It’s been quite some time since Facebook was valued at $15 billion. Everyone’s had the opportunity to pick up their jaws, reinsert their eyeballs, and so on. It hopefully won’t come as too much of a shock, then, that LinkedIn’s received $53 million in funding, putting its worth in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
Is $1 billion too much? The Dow’s only 62 points away from passing under the 12,000 mark. Is it too little? Compare the bank accounts of LinkedIn’s users to those controlled by Facebook fans, and then ask an advertiser which group looks better.
Some of LinkedIn’s backers seem to feel $1 billion is low. Backers are supposed to feel that way, of course (especially when they’re on camera), but since LinkedIn’s investors include Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures, we’re not talking about clueless cheerleaders.
In a post on the LinkedIn Blog, CEO Dan Nye notes that his company has been profitable since 2006, and continues, “This additional funding will give us even more flexibility to execute on our vision for millions of professionals to increase their effectiveness by using LinkedIn to build relationships and exchange knowledge, opportunities and advice.”
Finally, for better or for worse, there was no indication that normal people and the stock market will get to involve themselves in LinkedIn’s finances anytime soon.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) didn’t exactly point fingers and do any name calling, but the results of its broadband penetration study shined like red badge on the US’s broadband shortcomings. When compared to the rest of the world, Uncle Sam comes up short.
By the end of 2007, the US had slipped from 12th place in the world in terms of broadband penetration to 15th place, due mainly to consumers paying higher prices for slower speeds and poor rural access.
Despite that the US comprised nearly 70 million broadband subscribers, or about 30% of the total subscribers in the 30 countries studied, only seven countries were paying more for broadband access: Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Mexico, Iceland, Hungary, Poland and Norway.
Not exactly a who’s-who among developed nations. With 40% of Japan and 34% of Korea wired up to fiber connections, that busts the US down the ranks even further in terms of broadband speed. Twenty-six countries had faster advertised DSL speeds, putting the US just ahead of Mexico, Turkey, and Poland.
That’s good news for all the immigrants coming across the Rio Grande; they can count on slightly better Internet speeds. The fastest advertised download speed in the US was 50 Mbps, half of what is available in Finland, France, South Korea and Sweden, and dwarfed by 1Gbps available in Japan.
While we sourly remember a $200 billion good-faith payment the US government made to the telecommunications industry 12 years ago, the OECD gives recommendations for today’s government for improving available access. The recommendations are as follows:
• Governments need to promote competition and give consumers more choices. They should encourage new networks, particularly upgrades to fibre-optic lines.
• Governments providing money to fund broadband rollouts should avoid creating new monopolies. Any new infrastructure built using government funds should be open access – meaning that access to that network is provided on non-discriminatory terms to other market participants.
• Governments should discourage harmful business conduct and practices such as misleading advertising and unjustifiably long consumer lock-in periods.
Can you find which things the US forgot to do in the past 20 years?
“The fact is that the countries outperforming the United States have something we lack — a coherent national broadband policy,” said S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press. “Policymakers who are serious about America’s economic and social well-being should focus on the open access policies that bring the benefits of broadband to all Americans.”
According to an analysis by Free Press, countries with open access policies had nearly twice the level of broadband penetration as those that did not.
YouTomb, a site focused on tracking all the videos that have been removed from YouTube for copyright violation, is a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The people who created the site are the MIT Free Culture student group. YouTomb says it,”Continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown.” “The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm.” YouTomb records the title of each video that is removed from YouTube along with a description of the video, who uploaded it, when it was taken down and a few screen shots. There are no actual videos that visitors to the site can watch. The site is currently monitoring 223,246 videos and has flagged 4,396 videos that have been taken down for alleged copyright violation. The companies that have removed the most videos include, TV Tokyo Corporation, Viacom International Inc, Warner Bros. Entertainment, and World Wrestling Entertainment. YouTomb says its initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, but it is also interested in other video collections. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web sites are protected from legal action if they remove infringing content after receiving a takedown notice from the copyright holder.
I have used GreatNews: The intelligent RSS reader for over a year, and this application never failed me. GreatNews runs immediately and doesn’t require any special runtime environments.it’s a portable application.
With “Auto-discovery” Adding feeds to GreatNews is very simple, all you need to have is the link to the website and the reader will automatically find all the feeds offered by the website and give you the option to choose your preferred one.
Here’s a list of GreatNews Features(from the official website):
* Channel Statistics shows your top 10 most or least visited channels.
* Use labels to organize your articles. With just a single click, all items with the same label can be listed as if they are under the same folder. You can also use labelsto customize article exports.
* With Search Channels, you can type in stock symbol to track the latest news about the company via Yahoo Company News. Or use keywords to monitor latest blog comments via Feedster, MSN and Flickr
* Support all major feed formats, including RSS 0.9x, 1.0(rdf), 2.0, Atom 0.30 and 1.0. Support popular extensions like dublin core, content:encoding etc.
* Integrated internet browser, with tabs and popup blocking. Working closely with default browser like Firefox.
* With Import/Export wizard, you can import/export all channel subscriptions in a single step.
* Export rss articles to rss 2.0 format. You can also customize the export by selecting channel/group/label, and/or applying filters.
* Bloglines.com integration
Read everywhere at Bloglines.com, but read twice as fast at your desk.
* Full text search with keyword highlights.
* 100% Unicode support. Displays international languages on the same page. Use any languages anywhere in GreatNews, including Search, Label and News watch.
* “Channel Organizer” helps organize channel subscriptions in one place. Use “Find Channel” to locate your subscriptions quickly.
* Support HTTP Conditional GETs and gzip/deflate encoding to reduce bandwidth consumption.
* Track Comment function automatically updates articles with latest comments.
* BlogThis function to post directly to your blogging service. Support popular blogging tools like w.Bloggar, Zoundry and Windows Live Writer.
The popular BitTorrent tracking site Mininova announced the development of a new online video streaming service latest project in cooperation with a Dutch university development team. The service will offer Mininova users users the chance to videos streamed from .torrent files.
The first beta release of this software will be invitation-only for a small group of Mininova members, with no indication when it will be moved to open beta status.
The Open Source “swarmplayer” which is used for the video streaming service is developed in collaboration with the Tribler team from the Technical University Delft and Free University Amsterdam. Tribler is also working together with the BBC and several other European broadcasters, and they recently received a $19 million grant for P2P research from the European Union.
According to Mininova, the service will only work with the “featured” torrents, which lists all the distributors taking part in Mininova’s content distribution platform..
A check of Mininova’s current list of so-called “features” appears to include some very familiar names, including The Bourne Ultimatum, Ratatouille, and American Gangster — titles whose licensed status from their respective studios does not appear evident.
Though the legality of the site’s operations and services remains questionable, record and movie associations have had very little luck attempting to shut down Mininova thus far.
Mininova already has a music streaming feature for their content distribution platform, based on the Java applet developed by Bitlet
Mininova is listed among the 50 most visited websites on the Internet and has nearly 30 million unique visitors a month.
The site is looking for people to beta test the service, say Erik, one of the admins: “We are looking for people who would like to be in the first testing group who test the software, report suggestions and bugs you find.”
If you would like to join, reply to their blog post here.
While working on The Linker, it was suggested to me by the good people of FreeWebSpace.net to add some javascript that would automatically delete the text inside the input box. So here’s how i did it:
At first i had a simple input field wictch says “Write Your Preferred Shortcut Name”:
<input name="name" value="Write Your Preferred Shortcut Name" style="width: 390px" type="text"/>
That’s the html part, on to the javascript,For the Javascript i used the two built-in events: onfocus and onblur.The onfocus event occurs when an object gets focus, in the input field case, it means that when the field is selected.The onblur event occurs when an object loses focus, in the input field case, it means that when the field is unselected.
So what do we want to do these two events?
What i would like the script to do is automatically delete “Write Your Preferred Shortcut Name”, and when the input field is unselected while still empty the text should return. To do that, i included to if statments in the both events:
onfocus: if (this.value == ‘Write Your Preferred Shortcut Name’) {this.value = ”;} onblur: if (this.value == ”) {this.value = ‘Write Your Preferred Shortcut Name’;}
Since the moment i got my 1 GB Flash Memory stick, i began to gather all the portable applications i can find. Usually these applications are not marketed as portable, but you can easily figure it out by renaming the installation directory and running the application, if it run properly then it’s a portable application.
Here’s a list of free portable applications that every IT guy should have on his flash memory at all time.
PortableApps.com’s has a very nice list of portable application, here’s my favorite:
Angry IP scanner - Angryziber.com - IP scanner capable of scanning big ranges of IPs and checking for specific open ports.
SIW System Auditor - Gtopala.com - Gathers ALL available information about the system and dumps into a file.
CPU-Z - Cpuid.com - Gathers information on some of the main devices of your system and dumps it into a file.
LCleaner - 585Soft.com - Cleans the system from unwanted files
XP Security Console - DougKnox.com - This application offers hidden options in XP and can help you override modification implemented by Trojans and other malwares
The File Splitter - Dekabyte.com - This is a program that will split any file into pieces of any size and later combine the pieces to form the original file
Qumana - Qumana.com - A blogging tool, witch enables you to blog directly from your desktop
i will keep updating this list, every time i find a new portable application
Surfing the net, i come across some amazin photoshops that i like to store on mu computer. Here’s a my top ten favorite pictures, listed in no particular order:
Whenever a web browser is used to connect to a remote web server it includes a User Agent string that contains details about browser and operating system. This tweak allows you to add or remove additional information from this string.
Changing user agent string is needed when online security is a concern or to bypass web services access restriction for certain type of web browser.
For example, Adobe Reader download site will display different download page according to the web browser that visiting the site, limit or auto pick up Adobe Reader version for the OS type in the user agent string, force Adobe Updater to manage Adobe Reader download progress. So, by changing the user agent string, one can directly download any Adobe Reader version of any platforms or languages with Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox, without using the Adobe Updater or Opera web browser!
Another use for changing the user agent data is the ability to read restricted websites and forums. Some websites & forums will not allow you to read their content without registering first. This requirement gets really annoying and frustrating when you go through it over and over again. But you might or might have not noticed is that these pages are being cached by search engines, because they’re specially designed to allow access to specific search engine’s bots. So, all we have to do is get that page to think that you’re a bot and you do that by changing your user agent. Here’s how you do it:
Mozilla Firefox:
For people using Firefox, changing their user agent is very simple. All you have to do is download and install User Agent Switcher add-on. Then you can simply add different user agents and switch between them directly from the browser.
Internet Explore:
Internet Explorer 6 SP2 on Windows 2000 and IE 7 for Windows XP:
Create theVersion key of REG_SZ type (string type) or edit it if it already exists. Give it one of the following values: Firefox/2.0.0.4for Firfox , "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)", without the quotes for Google Bot.
IE7 in Windows Vista
Copy Paste the following code into Vista’s command prompt:
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe ADD "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent" /v Version /d "insert user agent here" /f
To revert back to original user agent string value:
%windir%\System32\cmd.exe /k %windir%\System32\reg.exe DELETE "HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent" /v Version /f
Note:Some services may not work correctly by changing your user agent, such as Windows update.
Opera 9.21:
Typeopera:configin the Opera address bar and press ENTER,
TypeSpoof UserAgent IDin the text-box next to Show All
Change the Spoof User Agent ID to any one of these supported user agent string:
1 = Opera (default user agent string of Opera) 2 = Mozilla 3 = Internet Explorer 4 = Mozilla, Opera not mentioned 5 = Internet Explorer, Opera not mentioned
Save the change made before exit and restart Opera 9.21
When it first launched in 2004, Facebook swept across college campuses and became forever embedded in our popular culture.Just two short years later, anyone older than 13 could join, making the social networking site one of the most popular sites on the Internet with 60 million registered users. It became so popular, in fact, that a 2006 study found that college students named the site as the second most “in” thing, tied with beer and sex - losing only to the ubiquitous iPod.
So how could something that became as popular as two of the most common college traditions go so wrong in just a few years after its creation?Even though many of us enjoyed the welcomed distraction of friending, tagging and poking people for countless hours, it soon became apparent that Facebook was going to have to do more than connect us with our friends to hold our attention - and keep turning a profit. And it was downhill from there. Unfortunately, to accomplish its revenue goal, the creator of the billion-dollar Facebook decided it would have to sell our privacy to the highest bidder. And with the extremely profitable market that the site had captured so quickly, it wasn’t unexpected. Sure, students quickly caught on that maybe posting everything on Facebook wasn’t such a good idea. When public scandals involving inappropriate photo postings continued to make the news on campuses across the country, users became more selective about what they were posting on the site. After all, not everyone wanted the world to see documented proof of a typical weekend’s worth of their debauchery. However, the more clandestine, corporate violations of personal privacy that a Facebook account might allow were not so obvious to the millions of the site’s devotees. We can trace the beginning of the end of Facebook as we knew it to Nov. 7. The site introduced Facebook Beacon, a marketing scheme that includes a system to allow users to share information about their activities on other Web sites. When people realized that what they purchased or viewed on these “partner Web sites” was immediately published on Facebook without their permission, red flags went up across cyberspace. Realizing the potential for destructive blows to his company’s net worth, founder Mark Zuckerberg made yet another public apology for the way that a new application was launched. Beacon was later changed to require that any actions transmitted to the site would have to be approved by the user. But, by then, the damage was already done. So, when it was revealed last week that Facebook is now the target of an investigation from the United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office, it came as no surprise to us. The site is currently facing questions about how it protects users’ data after someone complained that the social network did not fully delete their information even after they had terminated their account. We won’t try to deny the potential benefits of having a Facebook account, which is why we were so infatuated with it in the first place - hell, you can even friend the Alligator if you want. But we continue to be disappointed with the way the site is transforming into another tool for corporate America’s quest to acquire more consumers at the expense of personal privacy. The once genius idea generated from a Harvard student’s dorm room has become a corporate pirate holding hostage something some people would be willing to pay any price to have access to - our information.
Darko on June 18th, 2008
YouTomb, a site focused on tracking all the videos that have been removed from YouTube for copyright violation, is a research project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The people who created the site are the MIT Free Culture student group. 
I have used GreatNews: The intelligent RSS reader for over a year, and this application never failed me. GreatNews runs immediately and doesn’t require any special runtime environments.
The popular BitTorrent tracking site Mininova announced the development of a new online video streaming service latest project in cooperation with a Dutch university development team. The service will offer Mininova users users the chance to videos streamed from .torrent files.
While working on 
Since the moment i got my 1 GB Flash Memory stick, i began to gather all the portable applications i can find. Usually these applications are not marketed as portable, but you can easily figure it out by renaming the installation directory and running the application, if it run properly then it’s a portable application.
