Not too long ago, Mozilla foundation announced the formation of the autonomous entity Mozilla Messaging to spearhead its projects in the Internet Communication Software space. The organization has trained its eyes on delivering the next major release of the e-mail client Thunderbird – version 3.0.

A quote from Ars Technica

“Our plan starts with building a great product. Firefox has shown that if you have a great product that tens of millions of people love to use daily, doors open and more opportunities become within reach. So we’ll focus on the product,” wrote Ascher in a blog entry. “We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2.”

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Social Networks have been the buzzing web applications for a while now. There has been a significant shift in the online world towards bringing more services to the individual, and social networks have been the defining application towards this trend. At the same time, the success of online virtual worlds such as Second Life have shown that there are two worlds – one social and one virtual that will have to merge at some point down the information highway.

Avatars are virtual identities that with today’s better bandwidth and more graphics crunching capacities on machines provide a custom identity to the netizen. With the sprucing of more and more virtual services online, there is an increasing need for users to be able to take their avatars across services.

An excerpt from the Technology Review

Efforts to carry avatars from one world to another or out onto the Web are still plagued by the lack of interoperability among virtual worlds and inconsistent standards for graphics. Though more than 20 companies announced last fall their intention to develop standards for virtual worlds, those standards are yet to come. Patrick O’Shaughnessey, vice president of software development for the Electric Sheep Company, which makes content for virtual worlds and works with many different platforms, said at a panel during the conference that the interoperability forum is still “talking about how they want to talk about” standards. In the meantime, companies have gone ahead with their own efforts to connect worlds, supporting standards to whatever degree they now exist (for example, DAZ 3D supports COLLADA and FBX, two popular formats for 3-D images).

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Don’t You Just Love Google?

Well do you? I know I do. I don’t think I’ve gone a day without using Google. Because of the time period that I spent on the Internet, there are always things to be searched for; Music, movies, TV shows, books, how-to tutorials, you name it, I always end up using Google for my dose of information.

Being a student, Google is my life. 95% of my information for researches and assignments came from the Internet and of course to get to these information, Google is the perfect highway.

But for some people, sometimes googling can be a tedious work, annoying even, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for. I have friends who don’t use the Google much, and they do lose out on time and good (or relevant) information, time especially when there’s a dateline just turning up on the corner, and they don’t know where to start with Google returning more than 2,000,000 results.

But Google doesn’t only have to be useful to students or to get long-winded information. It can be handy for our daily tasks as well. This article will list out the more popular and useful Google search tricks, tailored to the usage of Malaysian Internet users of course (I hardly think that the “Zip Code Movie” information is relevant to us, it is more relevant to the US users).

1. The “phrase search” method

To start off, this is the more common and popular one, used to search for exact strings or phrases as entered. Just enter your search string with quotation (“”) mark. It is very useful, especially if you don’t want Google to search on separate words. It condenses and filters the results into more relevant and useful results.

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Privacy is an unresolved issue on the web. The fact that web activity metrics can be used to target individuals makes the internet all the more alluring for advertising and a lot more annoying to users. Essentially the very basic IP address of a user can be used to extract quite a lot of information.

Enter Tor, a free networking software which allows you to use the Internet anonymously. It connects your machine to a host of random machines globally so that your web traffic is bounced off those machines, making the process of tracking the origin of the web request more convoluted. In short, the tool provides a reasonable degree of anonymity to web browsing.

An excerpt from Wired:

Wayne Richardson over at the Fsckin w/ Linux blog has put together a dead simple tutorial for setting up Tor and Privoxy to enable anonymous web browsing on Ubuntu Linux. He even includes installing the Torbutton add-on for Firefox and all together the set up takes about 30 seconds.

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Have you ever found that downloading off websites like Sendspace.com and MegaUpload.com a pain? What with the download limit and the ever-busy servers of theirs? I find it very hard to wake up in the middle of the night just to check if my download has finished and to click on another link to run another download again, only to be told the server is busy, and to try again in another few minutes.

Yes, I’ve lived that life (ONLY for a day) and then I grew tired of the routine. So I searched the Internet to find me a good solution to this and alas, I found my favorite software of all time, well, at least for the time being.

This software is called the Universal Share Downloader. With its simple interface, this piece of software will make your life easier at downloading, because all you need to do is copy the download link and paste it into the software. The software will then start on the download, by-passing any annoying Captcha request and it will also automatically re-connect to the server if the server is busy until it can secure a slot.

Let me give you step by step screen shots.

Copy the download link from the MegaUpload address bar.

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