Recent Posts

401

Living Room / SOPA: Alt view - You need to be Shakespeare or Picasso to Avoid Content Scraping

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 26, 2012, 12:28 PM »

My friend has gardening blog and she regularly posts text, owned images and videos in her blog. There are some personal images related to her family and friends in that blog. She found her blog scraped by one black hat author who refuses to take down the content. I understand that SOPA/PIPA/ACTA are bad but scraping content that includes your personal property and replying arrogantly to content owner increases the power of SOPA/ACTA/PIPA lobby. I'll not be surprised if many bloggers/content owners support SOPA/PIPA due to this type of abuse.

Here's what she received as a reply for the DMCA take down notice sent to hostgator. I don't know what hostgator did to that site as of now (it looks up for now).

"We've got your copyright complaint by the hosting service. We are not based on U.S.A. and not obligated by United State's laws. But we've got respect for other website and intellectual properties. The content which was related to your complaint was added to our website by our volunteer editors. For us a public content that's opened to world wide web is not copyright protected unless it has a literatural value or including a specific sciencetific reasearch. Any text content is not copyrighted material if it's redistribution of public knowledge without highly literature value. But we are willing to add your name to the document if you permit, or if you will not give permition we will edit the content page properly if you can prove us that you are the copyright owner more than DMCA records. We want to know this is legally your intellectual property in a non-digital legal registered document."

Check the bolded part. You need to be Picasso or Shakespeare or some apple or MS in order to have your content taken down. Sad isn't it? I also came across similar case where blackhat folks refuse to take down personal images and are challenging the original author to prove that in court. So you have to prove that you own your personal images, relations as shown in blog in order for these scrapers to take content down?It's definitely not cool and something that is giving boost to SOPA/PIPA/ACTA.

Name of the site is : newhealthtips.com ( If you're aware of blackhat stuff then it doesn't take long time for you to realize that this is yet another scraper site).

402

Living Room / Re: Is our perception of worth/value affected by venue?

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2012, 07:42 PM »

Compare "apple products" sold in applestore and "windows products" sold in any random computer shop.

403

Living Room / Re: A drag and drop editor for wordpress themes: Headway

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2012, 05:37 PM »

It gives you option to change almost every little point in your wp theme. It has good selection of fonts and color schemes. If you don't want to digg much into the frameworks and code then I guess it's worth a purchase.

404

Living Room / Re: Google Ends Privacy

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2012, 05:16 PM »

You mean they weren't already doing this?

No. None of our service accounts were connected to g+ before but now they are connected and they're making search a garbage by fetching the data from our contacts and searched terms. Social search is what they're doing since past 6 month, not from the beginning of the search.

What do I care if the services I am already using, separately, share data amongst themselves?

Gmail contacts, Gooogle reader, Youtube likes and search terms data is in use among multiple google services. This change is official as per their new privacy policy. This was not the case before (publicly) but they're enforcing this change from march.

405

Living Room / Re: I came to a conclusion this morning...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2012, 03:38 PM »

 

406

Living Room / Re: Google Ends Privacy

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 25, 2012, 03:34 PM »

They collect a lot of personal data for quite some time and now they made it official in order to avoid FTC and EU actions.

Google has keyword research tool that searches keywords typed by surfers, their location, monthly searches from a country, state, region and not to forget frequency of keywords, CPC value, amount of clicks in past and lot more. If you think they dont log IP address and other user specific information, then you're so wrong. You can check basic version of this keyword tool in adwords interface. My point is that if YOU as a non-registered user or random surfer can see this data easily. If keyword extractor tools like keyword tracker, spyfu keyword research and many others can digg data then it's upto you to decide, how much a search engine that logs information can digg about you. Imagine how business agencies, data mining corps are accessing google by paying them. That's not all, Google can even keep more private information to themselves and force banner ads on users just because they click more. This privacy policy change means, they're saying "we're officially going to screw your data". Forget facebook, google is more dangerous.

Simple answer is to login to YouTube etc. with a different account.

Why use search by logging into any of their service at all? Isn't that what google wants?

407

Living Room / Re: DC Apps alternatives for LInux

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 21, 2012, 02:52 PM »

Thanks edvard, rover, 40hz, rssaphire for help. It feels much clutterless while using linux desktop instead of windows atleast for now. I don't have av yet and i don't think i need it as of now. Anyway, I listen to radiosure trance channels and often record the sets. Is there any radiosure alternative or similar software for linux?

408

Living Room / Re: DC Apps alternatives for LInux

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 19, 2012, 06:33 AM »

Thanks guys.

@ewemoa, I was thinking about making small handy widgets for text processing (word count and grammar stuff), I doubt AHK will work so thought about asking you guys if there is any powerful alternative on linux. I guess GTK and QT/Pyside seems to be the only option in case of linux.

409

Living Room / DC Apps alternatives for LInux

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 19, 2012, 02:57 AM »

I am seriously considering switch to linux and so far running few softwares under wine without any issues. As my offline work involves in programming domain, I have nothing to lose by switching to linux. Eclipse IDE and other programming lang sources. are accessible under linux, so there isn't any issue so far. Only thing I am finding it difficult is with some small apps for specific tasks, made in DC or outside DC and are windows only.

e.g.

• Find and Run Robot
• URL Snooper
• AHK? (not ironahk)

Any other DC software alternative available for linux?

410

Living Room / Google Kenya Rip -off

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 13, 2012, 02:20 PM »

Something interesting about G on boing boing.

Mocality is an African startup that has a Kenya-wide business directory. There is no Kenyan yellow pages, so the directory was crowdsourced, paying thousands of Kenyans to help create and validate its database.

When the businesses in Mocality's database started asking them about the premium service they were offering with Google, Mocality was puzzled. They had no joint venture with Google, and they had never charged any business for inclusion in their database. When they examined their server logs, they saw a large number of hits to the records for the businesses that had been cold-called from the same IP range.

So Mocality laid a trap: when that IP range next visited the Mocality site, they fed it fake phone numbers that went to Mocality's own call center, where a Mocality operator pretended to be a business-owner and recorded the conversation. In that conversation, the caller identified himself as a Google employee, calling about a joint Google-Mocality venture, and asking the business to pay Google for a Kenya Business Online website with its own domain on that basis. This was, of course, absolutely fraudulent. There was and is no Google-Mocality joint venture.

More...               http://boingboing.net/?p=138807

So my prediction:

Google is going to buy mocality and kenyan government+press to get off the bad rep. Mocality will end up aplogizing google for such accusation. Google fanbois will end up writing big blogs posts saying "told ya, google was innocent". 

411

General Software Discussion / Re: Drive Extender replacement due out in 2012. It's called Storage Spaces.

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 11, 2012, 02:34 PM »

You know what you got one convert this year.  I am literally trying to switch 100 percent to linux this year. I don't want to waste time with windows anymore. I have old computers which can't run modern windows but they can run slitaz or archlinux without much issues, virtualbox can solve some win dependent apps requirement. I guess anything nooh from apple and windows is starting to look useless to me. I played with w8 demo, apple and it's just not impressing me against linux.

412

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 09, 2012, 12:59 PM »

Yes, that's right, I'm talking about webmail. I agree with lack of features in dashboard.

413

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 09, 2012, 12:07 PM »

@SJ, you're talking about google app mail hosting? or postini mail hosting? I'm asking that because in case of google apps for domain, mailbox is same like gmail. There is no change of features in case of Gapps. Everything works perfectly just like an average gmail account. I don't know how come these problems exist for g apps hosting.

414

Developer's Corner / Re: Lost My Faith - Need New Religion - Need LAMP Help...

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 09, 2012, 07:58 AM »

I'll not get into the MS evil part but let's discuss about LAMP migration and other stuff.

Domain registrar :- Namecheap.com and Gandi.net, gossimer or any other enom based registrar is okay. Just double check if you're thinking about any other registrar because most of them are godaddy re-sellers. Also note that UK or eu based registrars are more expensive and costs 2$ extra for same domain price+ additional for features which you get free from most of the US based registrars, so avoid EU registrars if you have large number of domains in queue. I don't think moving small biz and commercial domains to non-us host is going to make sense, I mean SOPA is against freedom of speech, not commercial content or small biz. So upto you to decide..

Server OS : There is a lot of documentation available for CentOS and UBuntu, Suse. I've invested more time with centos and suse.Ubuntu is going to be next if any client comes with such request. Start by installing VM with one of these distros in it. Break things in VM before doing anything on live site.

CMS: Wordpress is fine and gets work done quickly compared to drupal and joomla, I found these two sucking my time for even simple things. You can use drupal or joomla if there are complex apps but other than that for simple blogs, static sites and form based sites wordpress is enough.

EMail: I think google apps for domain is fine and you get enough stuff that you need for typical mailing tasks.If you have too many domains to deploy then better to use external service like google apps because using your server is going to be waste time during maintenance and server transfer. In case of google apps all you have to do is change MX records in new VPS or server to fetch mails.

Host: I find it odd to suggest anything against softlayer because they're popular and known for their service. It's just that there are some glitches with them these days. I know rackspace(and their VPS division slicehost), knowhost are some good VPS hosts.

My 2 cents.

415

Living Room / Re: 2012 WARNING! I'm here and... cough... gack... ZAP! Argh!!!

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 01, 2012, 04:44 AM »

I hate resolutions but i am going to give it a shot --

things to do before December 2012   

http://dayzeroproject.com/

416

Living Room / Re: HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012!

« Last post by mahesh2k on January 01, 2012, 03:42 AM »

Happy New Year.

417

Living Room / Re: Hosters are impossible. (A.k.a. get me what I want, not what I don't want!)

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 30, 2011, 12:23 PM »

Google apps?

418

Living Room / Re: When you make your 100'th Post

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 28, 2011, 01:32 PM »

419

Living Room / Re: The Christmas arms race

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 28, 2011, 01:28 PM »

Is it just me or every random forum where I check for christmas and new year threads always end up talking about resolutions that they can't keep?

420

Living Room / Re: More Complete Patent Insanity (Warning -- You may vomit)

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 27, 2011, 03:53 AM »

What the eff?

421

Living Room / Re: Reddit Leaving GoDaddy because of SOPA Support

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 26, 2011, 01:30 AM »

Domain prices are increased last two years and now price of any domain fluctuates in between 12.95$-15$.

Xidomains.com  - 12.95$+ service tax (Enom)
Gossimer.com  - 13$+80 cents+ tax (enom)
Gandi.net  -15$
namecheap.com  - 11$+ TLD (enom)

There's one twist here that most of us need to know; godaddy has many resellers so make sure you check if the reseller is using GD services or not.

422

Living Room / Re: Reddit Leaving GoDaddy because of SOPA Support

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 25, 2011, 02:00 AM »

If CNN-IBN (I'd be surprised, they're a responsible channel AFAIK) is reporting the rest of it, they're jumping the gun.

I don't think there is anything left not to conclude. DOT this year made many changes that are are already in implementation e.g. almost every hollywood movie channel is moderated before broadcast. Watching movie like SAW or hostel is like watching teaser softcore porn in dark with absence of actors. Wait till they block youporn or any other porn site to prove the rest.

Of course, there's no telling how the Twitter/Facebook crowd (a fringe of the population, the so called "educated elite") may react if they see their favorite religious figure being bashed on FB, they just might burn this little country down.

I'm sure you're aware of Miraj Riot(2009) during ganesh festival? It wasn't that big and there was no chance for burning the country. I'm sure even religious folks here will not think social network add more fuel to this.

The worrying aspect for me is that the judge used the term "anti-social", it could potentially be used for political censorship in the future.

Yup. That's to stop protest from groups led by anna hazare, medha patkar and roy. This is basically a mix of political+entertainment+religious censorship. Mediafire was blocked by reliance last week and they do plan to take down torrent sharing too in next few months. So linux users are going to suffer in this mess.

423

Living Room / Re: Reddit Leaving GoDaddy because of SOPA Support

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 25, 2011, 01:14 AM »

non-religious content -- Anything that isn't religious???? This doesn't make any sense. Not even remotely. The entire Indian Internet must be religious?

Minority faiths like pagan are considered as superstitious beliefs and they'll be taken care of under anti-superstitious belief bill. Atheism has negative impact on people as per indian thinking. Bombing in the name of religion is considered as atheist act, not religious as per these spiritually religious folks. You can't beat their logic. This whole stuff is actually to get control of the internet just like SOPA. This is to stop some of the protests against politicians and movements against corruption that are shaking government here. As 95% or more indians think that spying on people for ads or getting manipulated by government or religion is good, so it's hard to educate this country.

6th feb, end of free internet here.

http://www.reddit.co...e_thinking_in_india/

424

Living Room / Re: Season's Greetings December 2011

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 24, 2011, 11:45 PM »

Happy Holidays

425

Living Room / Re: Reddit Leaving GoDaddy because of SOPA Support

« Last post by mahesh2k on December 24, 2011, 11:36 PM »

Here is good news for india as per CNN IBN... after 6th Feb Supreme Court ordered indian ISP's and social networks to censor following type of content - nsfw, non-religious content, content that makes fun of religion, content that makes fun of politicians and any other protest worthy content. Total 31 social network from around the world got this order from court. Good bye freedom. Welcome medieval age, lets respect idiots.