Internet Filtering in the United Arab Emirates- What you see if you hit a forbidden site
The full list of prohibited content is here. Removal requests for the UAE firewall can be submitted here.
Web Design Companies with Rubbish Websites? Doh!
The web design space is getting crowded, and it's getting difficult to tell the good guys from the ones who try to sell you a falafel of sales jargon. Or does it?
It never ceases to amaze me when a company, purporting to design websites, lets its own site look like it was cobbled together by the work experience guy on a bad hair day.
It's true that sometimes there isn't time - the company is so good, and its reputation is such, that it simply isn't worried about marketing. I have come across a couple of these cases. Websites of this breed tend to have a minimalistic aura about them, like something created by a 'designers' designer', made in a fleeting sushi matt motion. And when you speak to them you know right away that this is the case. They don’t have to work with you. They’ll see if they can slot you in. Or sometimes they’re just too busy to help.
As for the rest of you - please pay attention: If a corporate (or myself on their behalf as is often the case), is looking for the best web design company for a project, the first thing we will check is your website. If it looks rubbish, we won't spend another minute worrying about it, and move swiftly on to the next candidate. Simple as that. You wouldn't buy clothes from a tailor who displays badly-made suits in their shop window, now would you? Or a hairdresser with pictures of the Perez Hilton cut adorning their salon front? Didn't think so.
We want to see what you can do, we want to see who you've worked with, and what you've done for them (a simple logo is no good, we want to know what you've actually designed), we want to see good usability and accessibility, we want to understand what you're about and what makes you special - and why we should work with you. We want a sense of your ethos and maybe that little bit of x-factor.
Your website is your shop window. Now show us your wares. Please!
Your personal YouTube Viewing Habits to be Handed Over to Viacom
YouTube owner Google has been forced by a New York judge to hand over the personal information of every person who has ever watched a video on the YouTube to US broadcaster Viacom, whose TV channels include MTV, Paramount and Nickelodeon.
The information is of more than 100 million people, their viewing habits, internet and email addresses, and enough data to identify individuals.
Privacy activists from the Digital rights group, Electronic Frontier Foundation, said yesterday the order by Judge Louis Stanton of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York "threatens to expose deeply private information", calling the court order a "set-back to privacy rights".
In a response to the ruling, Google said: "We are disappointed the court granted Viacom's overreaching demand for viewing history. We will ask Viacom to respect users' privacy and allow us to anonymise the logs before producing them under the court's order."
Although Viacom's move may be seen by some as a bargaining gambit to get Google to cough up royalties, it is a deeply unsettling development for privacy and personal liberties advocates. In 2006 the US Department of Justice demanded that Google hand over details of millions of searches conducted by its users, and although it was unsuccessful in its demands (Google challenged it and won), a collective shudder was felt across the Internet.
Viacom may be right to demand royalties for copyrighted material it owns, but if indeed, as it claims, it is only out to prove the case against YouTube, it should take up Google's offer to anonymise the disks of personal information before it scours them for evidence to support its commercial case.
Further reading:
Viacom lawsuit: Google told to hand over all YouTube user details (Guardian)
Judge orders Google to give YouTube user data to Viacom (AFP)
UPDATE (15 July 08): YouTube, the online video site owned by Google, has struck a deal to strip potentially compromising personal information out of reams of user data that it is being forced to hand over to Viacom (more)
Firefox 3 – Download Now Available!
You can now download the Firefox 3 beta!
The new version of the popular Firefox browser is available for download here.
According to the Firefox 3 release notes:
Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 15,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.
In plain English that means it is designed to be faster, more secure and with better features.
You can see what's new in the Firefox 3 browser here.
A (very thorough) review of Firefox 3 can be found here.
Yahoo! to launch Yahoo.ro for Romania
Speaker: Darren Patterson, Business Development Director, YAHOO! Europe
New Media Conference & Expo 2008 - Bucharest (live blogging from the event)
Some highlights:
- Yahoo is planning the launch of Yahoo Romania. It has an organically grown audience in Romania and it wants to build on it. Similar things are happening in Turkey, Poland and Russia.
In Eastern Europe Yahoo finds that advertisers just want to buy a set number of page views for their campaigns. Yahoo is planning to introduce more and better targeting to this market, and educate advertisers about better targeting.
Romanian users with a @yahoo.com email address will be given the option to change to a @yahoo.ro address.
More:
http://beatriceworld.com/yahoo-launch-yahooro-and-messenger-service-in-romanian.html
http://ghepardoo.blogspot.com/2008/05/yahoo-will-launch-its-romanian-portal.html