Technology Madness

Earth hour day is here. Ideas in the Dark: March 28, 2009

Tomorrow (March 28,2009) is an earth hour day. People all over the world have been switching off lights for an hour to show concern at global warming. Earth Hour occurs at 8:30 pm on the last Saturday in March of every year. For Earth Hour 2009, 750 cities in 80 countries and counting have pledged to participate. Clearly the symbolic act of turning off our lights to show concern for our environment resonates deeply with people across the globe. Yet turning off our lights for one hour a year does not even put a dent in our energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. What is needed is a real, sustained change in the way that we live our life.

What I can do about it?

You can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Also, turn off your (non-emergency) home lights at 8.PM for 1 hour.

Suggestion to Google.com/Yahoo.com/AOL.com/Live.com:

Google.com/AOL.com or such major traffic website should blackout their home page everyday around 5.00 PM (office leaving time) for few minutes to remind people to turn off their office light and computer before they go home. Small things make a big difference.

Earth hour day video:

More information:

Climate Savers Computing Initiative
Earth Hour
Earth hour day wikipedia.org page
Follow Earth day Twitter message
WWF earth day information
Earth day Canada
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Earth Hour video
Take earth hour to earth day challenge

Earth Hour Global Social Media Profiles:
YouTube
MySpace
Twitter
Facebook Group
Facebook Fan Page
Flickr Fan Page
Bebo

Via [Official Google Blog: An hour for the Earth and Earth hour comes to America and Yahoo earth hour day news]

Tags: bright idea, Climate Savers Computing Initiative, Dark city, earth day, earth hour, earth hour 2009, earth hour campaign, earth hour day, earth hour poster, earth hour sydney, eh2ed, energy conservation, Environment, global warming, Save the world, wwf earth hour, youtube earth hour

Google’s Big Blunder: “This site may harm your computer”.

Since this morning every search query on Google.com is labeled with “This site may harm your computer.” What the heck! Even Google’s own pages are labeled with the same warning. Even if you want to ignore that warning, google will stop you on next page with another big warning:
“Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!”

This is clearly a blunder of Google and may be potential lawsuit from many company for harming their online reputation. As I write this, there is no warning information on google blog

See this screen snap:

Update: As of 10:25 ET, things are just fine but the reddit community confirms that Google searches were suffered worldwide. No word from Google Yet.

Update: 12:02 EST, Google has posted an update to its official Google blog that attributes this fairly major “bug” to human error: “We periodically receive updates to that list and received one such update to release on the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.

Earlier Google Blog reported that Google gets its list of bad URLs from stopBadware.org. However, stopnadware.org denied such statement. Later, Google updated its earlier post and stated that “bug” was due human error.

‘/’ has been removed and placed where it belongs to… All in all, things are happy now!

Update: 3:05 ET, I notice that some of my legitimate gmail email that I received between this down time, went to spam folder of my gmail:

See this screen snap of legitimate email that I used to get in my inbox but today it went to spam.

Example 1: Google’s own email went to Spam

Example 2:

Extra reading: Google’s Black Day: Truths - Myths - Pros - Cons via PavanKumar

Tags: Google, Google Coding error, google warning visiting this web site may harm your com, Googogle, slash error, This site may harm your computer

Earth Hour Day - Dark city, bright idea

Today is earth hour day. People all over the world have been switching off lights for an hour to show concern at global warming. Google.com homepage as a gesture (keeping google.com homepage with black background) to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation effort called Earth Hour. This event created by the World Wildlife Fund.

What is earth hour?

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone. On this day, cities around the world, including Copenhagen, Chicago, Melbourne, Dubai, and Tel Aviv, will hold events to acknowledge their commitment to energy conservation.

Which cities involved around the world?

List of cities? http://www9.earthhourus.org/cities.php

What I can do about it?

You can do something to reduce the energy consumption of your home PC by joining the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Also, turn off your (non-emergency) home lights at 8.PM for 1 hour.

More information:

Climate Savers Computing Initiative 

Earth Hour 

Earth hour day wikipedia.org page

Flicking the switch - before and after earth hour pictures/photos, here, here and here

Suggestion to Google.com:

Google.com or such major traffic website should do this (blackout their home page) everyday around 5.00 PM (office leaving time) to remind people to turn off their office light and computer before they go home. Small things make a big difference.

Google.com homepage on earth hour day: (March 29)

Australia Sydney during earth hour: 

Frequent flashes of far-off lightning lit the clouds as Sydney’s skyline went dark at 8 pm.

Via [Google.com earth hour page and earthhour.org]

Technorati tags: earth hour energy conservation save the world Dark city, bright idea global warming Climate Savers Computing Initiative

The New BBC Homepage

BBC has just launched a new home page at here - you can personalize every section on the site to match your interest, including color, position of any section. You can also add and remove your favorite sections the way you want, the where you want. However, layout can not be change from three columns to two columns. Currently, it is designed in three columns, with top story section merged in two columns.

What you can not do? You can not remove Top story section. Weather section can not be set for any of non-Britain location. Also, you may not be able to set your favorite stock price in business section. There are few more, may be you can add it in comment section <:-)

Overall it is beautifully designed and works well in latest Internet explorer and Fire fox

Via [BBC internet news blog]

Unlimited storage for Yahoo mail, it’s coming!

Today Yahoo announced their upcoming plan about  giving away unlimited storage for their yahoo mail service.  When it hits your account, you’ll notice the storage meter has
disappeared — meaning, you just don’t have to worry about deleting old
messages ever again!

So whats the Catch: well nothing except size of attachment. I can live with it.

Here is a comparison of the mailbox sizes offered by various web based email services.

• GMail: +2.5 GB (growing)
• Windows Live Hotmail:  2 GB
• Yahoo Mail: 1 GB (now its going to be unlimited)
• Lycos Mail: 3 GB
• Rediffmail: Unlimited: very popular in India

Via [yahoo blog]

Malicious Website: Super Bowl XLI / Dolphin Stadium!

WebSense is reporting that the Super Bowl XLI / Dolphin Stadium website has been compromised with malicious code. With all the traffic going there with the Super Bowl coming up tomorrow, a lot of people will get infected.

A link to a malicious javascript file has been inserted into the header of the front page of the site. Visitors to the site execute the script, which attempts to exploit two vulnerabilities: MS06-014 and MS07-004. Both of these exploits attempt to download and execute a malicious file.

The file that is downloaded is a NsPack-packed Trojan keylogger/backdoor, providing the attacker with full access to the compromised computer. The filename is w1c.exe and its MD5 is ad3da9674080a9edbf9e084c10e80516

We have notified the owner’s of the site, but the site is currently still malicious.

Via WebSense

Technorati Tags: super bowl, superbowl