Outrageously stupid as it may sound, the Indian Telecommunications Minister Kapil Sibal has asked Social Media sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the like to self-censor objectionable content right when they are uploaded by the users. This order was issued after Sibal found a Facebook page filled with hate-speech for Sonia Gandhi, a member of the ruling Congress party.

Soon after the news spread, people took to Twitter and Facebook to express outrage, mostly expressing concern about free-speech in a democratic country. Kapil Sibal was already a black-sheep due to his vile behaviour during the Jan lokpal revolution a few months ago and hence this was just fuel to the fire. Besides, I think that Mr. Sibal’s demand to put human watch over the constant hose of 250 million tweets per second, 48 hours of video per minute and 70 million statuses & updates is downright idiotic. Internet is practically the only place left where people can express their deepest thoughts with least hesitation or fear.

Here are some of the strong words of the Twitterers,

Thankfully, there’s no call-to-action from Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft. Google also denied to comment on the issue. However, 6-weeks ago, three representatives from these companies had a meeting with Sibal and stated that “If there’s a law and there’s a court order, we can follow up on it”.

[Source]

We should consider ourselves lucky to witness the transition between the industrial age and the information age in the past decade. The world came closer, thanks to internet, email, IMs and finally the social networks. Facebook has been continuously mapping various trends and patterns in the way people interact with each other and has shared with us fascinating results.

Social psychologists in 1929 stated that a person is linked with everyone on earth by not more than 6 relationships, the concept commonly referred to as ’6 degrees of separation’. Considering 721 million active users & 69 billion mutual friend relations, Facebook has been able to calculate the exact degree of separation (for the year 2011), which is 4.74. Exponential increase is apparent because it was just 5.28 in 2008.

Facebook affirms,

When considering even the most distant Facebook user in the Siberian tundra or the Peruvian rainforest, a friend of your friend probably knows a friend of their friend. When we limit our analysis to a single country, be it the US, Sweden, Italy, or any other, we find that the world gets even smaller, and most pairs of people are only separated by 3 degrees (4 hops).

About time we rephrase ‘It’s a small world’ to ‘It’s a tiny world’.

Source: Facebook

A major feature has been silently slipped into the latest update of Firefox 10 Nightly, which has the potential to phase out one of the most popular and extremely useful Firefox add-on – Firebug. Yes, Firefox‘s native Code/Style inspector is here.

Firebug is probably the single tool web developers need the most. For some, it is the only reason to use Firefox. Of course, all other major browsers have developed their native style inspectors, Firebug is still the favorite of the masses. But soon, it may have to face a fight for existence. The code/style inspector in Firefox 10 Nightly looks a bit juvenile but it’s just the beginning. The screenshot below shows that it already has some basic options in place, like ‘Inspect’, ‘Style’ and ‘HTML’ panes and a fly-out window called ‘Style Inspector’.

As of now, you can’t fiddle with any of the HTML or CSS code. I suspect Mozilla might take a different approach to CSS debugging compared to Firebug. Like I said, this is the first glimpse of Firefox‘s native code/style inspector so all we can do is to hope that the final outcome is satisfactory. It is definitely something I’d be looking forward to. Below is the screenshot of the Mozilla Wiki page that shows the feature is currently under development and will be available in Firefox 10.

Download the latest Firefox Nightly here.

So, what do you think of Firefox’s native Code/Style Inspector? Will it be a threat to Firebug? Or not?

This is unexpected but some of the Apple Retail stores across US have already started selling factory unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4S which were otherwise scheduled to go on shelves sometime in November.

Once you buy a factory unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4S and connect it to your computer and starting up iTunes, the following message will display on the screen: "Congratulations, your iPhone has been unlocked." This is completely legit because 9to5Mac, a popular Apple-only blog has confirmed it.

Although Apple says that they will begin selling unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4S units in the United States in November, we have learned otherwise. Select Apple Stores in the United States have begun selling contract-free versions of the iPhone 4S, which our friend Steven Troughton-Smith was able to both verify and purchase.

The confirmation also comes from Steven Troughton-Smith (the person who ported Siri to iPhone 4) who successfully used T-Mobile’s EDGE network using an O2 SIM card on his unlocked iPhone 4S.

If you are looking for a factory unlocked, contract free iPhone, you might get lucky to order one in one of the Apple Retail stores near you. However, it will take weeks for the iPhone to land up in your hand, thanks to the high demand of the device. All wireless carriers in the United States are sold out with pre-orders hitting 1 million mark and counting in the first 24 hours. We mentioned the pricing of the factory unlocked, contract-free iPhone 4S in our previous post. Take a quick glance at it again:

I am not a native English speaker but I am happily willing to go an extra mile to learn new phrases, definitions and idioms. Whenever I come across an unknown word, I look it up using Google‘s Definition feature using the ‘define:‘ keyword. Lately, to my surprise, I noticed that the definitions provided by Google are much more detailed and informative.

You will notice that apart from the definition, it clearly shows whether the word is an adjective, adverb or a noun and shows its meaning relative to each of them. What’s more awesome is that, Google even shows synonyms of the word. All this right within the search results, properly formatted! Also, if you are trying to figure out how to pronounce a word, simply click the small speaker icon or read the phonetic. Of course, links to popular online dictionaries are there as usual.

I am sure this feature is now available in other languages as well. It is one of those small features that makes our lives easy.

In case you have been in a hiatus, you might already know that Apple has released iPhone 4S (a powerful superset of the iPhone 4) as opposed to the widely rumored iPhone 5. Well, what comes as a bigger surprise is that Apple has already planned the official unlocked iPhone 4S to go on sale just a month after the contract-based iPhone 4S release. While the latter will be available from Oct 14, 8 AM onwards at Apple Retail Stores, the official unlocked iPhone 4S will hit the shelves sometime in November 2011.

The unlocked iPhone includes all the features of iPhone but without a contract commitment. You can activate and use it on the supported GSM wireless network of your choice, such as AT&T in the United States.* The unlocked iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S will not work with CDMA-based carriers such as Verizon Wireless or Sprint.

For more, visit Apple Store.

Youtube is the 3rd most visited site in the world as per Alexa rankings. YouTube is serves more than 89% of online video views and with other mind-boggling stats, it just keeps getting better. Unless you live a part of the world that still uses dial-up internet, you might be spending atleast a few hours per week to watch Youtube videos.

Today we have something that enhances your video viewing experience – Youtube Enhancer. This userscript does a lot of value addition to Youtube and makes it a perfect application for viewing online videos. Simply install Youtube Enhancer script (Firefox users will need Greasemonkey addon to install this script while Chrome users won’t require anything and get lots of useful options on Youtube.

Some of the nice features of Youtube Enhancer:

• Hover previews: Simply take your mouse over a video thumbnail and it shows more frames from the video.
• Download videos: While viewing a video, a blue download button appears to the top-right.
• Lights-off: Clicking on the small bulb icon in the top-right makes the screen go black Ento give you that ‘theater-feel’.
• More playback options: You will see some more controls like ‘loop the video’, ‘step forward/backward’, ‘kill stream’ and buttons to see videos in all quality and sizes.
• Autoplay on/off
• Better volume control
• Lots of keyboard shortcuts

There’s no reason you shouldn’t be using this free script. Download & install Youtube Enhancer now!

No more a rumor this time. Apple has started sending out invites to the hot-shots of the tech industry for the iPhone event being held on October 4th at Cupertino.

Like we stated earlier, multiple iPhone releases are highly likely. Along with the much obvious iPhone 5, a cheaper version of the iPhone 4 is also expected. Because Jobs is no more the CEO of Apple (which is a little saddening by the way), this event is going to be the first one with Tim Cook. Going by the rumors spreading all over the internet, the new iPhone is believed to have a slightly larger screen, an 8 megapixel camera, 1 GB RAM and a lot many advanced features. Stay tuned for more iPhone 5 news.

Apple is prepping a press conference on 5th October where the widely rumored iPhone 5 (with iOS5) may get launched, if the insiders at PocketGamer are to be believed. Previous rumors suggested October 15 and October 21 to be the released dates. 

Apple products are bound to bring with them a big bag of rumors but we assume people won’t mind it. We, of course, don’t. Whatever is the release date, we are sure that it is approaching near. This press conference is a major one because there’s a strong vibe that Apple may launch, not one, but two iPhones. A slightly more ‘touched-up’ version of iPhone 4 (aka iPhone 4S and a next-gen iPhone 5. Stay tuned!

Limited time-period offer.

This offer expired on Sep. 29, 2011.

The insanely popular Angry Birds game has drifted across many platforms and has its latest version Angry Birds RIO peaking popularity levels. Here’s to let you know that you can download Angry Birds RIO (Windows) for free before September 29, 2011, thanks to Intel AppUpSM Center.

All you need to do is to register at Intel AppUpSM Center before Sep 29, 2011 to get your free copy of the Angry Birds RIO game for Windows. Just go to AppUp.com and download the ‘Intel AppUp’ application for Windows. Register a new account and look under the ‘My Apps’ tab for the free game.