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The IE6 Countdown

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IE6 dead

It’s the father of all the modern day browsers. It’s the one that most of us had used one time or the other. It’s the one that has stood as a synonym to “Internet” in the minds of the internet users. Not a very hard one to guess, Yes, it is the Internet Explorer 6 (or IE6 as they call it).

Even though how good it was in the olden days, we must all agree that the days of IE6 are over. We had earlier covered in a post about a design firm based in Denver conducting funeral for the IE6 by launching a website dedicated for the same. Now Microsoft, the company which developed the IE6 has taken the initiative kill its own product. This could well be the last nail the IE’6’s coffin.

Microsoft has launched a website IE6countdown.com with the aim of “watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide”. The Redmond company has no issues is saying that “It’s time to say goodbye” for what has been a 10-year long journey for IE6. The company also advises users to not to let their friends and acquaintances use Internet Explorer 6.

IE6 countdown

Microsoft has also published a worldwide usage map of Internet Explorer 6 and it is stupefying to know that IE6 still has a total share of 12% around the globe. Even though most of the countries could drop their IE usage to a reasonable level of below 5%, the issue is with the Asian countries. As you can see, China tops the IE6 users with a staggering 34.5% usage followed by South Korea with 24.8%. Finland and Norway are the only countries with less than 1% of IE6 usage.

This is a good initiative from Microsoft and we at Techrena.net, do support the initiative to the fullest. We urge our readers not to use IE6 ever and not to let others use it. Please take your time to explain if you find someone at internet cafes or homes using the age old browser on their PCs. Visit the IE6 countdown site to learn more.

Make Phone Calls From Gmail For Free All Through 2011

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Gmail logo small

If you are located in US and Canada, Google has some very good news for you. You can now make free phone calls to all your pals till the end of 2011. When this feature was launched initially in August 2010, Google said that it would offer free phone calls service to the U.S. and Canada till the rest of 2010. According to a recent blog post at Official Gmail blog, the free service has been extended through 2011.

gmail phone call free

To get started with calling phone numbers in Gmail, get the Gmail voice and video chat plugin click on the “Call Phone” that appears at the top of your chat list and you will see the dial pad. You can either dial the phone number or enter a contact name to start a voice phone call. If you have a Google Voice phone number, you can even display it as the outbound caller ID and receive calls made to this number inside Gmail as well. It may not be as good as other leading VOIP solutions like Skype but still a decent one.While calls to the U.S. and Canada are free, calls to phones outside the United States are charged as per the following rates list.

gmail phone call rates

For more information, go visit gmail.com/call.

Find Techrena.net On Facebook, Twitter & Google Buzz

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techrena logo

Ever since we have launched this blog, we have been striving continuously striving to helping you out in your day-to-day computer and internet use.We have recently celebrated first birthday anniversary of techrena.net jubilantly on March 27, 2010 at Hyderabad.

As we grow our blog, it’s our first priority to make it easy for our readers to connect with our blog in all possible ways.You can either subscribe to our RSS Feed (or receive via email), you can follow Techrena on Twitter or on FriendFeed or on Google Buzz.

If that isn’t enough for you, we have just created a Facebook page, adding which to your profile makes it much easier to connect to Techrena.net directly from your Facebook profile.Just click on the “Like” button that you see on our Facebook and you are good go to.Alternatively you can also find a Facebook Like Box apperaing on the sidebar, where you can find the Like button along with the number of connectors to the site right now.See you all on Facebook !

Google.cn Is Over, Redirects To Google.com.hk (Hong Kong)

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This is breaking news coming right from the G-folks : Google has decided to redirect Google’s Chinese web users of Google.cn to its Hong Kong site Google.com.hk starting from today.

This has been posted in Google’s official blog.

earlier today we stopped censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News, and Google Images—on Google.cn. Users visiting Google.cn are now being redirected to Google.com.hk, where we are offering uncensored search in simplified Chinese, specifically designed for users in mainland China and delivered via our servers in Hong Kong.

This is the Google.cn’s cached page as seen from Bing’s cache.

Google.cn china bing cached version

This is the new Google.com.hk site where the Google.cn users being redirected:

Google.com.hk hong kong site

Also Google is predicting that at any moment, the Chinese government may stop access to its services.

We very much hope that the Chinese government respects our decision, though we are well aware that it could at any time block access to our services.

Hence to keep its users notified about any blockage of Google’s services, it has set up a new web page (China service availability), where one can see the status report of various Google’s app services.

Google china service availability

Google is also worrying about the safety of its employees in China, which is clear fro this statement:

Finally, we would like to make clear that all these decisions have been driven and implemented by our executives in the United States, and that none of our employees in China can, or should, be held responsible for them.

The Dalai Lama Officially Joins Twitter

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Dalai Lama has just joined in Twitter today and guess what? He already has 60,000 followers from this verified twitter account.

Just as the Twitter revealed about the site reaching 50 million tweets per day mark, Dalai Lama’s entry into the site mean more surge in tweets mentioning and welcoming @DalaiLama

Right now Dalai Lama’s account is posting updates from his official website dalailama.com.The number of followers is likely to increase further more as this news is drawing attention from the worldwide user base just like @billgates created lot of buzz last week around with more than 508,000 followers in his account.

Dalai Lama Twitter account

You can follow #Dalai Lama on twitter @DalaiLama

For more updates from us, you can follow Techrena Dot Net @techrena

YouTube To Stream IPL Matches Live From India

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YouTube IPL LogoGoogle India has just struck a nice deal with Indian Premier League (IPL) organizers that would enable to stream the IPL season 3 cricket matches live from it’s video-sharing site YouTube.

Google now holds the exclusive online rights of the IPL matches for two years.All the matches would be broadcasted with a delay of 5 minutes from the original live feed.

The live matches can be watched online from IPL’s YouTube account http://www.youtube.com/ipl.

With around 60 matches to be played, the tournament would be starting from March 12, 2010 and will run till April 25, 2010 in India.

IPL on YouTube March 2010

It’s probably the first time that Google is broadcasting a live sporting event.However IPL fans in USA may just have to stick to other unofficial live streaming sites as they wouldn’t be able to watch this coverage from YouTube.

BTW, the coverage also includes match highlights, interview of the man-of-the match player for that day, all wickets, top sixes of the match,award ceremony, pitch report etc.

Blogger Service Interruptions Update on Blogger Status Blog

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Blogger team today has posted a blog post saying that the the Blogger users, from now on will be communicated for the likes of interruptions like for instance that occurred on last Saturday on Blogger Status.If somehow even if the Blogger Status blog doesn’t work for you, check Blogger Twitter update on Blogger’s twitter account

Blogger team also clarifies that in case of any significant service interruptions, they plan to publish a post mortem on the Blogger status blog within 3 business days to provide details about the cause for the interruptions and what they are doing to sort it out and to avoid similar problems in future.

Excerpt from the Blog post:

“We don’t like it when our users experience problems like what we saw on Saturday, but we hope the combination of transparency around these issues and our commitment to learn from our mistakes will help assure you that we’re doing everything we can to keep Blogger a robust and reliable service for you.”

Blogger Buzz

BTW, Check out the first “Postmortem on recent issues affecting users in Europe” published on Blogger Status blog.

Microsoft’s Bing is Buzzing on Internet

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Microsoft’s new search engine Bing (Yes, Live search is gone and Bing is here instead).Microsoft’s efforts to bring this ‘Bing’ [http://www.bing.com/]are paying off as of now.Reports are out already that suggest that Bing has overtaken Yahoo as the second preferred search engine in the U.S.

Bing has been set as the default search engine on Internet Explorer 6. bing logoBing is also censoring search results for the searches like ‘sex’ on the search engine.

Microsoft has also started publicizing Bing among mobile phones users worldwide by releasing mobile ring tones called ‘BingTones’.

Has Microsoft delivered something up to Google? Primary tests show that Bing even though may not be a Google spoiler, but definitely a much better product from Microsoft.

Bing is changing it’s background picture daily so that users don’t feel bored.

Reports confirming that Bing has been well received by the internet users worldwide reached even Google which is set to review Microsoft’s new search engine tomorrow.

Good start ,Microsoft!!

So how are you Binging?? Share your views

The Pirate Bay Founders Jailed and Fined for Copyright breaking

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Pirate_Bay_logo

In what could be a one of the rare cases of Copy-right violation, today a court in Sweden has jailed the four main people behind the Internet’s most popular BitTorrent File-Sharing site (With an estimated 22 million users),  The Pirate Bay.

Each of the four defendants behind the Pirate Bay Site, Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Carl Lundstrom were each sentenced to a year in jail.They were also ordered to pay a huge amount of $3.6 million as a penalty for damage to major entertainment companies, including Warner Bros, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI and Columbia Pictures.

But the Pirate Bay founders however denied the charges against them citing that they didn’t actually hosted any files.And also posted a notice and a video in response to the court’s verdict in the Pirate Bay site

So, the dice courts judgement is here. It was lol to read and hear, crazy verdict.But as in all good movies, the heroes lose in the beginning but have an epic victory in the end anyhow. That’s the only thing Hollywood ever taught us.

And talking about the large penalty that the court has ordered, This is what one the 4 founders of Pirate Bay had to say:

“We can’t pay and we wouldn’t pay. Even if I had the money I would rather burn everything I owned, and I wouldn’t even give them the ashes.”

While Many Copyright holders around the world are cheering this Pirate Bay verdict, others feel that it may not affect the popular file-sharing over the internet.But it certainly a alarming notice to the other famous file-sharing sites like Rapidshare and other Bit-Torrent sites.