Wikipedia has decided to black out its english language version in protest of SOPA and PIPA.

But you got a homework to do and don’t know where to get the information?

Google to the rescue.

Search for the term in Google and hover over  the arrows that appear on the result when you hover you mouse over it. (click on the image to see the example)

And click on cache to view the site. Please note that the site content might be different from what it is now as the Google cache data would be several days old. So, you might not get the necessary results if you are trying to find information related to current affairs.

Here is the link to the cached version of wikipedia page Paleontology. In this case, the cache data is just one day old, i.e of 17  January, 2012.

You can use the same trick  for other content sites when they are down for maintenance or would be blacking out today like Reddit.com.

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died today, just a day after the launch of iPhone 4s. Love Apple or hate Apple, you cannot deny that he changed the way we perceive technology and the influence he had over the industry. He is regarded as one of the best presenter in corporate America.

This news has covered half the page of techmeme and it has just been little over four hours when it was announced, by which you can judge the persona he had.

Apple employees to have given an apt farewell to him on the home page. The url of the image on the home page is http://images.apple.com/home/images/t_hero.png

The tech industry  have paid tribute to him with friend- turned-rival Google linking to Apple’s page on its homepage, which contains official statement from Apple.

Larry Page wrote on his Google plus Account -

I am very, very sad to hear the news about Steve. He was a great man with incredible achievements and amazing brilliance. He always seemed to be able to say in very few words what you actually should have been thinking before you thought it. His focus on the user experience above all else has always been an inspiration to me. He was very kind to reach out to me as I became CEO of Google and spend time offering his advice and knowledge even though he was not at all well. My thoughts and Google’s are with his family and the whole Apple family.

Sergey Brin wrote

From the earliest days of Google, whenever Larry and I sought inspiration for vision and leadership, we needed to look no farther than Cupertino. Steve, your passion for excellence is felt by anyone who has ever touched an Apple product (including the macbook I am writing this on right now). And I have witnessed it in person the few times we have met.

On behalf of all of us at Google and more broadly in technology, you will be missed very much. My condolences to family, friends, and colleagues at Apple.

Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his FaceBook page

Steve, thank you for being a mentor and a friend. Thanks for showing that what you build can change the world. I will miss you.

His oldest rival Bill Gates wrote on his personal blog

I’m truly saddened to learn of Steve Jobs’ death. Melinda and I extend our sincere condolences to his family and friends, and to everyone Steve has touched through his work.

Steve and I first met nearly 30 years ago, and have been colleagues, competitors and friends over the course of more than half our lives.

The world rarely sees someone who has had the profound impact Steve has had, the effects of which will be felt for many generations to come.

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with him, it’s been an insanely great honor.  I will miss Steve immensely.

Pancreatic cancer, the cause of Steve Jobs death, has become a hot search trend on Google.

Google plus is getting popular in the social world. But, unfortunately, to fully use its functionality we need to have more friends in it. That is where it will be difficult to migrate from facebook to Google +. However, you can use the following tricks to make this easy.

How to update your Facebook status from Google Plus:

Add your facebook update email address to any circle provided that you don’t mind sharing your updates to the circle with the world via facebook. Or you can manually add it to the share box, whenever you wish to share.

This only works for status updates and will not work if you want to share photos.

How to transfer your Photos from facebook to Google +

You can use move2picasa for this purpose.

How to find your Facebook friends:

To find out if your Facebook friends are on Google+

• Create a Yahoo! Mail account
• Import your Facebook contacts
• Export your Yahoo! Mail contact list
• Import it into your Gmail account
• The imported contacts will now show up under the “Find and Invite” section of the Circles page, the ones who already have Google+ will be listed first.
• You can invite the rest.

Profiles of Google Plus users are being displayed in the search results. Google + is the new social network launched by the Internet giant Google.

It consists of photo, short description,links to other social networking site mentioned by you in your plus profile.

It will be intresting to see if Google makes public posts of users searchable as it has been hailed as a good blogging platform. Kevin Rose has even redirected his blog http://kevinrose.com to his Google+ profile.

Update: Google is indeed showing public posts in its search result. Though I had to put in an entire sentence from Scoble’s public post in the search box to find his post, it wouldn’t be long before Google gives G+ posts more weightage for short keywords.

With Google giving importance to Google Plus posts, it seems we won’t be quiting Google plus soon. I mean, who can give up the urge of commenting on some juicy posts? Google might have other failed products like Knol which it tried to resucitate by displaying it in search results, but in this case it is social+information.

According to WSJ, Apple is working on cheaper iphones so as to enter into to mid-price range smartphones market.  This market is dominated mainly

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by android powered mobiles .

With more mobile phones makers going android, it will soon become the dominant player. Sensing this Apple is all set to launch cheap phones.

It is quite strange as Apple products are usually expensive which makes it quite elitist, generating unprecedented fan craze. Cnet puts it aptly “Is Apple no longer the BMW of tech?”

This has been done so as to halt Google’s march. Remember, Google is planning to start music store, another Apple territory.

Apple insist that it won’t cut down the features available in the current phones for cheaper phones, so only thing they might do to save costs is reduce the hardware specs. But this would give rise to fragmentation as many apps which require specific specification won’t work on it, which has also become a bane for Android.

It will be interesting to see if consumers of this range who are usually tech-savvy would buy an iPhone over an Android.

You might have seen a lot of spam apps flooding your news feeds lately. More popular a site becomes, it is going to attract a lot of spammers. Same has happened with facebook. There are lot of spam apps out that do nothing but flood the users page with self-advertising posts.

I found out one and thought about reporting it to Facebook but was amused when I saw the subcategories of spam they had in their report spam form.

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Are you serious Facebook? Credible threat of violence, Self- Harm, Graphic Violence, Theft or vandalism and Drug Use don’t come under Spam.

As I was unable to choose the subcategory, I couldn’t report the app.

Nice way to fight spam. The only way a service can reduce the amount of spam is by making it easy for users to report spam like in Google, youtube and social bookmarking sites like reddit and digg.

From March 1, 2011, Payapal’s Indian users will have to agree to a new user agreement. Paypal has emailed all its users about the change 30 days in advance. Here is the excerpt,

1. Any balance in and all future payments into your PayPal account may not be used to buy goods or services and must be transferred to your bank account in India within 7 days from the receipt of confirmation from the buyer in respect of the goods or services; and
2. Export-related payments for goods and services into your PayPal account may not exceed US$500 per transaction.

Paypal has not clearly explained the first point i.e. what would happen if we fail to transfer the money within 7 days.

This has been done by the Government as many Paypal users in India usually don’t transfer it to their bank accounts and use it to purchase goods and services online.  This cannot be tracked and hence, government loses out in tax.

This RBI guidelines comes close after the opposition is cornering the Government for failure to bring in black money which runs into several thousands of crores stashed abroad.

Instead of doing something in that regards, this policy is going to put thousands of bloggers, freelancers and others who earn money online in discomfort.

Google sure can’t trust China anymore. After it was revealed by Google that China had launched sophisticated attack on it to hack in to Chinese human rights activists’ accounts, they are now taking them seriously.

Gmail does warns users, if it detects any suspicious activities from foreign ip-addresses. I have been accessing my account from German servers, but haven’t got any warnings. So maybe the Google’s algorithm knows that it is me who is accessing the account.

But there has been news about many people are getting warnings that their account have been accessed from China.

Threatpost says the users affected seem to be pretty randomly distributed—they found everyone from a privacy advocate, to the editor of a marketing blog, to doctors and gamers had been affected. The warning includes the IP address used to access the user’s account, and a recommendation to change their password.

It is a good practise to change passwords regularly, I do it after my account password was once compromised. Here is more on how to protect your account.

Twitter just sent out emails to all their users to inform them about the change in the way twitter interacts with external applications.

From now on all twitter application will use OAuth technology that will help application log in users without directly asking password. This means applications are no longer allowed to save password you just need  to connect the account once.

All long links will be shortened using t.co and wrapping will be done  and displayed in tweets with part of domain and title page. This will be extended to all apps.

egs A really long link such as http://www.amazon.com/Delivering-Happiness-Profits-Passion-Purpose/dp/0446563048 might be wrapped as http://t.co/DRo0trj for display on SMS, but it could be displayed to web or application users as amazon.com/Delivering- or as the whole URL or page title.

Gmail announced a feature called Priority inbox that would make sorting emails in ones account incredibly easy as it uses an intelligent sorting algorithm which gets better every time you you use it.

That is not the only intelligent feature in Gmail that makes it the best webmail. It also contains several small but useful features. It has an intelligent spam filter. Chances that you will find spam in your inbox is very less as much as 1 in 100000, unless of course you go on giving out email ids in bad neighbourhood sites.

Write ” I have attached” in the message body and try sending it to anyone without attaching anything. You will get a pop up message from gmail enquiring whether you want to send the email without an attachment. It is incredibly useful when you write long emails and you forget to attach any attachment you wanted to attach. It saves you from the hassles of resending the email with the attachment

Suppose you like sending particular emails to a particular group of people. Gmail remembers your group and next time you forget to send it to a particular person it will notify you about that. This feature is in labs and is called Don’t forget Bob.

There is another useful lab feature which is a variation of the above feature called Got the wrong Bob? In this, if you send emails to a particular group of people it remembers the preferences. Next time you try sending an email to this group but get a person’s email id wrong, due to several similar email id’s,  gmail will warn you. egs. If you put bobsmith@gmail.com instead bobmartins@gmail.com

And lastly, it has an incredibly good search. You can search through entire set of emails using operators to find the exact email you wanted. It is as easy and powerful as the Google search itself.