February 11, 2010

A Threat From Google To Goojje

Chinese web portal Goojje has said it "will not change" its logo despite US search giant Google's threat to sue it over copyright infringement, according to a media report Wednesday.

Goojje's logo resembles the logo of Google Inc and also bears a paw print sign like that of Baidu Inc, the biggest Internet search engine in China and Google Inc's arch rival in the country.

The website's interface also imitates those adopted by Google Inc and Baidu Inc, but falls short of the copyright sign and a link indicating the website's licence number issued by the Industry and Information Technology Ministry.




Google has sent the operators of Goojje 'a cease and desist' letter through a Beijing-based law firm, demanding that they stop copying Google's logo by Monday or the company will probably file a lawsuit against them.

Goojje, however, kept its logo and interface unchanged as of Tuesday afternoon.

"The website is our team's achievement," Huang Jiongxuan, the website's founder, told China Daily over the phone. "It's impossible that we would close it down."

The team has invested 30,000 yuan ($4,400) for the website's set-up, said Huang.

The website has yet to return a profit and Huang is now relying on his family for a living.

But he shrugged off the threat from Google Inc.

"A lot of lawyers have offered to be our counsel for free, and we also have many supporters," he said.

Huang, 24, and seven other team members, launched the website Jan 14, a day after Google announced the company would quit the Chinese market.

These young men's overnight efforts have made a splash in China's cyber world, partly because of the breaking news of Google Inc's exit claims and the website's name - Goojje.

Its second syllable, "jje", is the same as the Chinese word for "older sister", while that of Google, "gle", sounds like another Chinese word for "older brother".

The website is designed as a search engine, but experts said it produces search results by simply combining those of Google Inc and Baidu Inc, which means Goojje does not have its own search technology.

The website had an average page view of about three million in the first few days after the launch, said Huang. The number has fallen to two million lately, which is still remarkable for any website in the early days since a launch.
©IANS


Popular online payment service PayPal shocked several Indians and rest of the world by suspending payment transactions to and from India for more than a week. Anuj Nayar, spokesman from communications team for PayPal, posted on the official PayPal blog
, that personal payments to and from India and the transfers to local banks in India have been suspended. This directly impacts several freelancers from various fields and businesses that depend on PayPal as a transaction gateway.

Though temporarily, PayPal has given a mini cardiac arrest to several India-based PayPal users by shunning payment transactions to and from India. Apart from that, these users can't even transfer their funds to local Indian banks to withdraw their balance. All this was conveyed by a standard mailer that every India-based PayPal user received.

Here's a standard mail sent to Indian users:

Hello USER,

Your payment of AMOUNT has been sent back to the sender of the payment.

We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.

If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select Goods, and (c) provide a shipping address.

If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.

We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we re sorry for any inconvenience.

Thank you,

PayPal

Nayar's post indicates that the situation is temporary and the issue is to address the questions about the service that PayPal's business partners and other stakeholders have.

Over the weekend, we met some bothered India-based PayPal users who were literally clueless on whether their funds would be recoverable ever. Advertising professional Kenroy Rodricks said, " I've about $1,000 stuck in PayPal account which I can't transfer or perform any transactions with. PayPal is my only gateway where I send and receive payments from clients abroad." We're sure that Nayar's assurance
to restore the payments as soon as possible will give a ray of hope to many such India-based PayPal users.

Let's not forget a fact here that PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002. Yes, it's the same eBay that first bought Skype and 65 per cent stake of Skype to an investor group. We may not be surprised if PayPal undergoes the same process. What really freaks anyone out where books like 'The Secret of Hacking' Third Edition covers topics - How Hackers Hack Paypal account and credit card Hacking (fully untracable), are sold offbeing sold over the web.

With no intentions to scare or mislead anybody, we patiently wait till the issue between PayPal and its business partners as well as stakeholders get resolved.

The hack is believed to be a DNS Redirect

Indian software giant Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) has witnessed the hijacking of its official website www.tcs.com. The hackers not only attacked the website but also allegedly changed its domain name and put it up for sale!

The hackers posted a "For Sale" message on the site, written both in French and English. The hack is believed to be a DNS Redirect rather than a full-fledged one. This is similar to the one that rocked Twitter last year

This attack raises a lot of questions on the Indian IT industry and the overall Internet security in the country. If top IT firms cannot create a hacker-proof website, what more can we say?

However, the website has now been restored and is working fine.

SOURCE : TECHTREE.COM

February 6, 2010

The Advantages of HTML 5


Why should web designers start looking at HTML 5 and what are the advantages it can bring to our work? In this short blog post we run through a few of the many advantages we can gain from latest incarnation of HTML.

Improved Code

HTML 5 will enable web designers to use cleaner, neater code, we can remove most div tags and replace them with semantic HTML 5 elements.

Greater Consistency

As websites adopt the new HTML 5 elements we will see far greater consistency in terms of the HTML used to code a web page on one site compared to another. This will make it far easier for web designers and web developers to immediately grasp how a web page is structured even if they are brand new to it.

Improved Semantics

As the elements used to code a web page are standardised, using the new HTML 5 elements, the semantic value of every web page will increase. As it will be easy to see which parts of the page are headers, nav, footers, aside, etc. and most importantly know what their meaning and purpose is in a machine readable format.

Improved Accessibility

With HTML 5 it should be possible for assistive technologies to expand on the features they can offer their users as they can immediately build up a more detailed understanding of the structure of a page by looking at the HTML 5 elements it contains. Could this spell the end for skip links?


Audio And Video


The new video and audio elements make this really easy. Most of the APIs are shared between the two elements, with the only differences being related to the inherent differences between visual and non-visual media.

Both Opera and WebKit have released builds with partial support for the video element. You may download the experimental build of Opera or a recent nightly build of WebKit to try out these examples. Opera includes support for Ogg Theora and WebKit supports all the formats that are supported by QuickTime, including third party codecs.

The simplest way to embed a video is to use a video element and allow the browser to provide a default user interface. The controls attribute is a boolean attribute that indicates whether or not the author wants this UI on or off by default.


[video src="video.ogv" controls poster="poster.jpg"
width="320" height="240"]
[a href="video.ogv"]Download movie[/a]
[/video]


The optional poster attribute can be used to specify an image which will be displayed in place of the video before the video has begun playing. Although there are some video formats that support their own poster frame feature, such as MPEG-4, this provides an alternative solution that can work independently of the video format.

It is just as simple to embed audio into a page using the audio element. Most of the attributes are common between the video and audio elements, although for obvious reasons, the audio element lacks the width, height, and poster attributes.


Download song

HTML 5 provides the source element for specifying alternative video and audio files which the browser may choose from based on its media type or codec support. The media attribute can be used to specify a media query for selection based on the device limitations and the type attribute for specifying the media type and codecs. Note that when using the source elements, the src attribute needs to be omitted from their parent video or audio element or the alternatives given by the source elements will be ignored.

[video poster="poster.jpg"]
[source src="video.3gp" type="video/3gpp"
media="handheld"]
[source src="video.ogv" type="video/ogg;
codecs=theora, vorbis"]
[source src="video.mp4" type="video/mp4"]
[/video]
[audio]
[source src="music.oga" type="audio/ogg"]
[source src="music.mp3" type="audio/mpeg"]
[/audio]


For authors who want a little more control over the user interface so that they can make it fit the overall design of the web page, the extensive API provides several methods and events to let scripts control the playback of the media. The simplest methods to use are the play(), pause(), and setting currentTime to rewind to the beginning. The following example illustrates the use of these.

There are many other attributes and APIs available for the video and audio elements that have not been discussed here. For more information, you should consult the current draft specification.

The Internet was proposed by the Italian edition of the popular Wired magazine for promoting “dialogue, debate and consensus through communication” as well as democracy, the media reported.

Premier endorsers of Internet for Nobel Peace Prize nomination include 2003 Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi and famous Italian surgeon, known for his contributions to breast cancer treatments, Umberto Veronesi.

Wired Italy has also launched a dedicated campaign, ‘Internet for Peace´, which will carry on till September 2010, featuring different stories and experiences of those who with the web have tried to do something concrete to promote peace and harmony in the world.

“We have to look at the Internet as a huge community where men and women from all over the world and with very different religious views can communicate and sympathise, spreading a new culture centred on collaboration and sharing of knowledge that breaks all barriers.

“For this reason, the Internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction, which we can deploy to destroy hate and conflict and propagate peace and democracy.

“What happened in Iran after the latest election and the role the web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the Internet can become a weapon of global hope,” Riccardo Luna, editor of Wired Italy, said at the launch.




SAN FRANCISCO, US, and LONDON, UK, 4 February, 2010 - The Symbian Foundation today completed the open source release of the source code for the world’s most widely-used smartphone platform. The Symbian platform, which has been developed over more than 10 years and has shipped in more than 330 million devices around the world, is now completely open and the source code is available for free. The transition of this market-leading platform from proprietary code to open source is the largest in software history. The move has been completed four months ahead of schedule and provides the basis for unlimited mobile development based on innovation and openness.


Any individual or organization can now take, use and modify the code for any purpose, whether that be for a mobile device or for something else entirely. This strategic move provides the Symbian ecosystem with greater potential for innovation, faster time-to-market and the opportunity to develop on the platform for free. Symbian’s commitment to openness also includes complete transparency in future plans, including the publication of the platform roadmap and planned features up to and including 2011. Anyone can now influence the roadmap and contribute new features.

All 108 packages containing the source code of the Symbian platform can now be downloaded from Symbian’s developer web site (tiny.symbian.org/open), under the terms of the Eclipse Public License and other open source licenses. Also available for download are the complete development kits for creating applications (the Symbian Developer Kit) and mobile devices (the Product Development Kit). These kits are compatible with Symbian^3, the very latest version of the platform, which is now fully open source and will be “feature complete” during Q1 of this year.

http://tiny.symbian.org/open