted Internet access in its hostels, saying addiction to surfing, gaming and blogging was affecting students' performance, making them reclusive and even suicidal.

Authorities at the elite Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Mumbai said students had stopped socializing and many were late for morning classes or slept through them.

Accordingly, the Internet access will be completely cut off from 11pm-12:30 am every night, to encourage students to go to bed early, or at least get out of their rooms and talk to other students. 

But the move has not gone down well with students who say they hate their lives being regulated. 

Student anger has also spilled on to several blogs run by IIT alumni where bloggers say "the birth of the virtual world had led to the death of the real selves," but add that they resent regulation of students' activities.

On March 13, Dell announced that all Dell and Alienware customers who purchase select gaming desktops will now be able to increase their storage space by adding the world’s first one terabyte hard drive from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies.

Dell is the first computer system supplier to ship 1 terabyte (1,000 gigabytes) hard drives targeted at users needing to store large amounts of digital media.

The first Dell PCs to use the drives will be its own Alienware-branded gaming PCs. 

According to Neil Hand, vice president, worldwide consumer marketing consumer product group, “Digital content use is exploding in the consumer market – with this 1TB hard drive, a lifetime of memories, music and other information can be made, stored and shared with others. This type of capability used to be available only to the largest corporations. With the spectacular advancement in hard drives and the engineering in our systems, we’re now able to bring it to consumers.”

How different is it ?

Dell will use Hitachi GST's 1TB Deskstar 7K1000 drive spinning at 7,200rpm with a 3GBit/s serial ATA interface. The drive uses perpendicular recording, has five platters, a read access time of 8.5msecs and a write time of 9.2msecs. It has a cache of 32MB and an 8.7ms average seek time.

Pricing : Dell's 1TB drive is priced at $540.

Extras : 

Users can upload videos to Video Time Capsule Service  (www.studiodell.com) where Dell will store them, initially on the 1TB drives, for a claimed 50 years.

via [ StudioDell Website ]

They won't divulge their real names, they call their project a "whiny, attention-seeking ploy," and they appear to take their fashion cues from Beastie Boys music videos.

They won't divulge their real names, they call their project a "whiny, attention-seeking ploy," and they appear to take their fashion cues from Beastie Boys music videos.

But two hackers going by the names of Mondo Armando and Müstaschio promise to begin disclosing security vulnerabilities in MySpace, News Corp.'s popular social networking site, every day next month.

"The purpose of the exercise is not so much to expose MySpace as a hive of spam and villainy (since everyone knows that already), but to highlight the monoculture-style danger of extremely popular websites," wrote Mondo Armando in an e-mail interview.

"We could have just as easily gone after Google or Yahoo or MSN or IDG or whatever. MySpace is just more fun, and is becoming notoriously [obnoxious] about responding to security issues," he said.

These "Month of Bugs" projects have become a way for hackers to bring attention to both themselves and to security problems in certain types of products. Well-known hacker HD Moore kicked off the craze last year when he published one browser bug per day for the month of July. His effort was followed by a "Month of kernel bugs," a "Month of Apple Bugs," and a "Month of PHP Bugs."

The MySpace hackers launched their project late Thursday expressing simultaneous enthusiasm and disdain for the task ahead. "If it ends up being just as lame as the Month of Apple Bugs, then we haven't really missed the mark. If it's funnier, then great," they wrote on their project's blog. "If it kills this Month of Whatever fad, then hurray for everyone, it's over."

They intend to primarily publish cross site scripting bugs, which can allow an attacker to execute malicious script within a victim's browser, but they may also publish bugs that affect browsers or technologies like Flash or QuickTime.

[ Whiny,attention-seeking ploy ] via [ pcworld ]