PROTECT IP/SOPA

Today, where Internet has brought to us the most of the free information and entertainment and where we are able to communicate with the hundreds of people in real-time, American government is trying to censor and limit our ability to all free stuff there is on the World-wide web. Internet provides us with free music, movies, books and represents a place where people can share their creativity, thoughts, information & else. It has been the most productive way of organizing protests around the globe.

What is PROTECT IP/SOPA?

The PROTECT IP Act or Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 is the new bill with the stated goal of giving US Government and corporations power to censor the Internet in order to improve entertainment business. US Government want the authority to shut down websites that provides us with free movies, music and other.

How can they do that?

Well, they have a few different ways.

1. They can block almost every website they want.

2. They can sue almost every website they want.

In that case, search engines and social-media sites could be led to bankrupt because of that. Why? If a user share any copyright material on the Internet, it’s automatically social-media network’s responsibility.

Of course we won’t even discuss the possibility that US Government will try to abuse this bill and censor almost every website they don’t like or feel it’s promoting something that does not correspond to them.

In other words, this bill can only lead Internet to be more unsafe and independent place.

What can I do to change this?

First, I want you to go to this website and fill a quick letter to the US Government. There are also a lot of company’s who have joined in this action. The important thing is to inform everyone about this. Information should be free and independent, especially on the Internet. Fight for the future.

There is a possibility that this blog could also get censored, so the important thing is to share. Sharing is caring.

Twitter Population Hit 75 Million

Twitter

Number of users of popular micro-blogging site Twitter.com just hit 75 million.  The number of new users rising, but lot of them are inactive and the number of new users are falling. “Twitter revolution” started in July 2009 with the rise of 7.8 million users. Last month number of users reduced to 6.2 million.

The problem is that a lot of users are inactive and according to studies, last month only 17% of users Tweeted. Studies show that Twitter has between 10 i 15 million active users, who ordinarily sent their tweets, when about 80% of users tweeted less than 10 times.

iPad launched

iPad

It’s official. The iPad is here. It was presented tod

ay at Apple’s keynote in San Francisco. Like the first iPhone or iPhone, this is going to bring a revolution in computer technology. Do  I even have to tell that everything related to Apple is now a trending topic on Twitter?

So, it is a high resolutions, 9.7 inch (diagonally measured) multi-touch screen. You can use it for about 10 hours listening to music, surfing through the internet(on wi-fi), watching movies, browsing through pictures, reading a book or even playin a game. It is also available in a 3G model.

It also has a built-in speaker. Capacity 16/32/64 GB.

It is not yet available but it will be in 60-90 days depending on a model. But the price is set and for those who can afford it is rather cheap(500$!).

There are now 3 stores on iPad. An iTunes store, an AppStore

(with about 140,000 aps and counting) and now new eBook store for previewing and downloading books on your iPad.

If you are bored with all this long lines of text, here is a video preview:

apple-ipad-video-us-20100127_848x480

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Facterylabs.com launched

FacteryLabs

For all people who prefer facts instead of long boring links there is now a site for that. Today company Factery Labs launched it’s fact search engine on facterylabs.com. So in this post I’ll try to review facterylabs in short lines…

When you first open the site you’ll see that it’s not really as minimalist and simple as today’s 2.0 websites. It’s not really nice looking but it will provide you all the information you want. There are about 9 widgets showing current hottest trends. They are based on Twitter‘s trending topics. At the top are 8 tabs showing you other topics you may be interested in. You can browse through Sports,  World, Living, Tech and other. On the left is Search bar.

Since the site is pretty new, as expected it’s not giving you the facts right now. For example I first typed “Firefox 4.0″ and after few seconds it appeared that there are no facts about it. Second, i typed “Last.fm” and it had been passed like about 2 minutes and facterylabs are still getting facts? So, I decided to try something simple:  typed “Avatar” and still facterylabs yet failed to get me some facts.

Even that facterylabs failed to share me some facts the idea of the site is pretty interesting and maybe will lead to something better in future such as GoogleFacts or something. I sure will give it a shot as soon as it become functionable again, and I suggest you to try it out too.

Mozilla Firefox 3.6

Firefox

Great but not such a breaking news is that Mozilla Firefox 3.6 is released. And it brings a lot of exciting new features. Mozilla Firefox is probably the best web browser there is. So what’s new in Firefox?

• Probably the most interesting feature is Personas. You can now browse through 30.000+ themes which will make your browser look beautiful. The great thing about Personas is that you can preview and apply any theme without restarting your browser!  Although Google Chrome came up with it first, Personas made me switch back to Firefox.
• The most important feature is that there are about 200 bug fixes since the Firefox 3.5 which makes 3.6 more safer on the web.
• New Firefox is about 20% faster. It’s very good but still slower than Google Chrome. We hope that will be changed in Firefox 4.0 which will come somewhere in the end 0f 2010.
• It’s available in more than 45 languages which makes it even more friendlier to you. And today, everything is about making users feel safe around web.
• Add-ons were always the best thing in Firefox. In my future posts I will talk more about it.
• And at last 3.6 supports Newest Web Technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3…

Unfortunately there will be no Firefox 3.7, just automatic updates…

WoW: Catalysm Announced

For all you World Of Warcraft freaks, the new expansion is coming. It will bring a whole new adventure for as they work their way through a destroyed and changed Azeroth. New playable races will be Goblins and Worgen. The level cap will be raised to 85 and everyone will enjoy with new quests, dungeons and raids. Archaeology will be the new secondary skill.

Blizzcon also brings us new trailer:

Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal = DOWN?!

As I just heard Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal are suffering from a denial-of-service a.k.a. DDOS attack. The Twitter outage began at about 9 a.m. EDT, said Ken Godskind. Twitter and LiveJournal are down, but Facebook is only slowed.

Facebook issues are affecting comments and statuses.

New Del.icio.us features

Del.icio.us just got better. For all of you who don’t know what Del.icio.us is, here is an explanation. Delicious.com is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering web bookmarks. It was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003. It has more than five million users and 150 million bookmarked URLs.

So, What’s New On Delicious?

The most exciting feature is Sharing. Now, with Del.icio.us you can share your bookmarks to your friends who are or aren’t on Delicious.You can also post your bookmarks to Twitter.

Share

Searching with Delicious is now better. Richer content, search suggestions as you type, easier tag filtering and a timeline graph that shows when the bookmarks were originally saved.

search

There is also Support for inline videos and flickr images. I personally use del.icio.us every day and it’s one of the most reliable social networking sites for me.

Last.fm free radio

We all loved last.fm because of free radio. But then some really stupid people decided to take our last.fm free radio and make us pay the subscription of 3.00$ a month, except for USA, Canada and Germany where is still free.But there is a solution. And it is free. The solution is: Proxy.

First open Last.fm program on your computer. Go to Tools >>> Options…>>>Connection.

last.fm

Now go HERE. Insert a host and port, and here you go! Free last.fm radio. I personally recommend Host: 208.78.125.18

Port: 80

Enjoy your free music

Michael Jackson passed away.

I have just found out on Twitter that pop-star icon Michael Jackson passed away after suffering a cardiac arrest. TMZ.com reported that Michael Jackson, 50 suffered from a heart attack just after 12:00 pm (1900 GMT) local time and paramedics were unable to revive him. A source tells me Jackson was dead when paramedics arrived. We’re told one of the staff members at Jackson’s home called 911. Michael is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince “Blanket” Michael Jackson II.