Arun

Yeah, there are a lot of other means to access them, proxies (like pkblogs.com). If the motive of the government was to prevent terrorists from using the blogs/websites, then its a dumb decision as terrorists would certainly find a way out using these proxies (thats extra protection for them since they can't be traced through proxies !). Instead, other normal bloggers/publishers are being punished by blocking traffic to their blog sites !

looks as though the government did officially order to the ISPs for blocking certain websites in the wake of the terrorist attack in Mumbai. DoT asks Indian ISPs to block 20 websites & blogs, post-Mumbai blasts Press Trust of India New Delhi, July 18: In the wake of reported shooting up of terror and hate messages on the internet following the deadly Mumbai serial blasts, the Telecom Department has directed all the 150 operational Internet Service Providers to block 18 websites. The 20 websites, according to the Government, could be used by terror groups to communicate and spread provocative messages. 'sex.in', ‘bloodspot.com’, ‘dalitstan.org’, ‘hinduhumanrights.org’, ‘hinduunity.org’ and ‘clickatell.com’ figure among the other blocked sites. It is not immediately clear till what time period this blockade will be in force. Although DoT and Department of Information Technology officials declined to comment on the issue in, which DoT issued notices to ISPs, Deepak Maheshwari, secretary, Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said the Association has received the instructions from the Government. "The instructions have been received from the Government and the sites have been blocked accordingly", Maheshwari said. Meanwhile the software industry has flayed the decision to block the sites. "The Centre's decision to block some blogs and websites in the wake of last week's serial blasts in Mumbai was "neither desirable nor feasible," NASSCOM President Kiran Karnik said in Chennai today. "The Internet should be a free media. Any attempts to block out some websites is not desirable. "If you stop the media, rumours float very fast and it is not desirable," he said. Meanwhile, soon after bloggers came to know that the government had jammed some blog sites, signs of protests were seen as large-scale discussions started on the Internet. 'The government cannot curb freedom of expression of the people and jamming of blog sites would lead to protests by the bloggers. We are discussing the future course of action,' said Kajal Basu, a web journalist. He added that a lot of bloggers are also hackers and they might try to hack into government websites as a way of protest. He said there are several websites which the bloggers could use to access the blogs and 'hardcore' bloggers would use these websites to continue blogging. 'Most of the websites that have been jammed are harmless blog sites and the information posted on these sites are open for public viewing,' Basu told IANS. He added that all these blog sites were accessible outside India and only Indians were unable to access these sites.

Qualcomm board likely to set up a fire-fighting panel DNA Networks Monday, July 17, 2006 22:02 IST KOLKATA: The board of Qualcomm, which is slated to meet on July 19, is likely to appoint a committee to initiate conflict resolution between Indian CDMA operators and the San Diego-based technology provider on such issues such as royalties and chipset costs. According to industry sources, a team of senior Qualcomm executives of based in the US has been in constant touch with both Reliance Communication Ventures and Tata Teleservices to sort out the royalty issue. “Indicative appointments with Reliance and Tatas have been sought and members of the Qualcomm board-appointed committee may come to India before the next board meeting of Reliance, which could finalise the company’s future GSM expansion plans,” a source said. An official with a CDMA operator said the key issue is economic parity between GSM and CDMA in terms of network costs and price of handsets. The Indian government, he said, is concerned over the high royalty and chipset tab, that are increasing costs of rural telephony projects by about Rs 400 crore. “To a great extent, the future of CDMA revolves around the market share it manages to capture in India. With the largest and most aggressive operator, Reliance Communication, tilting towards GSM for future expansion, the Qualcomm board will have to take a relook at its Indian strategy at its forthcoming board meeting,” an official of a GSM operator told DNA Money. GSM ‘only’ for USO — another blow ahead? Just ahead of Qualcomm’s forthcoming board meeting on July 19, the San Diego-based CDMA technology owner has received another jolt in India. The Department of Telecom is learnt to have made a proposal to the effect that only GSM mobile telephony, and not all cellular operators, be made eligible for the benefits of the Universal Service Obligation (USO) for offering services in rural areas. If the proposal is approved, CDMA operators would not be able to access USO Fund. Only basic or fixed-line service providers were eligible for the USO Fund earlier. A Bill was tabled in the Budget session of Parliament to include cellular operators, too, for the USO Fund benefits. Currently, the Bill is before a parliamentary standing committee. The eligibility of GSM could potentially put another squeeze on Qualcomm’s marketshare in India.

Check your email now, Setu

Heard this Tsunami won't affect India and is safe here, as quoted by an official in the ministry. Well, Indonesia is always at the receiving end when Tsunamis occur in that part of the world

well done Amit ! um, Microsoft better sue "Google" to stop piracy !

It doesn't depend on the place, but on the brand/company. HP would cost you Rs.65000+ for a similar configuration, and the nearest one is HP Pavilion DV5200TX (Windows XP Professional will be an addon to the price as it comes with XP Home)

Some image viewer tools like IrfanView do not allow you to resize animated gifs. Incase you do not have any other image editors which supports that, you can resize your image from www.gifworks.com for free. On the website, click File > File Open and then browse the file from your PC, and upload it. Then click Edit > Resize/Crop > Resize and a small window opens. In it, change the larger value to 64 (if its same values, then just change both to 64) and then uncheck the "Constrain Proportions" button and click OK. Now click File > File Save to save the image and then you can just right click and save the new resized image !

Thanks Utsav, the file is last updated on July 11th, 2006 and covers almost all handsets now. Pinning topic !

Its not just the royalty fee burden thats forcing Reliance Comm. towards GSM, but issues like Spectrum availability, higher infrastructure cost and also an the insecurity of being left with a very small piece of the total market share in the wake of ever increasing dominance of GSM players. Over 80% of the total market share and two billion subscriptions, comparatively low subscriber acquisition cost, high number of GSM/WCDMA terminals, and support for standards like EDGE, WCDMA-HSPA and LTE make GSM very convincing. Reliance's foray in the GSM space could be due to these very reasons and the royalty fee squabble may well be just an excuse ! HFCL may go the Reliance way - CDMA to GSM ! DNA Networks Friday, July 14, 2006 21:04 IST MUMBAI: Qualcomm’s business in India may be nearing a dead end. Following in the footsteps of Reliance Communications, Punjab-based Himachal Futuristic Communications Ltd (HFCL) is learnt to have applied for GSM spectrum for offering mobile services. The Rs 756 crore HFCL runs telecom services under the brand name ‘Connect’ in Punjab and Chandigarh. The company turned around recently, riding on the telecom boom. HFCL sources said the company wants to move away from offering CDMA-based mobile services to GSM. It, however, has no plan to surrender the CDMA spectrum and will continue to offer fixed wireless services based on CDMA. HFCL MD Mahendra Nahata could not be reached despite repeated attempts. But officials of the company and the DoT confirmed that HFCL had applied for GSM spectrum on 1800 MHz from DoT. It is planning to offer services in other circles, especially in the north, by next fiscal. Should Reliance and HFCL indeed pullout, Tata Tele Services and Mahanagar Telecom Nigam would be the only two players left in the space. While it may be too premature to say whether Industry sources feel the country is gradually shifting from CDMA to GSM due to difficulties in getting spectrum and the high cost of CDMA infrastructure.

http://messenger.yahoo.com/partners_msn.php You need to use Yahoo Messenger Beta 8 and/or Windows Live Messenger to interlink between the two networks. The Yahoo-MSN Beta program is available for India as well.

Old web addresses like www.relianceinfo.com will also work. subhrajit saha, try flushing your DNS cache and check, or else use a different DNS address in your TCP/IP settings.

that can happen, maybe at the place and time you tried there could have been lesser congestion... good for you ! Mobile phone networks were not blocked by the police, but it was the congestion which caused the problems. But the SMSs would have gone through only if everyone did that instead of calling, which isn't practical either. This is what he suggests to avoid such situations in future...

Qualcomm may agree to chipset price cut for India Press Trust of India / New Delhi July 13, 2006 CDMA technology inventor Qualcomm is likely take up the issue of chipset price reduction for the Indian market at its forthcoming board meeting on July 19, which may result in a reduction in prices of handsets. The CDMA technology licensor's market capitalisation has taken a knock-down of $15 billion, owing to several reasons like Nokia's pull-out of CDMA-based handset market and Reliance Communications' planned expansion into GSM-based mobile services. During his visit here, Qulacomm CEO Paul Jacobs is believed to have favoured the chipset reduction model over the royalty cut, which he said has no scope for further reduction as being already low. But he had not committed any time-frame for this. Indian CDMA operators have suggested Qualcomm bring down the chipset cost at par with GSM chipset cost. In low-end handsets (about $40), the CDMA chipset costs $10 while the GSM chipset costs $5. The $5 difference translates into a 12% rise in handset costs. The $10 chipset cost is 25% of the overall handset cost. Operators are believed to have asked Qualcomm to reduce the chipset prices immediately rather than doing it over a period of time of 3 years.

Microsoft, Yahoo connect IM services CNET News.com Published on ZDNet News: July 12, 2006, 5:15 PM PT Nine months after announcing they would make their instant messaging services interoperate, Yahoo and Microsoft have done it. The companies are set to release on Thursday a limited beta test of a service that will enable users of Windows Live Messenger (the next generation of MSN Messenger) and Yahoo Messenger with Voice to connect with each other. The move creates a global community of nearly 350 million accounts, the companies said. The beta service is being launched globally in 15 localized languages. "It's the first-ever bridge between two global instant messaging services," Blake Irving, corporate vice president in Microsoft's Windows Live Platform division, said Wednesday. The service will allow people to sign into both services using one user ID, and to see the status of connections of friends from both networks. "The messenger friend list is your heart of your social network in many ways," said Brad Garlinghouse, senior vice president of communications, community and front doors at Yahoo. "We expect a rapid ramp with millions of users in the coming weeks." Connecting the networks took months of testing, Irving said. "This was a very difficult technical problem to solve," he said. The companies announced plans last October to make their IM services interoperable, in what analysts said was a shot to market leader AOL Instant Messenger and a defensive jab at Google Talk. AOL representatives could not be reached for comment. A Google representative provided an e-mail statement that said: "From the very beginning, the Google Talk service was built to support interoperability with hundreds of other communications service providers. Any service provider that supports industry standard protocols can federate with us today, and many have...We don't have further details to share on our future plans in this area at this time." Under an agreement between Google and AOL, in which Google paid $1 billion for a 5 percent stake, the two companies are working to make their respective instant messaging services interoperate. Neither Microsoft nor Yahoo would comment on the status of any discussions with AOL about interoperating. "We certainly welcome seeing other industry players come to the table," Yahoo's Garlinghouse said. "We're blazing a trail for how interoperability is done." David Card, an analyst at JupiterResearch, said AOL would not move to interoperate with others until customers demanded it. "AOL doesn't need to let the other guys in as long as the user base is still healthy," he said. "I think they will let people in, eventually. This will help pressure them a little bit more."

Yes, it does have GPRS... one of my friend has it.

FireFox Official Beta 1 released July 11, 2006 - ZDNet The Mozilla Foundation has released an official beta version of Firefox 2, the next major version of its Web browser. This is the first beta version of Firefox 2 to be made publicly available, and Mozilla hopes that software developers will download it and test whether it is compatible with their existing Firefox extensions. "We have over 1,000 extensions already, but they may not work with this new version," said Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe. According to reports, the beta version comes with a built-in antiphishing tool, improved search box capabilities and an integrated spell checker. Changes have also been made to the RSS support. Nitot declined to speculate about the features that might appear in the commercial release of Firefox 2, pointing out that changes may be made following public reaction to the beta. It can be downloaded here

yet another shocking news to hit the country hope everyone's safe.

whoa, thats a lot of complaints that you have sent them ! and I don't think they are going to close down ! they are even planning to deploy WiMax in India in the near future ! From what you have posted, it appears that you have made complaints only through their website and over phone. I never had any success with their Customer Care number whenever I had problems with my TATA Indicom Broadband connection. The Customer Care numbers are routed to their Call Center in Hyderabad, which isn't very effective in clearing complaints. There should be a local VSNL office in your city, and you should approach them to clear your issues. Keep their local office number too, so that you can contact them when connection issues occur. But the problem is that Customer Care may not give you the contact details of your local VSNL office, so you will have to find out the local VSNL office address somehow.

Firefox usage continues to increase - IE down again ZDNet - July 11, 2006 The latest browser market share stats from OneStat.com show that Firefox's usage share continues to gain on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Firefox now has a total global usage share of 12.93 percent, up 1.14 percent from May 2006. Meanwhile the total global usage share of Internet Explorer is 83.05 percent, down 2.12 percent from May. Here are the full global stats from OneStat.com: July 2006 1. Microsoft IE 83.05% 2. Mozilla Firefox 12.93% 3. Apple Safari 1.84% 4. Opera 1.00% 5. Netscape 0.16% The most popular browsers in the USA are: July 2006 1. Microsoft IE 79.78% 2. Mozilla Firefox 15.82% 3. Apple Safari 3.28% 4. Opera 0.81% 5. Netscape 0.20% Source: OneStat.com The stats are even more impressive in certain European and Asia-Pacific countries. In Australia, Firefox has 24.23% of the market. For World Cup champions Italy it's 20.41% and in Germany it's a whopping 39.02%! The little browsers, Apple Safari, Opera and Netscape, seem destined to settle for niche markets from here on out - e.g. Opera is doing very nicely in the mobile market. Of course both Microsoft and Mozilla have major new versions of their browsers due out this year - IE7 and Firefox 2.0. The competition is only going to heat up!

I had used TATA Indicom on my friend's laptop using a Data Card last week in Chennai, and the the speeds were pretty much lower that I used to get when using R-Connect. Though a point to note is that the signal strength for Reliance was higher than TATA at that place.

WiMax set to make a debut IndiaTimes July 05, 2006 01:02:56 PM As Mumbai faces yet another deluge, India’s commercial capital can take a leaf out of a stranded New Orleans that managed to stay networked despite Hurricane Katrina, thanks to WiMax. The technology provides high-speed data services over a wireless network. But WiMax — Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access — may soon knock on Mumbai’s doors. Leading cellular operators are planning WiMax trials even as Mahanagar Telephone Nigam (MTNL) has indicated ambitious plans to cover both Mumbai and Delhi with the technology. On the other hand, Nokia, Motorola , Siemens, Alcatel also have a strong WiMax play. Then there are software developers like Flextronics Software Systems (FSS) and Wipro Technologies , which are working on specific products around this future wireless standard — WiMax or 802.16. Here is the potential. According to telecom research firms Maravedis and Tonse Telecoms, India could have 13 million WiMax subscribers by 2012. And here is what it could do. WiMax, offering data transfer speed at 10-15 times faster than third generation (3G) mobile services and at much lower costs will remove hassles of putting a wired last mile. Users could access phones, computers and the Internet from virtually anywhere and totally wire-free. That’s because with WiMax, wireless bandwidth will be enough to carry heavy applications like streaming video, TV, graphics heavy presentations, or even your MRI scans. Globally the service is still in its infancy. Only Korea has rolled out a version of WiMax called WiBro. In the US, WiMax was used on an experimental basis during Hurricane Katrina, to act as a back-up to damaged cellular networks. While it won’t replace 3G, its biggest appeal and promise lies in connecting remote, far-flung and even congested areas with a fat, wire-free pipe, in about a 30-km radius. Says Manoranjan Mohapatra, executive vice president and COO, FSS, `WiMax is a completely disruptive technology. The initial investment may be high but in the long-term it will offer a low-cost wireless broadband solution. It will provide a wireless extension to cable and DSL for the last mile broadband access to homes.’’ Mr Mohapatra believes that commercial roll-out (that could be more than a year away) will start with cellular operators identifying high ARPU cell sites within a city and offer WiMax as an add-on. It will help users transfer data-heavy files wirelessly and enable wireless operators to stream such applications like video to homes. Adds Raghavendra Rao, general manager, business development, wireless networks and devices, Wipro Technologies, “WiMax and 3G will co-exist. For most of our premium customers we are developing WiMax solutions.’’ FSS is building the complete software for access service node (ASN) gateway. It will be licencing this product. Says Alcatel India managing director Ravi Sharma, “We have a joint venture with C-Dot, which is doing research on WiMax. GSM can be upgraded to 3G while WiMax will be an entirely new deployment.’’ Users will benefit from WiMax services within the city limits, while they will switch to 3G for wider wireless connectivity. However, lack of spectrum availability and initial use on laptops only, via WiMax cards, could slow down subscriber growth rates.

Check out the review on Sony Ericsson W550i by Manoj. Now the Sony Ericsson’s W600i is available. It has a 1.3-megapixel standard camera, and for audio-video capabilities its real good.

imvikky, Check out this tutorial

I would suggest cross checking the username/password and also the dial number which is #777