KAZEY JOURNAL

Do you happen to hang out in star bucks, Macdonald’s or around a public library where internet browsing is actually free? Well I do, considering it gives me the opportunity to get some fresh air and a chance to check out what the world has to offer.

But beware, it comes at a price, a hidden one !! Free as it may sound, it is an unsecured network, and an idiot browsing the same network could sniff the traffic for passwords and confidential information. This is not funny at all because you could become a victim.

So how do I secure myself from such idiots, who think they have the right to steal and use my information, because I happen to like free surfing?

I use Tor. Tor helps me anonymize my web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol.

It also comes bundled with an application named “Privoxy”, which prevents my computer from automatically sending personal information to websites.

Well so how much does it cost? Well everything comes at a price, and Tor certainly does come with a price too. It does cost me time because it is slow. It is slow because WebPages are transmitted through several servers around the world to get to the computer of the user.

You can download Tor from http://tor.eff.org/download.html.en . So Beware of free wifi hotspots, you have been warned.

I was just browsing through the net and I came upon a killer product by google named ” Google Apps for Your Domain“.

Now you can offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar tools to all of your users for free*, so they can share ideas and get things done more effectively. You can design and publish your organization’s website, too. It’s all hosted by Google, so there’s no hardware or software for you to install or maintain.

With this strategy, would that mean, a goodbye to email hosting companies?

Well I wouldnt certainly say so because Microsoft’s Live Custom Domains, was not really a dorminating success.

I run a web hosting company, and I am so unhappy with google’s approach to dorminating the internet world this time.

Google launched a web calendar, which is a free service that not only enables you to get alerts via sms but also allows you to have multiple calendars for your schedules under one account.

The features.
Google Calendar, available at www.google.com/calendar, offers a number of easy to use features including a drag and drop interface and the ability to see you diary, 1 day, 4 days, a week and a month at a time.

The Good news:

You can get the calendar to remind you of events via SMS, and also be able to run multiple calendars from the same log-in, so you can have one for business, home and whatever else you care to run a separate calendar.

Opinion: I am really loving it. Google seems to be solving every, virtually possible problems day by day, but wait a minute, are they just realeasing the bits and pieces of their Goobuntu OS, whilst still developing it? It might be? who knows?

The Source of news: Pocket-lint.

As Google support team claims and I quote “Blogging is near and dear to our hearts here at Inside AdSense. We know you want to get the most out of those posts – but how do you do it? “, and I must say Google really is in love with blogging. Google does have 15 corporate natured blogs, which is quite a number from just one company.

Now back to what I was actually going to blog about, this love of Google for blogs and bloggers led them to release a very helpful adsense placement map for bloggers to aid them in getting a better CTR. Well I would consider implementing the side ad unit which I am yet to implement on my blog soon. For further reading you might as well want to read the full content here.

Google finally released its much awaited chat platform within its e-mail web client Gmail. I think it is a cool feature. Ajax is really making the web frontier a fun place to be.

It comes featured with:-

1. Chat
Allows you to send instant messages from directly within Gmail. When you go to your inbox, you’ll be online.

2. Status
Allows you to see when others are online and let them know when you’re online, away, busy, tired, whatever.

3. History

Your Chats can be just like your emails. You can Save them, search for them—never lose important chats again.

So Yahoo messenger users, give it a taught, Google really does deserve your patronage. I mean what else do you need to convince you, that Google can do it better? jocking

Well but nevertheless, we can’t forget features like launchcast, message archives etc. In fact yahoo does it better still. Google is just been sleek with the use of Ajax on its presence. So Yahoo loyals, you can still stick with yahoo. Google hasn’t won just yet. By the way, how about msn messenger users? argh well you also have a better featured client, ah yes.

Google is now an ICANN-accredited registrar of domain names.

According to a hint by Garett Rogers who experimented some GMail codes, there is a possibility that Google is introducing, a powerful way for anybody who owns a domain to utilize GMail as a mail server, not just a client. This I think is a possible battle, against the fruitlessly msn introduced Windows Live Custom Domains under its Windows live ideas project.

There is also a rumour that Google is thinking of venturing into domain and web hosting, which points to the direction of another possible competition with Yahoo yet again, after its victory over Web Search engines.

The question is, how far would Google go, to secure the king of the internet title?

What would be Google’s next step?

Songbird 0.1, yet another product of the evolving craze in the web2.0 world has just been released.

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox’s browser engine, which plays the Web without leaving the web. Songbird can view Web pages, while presenting an impressive futuristic play, save and downloading feature. It doesn’t just end there; it has all the features you would expect in a desktop media player.

It also promises a feature that allows authors to be able to publish play lists and transfer MP3s which also allows author’s, the ability to build digital music stores like eMusic, music subscription services like Yahoo! Music Unlimited, virtual jamming services like Ninjam, playlist sharing services like WebJay and more.

Songbird is open source, and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions. Quite Impressive right?

So what are you waiting for? Check it out. By the way I am yet to install it myself after downloading it a while ago.

I have 20 Newsvine invites to give out, if you are interested, just comment so.

Newsvine is a collaborative, social news site. Like other sites, Newsvine shows major news publications. The beauty of it is that, readers can comment on news items, which creates an avenue for interactive discussion, it also comes with a chat feature.

Tagging feature is also not left out. Any user can bookmark a news piece (or any web page) with a tag such as “sports” or “Iraq” and it will become available at Newsvine under the URL newsvine.com/[TAG]. This is very good technique with Search engines in mind. This allows you to be able to go straight to the news using the link with the tag respectively.

Newsvine uses a voting system, like Digg, to determine how relevant given news item is. Its quiet impressively packed with lots of features, and membership is strictly by invitation.

It is unlike Digg in many ways, because currently Digg is flooded with kids that think they are the law makers there. They hate blogs too. Come to think of it, Maybe another Digg site with blogs in mind, would be a great idea.

At Newsvine, you can read breaking news from around the world, write your own articles, and publish links from across the web directly to your column. You’ll also keep ad revenue from all traffic your pages generate. You are also given a domain name for yourself (yourname.newsvine.com). Mine is http://kazey.newsvine.com.

Protecting information from leaking to the internet is a necessity, especially when you partake in daily risky transactions that involve you visiting sites you do not trust. Tor gives you the assurance that some of your information would not be leaked out.

Website: http://tor.eff.org/index.html.en

Tor is software that contains a bundle of applications that helps secure online activity by safe guarding certain information from leaking from your computer to the internet.

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Google annouced its interest in Operating systems, and I am sure the news would provoke Microsoft. Google said, it is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop in a project called Goobuntu. A version of the increasingly popular Ubuntu desktop Linux distribution, based on Debian and the Gnome desktop.This is indeed a possible bid to take on Microsoft in its core business – desktop software.

What I dont understand is, isn’t the race in building an internet empire occupying enough? I think google is getting too ambitious. How about if they become successful in making it to be able to execute windows based applications? What would happen. Would that trigger an aggressive feedback from Microsoft? Well that would also be good news to the opensource community.

Anywayz lets wait and see.

News can be read, HERE.