Here at Techgeek, we value freedom, life, democracy, love, peace, war, rainbow unicorns and hard drive failures. With reference to the first one, we are curious about the url fbi.com. Everyone of the TG that attempts to access this URL is redirected to 0.0.0.0! Coincidence? Conspiracy? We would like to know.
Well, this was expected. After a little more than a year, Google has shut down its Google Wave service with the site to be closed down at the end of the year.
Wave allowed real time communications, merging a chat client, an email client and Google Docs, allowing communications and collaboration on projects.
One of the big problems for Wave was the user adoption rate. Because of the very limited beta, many users were not able to add their friends and were not able to use it fully. Google has admitted this was one of the reasons why they have shut down the service.
Yes, it’s that guy. You know, that guy who claims that he owns 84 percent of the social networking website Facebook (which I might add, is a total bullsh*t claim in the first place). He does have a name – Paul Ceglia.
Ceglia’s claim is based on a contract and a US$1,000 cheque signed to him by Zuckerberg – with the contract mentioning a $1,000 investment into The Face Book while he pays Zuckerberg $1,000 for developing a program for his company StreetFax.
Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg may face the death penalty after violating Pakistani law when the social networking site became the host of a controversial contest that asked people to draw the Prophet Muhammad last month.
This resulted on a temporary ban of the site in the predominantly Muslim country on May 19. The ban was lifted on May 31.
A New York man who runs a wood-pellet fuel distribution company has claimed that he owns 84 percent of the popular social networking company Facebook, claiming that he has a 2003 contract with owner Mark Zuckerberg. He is seeking ownership of the multi-billion company and monetary damages.
Paul D. Cegila claims that he signed the contract to develop and design the website on April 28, 2003, getting a US$1,000 fee and a 50 percent stake in the company. He claims that he also will get 1 percent interest in the business for every day after January 1, 2004 until the site was finished and launched on the February 4.
Google has announced that China has renewed its ICP licence to operate in the country, after announcing a week ago that it plans to end the automatic redirect to Google.com.hk, its Hong Kong-localised version of Google, with a landing page.
The move to stop the redirect was due to the objection by the Chinese government in March.
Wikipedia, along with the sites belonging to the Wikimedia Foundation, experienced a two hour outage, after a power outage happened at its Florida-based data center, according to Wikipedia.
Overheating problems were initially reported to be the cause of the outage, similar to an incident that happened in March – which took the site down for more than a couple of hours.
Columbia Pictures has released the very first teaser trailer for the upcoming film about the popular social-networking website, Facebook, that is being written by Aaron Sorkin, of The West Wing and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip fame. Titled “The Social Network” – though many have referred it as the Facebook Movie – it depicts the founding of Facebook and the conflict between ConnectU founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Mark Zuckerberg.
You can see the trailer after the jump.
After seeing what are the new things in Windows Live Messenger, we were hanging on our seats to see when Microsoft will release the beta version of the next installment of Windows Live Essentials. Now, we know the date. It’s now.
Windows Live Essentials Beta includes the next versions of Messenger, Writer, Photo Gallery, Mail and Movie Maker, and are all part of connecting Windows 7 to the online services like YouTube, Facebook, WordPress, etc. The new beta has a particular focus on integrating social networking sites – allowing you to upload videos and photos from Movie Maker and Photo Gallery to your social profiles.
Photo Gallery gets some brand new features, including photo retouching and basic manipulation; while Movie Maker has a new Auto Movie feature that will automatically add themes, titles, transition and effects with videos and photos. Messenger adds HD video chat, while Mail includes Yahoo! Mail and Gmail support.
You can download the beta version of the new Windows Live Essentials package here. If you also don’t like toolbars, don’t forget to tick off the Bing Bar that comes included.
Google has introduced a new feature called Google Search SSL Beta. Basically, you can now perform web searches using an SSL encryption by going to https://www.google.com . Google note that this beta functionality is only available to web searches and not (yet) to Maps, Images, Books and other Services. And to be double-sure you are browsing secure, Google has updated their famous Google search page to reflect this new beta period.
Hit up the Google KB Article here.
Revealed yesterday, the film The Social Network (or the Facebook movie) revealed its official poster. The poster is just a face shot of Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, with the tag line “You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. The movie, which recounts Zuckerberg’s founding of the popular social networking site, is based on The Accidential Billionaires by Ben Merzrich, and has been adapted by Aaron Sorkin – the guy who produced the West Wing.
But is it worthy of making a movie about it? Is there anything interesting from Zuckerberg’s life that would warrant a film? There might – especially the controversy between Zuckerberg and ConnectU, who claims that Zuckerberg stole their idea to make TheFacebook (the previous name). As well, with the recent privacy concerns, there might be some answers (for those who haven’t read the book – I mean, who reads books!?) that could provide some insight about his ideas on what privacy means.
Other small details I would like to point out: It clearly also uses the Facebook toolbar on the poster, with the website located where the search box is. It’s also using Firefox (tabs give it away), and using a Mac (sidebar).
You can have a look at the movie’s poster, after the jump.
What a way to end the week. On top of the news that there has been over 600,000 iPhone 4 orders, a new Mac mini and a FCC inquiry into possible anti-competitive practices by Apple, the big fruit has updated its MobileMe Web Interface and launched a new Find My iPhone App.
Hotmail is going to get some improvements soon as part of a major overhaul of Windows Live (dubbed Wave 4), including some brand new features in an attempt to compete better with rivals Yahoo and Google.
A new feature is the ability to share photos and documents using web applications right in the email. Services like SmugMug, Flickr, YouTube and Hulu will be able to be seen with one click without opening to a new tab or window, while document editing is integrated with Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, similar to Google’s Gmail and Docs arrangement.
Thought that message about you cheating on your test was within your Facebook friends? Or maybe you took a HIV test and found out negative (or positive), or just want to shout out that you have lost your virginity. Well, get ready to learn something harsh. Your status messages are public, and now they are searchable. Yes, just like Google, I can type something in Openbook and find out what you and the over 300 million people on Facebook are talking about – unless you are smart and lock down your account.
Even though your profile may be locked down, it does not mean your status messages are. And that is what they try and use to power the service.
And when you thought Facebook couldn’t take any more heat, leaked instant messages published online appear to show Zuckerberg mocking users joining the social networking site (then called The Facebook and was limited to Harvard students) in 2003, and is very brutal on the people who published photos and addresses and was willing to give them out to people when asked.
