WikiLeaks.info, a site assisting WikiLeaks' effort to share U.S. war information and diplomatic cables, is rebutting online security organizations' warnings that its Web could be dangerous to visit.
WikiLeaks.info provides a list of sites that mirror the original WikiLeaks content, and in recent days the main WikiLeaks.org Web site has redirected visitors to the WikiLeaks.info mirror page. WikiLeaks.info has grown in importance because of others' moves two weeks ago that made it difficult to reach WikiLeaks.org and led its operators to resurface at WikiLeaks.ch, a Swiss domain.
Spamhaus, a nonprofit volunteer organization that seeks to curtail spam, phishing, botnets for network attacks, and malware, issued a "malware warning" yesterday for WikiLeaks.info.

Over the years, we've worked hard to cover products and services as they've launched, and well into their successes and failures. And like any business venture, there's risk involved.
The Web is no different, leaving many sites to close up shop--sometimes just a few months after what their creators had hoped would be a successful launch. In other cases, it's a slow death march, stretched out with the occasional change in strategy, or a last-ditch re-branding effort.
2010 brought the closure of quite a few sites. Some names on this list you'll recognize right away. Others may leave you scratching your head, which may be just one of the many reasons they're no longer with us.
We've gathered 15 such sites and services that were open at the start of the year and for one reason or another closed up shop. Click through to find out what they were, what they did, and what happened.


15 sites and services that shuttered in 2010


Search operators in Google help you refine and improve search results.
For instance, a query like “Taj Mahal AND Hotel” will search for pages related to the Hotel Taj and not the Mughal monument. Similarly, “kindle -site:amazon.com” will find all Kindle related resources outside the Amazon website.

December 13, 2010

‘Speak’ Foreign Languages

google translate with speech

You use the free Google Translate service to instantly translate text from one language to another and in some language pairs, you may even listen to the translated text by clicking the blue speaker icon as show in the the above screenshot.
In theory, such a feature may come handy in situations when the person on the other side of the phone doesn’t understand your language. You can type the text in your native language, hit translate and play the translated text as audio (example) over the phone.


Google on Wednesday unveiled Boutiques.com, a Web site that combines computing power with fashion savvy in an effort to keep users informed about trends and provide shopping recommendations.
"Boutiques uses computer vision and machine learning technology to visually analyze your taste and match it to items you would like," Munjal Shah, Google product management director, wrote in a blog post.


Facebook Places, a Foursquare like service that lets you broadcast your current location to your other Facebook friends, may have just gone live in India.
The service has been available since day one to all employees of Facebook who are based in India but looks like they are now slowly rolling it out to external users as well.
The service will automatically determine your current location and show you a list of nearby places – if your “place” is not listed in the Facebook Places database, you may create it using the mobile app itself.


After having stayed in the US for nearly 15 years, Peeyush Ranjan and Mallika recently decided to shift base to Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, along with their two kids.
Peeyush is now the head of engineering (R&D) at Google India while Mallika continues to work with Microsoft. Read their experiences after moving back home:
Peeyush and Mallika Ranjan
Why did we return to India?