Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on August 18, 2006 by CyberNet.

Free For All Friday

We’ve become all too familiar with social sites like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo to name the few major ones. However, I wouldn’t consider any of the above mentioned to be family oriented or “safe” for all ages. This is where a website called famster comes in.  If you couldn’t tell from the name, famster is geared towards families and provides a safe environment for all ages.  They’ve been in the web hosting business for while and more recently the famster site (in beta) seems to be gaining in popularity.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the things you’re able to do. First, sharing photos and videos is made simple with Famster. There’s also the option to maintain a family blog, or family tree. You’re able to keep a list of your favorite sites, recipes, for others to see. These options can be public so that anyone who comes to the site can see them or they can be password protected and made private.

You’d want to first start by creating an account. This is simple and easy, and many people use their last name as their account name. The address for your account would be www.famster.com/insertfamilynamehere. This site was designed for the average everday user, no tech saviness required. One of the first things I noticed is that it is all designed with Flash which makes it easy on the eyes. This works just fine for the average user, although it does cause some limitations.

I took a look at their “about” page and they say that 1 in every five children will be approached by a predator on the Internet. Their goal is to provide a safe family friendly environment.  As part of this, they keep you up to date with current registered sex offender alerts and offer other security features.

 There’s lots of extras in case you’re not fully satisfied like a file cabinet where you can upload files to store or make available for your family and friends to view.  After creating an account and playing around with famster for a while, it seems to be a good option for families who are wanting a social site that is family friendly and safe with lots of features!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on December 15, 2007 by CyberNet.

Weekend Website

There are plenty of dictionary services available online, and most of them are free for at least the basic features and get the job done. Today we are going to take a look at “The Free Dictionary” which is yet another free dictionary, accept they offer more than the average service like dictionary.com offers.  Not only do they offer a regular dictionary/thesaurus, but they also offer several other types of dictionaries and encyclopedias as well which we’ll explain below. And if you consider yourself a word guru, meaning you like games that revolve around words like Scrabble, they offer that as well.

Dictionaries and Encyclopedias Offered

Of course you’d expect a site called The Free Dictionary to have a dictionary, which they do, but they also have additional dictionaries including:

• Medical dictionary
• Legal dictionary
• Financial dictionary

Words and definitions included with the medical dictionary come from The American Heritage Stedman’s Medical Dictionary and a few others good sources. It includes over 45,000 different entries. The Legal dictionary, of course, has all of the words you’ve ever wanted to know when it comes to the law, and these entries come from The People’s Law Dictionary. Like the others, the financial dictionary is specific in what it offers with more than 5,000 definitions specific to the financial world like annuity, futures, reverse mortgage, and more.

As far as encyclopedia’s go, the entries they provide come from numerous different sources like the Columbia Encyclopedia.  In all, there are over 80,000 different terms that can be looked up.  If you’re just browsing, they give you a snapshot of the popular articles from the dictionary that people have recently looked at. Additionally, you can perform a Wikipedia search right from TFD site.

Other services

If the dictionaries aren’t enough, they also offer an acronym lookup as well as idioms lookup. If you’ve got an acronym that you’re not sure what it stands for, just type it in and you’ll get a list of results. When I typed the acronym “LOL” a whole list of meanings were displayed with “laugh out load” and “Labor of love” topping the list. There’s also an idioms look-up that  can explain over 7,000 idioms from countries like Britain, the United States, and Australian English.

Add-ons and Extras

To make the service even better, they offer a few add-ons and extras.  One such add-on is the “right-click” browser add-on which is offered for Internet Explorer and Firefox.  If you were to come across a word while you’re browsing the Internet that you didn’t know the definition of, you could right-click and one of the options would be “dictionary” or “search dictionary for __.”

Other add-ons and extras include:

• Desktop Assistant for Windows (get definitions for words in your desktop applications)
• Google Toolbar –  add The Free Dictionary to your Google toolbar
• Add The Free Dictionary to “My Yahoo!”
• This isn’t exactly an add-on, but what is nice is that you can have them pronounce the word for you.  Some sites like Dictionary.com have this feature, but you have to pay to get a premium account if you want to hear a word pronounced.

EXTRAS FOUND HERE

Customize your Page

I don’t know that you’ll be using The Free Dictionary enough to make customizing the page worth it, but keep this in mind as something you are able to do if you want to.  You can add, remove, drag and drop the different elements of TFD so it’s set up just the way you’d like it to be.  You can also view weather info, your bookmarks, and RSS feeds, right from the page.

Features of TFD

When you go to the site for the first time, you’ll see several things  already there and ready for you to use which I will list below.

• Article of the Day
• Match Up – Game where you match each word from the left column with its synonym on the right.
• Scrabble
• Quotation of the Day
• In the News – an article that’s currently in the news
• This Day in History – a quick blurb about something that happened this day in a previous year
• Horoscope – enter in your birth date to get your daily horoscope
• Today’s Birthday – what famous people have a birthday today?
• Spelling Bee – You hear a word, and then you must spell it (varying degrees of difficulty)
• Hangman – the classic game

I know that there are several dictionary services out there that you’re probably familiar with and use regularly, but I really do recommend taking a peak at what’s offered over at The Free Dictionary. They offer more than just the typical dictionary and include a lot of extras which could potentially come in handy.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 05, 2008 by CyberNet.

It looks as though Microsoft is dancing around the fact that they need a forum – a place where people can go to post their tips and questions for anything Microsoft related whether it be Windows or the Zune. They just relaunched Windowslive.com as a community site which we see as a step in the right direction, but they aren’t quite there yet. Speaking to Read Write Web, the Windows Live senior marketing manager Marty Collins explained that their goal behind the redesign was “to better explain to users how they can use these services together, as well as fostering an active user community.

Microsoft is also currently in the process of rolling out Windows Live Clubhouse. The clubhouse, currently available by invite only, is a forum of sorts for Windows Live users. When we first saw and read about it, it reminded us of a more abstract forum. People can post help and tips about Windows Live products, but it’s not quite as organized and open as it should be.

Here’s how the Clubhouse will work (from what we understand). Someone can post something “Live” related on their Live Spaces account and tag it with “Clubhouse” followed by the name of at least one Live application that they wrote about. Those posts will then appear for others to read and rate. The stories rated the highest whether it be a how-to tip or a story about using a Live product will then be featured on WindowsLive.com. Authors receive “club points” for contributing.

Now getting back to the idea of Microsoft introducing a forum, we think it would help them out tremendously. Like we said, the Clubhouse is a forum of sorts, but it doesn’t allow for open communication as much as a typical forum would. They’d certainly have to spend a good amount of time designing a forum, and then hire a team of people to moderate it, but think about all of the questions people have regarding Vista that could very simply be asked and answered in a Microsoft forum. They have so many different products and services, and each could have it’s own dedicated section.

Should Microsoft just create a forum?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on March 02, 2007 by CyberNet.

When you buy a domain name, common sense would say that it is yours for the keeping. The only time that we really hear about people losing a domain name is when they forget to renew it after it expires, and in order to get it back you normally have to fork out a good chunk of money.

There was just a situation, however, that goes beyond what many people have ever thought about happening. The owner of the domain FamilyAlbum.com found himself pinned in a corner when he saw that he no longer owned the domain. Apparently GoDaddy was informed that the email address specified for the Whois registration was no longer valid. GoDaddy sent the owner of the domain an email to that account, and after no response for 8–weeks GoDaddy automatically took possession of it.

GoDaddy’s response was:

We cancelled the domain name registration on this domain name because the customer did not respond to our email request to update the information. In fact, we did not hear from the customer for more than eight weeks after our initial contact attempt. Per ICANN regulations, we are required to collect valid information. Per our Registration Agreement, we will cancel the name for invalid Whois if the information is not updated within the appropriate amount of time.

What is really aggravating is that they only sent an email. They didn’t try to mail him a quick letter or even pick up the phone to call him, which would have worked since that information was still said to be valid. Instead they relied on an email address that people have a tendency to change quite frequently.

After GoDaddy got the domain they turned around and sold it for $18.99, which is their backorder price. That means someone probably notified GoDaddy that the email address was no longer valid just so that they could swoop up the domain themselves. I did a little hunting around and it appears as though the domain is just for personal purposes, but that still doesn’t excuse their actions.

If you are using GoDaddy for your Registrar,I highly recommend that you make sure your Whois information is up-to-date. That would be really horrible to go through a lot of work setting up a site just to have it taken away from you!

Source: Domain Name Wire [via ThreadWatch and Digg]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on August 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

Anyone that has been using BitTorrent for several years undoubtedly knows, or used, the SuprNova.org site. It was a BitTorrent tracker much like what The Pirate Bay is today, and before shutting SuprNova down in December 2004 it was bringing in some 1.5 million visitors per day. It has since become a mere legend in the world of file sharing, but The Pirate Bay is hoping to give it a breath of new life.

The owner of the site, Andrej Preston, closed the doors because he didn’t want to keep fighting the legal warnings that SuprNova was receiving. In 2005 Andrej used the site to host a beta version of eXeem, which was a file sharing application that was supported by the dreaded Cydoor spyware. Later that same year eXeem was also shutdown after tarnishing their reputation.

Also in 2005, SuprNova was used as a file sharing news site, but even that didn’t last a full year’s time. As of today the site is stilling being served with pure ads, but that will all be changing soon.

Andrej has transferred the domain over to The Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Frederick Neij. The Pirate Bay can do whatever they want with it now, but Andrej requested that the site not change from what people were used to:

I’m tired of the questions why I will not bring SuprNova up again. I thought myself that SuprNova is going to be dead forever, and I have even written myself, that SuprNova will never return as a torrent site. But things changed in real life and in my head.

My deal with [The Pirate Bay] was that the role of SuprNova can’t change much. It needs to be community orientated, but I hope they make some updates the SuprNova was sooo missing. But what they will do, it’s not my thing to decide anymore. But I know they will do [well] and will try to keep the community spirit running.

I’m going to go study abroad, actually in film industry and I do not want to be associated with it anymore. I still support the whole concept of piracy and I believe it’s the next step in ’media revolution’, but I do not have the time for it anymore, or do I not want to be associated to it until I’m in USA.

Wow! He is going to try and get into the film industry now? I’m sure someone is bound to realize who he is and what he started.

In the mean time a forum has been setup at SuprBay.org where users can watch for news and announcements, or submit bugs and suggestions for both SuprNova and The Pirate Bay. There has been no word on as to when we can expect to see SuprNova back up and running, but looking at The Pirate Bay’s track record I would say that it won’t be going down again after it launches.

It appears that The Pirate Bay is trying to dabble in everything, and up until now they have launched an uncensored image sharing site, a video sharing site is in the works, and they’ve even got a legal site called Playble. I think their unmatched growth can only mean one thing…a Google acquisition is in the near future.

The closest incarnation of SuprNova available today is probably Mininova. It’s a great BitTorrent search source with a simple interface, and much like old SuprNova it has a dedicated community of over 75,000 forum members.

Sources: TorrentFreak and Slyck

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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