Of the many personal content filters available today, comes another from His Masters Choice, Google. The edge, other than from the superimo himself is that, Google Content Blocker, it would block everything but ads
More of John's humor pitara!

Bye Bye those slow, buggy Flash wraping those plain nice images in between them at Flickr, the #1 reason for many like myself to stay away from the god sent service, and #1 on the hit list of almost every Flickr user. Flash has been replaced by Ajax and now you too can uninstall that Flickr hack using Greasemoney script. BTW Fotolog lives up to its reputation of going from bad to worse, even though the # of servers have gone from one to hundred. FL submission during last three years all gone waste and the guys don't even make it extensible with API's.

[Update1:] - Its been more than 12 hrs now and Fotolog is still down, none of the NS are not responding, another case of DDoS, maybe as the admin was worried about? Other image servers sp*.fl.net and personalisation server my.fl.net are still functional.

Speeds. Now that one is back on dialups and broadband seems a myth again, posting even an MB of audio is a deal, big one indeed. If you happen to have a portable rec. and get decend speeds at your disposal... try give it shot... try podding. Podcasting though been there for years now (as audioblogs) has emerged in a new avatar, a new package and a brand equity. Now click to iPodder get workin'

The trend doesn't end here we have come from the text archives of individual from all nooks and corner of world to now audio archives and also brewing are the video archives (TViO hacking types). Weblogs, blogs, alogs, vlogs, vidlogs, pods, vods et al. take your name.

This would be first of few legal implications for putting information on blogs. Next time anyone posts any business trade sensitive information, think twice. Apple has won the legal battle against 3 blog posters who had divulged their trade secrets on a public Apple fan site. The threesome will now have to reveal the sources from where they got the information about Apples secret Asteroid project.
Google too recently had fired a member of their staff for he bloged!
Is this a start.....of things to come.....

Had been thinking of bringing this in public and reading SB mail on the the list just initiated the whole length.
Copy of mail posted to India-Gii

Let me too join the voice against Sify Broadband. Had been a subscriber since Jun 2k4 until Jan 2k5 and had the same amount of hiccups and much more. The problems were endless.

Main gateway and the network keeps going down every hour and many times the whole of weekends go without access to the network. No point calling up anyone and waste my energies chasing everyone here.

Cust Support is more or less are useless as they can't seem to take any necessary actions immediately and always talk to fwding the query to Technical desk and that "We'll get back to you". In the end nothing happens.

Both parties i.e. the Local distb. (CTO) and the Sify are totally disconnected and keep passing the buck at each other for any problem reported.

In my specific case the Firewall at local CTO's place blocked everything except traffic on basic min ports like 80, 21, 25 etc. Somehow one day it all started working and I had no problems on that front for 2/3months until the problem resurfaced and despite n number of calls to and from Sify, no solution was provided which forced me to finally gave up on their BB service. All I wanted was either to disable firewall for my specific login IP (as I already have one installed) or to enable port forwarding for me. Both which seems is technically challenging for the service provider.

Renewal again is one big hassle. Sify ppl call up asking about my willingness to renew and even though after mentioning Yes, they are unable to renew because the CTO has no (never has) credit to his account with Sify. Which means that one again has to go without access and has to make number of calls to both Cust support and the local CTO to plead renewal? Sify seem to forget that I have subscribed to their service and not CTO's and hence I should not be made to suffer due to the local distb antics.

The offered plans and the speeds is another Questionable area, though let me stick to service levels for now. Well to cut the story now, the objective of this mail is just to update Sify about the kind is service they are running (though, I am sure they are every well aware of that) and I hope for no betterment and no thanks I would never subscribe to your service again.

Live long reliable dialups. Thumbsup!

till l8r, best0
Amit [Netahoy] Agarwal
netahoy.org

A lot has been said about this before by both by exusers and current users. Incase you too are one of many unlucky souls head to http://sifybroadband.blogspot.com/ or help AR strengthen the legal case again Sify or simple browse the forums at http://sifybroadband.techwhack.com/

Now that we have each helped make SPAM reach 75% of the total mail traffic, we better start find some alternative methods to mailing... ummm maybe voice errr now that would be too futuristic...or maybe somehow find our way out of the SPAM mess at the gateway level.... naah not possible too.... though we can always wish! O LORD! we wish you save us from SPAM, hell we still can resist.

Though I have been in total isolation from the rest of the bworld for more than a yr, and which explains the activity meter here too. Well for once after a long shot blogwalking from FL to Anna to Simonworld to finally land to Indiblog Awards 2005, and to my enlightment.. the space is still hot and getting more each passing yr. The oldies still dominate the list, as were the newcomers and the list is quite a revelation afa the types and kuch hatke stuff goes.

Now that every1 has tasted the fruits of comment spam on their blogs, the google consortium has come up with solution to curb the pain in our blogs.

This isn't a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it's just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In brief the blogs app manufacturers will create links with use of the nofollow attrib in your markups which the indexing engines will ignore to give spam robs Zero benefit of their efforts.

Fiber survives the Tsunami, reports Lightreading/. Though the Tsunami affected the human lives for years to come, technology seemed to have gone unscathed. All major under sea cables feeding India to the world remain intact, with minor damages to few like VSNL backed SAFE. Rest of the main links of Tata, Bharti continue to keep India on the global map and provide that valuable communication and data network for the relief work. [via Om Malik]

This years Google Zeitgeist is out, 2004 surprises to me were the mention of India in the Google News queries standing at #3 of Popular Country Queries, even cricket made it to the list this year at # 8 in Popular Sports Topics
Last time anything desi was on the was in Google Zeitgeist 2002 ranking India as # 4 of Top Destinations around.
Hope to see the India specific Zeitgeist in 2005.

Suprnova.org bends down and closes, the most loved and easy access to those tons of torrents. Happy they maybe who forced the shutdown, but the celebrity bittorrent website having one of the best index of torrents around was a sitting duck. Fame does bring you down some day! Capturing 35% of the Internet traffic is no joke and that too over a period of 3 yrs, bypassing all other P2P taken together and the websites browsing competing next to the most hated SPAM.

Update 2004-12-30: Now Lokitorrent is preparing to fight back MPAA suite to shut it down, and have manged donation funding of USD 20k of 30k required from across world to keep the legal fight.

Forget Spyware, Adware and malacious apps, Welcome the big daddy of all!
Past few weeks was just wondering abt the real privacy of using the all new happening desktop searches making headlines last few months. Just wat would stop them to peek into your somewhat private HDD and start indexing and who knows throw up results pointing to the contents of your HDD in future. Well good news is, its is true and on schedule. BravO!

The find of the week surely is the nice fresh sound of Rabbi Shergil, the Sardaar with a Guitar. Lucky me and while flipping those obnoxious channels around happen to had a glimpse of this vid which looked _different_ and a simple press on unmute brought refreshing waves to my ears, Bulleh Ki Janaan Main Kaun. Waise the stud did music for Waisa Bhi Hota Hai and Lets Enjoy. Now off to discover more gems of this new age Sufi gutarist....

Says Bulla, who knows who I am!

Finally, I only know myself.
I cannot know any other.
Who could be wiser than I?
Bulla asks, who then, stands here?
Says Bulla, who knows who I am!

While on move, don’t we need a place to fill that ipod types (ipod.com) with that particular song or get the latest movie on that zen (creative.com/PortableMediaCenters)? Not even wait to get home to put it on. Just enter that music shop, plug in the wire, make a choice on the touch screen and wooosh! comes it downloading. May be buy a ecoupon to avail additional benefits/downloads, who knows! After the success of pay to download (apple.com/itunes/) the next value addition comes with instant access. Offer a bone for free and they come running to buy more. And then is days to follow the thousands of illegal booths working out of those nukkar ki dukaan with provide those dangling cables to serve types of all kinds. And once the wireless Gigabit comes the ipods or the zens, serve them on the airwaves! Whynot!

BBC reports "Blog picked as word of the year", The term "blog" has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by a Merriam-Webster.
BLOG noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks provided by the writer

Guess this was the right time and neither late. Catch on ppl.