By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I can admit it. When I was very little, I went out to our backyard and tried to dig to China. I was a literal child and I guess, not much has changed. Here’s a handy site that shows exactly where you would end up if you dug through the earth to the other side.

Key Learnings: China is not even close to where I’d end up if I dug from San Francisco straight down. I’d be washing ashore in Madagascar or Cape Town, South Africa. But the best part about the world being round, is that the bottom of the earth is also the top and the side when you move the start location around. Makes the experience more 3D than even me with my little yellow shovel.

Try It Here
Source: ubasics.com

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Researchers from Microsoft and California University have been following the spam money trail and have uncovered the companies and some of the techniques they use to get doorway pages listed in search engines and how they use the traffic they get to make big bucks redirecting visitors to advertiser sites or using such programs as Google Adsense. The researchers also noted that 22% of their sample that were cataloged as spam were blogspot urls, and that most of it was going through two web hosting companies.

“A small number of rogue actors who know what they are doing can create an enormous amount of disruption,” said David L. Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-indexing company that works to keep junk pages of this sort out of its indexes. “It’s sort of like putting a blindfold on you and spinning you around three times and then taking off the blindfold and showing you an ad.”

Surprisingly, the researchers noted that the vast bulk of the junk listings was created from just two Web hosting companies and that as many as 68 percent of the advertisements sampled were placed by just three advertising syndicators. Source: Researchers Track Down a Plague of Fake Web Pages

We Say: The important thing is they have found out how they do it and how to find out who is doing it and for what advertiser. On the Strider Search Ranger page, don’t get me started on that name, they even tell you how to do it yourself; if you have a blog that gets comment spam, using free tools like Fiddler and whois lookups, you can help follow the money trail. More here.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Cisco has been quietly focusing on video conferencing as the next big thing. True, there is very nothing new about video conferencing, but companies like WebEx have made it easy and popular to do conference calls with shared data and some video. If you think of WebEx as the platform and video as the missing link so to speak, you can see what Cisco is up to with this acquisition.

“Cisco and WebEx share a vision of web collaboration as a key to accelerating business processes and critical to durable competitive advantage,” said Subrah S. Iyar, CEO of WebEx. “Cisco’s global reach and customer focus will help us extend our core web collaboration applications and continue to broaden the services we offer through the WebEx Connect platform.”

The deal has been approved by both boards and moves on to federal regulators for a final go-ahead. It is expected to be complete by Cisco’s fourth quarter. Source: Yahoo News

We Say: Anyone remember when drag queen Ru Paul was the WebEx spokesperson back before the crash? Things have certainly changed.

By Unknown Writer
Via Digg
1. It boasts how long it can stay up. Go to the Command Prompt in the Accessories menu from the All Programs start button option, and then type ’systeminfo’. The computer will produce a lot of useful info, including the uptime. If you want to keep these, type ’systeminfo > info.txt’. This creates a file called info.txt you can look at later with Notepad. (Professional Edition only).

2. You can delete files immediately, without having them move to the Recycle Bin first. Go to the Start menu, select Run… and type ‘gpedit.msc’; then select User Configuration, Administrative Templates, Windows Components, Windows Explorer and find the Do not move deleted files to the Recycle Bin setting. Set it. Poking around in gpedit will reveal a great many interface and system options, but take care — some may stop your computer behaving as you wish. (Professional Edition only).

3. You can lock your XP workstation with two clicks of the mouse. Create a new shortcut on your desktop using a right mouse click, and enter ‘rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation’ in the location field. Give the shortcut a name you like. That’s it — just double click on it and your computer will be locked. And if that’s not easy enough, Windows key + L will do the same.

More

By Jimmy Daniels
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

Has everyone seen the Snap popup preview that is running on some of the big blogs like Techcrunch? I thought I was the only one who hated as I had never seen any posts about it, it was like they just popped it on their blog and no one cared, so I didn’t complain any. I couldn’t believe that Techcrunch added such an annoying thing to their blog, I know it had to run off some readers, I haven’t visited it very much since, reading it mainly in my RSS reader. Well, now I know I’m not the only one, Nick Wilson from Performancing just blogged about it and almost everyone who commented agreed. Woohoo, I was beginning to think it was the 90’s all over again, with the blinky text and the annoying midi files.

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and un-useful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory. Source: Performancing

We Say: At least I say, I agree with Nick and everyone else that hates it, and I can’t believe Wordpress added it to run by default, how annoying was that for some webmasters? Some people complained that if you go to the Snap.com site and disable it, that it will come back if you clear your cookies, well, there are a couple other ways to block it. One is to turn of JavaScript, I believe, not for sure as I have it turned on, or you can go into internet explorer, into the security tab and Add http://spa.snap.com to your restricted sites, and it is over. No more popup previews.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Now this could get me buying cigarettes again.

Actually, RF jamming is illegal in the United States, but a hacker/researcher at MIT Media Labs named “Lady Ada” has developed a RF jammer she calls the Wave Bubble based on this philosophy:

“In a high population density city, inhabitants must be prepared to defend their own personal space. Technologies that increase personal productivity are on the rise, even though they may intrude on others. The unavoidable reaction is to create technologies that counteract other people’s devices. Wave Bubble is a product that counters the all-too-familiar annoyance of loud ring tones and overt cell-phone conversations in public.”

We Say: Go Ada! Actually her concept of “Social Defense Mechanisms” is right on the money even if it a bit scary. People want to turn off loud airport TVs, and silence ear-splitting ringtones in movies and restaurants. The technology has actually been available for years, and is in use in Japan, but the US is especially sensitive to the fact that a jammer can mess up a pacemaker. And you know how Americans love to sue. To that we say - smoke em if you got em.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

Shouldn’t we be over “Web 2.0″ by now? The use of big fonts and colors and tags and all the other zoomy things that dressed up Web pages and made us feel better about the crash? That’s what I thought until I have to say I was taken by silly-sounding Zirr.us.

You basically create a mini ecosystem of tags based on how important the task is, and Zirr.us generates a tag cloud - visually reminding you that your 5:00POM deadline is far more important than that aspirational “Start a Band” to-do.

We Say: Silly and not very serious, Zirr.us is nice try, and I now have using it on my own to-do list.

By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

I have to admit that all the friend-making in cyberspace is a bit much, espeically when you know that many a troll lurks behind that friend-ladened profile. That’s why we found Snubster to be a breath of fresh air. The concept is easy to grasp - you post a gripe in either a “Dead to Me” list or the less severe “On Notice” section and set yourself free. Here is a sample:

sugarless soft drinks They are unreal and have a bitter aftertaste - like Starwars 1, 2, 3

Bottom Line: Great for people who have something to get off their chests every five minutes. Not so great for those who have more on their minds. And watch for the dark entries like, “Left me even though he only has one hand” and ” She killed my mom.”