Google PageRank updates schedule for 2013

 Google’s PageRank (named after Larry Page), or the heart of their software as Google describes it, is a system of counting link votes and determining which pages are most important based on them. These scores are then used along with many other things to determine if a page will rank well in a search.



The PageRank updates scheduled for this year:

• 1st Update: January 28 to February 6
• 2nd Update: June 27 to July 7
• 3rd Update: September 29 to 4 October
• 4th Update: 24 December to 29 December
  

However, Google also relies on other strategies such as Google Panda (released in February 2011) which is a change that aims to lower the rank of "low-quality sites" or "thin sites", and return higher-quality sites near the top of the search results. CNET reported a surge in the rankings of news websites and social networking sites, and a drop in rankings for sites containing large amounts of advertising.

The Free Web Vs DRM in HTML5

 "The W3C has a duty to send the DRM-peddlers packing, just as the US courts did in the case of digital TV. There is no market for DRM, no public purpose served by granting a veto to unaccountable, shortsighted media giants who dream of a world where your mouse rings a cash-register with every click and disruption is something that happens to other people, not them." -Cory Doctrow.

With the death of the owners plugins like Flash and Silverlight, media groups have a problem controlling their streaming flow. For example, they wont be able to restrict a video to certain countries, or to ensure that a film is not viewed simultaneously by two friends sharing a unique Netflix account.
To address their concerns, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides an integrated control system (digital rights management or DRM) directly in HTML5, this update of the language through which the Web is built.  
While the measure has not yet been adopted, 27 organizations, including the April and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote a letter to the consortium. Their request: "Keep the digital handcuffs off web standards."

The arguments for
Rather surprisingly, the father of the World Wide Web and W3C Director Tim Berners-Lee, who usually defends a free and open network, supports this measure. According to him, DRM is not directly integrated into HTML5. In essence, he said that HTML5 would contain hooks, and that everyone would be free to lock or not to lock.
More generally, he argues that such a system is the only solution for media groups to adopt HTML5 and  not to return to Flash.  
Netflix, the streaming giant, recently said it was ready to move to HTML5 if the W3C incorporated the famous extensions for encrypted media (EME, the barbarous name of opening the door to DRM plugin). Microsoft and Google are also in this camp.
The arguments against
"This catastrophic proposal would change the HTML so it promotes the digital handcuffs (DRM). EME is sponsored by a handful of powerful companies that are members of the W3C, such as Microsoft and Netflix. These companies are promoting DRM, both for reasons of their own and for the close relationship they have with the most important media companies", the coalition wrote.
The founder of the website BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, is comparing it to the DVD, wanting to control the media chronology with geographical areas, media conglomerates have indirectly led users to hack. According to him, DRM is not only against-productive, they also limit innovation because they restrict the changes that can be made to content or services. While the industry has moved away DRM on physical media, including music from the iTunes store, she sees the transition to paperless cloud the opportunity to return to the charge. A story that repeats itself, in fact.

Learn more about DRM and join: Voices Against EME

How to treat your visitors with respect?

Everyone of us work hard to make his website or blog appealing for the audience, whether by delivering the proper content, design or services. And to be able to always satisfy your visitors, you should gather some basic information about them(page views, country, browser, OS, traffic source).

Such information in my hands or any other website's, is most probably harmless and it is to serve a specific purpose.
These information become harmful when you hand them to big corporations with huge databases containing a tremendous amount of information, that eventually, by matching them, they could end up possessing some very intimate and personal information about your visitors.
And by big corporations I mean Google, Facebook, .... or in some countries, government.

Don't get me wrong here, I'm not trying by any means to generalize that big corporation are evil (Although it's not totally wrong) and other independent website are good. But there is a factor we can't ignore, these corporations have the power. Power that neither I nor any website have.

How is information gathered?
Well, simply put, an information is gathered whenever you Like something on Facebook, you +1 something on Google, you connect to iTunes or the scariest, when you send an email(check this post: Audacity).

Some other times, it is handed out to them by bloggers and website owners like us.

How? Well, in the process of working on our blogs and websites and making them more appealing, we need tools to help us, and some of these big corporations, as kind as they are, offer it to us for free (Check out this hostile post If you're not paying for it, you're the product). And it is needless to say, that the most powerful and popular tool is Google's web analytic.

How to treat your visitors with respect?
Whether you are a care free person who thinks that all this is delusional and worthless or whether you are some paranoid person who believes in conspiracy and spray over their webcams because you think you're under surveillance, whether you like this digital world or not, it is a fact that it is controlled in a way Hitler could've only dreamed of.

And once you have a website, you have a responsibility and whether you believe in privacy or not, it isn't up to you anymore. You have visitors, that have their own beliefs and you have to respect them. And in order to do that, you must not hand the information they trusted you with to anyone because by this you would be sabotaging your relationship and showing no respect to their privacy and freedom.

So, a first step would be keeping these information to yourself. And to do that, you must use tools developed by people who believe in freedom and personal privacy unlike Google. So what I am suggesting, is for us to stop using Google Analytic and start respecting our visitors. And by us, I mean myself too. So, join me!

What's the alternative?
If you've been coming to my blog (powered by Blogger-Google) for a long time, you would know that I won't leave you without an alternative, an excellent one:

http://piwik.org/ :a free software and by that I mean that it respects the freedom of computer users by putting the users first and granting them freedom and control. And it also happens that it costs 0$.

Firefox 20 available in final version

While Netscape freed, 15 years ago, the source code of its Web browser, resulting in the birth of the Mozilla project, Firefox is celebrating today its twentieth release. While the version numbers do not mean much anymore, but each Firefox version has brought a lot of new yet important updates so far. 
In addition to traditional invisible but important improvements, Firefox 20 has two new special updates to the user: 
First and the most visible, the new download manager and button at the top right of the toolbar. No need to start the download window, a single click will display the latest downloads and progression of downloads appears below the button. It is still possible to display a specific window, called "Library" which allows you to organize the downloaded files.
 

 
Another innovation will address the fans of  porn (private) mode that is particularly useful. Firefox offered previously the choice to reboot in private mode when it was selected, then closing the session where you were and preventing juggle between as it is possible such as Chrome.  
This twentieth release now offers navigation window that no longer requires the user to have to close the session to enjoy the incognito mode.

Note that this latest development is also valid for the Android smartphones version of Firefox. 
Finally, for developers, we note the integration of WebRTC's getUserMedia API, a toolbox allowing faster access to development tools. Firefox is available for: Windows, OS X, Linux, Android.

After Google's decision, what is the alternative for the RSS Reader?

On july 1st, the most popular RSS reader will stop working. Google has decided to cut the service, saying it was used less.What happens there at Google?
Day after day, the company is making announcements that go beyond product launch. After yesterday's announcement of the departure of Andy Rubin, one of the architects of Android, the Mountain View company, has released an info this morning to say the unexpected: the outright stop of Google Reader. 

The RSS reader which inform millions of people around the world, will be permanently closed on July 1st. Without further guidance. It gives little explanation to justify this decision. Two reasons were mentioned on its official blog: Google Reader users number is decreasing and the company need to rationalize its services. 

What is the alternative?

While Google Reader team expressed his "sadness", the followers of this service are put together as shown in the number of reactions on specialized sites and Twitter. Petitions embark on the same canvas in an attempt to put pressure on Google to reconsider its decision. One of them garnered the signatures at an impressive rate, with a number of names which reached more than 30,000 in just a few hours. In addition to these reactions, several companies offer their solution.
Services like Feedly are already offering to  automatically manage the recovery from Google Reader. They hold also to reassure their users: the removal service will not affect Google users to Feedly. Others, such as Old Reader, have decided to adopt an interface "old" that should delight fans of Google Reader. The only problem is, this service is saturated since Google's decision. The design solution is also French, it is called Netvibes. Fortunately, there are a thousand ways to recover for Google RSS Reader.

Two quick tips!

I'm in a good mood and I really feel like sharing something. And since this isn't my diary, neither my twitter account, I thought why don't I share something with my really good committed (:@) readers. Something, that my readers will actually benefit from.

So, I have two tips, the first should concern anyone, anyone who access the web actually; And the second one, is exclusive to anyone who has a blog, a site or planning on getting one.

1st Tip: Your personal security.

We all know how critical our personal information can be, and yet people still choose to share them anywhere and then blame it on the web.

Well, I'm not saying that it is completely the user's fault. but corporations like Google are really working on privacy. And you also should. After all it's your information.

After this boring introduction, I'm going to talk to you about the security questions that you answer when you register in some sites, in order to get your password in case you forgot it. Well, the thing is, these days, these security questions aren't as secure as you would think. I mean take a look at this example :

When does Gmail block your account?

One of the possibility why you can’t log in to your Gmail account is because of it having been locked by Google. This happens automatically when “abnormal usage” indicates that an account has been compromised. According to Google, it may take up to 24 hours before account access is reinstated.  Reasons for locked accounts include:

• Receiving, deleting, or downloading large amounts of mail in a short period of time. If you're getting the error message, 'Lockdown in Sector 4,' you should be able to access Gmail again after waiting 24 hours.
• Sending a large number of undeliverable messages (messages that bounce back).
• Using file-sharing or file-storage software, browser3 extensions, or third party software that automatically logs in to your account.
• Running multiple instances of Gmail.
• Browser-related issues. Please note that if you find your browser continually reloading while attempting to access your Inbox, it's probably a browser issue, and it may be necessary to clear your browser's cache4 and cookies.

Another possibilities of why you can't log in to your account are:

1. Login problems.
2. Forgotten username or password.
3. Hacked accounts.

What's hot today?

Well, since most of my readers are from the US and there is a huge time span, the post title to you should be what was hot yesterday.

Anyhow, since today I'm too lazy to figure out what to write about and I don't want to just write anything, I decided to spare you some time and bring you the hottest topic in the technology blog sphere today.

And this is a reminder to myself so you can skip it : (today is January 4th)



So here's the top 5 topics/news online for today: 

WWW, WWW2, WWW3...What is the difference?

We've all seen www, www2, www3; We type for exemple 'www.company.com' and we're suddenly redirected to 'www3.company.com'. What exactly is this, and how do we get there?

Starting the domain name name of your web site with www. or www2. or www3. is a common convention and nothing more. There is nothing in the HTTP specification that says a web site must start with www. or any other prefix. It is simply a convention that began in the early days of the web and was used to distinguish a company's web server from its FTP server, gopher server, mail server, etc... But no such distinction is necessary, because this part of the URL, 'www.' help it decide how to perform this internal routing.
Usually this type of configuration is stored in your .htaccess file, located in public_html.

Another example is role-based routing. For example, store.company.com and developer.company.com are both hosted at company.com, but serve different roles on the web; one is an online store, the other is a site with resources for programmers. (And each is probably also load-balanced in ways that don't rewrite your URL.)

How to access any blocked website using ssh tunnel?

How much do you hate it when you're at work, school, college surfing the web, trying to access some website and you get prohibited, because "they" don't want you to see the content of just because you have some work to do and you shouldn't waste your time on Facebook.

Here in this post you will learn how to bypass the web filter using ssh tunnel in 3 extremely easy steps.

Don't be so hasty now, it's not the time for you to skip to the steps. First you have to know a little about ssh tunnels and firewalls.

Well, as shown clearly in the picture above all that an ssh tunnel do is connect to an online ssh server that allows SSH access and create a Tunnel between the host PC(ssh client) and server by bypassing the web Filter.

As for the firewall, well it is the sadistic son of a b*tch that is prohibiting you from accessing facebook. As you see in the picture below.

Or, as Wikipedia defines it: a software-based or hardware-based and is used to help keep a network secure. Its primary objective is to control the incoming and outgoing network traffic by analyzing the data packets and determining whether it should be allowed through or not, based on a predetermined rule set.

Now after I bored you to death with my babbling here is how you can access Facebook, Youtube, ..from your work place or school :

5 Awesome Gmail tips and tricks

I'm sure that everyone who's reading this has a Gmail account ( or at least the ones who know what they're doing). It's simply the single decent mail service online and I'm sure you all know this. But what you might not know is that there is plenty of tricks and things to do to enhance you experience.



Here's the most efficient and useful 5 simple tips that you can do:

1 - SEARCHING IN GMAIL

Search All Emails

Entering search word in Gmail search box will search for all the messages including chat messages, emails in sent, drafts, inbox and all the messages that are archived and labeled.

Searching Emails in Particular Folders

“Searchtext in:foldername” will search for the given text in the specific folder which you specified.  For example, following will search for keyword geek in the Sent Folder.

The platform in:sent

Search Specific Type of Messages

Types of messages in Gmail

• Starred - messages which are Considered as an important
• Unread - messages which are unread
• read - messages which are read
• chat - Conversation messages

“is:starred”, “is:unread”, “is:read” and “is:chat” will search for the messages that are starred, unread, read and chat messages respectively.

For Example, the following will give you the list of starred messages in Inbox folder.

in:inbox is:starred

Use OR Operator

You can search messages based on either-or condition. For example, following search gives the message which has ramesh as recipient or sender, after 2012/12/01

from:h20 OR to:h20 after:2012/01/01

from:h20 | to:h20 after:2012/12/01

Note: OR is case sensitive and must be in upper case.

2 - ATTACH A .EXE IN GMAIL

You cannot attach an executable file like a normal file.  Gmail will display the error message –  “FILE is an executable file. For security reasons, Gmail does not allow you to send this type of file”.

To overcome this issue, do the following as a sender of the email.

• Rename the file without an exe extension,
• Compress it with any compression utility and then attach it.

Now it will get attached, and uploaded successfully. The receiver of the email should uncompress the attachment and rename it again with exe extension.

3 - Add Emphasis to Chat

Gmail's instant messaging Chat function is one of the more basic options around, but there are a few bits of formatting you can use to add nuance to your online communication.
Bold: *The Platform*
Italics: _ The Platform _
Strike: - The Platform -

4 -Gmail Desktop Notifications

  

Google offers a free Gmail Notifier as a quick download that will alert you with a visual pop-up and audio cue when new mail has arrived, even if you don't have Gmail open in a browser.
It automatically checks for new mail every two minutes, with the icons changing to show unread mail in case you miss the notification. The app is available for both Windows PCs and Macs. It should be noted that downloading this will also make Gmail your default e-mail program, which you might need to consider if you don't want this to be case.

5 - Create Variations of an Email Address

Personally, I find this feature very useful it helps you to organize your mail in a very efficient way and it prevents random news feeds splashing all over your inbox.
You can finally feel comfortable listing your mail in a news feed. You can create multiple gmail variations by adding a word after your name with a plus sign. So,yourname+platformfeed@gmail.com.

This alias system then comes into its own if you also set up filters to direct those messages where you want them. For example, they could skip the inbox and be archived, have a label applied, be forwarded to another account, and so on.

To set up a filter, go to "Settings," hit the "Filters" tab, select "Create New Filter" and follow the simple steps from there.

National Geographic suspends new Instagram posts over new terms

Famed purveyor of awesome photography is 'very concerned' 

By Chris Smith  21 hrs ago On techradar.com

 

The backlash against Instagram's new terms of service has continued, despite the company's claim that it isn't planning to sell photos posted on the site.
National Geographic, the magazine famous for its top-notch snaps, said on Tuesday that it was suspending all posts to the Facebook-owned service beyond the current 714 uploads.
In a post on its Instagram feed, the publication said it was 'very concerned' by the new terms threatened to delete its NatGeo account completely, unless the policy is changed.
"@NatGeo is suspending new posts to Instagram. We are very concerned with the direction of the proposed new terms of service and if they remain as presented we may close our account," the post read.

Open to interpretation

Following the public outing of its controversial new privacy policy and terms of service documents on Monday, Instagram has been taking an almighty hiding from all comers.
The new terms requested that Instagram be given the rights to harvest users' photographs and likeness in advertisements without any reparations to the person who posted them.
It stated: "To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata) and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you."
On Tuesday, co-founder Kevin Systrom, claimed that the document had been misinterpreted and that it would soon be republished with different wording to make things clearer.
He wrote: "It was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing.
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear."

Reversed or reworded?

In the case of National Geographic, which has almost 650,000 followers, it is unclear whether the publication wants the new policy to be reversed or whether it simply wants the language to be altered.
It will be interesting to see if more high profile users of the service follow suit and the effect this has on how the policy reappears to the world.

Who knew it? Google has a sense of humor

Behind many applications , great applications such as google chrome, Gmail, google maps,adsense etc... and some other not so great applications like picasa and gtalk , and some miserable applications like google videos, google web accelerator (WTF!!!) , google checkout , google desktop(2004-2011) that imposed some serious security issues etc.. Behind all this wrapped in millions of terms policies and conditions, it turned out that google has a sense of humor.

Starting from the oldest here's an article that shows some of google's best gags:

• Google Gulp:A line of "smart drinks" designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.
   
• PigeonRank™ : Google reveal its darkest secrets. April's fool 2002
  
• Google Autocompleters: The unknown Soldiers

 

• The Youtube Collection : Offering you to deliver all  youtube videos to your home

• The jargon: Help people navigate through complicated business speak with Jargon-Bot
  
  
  
  
• Google Maps for for 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment
  
  
  
  
• Gmail Tap: A better way to type, a better way to multitask
  
  
  
  
• Google Analytics in Real life campaign: there was a series of video released, here's a sample
  
  

  
  

Popcorn Maker : change the way the world tells stories on the web

Today, a powerful new Popcorn Maker demo makes its debut on TED.com, showcasing Popcorn’s potential to change the way the world tells stories on the web.
Mozilla Chief Operating Officer, Ryan Merkley, presented Popcorn Maker with a live demo at TED Global in Edinburgh on June 29. The online tool, developed as part of Mozilla’s Webmaker program, makes it easy for anyone to add live content to any video — photos, maps, social media feeds and more.


ENJOY!

Full story: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2012/10/19/ted_popcorn/

Turn Your Online 'Error Pages' Into Missing Children Ads

Posted the 26rd of Sep 2012 on http://designtaxi.com
 
Error 404 pages are some of the most-visited pages on the internet—they just ‘naturally’ appear when web pages can’t be found.

A project in the European Union called ‘NotFound’ wants businesses to make better use of these dead links by turning them into missing children ads.

Site owners and businesses can help their cause by simply installing the Notfound application on their website.

Once installed, an advertisement of a missing child will automatically be published on every 404 error page on the website—with the message, “Page not found, neither is (child’s name)”.

The NotFound project is a collaboration between Child Focus and Missing Children Europe.