Elk Cloner (1982)

Elk Cloner is regarded as the first virus to hit personal computers worldwide, “Elk Cloner” spread through Apple II floppy disks. The program was authored by Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grade student then, who wanted to play a joke on his schoolmates. The virus was put on a gaming disk, which could be used 49 times. On 50th time, instead of starting the game, it opened a blank screen that read a poem: “Elk Cloner:  The program with a personality” It will get on all your disks. It will infiltrate your chips. Yes it’s Cloner! It will stick to you like glue. It will modify RAM too. Send in the Cloner!” The computer would then be infected. Elk Cloner was though a self-replicating virus like most other viruses, it bore little resemblance to the malicious programmes of today.

Brain (1986)

Brain was the first virus to hit computers running Microsoft’s then popular operating system MS-DOS. The virus was written by two Pakistani brothers, Basit Farooq Alvi and his brother Amjad Farooq Alvi and left the phone number of their computer repair shop. A boot-sector virus, Brain infected the boot records of 360K floppy disks. The virus would fill unused space on the floppy disk so that it could not be used. The first “stealth” virus, it hid itself from any detection by disguising the infected space on the disk. Due to its partial non-destructiveness, Brain often went undetected as many times users paid little attention to the slow speed of floppy disk access. The virus was also known as Lahore, Pakistani and Pakistani Brain. BusinessWeek magazine called the virus the Pakistani flu. The brothers told TIME magazine they had written it to protect their medical software from piracy and it was supposed to target copyright infringers only.

Morris (1988)

Written by a Cornell University graduate student, Robert Tappan Morris, the virus infected an estimated 6,000 university and military computers connected over the Internet. Incidentally, Morris’s father was a top government computer-security expert, The computers Morris invaded were part of the Arpanet, an international grid of telephone lines, buried cables, and satellite hookups established by the Department of Defense in 1969. Interestingly, Morris later claimed that the worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet. An unintended consequence of the code, however, led to the damage caused.

CIH (1998)

Chernobyl virus also known as CIH or Spacefiller was first detected in 1998, however, it first triggered in April 1999, 13th the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (which took place in Ukrainian). It was conceived by a University graduate from Taiwan called Chen Ing Hau (CIH). One of the most harmful viruses, it overwrites critical information on infected system drives. The virus was reportedly the first virus known to have the power to damage computer hardware, with virus attempting to erase the hard drive and overwrite the system’s BIOS as well. The virus is also known as “space filler virus,” due to its ability to clandestinely take up file space on computers and prevent anti-virus software from running. The malicious program caused widespread damage in several Asian countries paralyzing thousands of computers.

Melissa (1999)

‘Melissa’ was one of the first viruses to spread over email. When users opened an attachment, the virus sent copies of itself to the first 50 people in the user’s address book, covering the globe within hours. The virus known as Melissa — believed to have been named after a Florida stripper its creator David L. Smith knew, caused more than $80m in damage after it was launched in March 1999. Computers became infected when users received a particular e-mail and opened a Word document attached to it. First found on March 26, 1999, Melissa shut down Internet mail systems at several enterprises across the world after being they got clogged with infected e-mails carrying the worm. The worm was first distributed in the Usenet discussion group alt.sex. The creator of the virus, David Smith, was sentenced to 20 months imprisonment by a United States court.

Features of the theme:

Installation Guide
Ad Optimized Theme
Magazine Style theme – add your news easily
Thumbnail Support for Stories – “Images are resized on the fly, no custom fields”
Video Spot – Place videos on your theme with simple steps
Ajax Tabs
Dropdown Navigation
2 Sidebars with Widget Support
Valid XHTML Strict code
Valid CSS code
Gravatar Support Built-in
Custom 404 Error Page

Live Demo Download Guzel

Now you must be excited to download the toolbar and see it in action. Well Please download the Entrecard toolbar now.

Some of the features of Entre card toolbar are Quick Account Switching, your personal account details, Who to browse and how to browse, jump button, one touch favorites, One-Click Advertising, Interaction Menu and Entrecard Menu for login and logout.

For a detail description of the features and more elaborate description, please head over to Entrecard blog.

No to no follow

To avoid this situation and encouraging users to provide their views and interact with other users and webmasters, the webmasters could not spare the rel=”nofollow” attribute. Many such individuals decided to pass the link juice from their blog/websites to their users (geunuine readers) so they come up with something called Do-Follow. So they came up with strategies that will remove the rel=”nofollow” attribute from a user submitted link (It is not gonna put rel=”dofollow”). Omission of the nofollow attribute lets the search engine spider to perceive the link as a normal link and it passes the link juice. Here is an example of how a comment looks like when rel=”nofollow”  and without Rel=’nofollow” that’s with Dofollow attribute is present.

<a href='http://freelancetwins.com' rel='external nofollow'>Alex the Freelance Twin</a>
<a href='http://www.swopster.com' rel='external'>Swopster</a>

As per my knowledge a fine webmaster and blogger called Colleen from GeekySpeaky is attributed as the original promoter and creator of Do-follow blog list. Which has been popularized by Courtney Tuttle with his D-List. At time this D-List was so popular and people started adding their blogs into the list that I got a lot of back links to this blog (Forgot to mention that I was among the initial few to start promoting inspired by Courtney Tuttle) that once my technorati ranking was as low as 40,000. The D-LIst contains more than 250 Do-follow blogs list which would have been the best way top get approximately 250 back links to any website. But wait I am yet to say the prime reason I am writing this post.

As I said this more than 250 lists of Do-follow blogs would have fetched as many back links. But that’s not true. Only recently got to know about it. I was reading a couple of posts in Digital Point forum, in services section I was surprised to find that many service providers are offering Do-Follow blog commenting service and they are getting orders like hell. I got hold of a couple of such service providers and found the list of blogs they are putting comment. Much to my dismay they are following the D-List in close paralance. So what I did was I just checked a couple of blogs from the D-List and I was surprised to find that they are no longer supporting the movement. I mean they are not passinng any link juice to ur website as the rel=”nofollow” attribute is quite visible in the user submitetd links. I checked almost all the links one by one and more than half is no longer Do-Follow blogs. So are the serevice takers in DP being cheated by the service providers?

I can not say they are being cheated knowingly. The service providers are putting the comments in DoFollow blogs but they are not sure whether the blogs are do-follow or No-Follow. They are just blindly following the easily available D-List in the Internet.

Now the question definitely arises why the webmasters and Bloggers who joined the Do-Follow movement earlier are now opting out of it? It has a single unanimous answer and that is comment spam. After I joined in the D-List I have seen the comment count in my blog has increased exponentially and most of the comments seems as if they are for the purpose of link building and the commenter or reader does not have any genuine interest in commenting. They use all funny anchor texts just for the purpose of SEO. Such instances has made many Do-followers to become no-followers.

Now here is something for you. I stumbled upon this post in DP where the guy is selling Genuine Do-follow blogs, forum and Directory list. I got one by paying 10 bucks to him and it seems this is the only genuine list available now. It has a whole 61 such links and they are Do-FOLLOW atleast that what it seems to me till now.

They write unique contents and present it in an easy to understand manner.

They write regularly and write more than one posts in a day.

They have embraced blogging as a full time occupation.

So if any one wishes to be a problogger the above 3 points especially the first two counts a lot. But you are new to blogging things and have not got quite used to it. You do not have much idea to write unique contents and you have a 9-5 job and want to spend quality time with your family. So obviously you can not give much time to your blog. Do not worry you can still be a problogger and you do not have to shell out tons of dollars for that. Atul from Digital I.T has foiled the trick of getting copyscape passed unique article for your blog for a few dollars. Here is an excerpt from Atul’s post titled Be a pro blogger in just $20.

I thought this would be a great headline that how few new upcoming webmasters and bloggers think that they can be a pro blogger in $20 but it is not a right method but many guys are using it in forums . I was working on this from last few days and after completing my survey i decided to write on it . Few days back while working for my clients on digitalpoint I saw many writers were providing article writing services and when i contacted few service providers via mail than they offer me copyscape passed article for just $3 to $5 but for that i have to place a minimum bulk order of 10 articles on any niche and they will deliver them in just 24 to 48hours(It is a trick so that buying customer think that the are writing their own and not using any software but you can rewrite one article in just 3 to 6 seconds by rewrite softwares ). Than i thought than how can someone write on so many niche so professionally and so fast too…..Read the full Story Be a pro blogger in just $20

In a shared hosting plan basically 500- 1000 websites are hosted on a single web server and it is evident that with growing popularity of a site it will consume more resources. According to the terms and condition of reseller panel I was not supposed to consume more than 4.5% of CPU resources for 180 seconds. At the beginning of this site that was never a problem but with popularity the site started eating resources and in a week time they suspended the site almost 4 times for violating the terms and condition. So I finally decided to look for other alternatives and with discussion with many hosting providers I finally gave it a go to choose a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting plan. Though tweaking the site a bit could have made me manage with a shared hosting plan but it is for sure that one day in future it will require a VPS or a dedicated server. So I thought why not now. I will be writing more about my journey in the last 1 week and the knowledge I gained doing research on webhosting later.

Now this site resides on a Virtual Private Server provided by TheVPSGuy with following specification:

- 20GB dedicated hard drive space
- 768MB dedicated RAM and swapable upto 1 GB
- 800MHz dedicated CPU speed
- CentOS 5.1 with Lxadmin and HyperVM

Thats quite a good configuration for this site and to serve thousand of users at a time without any issues.

You would have also noticed that recently I have changed the design of blog very frequently, this is because I am going to launch Techie Zone V2.0. You may ask me why the heck I am experimenting the design on a Live site? This is because to provide a glimpse to the users about the new designs I am experimenting. Very shortly I will announce Techie Zone V2.0 and the current theme is the one. More on this will follow on my future posts.

Let’s wish the new incarnation of Techie Zone a very best future and let it serve the community without any flaw or downtime.

The First Day of Summer is the day when the summer begin. In United states and rest of the Northern hemisphere the summer of 2008 begins at 20th June. This is the day of the year when the sun is the farthest North. It is basically called as the Summer Solstice and the name of the image represented by Google Doodle says the same. When we take the whole world into account the summer starts at different period in different regions. Like it starts on March 21st in India and on 21st December in Australia. So there is not an official first day of summer like New Year’s Day or Christmas day. The First day of Summer wherever it be, is the longest day of the year.

My Argument on this Doodle:

Google has different domain for different countries, so why they still make the doodle ( for an occassion which is not celebrated worldwide ) appear for all the domains of Google. Like when I type google.com in my browser and hit Enter it automatically takes me to google.co.in page (though the look and feel is same but I am served from a different server of Google, correct me please if I am wrong in my understanding). Then Google can better keep the doodle in the domain of the region the occasion is meant for. It makes no practical sense for someone in India or Australia to see the First Day of Summer Doodle when they are in Rainy season or Winter.

The premium themes are generally available at a price range of $39 and more. If you wish to buy a decent premium theme it will bun your pocket in access of US $ 50. When I first started my blogging journey and moved to Wordpress, I was incited by the look of these premium themes and in a hurry bought a theme called WP Remix. The person behind the theme is R Bhavesh. The website for this theme promised a lot of things and design about the theme but it delivers nothing. It is infact worst then a free theme. The design included with the theme are worst and the support for the theme is not available. The guy promised me that he will help me in any kind of customization but after I purchased he made me look like a fool. he told he is too busy and he can not help me in customizing. Moreever the showcase in the website for the WP Remix theme shows various designs and when I asked the guy for example or Live demo of those sites he was failed to provide any. It seems he has created the PSD designs and is showing them on the site and those design exist no where. I paid US $ 55 for this theme but have not used the theme till date.
Based upon my learning, while choosing theme for your site, do not get incited by the look of the so called premium themes and waste money on them. Rather do extensive research and find some freely available themes. For your information the theme currently used in this site is a free theme but it delivers much better look and facilities then the US $ 55 worth of WP remix theme. The theme I am currently using is WP Magazine and available fro free at Gabfire. Though I have modified it extensively I like working with this theme and the way it is designed. Another theme that I am using in one other site of mine is Options theme and it is one of the best theme available fro free. In fact it delivers quite more functionality and customization then the much hyped premium themes with price tag attached to them.

A final a few words of caution before you decide on switching to Premium themes, Do not ever buy WP Remix theme (telling from my personal experience), Do extensive search in google to find a a theme for free that will serve your purpose, read other users comment about the theme you wish to buy, thoroughly check the theme show case and demo.

Hello,

Thank you for your email.

I’ve started the reissue process for your payment and I’ve placed a stop payment on your check. If you happen to receive the original check, please do not deposit it, as your bank may charge fees for depositing a stopped check.

Within about 15 days, your earnings will be credited back into your account and you’ll see a ‘Check stopped – earnings credited back’ line appear on your Payment History page. If this line appears before the 15th of the month, your earnings will be included in that month’s payment cycle. If it appears after the 15th, your earnings will be included in next month’s payment cycle.

If you’d like to update your form of payment to receive your payment by another means, please do so between the 1st and 15th of the month. If you update your form of payment after the 15th of the month, we can’t guarantee you’ll receive your payment in the manner you’ve chosen.

For additional questions, I’d encourage you to visit the AdSense Help Center ( http://www.google.com/adsense_help ) or the official AdSense blog ( http://adsense.blogspot.com?utm_source=txft ). Alternatively, feel free to post your question on the AdSense Help Forum ( http://groups.google.com/group/adsense-help?utm_source=txft ).

Sincerely,

Bhavani
The Google AdSense Team

After reading that reply this was my reply to Google:

Hello Bhavani,

Could you please let me know why the process of getting check is delayed everytime. last time It did not reach even aftre 2 months and I had to cancel. A few days after I request for cancel the payment the check reached. And this time The check tht was sent on 22 feb has not reached yet. Could you please let me know what is going on??

To my above reply, this is the response I received from Google. Does it look something fishy?

Hello Ajay,

As you’ve selected your payment method as ’standard delivery,’ we send
your check via normal post. There might be a delay if there are issues at
the local post office. I suggest you select ’secure express delivery’ so
you can receive your checks via courier.
Checks delivered by secured express delivery will be mailed to you via DHL
and should arrive within 5 days of the approval date. Should you choose to
have your payments sent in this manner, a secure delivery charge for
mailing each check will be deducted from your account at the time of
payment. This charge is visible in your publisher account – simply click
the ‘edit’ link under ‘Payment details’, on the My Account page.

Please note that secured express delivery charges will not affect the $100
minimum amount to qualify for payment. For example, if your account
balance reaches $105, but your secured express delivery fee is $25, your
account will still qualify for payment and you’ll receive a check equal to
$80.

If your payments are sent by secured express delivery, you can view a DHL
tracking number by clicking any Payment link in your Payment History page.
Tracking numbers will typically be visible by the 5th of any month and can
be tracked on www.dhl.com.

Sincerely,

Bhavani
The Google AdSense Team

Again My reply:

So u mean to say that if I am opting for normal delivery to get rid off the $ 25 charge which is too huge then there is no way to track the payment sent.
I understand that standard delivery will take some time but a delay of 3 months is clearly not acceptable.

To this the guy sent me a nice reply mentioning a workaround, read this out:

Hello Ajay,

Please understand that we issue your payment as soon as your earnings
cross $100. There might be delays in your payment reaching you because of
the postal service. To avoid paying $25 every time your payment is issued,
you can choose to have your payments held and your earnings carried over
to the next month by selecting a ’self-hold’ within your publisher
account. To request that your payment be held, please follow these steps:

1. Log into your account at https://www.google.com/adsense
2. Click on the ‘My Account’ tab
3. On the ‘Account Settings’ page, under ‘Payment Holding’, click ‘Edit’.
4. Check the box marked ‘Hold payment’ to hold your previous month’s
earnings.

We ask that you place a hold between the 1st and 15th of the month. Should
you change your hold status after the 15th, we cannot guarantee that your
payment will be held for the previous month’s earnings. We therefore
strongly advise you to make changes to your hold status only between the
1st and 15th of any month. We appreciate your understanding.

Sincerely,

Bhavani
The Google AdSense Team

So what do you guys think is going on? Don’t you think that Google should remove the standard delivery option from Adsense. Is it a plot by Google not to send checks by standard delivery and let the user sacrifice 25 bucks just for the sake of Express delivery. If it is like that why do not they make the limit to 1000 bucks instead of 100. Now guess what, I have made a hold to my payment till I accumulate 1000 bucks and I will sacrifice 25 bucks to receive the check through Express Delivery. I am not saying Google is wrong, but they should take some extra care and make sure that the checks through standard delivery are also reaching to publishers.

what do you think, please share your views.

The search for future content is as simple as google search as per the new user interface developed by Google. Type the word you would like to search and select the option “One day in advance” and hit Enter and you are taken to the future and you will get to see how the web will look tomorrow.

The core technology that powers gDay is MATE short for Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation. Using MATE’s machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.

Google spiders crawl publicly available web information and our index of historic, cached web content. Using a mashup of numerous factors such as recurrence plots, fuzzy measure analysis, online betting odds and the weather forecast from the iGoogle weather gadget, we can create a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from now.

Please visit the Gday site for more information.