How do they teach about Internet at college

I’ve been using college Internet for the last couple of months and I realised how it helps us understand and exploit the net better!!
Lets take it one at a time…

Banning YouTube: It took me a lot of troubles to find out how to still have access to it. [Its one of the sites that changed the way we look at Internet. why ban it?! ]

FaceBook Banned: Who doesn’t know how to access it through proxy!!

Access restriction to orkut: You gotta be kidding me.. after some googling, one can open it easily!!

now coming to the title of the post, I’m grateful to our college authorities for banning all those sites; it provided me with ample opportunities to discover Internet better so as to exploit it to the fullest!!

NOTE: If you happen to be one of those guys who restrict the sites for access, try googling other ways to access the same and ban that too.

My Stand on this: Access restriction is not the solution. The use of a specific site should be left to the users’ discretion.

The Idea: Try banning Google. It leads to every other thing!!

Who Wants Cracked Software

You gotta see it to beliv it!!

Google Reads Your Mails?!!

I still like Gmail for its features and convenience but when it comes to security and privacy issues, there are major concerns…

It reads all your mails!!! In order to generate ad-based revenues, they scan the text of all incoming messages and place targeted ads, which can be seen at the right sidebar of the mail screen!!

In response to the criticism of privacy advocates, they respond by saying “we’re nice, trust us” or point to the company’s mission statement of “do no evil.” Is this the price we should pay for using some free web service?? are we ready to put our privacy at stake for 6 GB free space!!

If this doesn’t scare you, consider the company’s confused retention policy: “Google has not set specific, finite limits on how long it will retain user account, email, and transactional data. And Google has not set clear written policies about its data sharing between business units.”

Google’s cookie is an index for all your searches, and sits alongside an Orkut cookie that tells Google exactly who you are. The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the services. How about this, “Google has all our data even after we delete it from our mailbox or even after we terminate our account!!” They might create large repositories of personal data that could possibly be shared inappropriately.

Here is how Google puts it

Google processes personal information on our servers in the United States of America and in other countries. In some cases, we process personal information on a server outside your own country. We may process personal information to provide our own services. In some cases, we may process personal information on behalf of and according to the instructions of a third party, such as our advertising partners.

HERE is the letter sent by privacy groups to Google’s cofounders which says,

1. First, Google must suspend its implementation of scanning the full text of emails for determining ad placement.

2. Second, Google must clarify its information retention and data correlation policy amongst its business units, partners, and affiliates. This means that Google must set clear data retention and deletion dates and establish detailed written policies about data sharing and correlation amongst its business units and partners.

So, the next time when you the services of Google, Think before you act!!

Google

Yeah.. The word that touches our lives everyday!! Much of what I know today is the contribution of Google. Apart from the search engine; Gmail has lots and lots of features… Some of them which I use and like the most is:

• If you’ve got Gmail, You’ll never need to open any of your other mails: It will fetch all other mails to the Gmail account!! Just go to Settings–>Accounts–>Get mail from other accounts

• I REPEAT (If you’ve got Gmail, You’ll never need to open any of your other mails): You can use gmail to send mails using any of your email ids (yahoo, msn etc..)

• Invisible in Gtalk: Everyone (whoever uses it) is aware of the invisible feature (recently introduced) in Gtalk.

and Finally, Never worry if someone’s got the (dot) at the wrong place in the mail id.. i.e. if you send mail to larry.page@gmail.com or larrypage@gmail.com (or any other combination), it gets delivered to the intended recipient. Gmail doesn’t care about the little . dot

Google is [not] the Best Teacher

While doing my project, I never thought about the number of times I use Google… [I guess thats a project in itself] and I must say: …. (Well…I think I am falling short of words to describe how useful it is), may be the picture below says better

The other day one of my friends said, “Google is the Best Teacher“, It has answers for anything and everything…

Is that really true and applicable in all instances??? I doubt it.. There are times when it doesn’t show the desired (read best) results or to worsen the situation, it creates utter confusion…

and Google itself told me, I am not the only one to think that way!! Have a look HERE..

What are you doing?

Yesterday, while going through Technology Review(TR), I found some interesting things… I saw Tim Berners-Lee talking on Semantic Web (The inventor of the World Wide Web explains how the Semantic Web works and how it will transform how we use and understand data.)

Then I read about Evan Williams… How he got rich by selling Blogger to Google and then went ahead to found Twitter; what inspired him to extract a simple, obvious tool from a more complex, struggling technology. (Do we call this luck?)…One thing I particularly liked was his views on books (I mean I share the same view…Coincidence??!!)

“I realized I could go buy books and learn something that people had spent years learning about“

Check out my About column if you want to crosscheck, if you are lucky enough I haven changed it yet Read the full article here. I like the concept of Twitter too (though I don’t use it, neither do I use Blogger… I prefer WordPress)

p.s. To know why this post is titled that way, you need to visit the Twitter site.