Web Zone

The contest held to award the best and brightest extension developers in the Firefox community. Over 200 Extensions were submitted to the contest and only 18 finalists. You can see the list of the finalist extensions at: https://addons.mozilla.org/finalists.php

Winners will be announced in mid-February.

The French police are dumping Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) for Mozilla's Firefox. The French Gendarmes will convert their 70,000 odd desktops to Mozilla's Firefox browser and its email client - Thunderbird, because of Firefox's "reliability, security and inter-operability with other state services.

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In the tutorial entitled "AJAX Design Patterns" Snyke try to design a community portal as it has a wide range of different components that give a good overview of what is archievable with AJAX, also it should provide you with the basic tools that will help you in more complex AJAX applications. I must say that the word "Patterns" in the title is exaggerated and misleading. I'm not sure if Snyke knows what "Patterns" means. Anyway, the tutorial is nicely written with tons of info for the average users.

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Mister Bill's fortune is put at 47 billion dollars (38.9 billion euros), according to the latest list of the world's rich published by Forbes magazine.

At Yahoo News there is an article entitled "Microsoft founder too rich for tax computer to handle" about Mister Bill fortune. Bill Gates said at a Microsoft conference held in Lisbon:

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You know probably that the preview build version has been leaked. Now, Microsoft releases the preview version of Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 and make it available for download. This news is not for *nix users. I know they all use FireFox like me or Mozilla

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The Bantown hacker group hijacked hundreds of thousands of user accounts at LiveJournal. LiveJournal is an online community ("blogging") with 9,2 millions registered accounts. The hijacking was made possible by stealing "cookies" due to a series of Javascript security flaws in the LiveJournal site.

The hackers said on their site:

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ZDnet reported:

The Internet community will not know the scale of the February attack until it occurs. It depends on how many hosts are infected.
...
At the moment it's just sitting there quietly, and we won't know how many home users have been infected until Feb. 3.

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There are people that work to make the internet better. Here is a really good initiative. You can help. Do not hesitate to share your stories.

The StopBadware.org is a "Neighborhood Watch" campaign aimed at fighting badware and to be a clearinghouse on anti-badware efforts, providing people with a way to submit their stories and their data, and using that data to inform the research efforts.

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Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 preview (build 5299) has been leaked to the web and removed at Microsoft's request from many sites but it is still available at some sites.

Here are some screen shots:
http://rapidshare.de/files/11685012/ie5299.zip.html

If you are not satisfied with secreen shots here is some links for download :

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The Free Software Foundation has published the GPLv3 Draft and they are asking people to check carefully for cases where the GPL 3 won't do the right thing, so that they can fix them before the license takes effect.

I'm not lawyer and I don't know much about laws but what I have understood from Richard Stallman's interview, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the current license, at eWeek.com about the version 3.0 of the GPL license are these points:

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From "relationclient.net":
If you work in the B2C world, i.e. your company sells its products directly to consumers, you know certainly how much your Web site is important. The french company Numericable seems to be able to afford the closing of its site during several weeks.

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PHP is not only the name of the popular scripting language but also the name of a nonprofit organization (http://www.php.com) that has nothing to do with the PHP language. PHP's (Parents Helping Parents) mission is to help children with special needs:

PHP's mission is to help children with special needs receive the resources, love, hope, respect, health care, education, and other services they need to reach their full potential by providing them with strong families, dedicated professionals, and responsive systems to serve them.

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I saw today a great example of using XUL (XML User interface Language). The pointer is from Digg. It's an application that searches Amazon and displays results in an elegant way. It looks like an entire seperate program. Try it, it's amazing. If you are programmer, get a look to the source of the page: In firefox CTRL-U.

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In continuation to the post "Allied with the devil: Yahoo and now Microsoft", here is an interview with Bruce Einhorn from the BusinessWeek's Hong Kong bureau about the role U.S. companies play in helping China control the Internet.

China would not have succeeded in censoring the Net without the support and cooperation of foreign IT companies. This is the inescapable truth. This is the problem that has to be addressed.
....
The business interests are so large that you will never stop this.

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An article entitled "Opera launches web browser for consumer gadgets" From linuxdevices.com announces that Opera Software is shipping a version of its web browser aimed at TVs, set-top boxes, phones, and other consumer devices. Opera 8.5 aims to provide an execution environment for web applications and user interfaces, in addition to the "full" Internet experience Opera has long claimed to offer on embedded devices.

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You probably know, if you are blogger, that Ping-O-Matic uses WordPress on their site because of the error that appears from time to time: "Error establishing a database connection" (look at the picture). It is starting to get old.

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You know slashdot site, the site of "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters". One of my prefered sites on the web. I check it often. Today, Rob Malda, the creator of Slashdot wrote an article entitled "On the Matter of Slashdot Story Selection" in a response to users that accuse Slashdot Editors of being in cahoots with scam artists.

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This site is the strangest ever seen. In the Police Notebook site there is a Citizen's Self-Arrest form.

Thus, if YOU commit a crime, it would be extremely helpful (and provide a savings of tax dollars) for you to perform a Citizen's Self-Arrest.

and To ensure your Citizen's Self-Arrest is received, you have to mail a copy of the form to the local police department, in accordance with 5 instructions.

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In September, Yahoo had provided information to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of a Chinese journalist and now, Microsoft has admitted to removing the blog of an outspoken Chinese journalist from its MSN Spaces site, citing its policy of adhering to local laws despite the site in question is believed to be hosted in the USA and has nothing to do with Chinese law.

Yes, it's all about money. The day when Microsoft or any other western company looses its market in China, you will see how they will be better than a mother Teresa. But until that happens, these companies are allied with the dictators against the USA law that protects the freedom of speech.

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BBC releases nearly 80 pieces of video and audio covering iconic news stories and events of the last 50 years. You might feel that some important stories have been left out. If so, it is likely to be because the BBC doesn't have the rights to release the item. The BBC has decided to limit access to its archives in this pilot to UK residents. Users outside of the UK are not able to access clips.

But wait, there is a solution:

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