I just approved a bunch of new proxy sites. We now have over thirteen hundred working proxies in our proxy list.
The definition of what is a “working proxy” is one that comes up frequently. A person may try twenty proxies — and discover that none of them work for him. Are those proxies then not “working proxies”?
Not exactly. Those proxies still work fine - they have just been blocked by the content filter (such as WebSense) at their location.
Sometimes one of these users will say “Why don’t you delete this proxy from the list, because it is now blocked?” It’s not that simple, for two reasons:
There are dozens of content filtering software packages, each with its own databases
Each organization can define their own filter rule sets and individual site filters
The proxy might be blocked by SmartFilter, but allowed by WebSense. Or, it might be blocked only by one particular school.
There is simply no way for us to tell what proxies are blocked from what networks.
The best strategy for proxy users to follow is to use new proxies, as they are less likely to be blocked by content filters.
An interesting Yahoo article explains why Google is now considered the heart of the Internet and the electronic center of human knowledge.
In these 10 years of life, Google has indexed billions of web pages, images, books and even videos from all over the Internet. This is definitely a must read.
In the past years Google has expanded at a breakneck pace, and currently has some 13,700 employees. The company thrives on a culture of innovation: the best example is that it asks employees to dedicate 20 percent of their time to develop ideas for the company.
Not a very long time ago, Digg removed the top 100 users from its interface, due some left-in-the-dark corruption issues (people were trying to buy the top users’ action of submitting stories so that they’d get dugg faster).
Using a small trick, one of the regular users launched this page in order to keep an unofficial list of the above mentioned people. Now, Glen Allsopp analyzes that list in details and here’s the result.
According to Wikimedia Inc, the English version of the very popular online encyclopedia passed the 2,000,000 articles mark today.
The English-language Wikipedia currently contains 2,000,853 articles. This number excludes redirects, discussion pages, image description pages, user profile pages, templates, help pages, portals, articles without links to other articles, and pages for Wikipedia administration. Including these, they have 10,201,476 pages
After experimenting for a few months with various ways to introduce ads in their videos, YouTube is finally launching a video ad platform. The current format is represented by a strip which occupies 20% of the video. The ad appears only after 15 seconds of the movie have passed and if the user clicks the ad, the video is paused and a new window opens for the ad. If the user does not click the ad, it’s displayed for 10 seconds and then it disappears.
As for the pricing, Google choose to apply a 20$ fee for 1000 impressions. Although it’s a little weird they use this instead of the Google classic Pey Per Click system, but Google officials think that safer CPM model will be better for their customers.
So having YouTube as a constant user-generated content pool, Google can provide extensive coverage for publishers and interesting ways to financially attract advertisers. But for now the platform has to be tested to eliminate eventual bugs and to attract publishers.
As we speak, every single blog in the Blogspot network is not functional, returning a 502 Server Error. That includes the Google Blog itself. Oftenly, the connection to some other blogs hosted on Blogspot times out after a minute, leaving a few question marks behind.
At a quick closer look, the Blogger network is down as well, including their main sites. Could this be due the blog migrations? Perhaps.
I couldn’t find any valid explanation from Google, downtime reports or to be honest any official stance, but I will keep you updated as soon as I find out.
In the mean time, if anyone has any kind of idea or information related to this, please share it with the others by leaving a comment. I would appreciate it.
Keep in touch,
When Google launched their new Google Gears service a couple of months ago, I was sure online-based applications will make full use of it. And that’s just the case with Zoho, one of the most popular online office suite and a direct contestant of Google Docs.
The fact that they used Google Gears to provide offline availability for Zoho Writer before Google did is funny in a way. But for now only Zoho Writer will be accessible offline, the rest of the Zoho suite is going to be made available in weeks to come, and besides that the documents will be read-only when offline.
After the install of the Google Gears plugin a “Go Offline” button will be enabled, not that this only works with Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Zoho lovers should be pleased, as this is only the beginning and other features will become available in the following 4 or 5 weeks.
It seems that the problems Skype users were experiencing were over as of yesterday. For the moment Skype officials only posted a brief notice, promising to give more details on Monday.
Hello friends,
Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal.
On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.
We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!
Yesterday the service came back online, first the VoIP calls an then, the presence and chat services became available. Skype blames the outage on “a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software”. The latest news is that this fault was present in every copy of Skype downloaded since 2003 until now. Although nobody seems to know why the failure of the system occurred now, since it was present since 2003, some say that it has something to do with the Skype network infrastructure that relies on high-bandwith peers. When several of these peers go down the whole network becomes unstable.
For short there’s no exact answers and we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out more.
As you all know, various complaints started flowing in since Thursday, that Skype users were not able to login to their VoIP sessions. Skype promptly posted an official statement on their company blog:
Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen. This problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network.
So it seems it’s a software issue and not a hacking/exploit bug. Rumors say that the service will not be functional throughout the week-end, despite of the official announcements. I just hope that Skype will be back to normal soon as they currently sum up 220 million users.
