IT Masala

Ryan Fitzgerald , an unemployed 20-year-old who lives with his father in Southbridge , considers himself a guy who's easy to talk to.

He posted a video with his cellphone number on YouTube, urging anybody anywhere who wanted to talk for any reason to give him a call."Girls, guys, whoever you are wherever you're from talk about whatever," the spiky-haired young man told the world.

He had got more than 5,000 phone calls and text messages from around the world. Monday morning at 5 a.m., the free "weekend" minutes on his T-Mobile service were scheduled to run out.

"I love talking to people," he said. "I just love helping people."

His original video, posted Friday and titled "I'm Here For EVERYONE! Give Me A Call! 7742531962" is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-rDqt99eGc

It has been viewed about 120k times and attracted around 400 comments.

His response, "Update On The Many Phone Calls I've Received And Rumors," from Sunday, is here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iF-Vxc0VC9k

One of the comments on his original post says:

"With all the pain and suffering in the world, it's nice to see someone trying to reach out to other people. I'm also amazed that many people seem to think this is some sort of self-promotional stunt; it seems to me that Ryan is utterly sincere, and his video is short and to the point. We are all so connected, and yet all completely cut from each other by the huge electronic grid we all now share; I say "bravo" to Ryan for trying to reach out in an increasingly impersonal world." - cursewill

First to those who donna what is Hitwise . Hitwise is a company which collects Internet usage data directly from ISPs to measure the traffic to more than 800,000 Internet sites.

It has predicted the next six Web 2.0 companies most likely to reach the soaring success of YouTube, Wikipedia or Flickr.  The list includes Yelp, StumbleUpon, Veoh, WeeWorld, Imeem and Piczo. Hitwise announced its projections in San Francisco at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo.

Here is in short on what these six Web 2.0 companies do:

• Yelp offers an online guide that allows users to rate various goods and services.
• StumbleUpon allows users to recommend Web sites to others with common interests.
• Veoh provides software to allow users to collect, publish and watch high definition videos.
• WeeWorld allows users to create a graphic alter ego to be used for online or mobile communications.
• Imeem is an online community to allow users to promote their content, blogs, music, photos and videos.
• Piczo is a site that allows users — it targets teenagers — to create their own customizable Web sites.

Wikipedia, the wiki-based encyclopaedia, is the one exception cited in the Hitwise study: 4.6 per cent of all visits to Wikipedia pages are to edit entries on the site.

Besides Wikipedia, other well-known Web 2.0 destinations are social network sites like MySpace and Facebook and photo-sharing site Photobucket.

Visits by web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 per cent of US web activity, up from only two per cent two years ago, the study showed.

[ Hitwise ]

Check out these sites and get to know the ranking of universities.

US News - Best Rankings list..

i20fever — Reliable list- is a site which has put up a good list according to scores . first go on putting the scores for every area, then see the total cumulative score and refer the list of universities respective to your cumulative score.This i20fever is a really very helpful to choose universities ..etc..

Princeton Review - Pretty good list ( but i donna how they come out with some odd ranking list such as 361 best colleges…anyway its a good list..
 

The Center for University Performance Measurement - very good lists ..listed in categories..etc.. 

Webometrics - Fairly good list, also has world rankings..etc..

The Department of Defense project to test Internet routing in space (IRIS) will be managed by Intelsat General, and the payload will convert to commercial use once testing has been completed. The IRIS project is one of seven projects — out of hundreds of applicants — funded and announced in fiscal 2007 as a Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (JCTD) by the Department of Defense.

Intelsat is the first commercial satellite company to be awarded a JCTD Program. The IRIS JCTD is a three-year program that allows the DoD to collaborate with Intelsat General and its industry team to demonstrate and assess the utility of the IRIS capability.

Cisco, the global networking leader based in San Jose, CA, will provide commercial IP networking software for the on-board router. In addition, SEAKR Engineering Inc. of Denver, CO, will manufacture the space-hardened router and integrate it into the IRIS payload.

via [ playfuls ] 

Cybercrooks are using a yet-to-be-patched security flaw in certain Windows versions to attack computers running the operating systems, Microsoft warned late Thursday.

The attacks target Windows 2000 Server and Windows Server 2003 systems through a bug in the domain name system, or DNS, service, Microsoft said in a security advisory.

What is the vulnerability: 

The vulnerability is believed to be caused by a stack overflow error in the Windows DNS Server's RPC interface implementation when processing malformed requests sent to a port between 1024 and 5000.

This means that remote unauthenticated attackers can execute arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges by sending specially crafted requests to vulnerable systems. 

"An anonymous attacker could try to exploit the vulnerability by sending a specially crafted RPC packet to an affected system," Microsoft said in the advisory.

What is RPC?

RPC, or Remote Procedure Call, is a protocol that applications use to request services from programs on another computer in a network.

Red Alert : The French Security Incident Response Team deems the Windows DNS vulnerability "critical," its highest rating.

Which OS's are Affected : 

Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4, Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 are vulnerable, Microsoft said.

Caution to be taken : 

Security experts are advising that users for the time being disable remote management over RPC capability for DNS Servers or block unsolicited inbound traffic on ports 1024 to 5000.

via [ Microsoft security advisory ]

Most people are familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. Less known is the aXXo prayer, dedicated to the popular DVD ripper that goes by this name. (found this @ Torrent Freak)             

People who use Torrents & download dvdrips from famous torrent sites might know whom i am talking of …anyway ..here it goes !

Our Ripper, who art on mininova,
aXXo be thy name.
Thy torrents come.
Seeding will be done,
Here as it was on suprnova.
Give us this day our latest rips.
And forgive us our leeching,
As we forgive those that leech from us.
And lead us not on to private trackers;
But deliver us from the MPAA:
For thine is the ripping, the seeding, and the glory,
For ever and ever.

Amen…                                        - Courtesy of “the_dwarfer”

Long Live aXXo !  

MySpace is at it again ! It has banned use of Photobucket pictures,videos into MySpace..

Photobucket, founded in 2003, has 39 million registered users and ranked 34th among comScore's top 50 U.S. Web properties in March, with almost 16.8 million unique visitors.

Photobucket ranks by far as the most popular photo sharing site in the U.S. with 41.4 percent of visits to sites in that category in March, according to Hitwise.

Photobucket, which lets users store photos, slide shows, videos and graphics on its servers and then link them to other Web sites, receives almost 57 percent of its upstream traffic from MySpace, according to Hitwise.

Photobucket even had exclusive pages like "The most popular myspace icons on Photobucket" etc…

Likely Reason:

Not a word still from News Corp. as to why; though Mike Arrington @ TechCrunch said that it may be because Photobucket is looking for a buyer. Where the photo and video sharing service is to fall into the hands of one of MySpace's main competitors — say Google or another big media company.

From Photobucket's official blog:

MySpace became successful because of the creativity of you, its users, and because it offered a forum for self-expression. By severely restricting this freedom, MySpace is showing that it considers you as a commodity which it can treat as it sees fit.

Is this a bad news to the mashups going on ??How is this ban affecting the users on MySpace ?? Is it too much restrcition?? pour in your comments

Since I have to prepare for this very soon.. Recently i started asking people around about this and "googled" around. i got a reply from my friend mayur who gave this site link.

Applicants can seek information at any US Visa Application Centre located in 11 cities across India.

This site has all the details right from How to Apply for a Non-immigrant US Visa, current availability of visa interview appointments,steps to follow , book dates , about the visa fees , rules for size of photograph etc and Security Regulations to follow and all the detailed stuff necessary for your visa.

Also see Websites of U.S. Missions in India  New Delhi  Chennai  Mumbai  Kolkata 

Visit [ U.S Visa ] 

Great News ….NASA scientists plan to announce a new open-source project this month called CosmosCode — it's aimed at recruiting volunteers to write code for live space missions.

Jessy Cowan-Sharp and Robert Schingler set up CosmosCode to help NASA develop open-source software for space exploration.

The program was launched quietly last year under NASA's CoLab entrepreneur outreach program, created by Robert Schingler, 28, and Jessy Cowan-Sharp, 25, of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. Members of the CosmosCode group have been meeting in Second Life and will open the program to the public in the coming weeks, organizers said.

"NASA is recognizing the value of free and open-source software in other sectors," said Cowan-Sharp, a contractor at NASA Ames in Mountain View, California. "CosmosCode is going one step further by allowing NASA scientists to begin a software project in the public domain, leveraging the true value of open-source software by creating an active community of volunteers."

NASA has already released more than 20 open-source software titles, including World Wind, a 3-D virtual globe similar to Google Earth, and Vision Workbench, a framework for computer vision applications.

via [ wired ] 

Here's an Outstanding essay on the end of Microsoft’s reign over the computer industry by Paul Graham co-founders of Y Combinator(it funds startups).

He starts from how Microsoft started after IBM and how it monopolized. But this monopoly is gone now. The time has come , No one is even afraid of Microsoft anymore. They still make lot of money - but they aren't dangerous.

He writes what killed Microsoft , they are - Google , Gmail , broadband Internet , OS X. He suggests what can save Microsoft from dying away !!!..  He nicely adds at the end

"I already know what the reaction to this essay will be. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and that I should be more careful about drawing conclusions based on what a few people think in our insular little "Web 2.0" bubble. The other half, the younger half, will complain that this is old news."

This is a must read for all geeks../ ..everybody !!  Read Full article here . 

via [ PaulGraham.com ]