The Battle of the Browsers will revive again as the new contender joins in. If you think that we have enough Internet browsers as it is, think again. Google is not going to let Mozilla and Microsoft take all the glory for themselves.

Google Chrome is ready to be released from Google’s arsenal of fast apps on September 2, 2008. This new browser from Google is designed to be fast, simple and clean, just like the Google Homepage. The philosophy behind the development of this new browser is to make things clean and simple, take away all the unnecessary stuff and let the user do the important stuff like browsing, chatting and sending emails. Google Chrome gets out of the way so you can surf the Internet or write those emails. Most of the components in Chrome is from Mozilla Firefox and Apple Webkit, but will remain open-source, and participation from community to help build this new browser is encouraged.

From Chrome’s official blog:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Google also takes the road less traveled in introducing their new app - this time they have used comics in introducing their new open-source browser. Not very typical way of introducing a new app but indeed very unique. The comics about Google Chrome can be found here.

For now, Google Chrome is available only for Windows but time will only tell when there is going to be a version for Linux, which I am willing to wait patiently. As for the number of choices that we have for browsers, all I can say is we can’t have too many browsers. Tell that to web developers as they have another browser to test their sites on.

Author’s Note:

I will update this post once the browser is released. I will also include the link to the download site as well.

Download Google Chome for Windows XP/Vista here.

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I wrote this simple bash script so I could tell the server’s current load by email. The script is run every 15 minutes and very lightweight.

#!/bin/bash

LOAD=`uptime | awk -F: ‘{print $5}’ | awk -F\, ‘{print $1}’`
RCPT=”kamotegirl@pinoytux.com”
TIMESTAMP=`date +%D\ %T\ %Z`

`uptime|mail -s “Server Load as of $TIMESTAMP is $LOAD” $RCPT`

Then setup the cronjob to execute the script to run every 15 minutes and send an email to the RCPT.

*/15 * * * * /home/bom/load_alert.sh > /dev/null

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I accidentally clicked a link to Gmail’s blog and here is what I have discovered. Did you know that you can alter your email address AND still receive your emails? Here are two examples: Read the rest of this entry »

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pcworld.com writes:

Software developer Unison has launched what it claims is the world’s first fully-unified communications suite based on Linux.

Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

“You can get all these elements separately on Linux, but this is the first time they have all been in one server,” said Rurik Bradbury, Unison’s chief marketing officer. Other unified communications (UC) schemes, such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) can require three or more servers to do the same thing, he added.

“If you’re reasonably familiar with Linux, you can deploy Unison in a couple of hours, and have a complete system running for a company of perhaps 50 or 60 people in half a day,” he said.

The server software works with a Unison client program for Windows PCs. This provides a genuine alternative to Microsoft’s combination of Exchange and Outlook, Bradbury claimed.

“We’re amazed no-one has done this before — build both a client and a server. Others have either one or the other,” he said. He added that a Linux version of the client will come later this year.

Unison is aimed at 20- to 300-seat organizations, but the US-based company plans to add server clustering in the future to support more. It is partly based on open source technology, such as Thunderbird for email and Jabber for instant messaging, and partly developed by Unison’s own programmers.

The software is initially offered as a free beta version but is already fit for use, Bradbury claimed.

“It is almost finished — it is relatively stable software,” he said, joking that he uses commercial software that’s less robust.

Once the beta program is complete there will be a free “community” version for up to 20 users, and per-user or perpetual licences will be sold for larger systems, although pricing for those is not yet fixed.

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Virginia’s Supreme Court on Friday upheld the first US felony conviction for spamming. The spammer will serve nine years in prison for sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003. Jeremy Jaynes is the man who will make history. A Raleigh, North Carolina, resident who made Spamhaus‘ top 10 list of spammers, Jaynes was arrested in 2003 even before the CAN SPAM act was passed by Congress. Jaynes was convicted in 2005, but his lawyers appealed the conviction. This past Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court upheld that conviction, but the vote was a narrow 4-3.

The prosecution presented evidence of over 53,000 illegal e-mails that Jaynes sent over just three days during July, 2003, but it is believed that he sent 10 million messages per day between July and August of that year. Though he is a North Carolina resident, Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the AOL servers he used for sending spam were located in Loudoun County, Virginia.

While defending Jaynes, his lawyers attempted to argue that a provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act violates constitutional First Amendment rights to “anonymous speech,” as well as the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution. The court rejected these claims due to Jaynes’ use of fake e-mail addresses, which breaks the US CAN SPAM law’s condition of giving recipients a means of contacting the sender. The court also stated that his peddling of scam products and services excludes him from First Amendment rights. In effect, the court said that you can’t scam people and then cry “free speech!” when hooked by the law.

While one might think that Jaynes’ case should have been open and shut, Justice Elizabeth Lacy highlighted some of the reasons behind the close 4-3 verdict, along with the potential dangers of vague anti-spam legislation. In her written dissent, Lacy argued that the “unsolicited bulk electronic mail” provision of Virginia’s Computer Crimes Act is “unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mail including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Still, the court upheld Jaynes’ original 2005 sentence of three years in prison for each of the three Virginia Computer Crimes Act code violations for which he was found guilty. For those playing along at home, that’s nine years in the pokey.

The lesson? Spam doesn’t pay, unless you live outside the US. But that’s a story for another day.

Source: arstechnica.com

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