Quick Pitch: NuCaptcha is a first-of-its-kind CAPTCHA technology that uses video to determine if users are human, not bots.
Genius Idea: CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. These tests, of which 100 billion were used last year alone, generally comprise warped letters and numbers displayed in a widely varying range of readability levels. The idea is that they’re supposed to be nonstandard enough to be indecipherable by machines yet simple enough for humans to understand and reproduce, preventing spambot or other machine use of computer systems while granting access to humans.
In recent years, some of the CAPTCHAs humans has been asked to solve, however, have been ridiculously illegible. Most of us have at least once had to pause at the end of a web form to squint at a CAPTCHA that looked more like a yarn squiggle than an actual string of characters. That’s where NuCaptcha aims to make a difference.
NuCaptcha’s technology substitutes a brief video display of characters for the usual smash or squiggle of letters. It’s definitely easier on the human eye, and its creators say it’s also much more secure.
Moreover, if humans find NuCaptcha as legible as machines find it illegible, it should help increase signups while decreasing spambots for web services and applications.
NuCaptcha’s Flash videos run in a small, embedded screen. They come in a variety of themes and show a predetermined, constant white text followed by a short string of red letters, which the user is asked to type in a box below. As you can see below, the legibility for end users is far better than with a typical CAPTCHA:



NuCaptcha was founded in 2008 and has offices in Vancouver and San Francisco. The company offers APIs for a handful of languages and platforms; you can also download a WordPress plugin.
What do you think of NuCaptcha’s technology? Is it easier for you to read than a CAPTCHA from another site? And if you have a site or app of your own, would you consider using a technology like this? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Even though Microsoft’s spell check insists that “blog” and “blogger” are not real words, they’ve been been in the dictionary since 2003. Blogs and their platforms have a lengthy history.
The beginnings of blogging was a time not unlike today: Plaid was in style, a beloved rock star had passed, and the Internet was just gaining momentum on college campuses. In 1994, then Swarthmore College student Justin Hall started an online diary called Justin’s Links from the Underground. The site, which first started as a guide to the web, soon became an account of Hall’s life, and earned him the surely coveted title of pioneer blogger. Three years later, Jorn Barger would coin the term “weblog,” and it’s short form, “blog,” was later coined by Peter Merholz.
Today, the web is comprised of millions of blogs covering every topic imaginable. Here is short history of some of the medium’s most popular platforms.

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1. Open Diary

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Founded in 1998 by Bruce Ableson, Open Diary was the first website that brought online journal keepers together as a community, as users had the ability to read each other’s journals and leave comments on them. To date, the site has hosted more than five million diaries since launch, with more than half a million diaries currently being used.

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2. Live Journal

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3. Xanga

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4. Blogger

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Blogger was created by San Francisco company Pyra Labs in 1999. Created on a “whim” according to the site, Blogger took off, gaining in popularity. The site was bought by Google in 2003, and the platform subsequently saw the integration of Picasa and Hello. 

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6. TypePad

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Did you just buy a new cell phone? The first thing that you’re probably looking to do is copy all the phone numbers and other contact information from the old phone to your new one.

How to Transfer Contacts to your New Phone

The process may vary depending upon the model and OS of your phones but broadly, there are three options:

1. SIM based transfer

If the address book of your old phone is relatively small and you only want to copy the phone numbers to your new cell phone, simply use the SIM card.
Just copy the phone numbers from the old phone’s memory to your SIM card, insert this SIM card into your new phone and then copy the phone numbers in your new phone’s memory.

2. Transfer Contacts via your Computer

The SIM card based approach is good only for transferring basic phone numbers but if your phone’s address book includes long names, email addresses, and other details of your contacts, you need some sort of software to help you with the transfer process.
For instance, if you have a Nokia phone but are shifting to a BlackBerry or an iPhone, you may use Nokia’s Ovi Suite application to copy your phone’s address book to Microsoft Outlook on your desktop computer. You can then use BlackBerry’s Desktop Manager software, or iTunes in the case of iPhone, to transfer contacts from the PC (Outlook) to your new phone’s address book.
Windows Mobile users, like Samsung Omnia or HTC HD2, may again use Microsoft’s Device Center (or ActiveSync for XP) to copy their phone address book to the desktop via Outlook. If you are simply switching from one Windows Phone to another, you can transfer contacts via the cloud itself using Microsoft’s My Phone service.
If you have an old CDMA based mobile phone from, say Samsung or LG, you can use the free BitPim utility to copy the phone book to your computer. BitPim is available for Windows, Mac and Linux machines and it can export address books in standard vCard format (.vcf) that you can easily import into Outlook and other contact managers.

3. Transfer Phone book “Over the Air”

If you have an Internet enabled phone, you can easily copy contacts from your old phone to the new phone over-the-air without even requiring a computer.
An online service called Mobical is free and it works with most mobile phones from Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson and so on. You first need to setup Mobical on the old phone and it will create a backup of your phone contacts in the cloud. Now setup Mobical on the new phone using the same credentials and it will automatically download all the contacts from the cloud to your new phone.
Then there’s Google Sync, a cloud based service that works with BlackBerry, iPhone, Nokia and most other mobile phones that are SyncML capable. Google Sync keeps your phone’s address book in sync with your Google Contacts. Therefore, if you now install Google Sync on both your old and new phone, they’ll have the same phone book entries automatically.
Android based phones can sync with Google Contacts out of the box – you can then export Google Contacts out as a CSV file and copy it to any other phone manually via the desktop tools. HTC even offers a desktop utility called HTC Sync that you may use to synchronize Outlook contacts with your Android phone. This will be handy when you want to copy your HTC’s phone book to another phone that is not web-enabled.
PS: Previously mentioned Zyb is now part of Vodafone and is no longer accepting new users.

Users' personal information cannot now be made private, security consultant says.

The personal details of 100 million Facebook users have been collected and published online in a downloadable file, meaning they will now be unable to make their publicly available information private.

However, Facebook downplayed the issue, saying that no private data had been compromised.
The information was posted by Ron Bowes, an online security consultant, on the Internet site Pirate Bay.
Bowes used code to scan the 500 million Facebook profiles for information not hidden by privacy settings. The resulting file, which allows people to perform searches of various different types, has been downloaded by more than 2,400 people.
This means that if any of those on the list decide to change their privacy settings on Facebook, Bowes and those who have the file will still be able to access information that was public when it was compiled.
Bowes’ actions also mean people who had set their privacy settings so their names did not appear in Facebook’s search system can now be found if they were friends with anyone whose name was searchable.
'Scary privacy issue'

On his website, http://www.skullsecurity.org/, Bowes said the results of his code were "spectacular," giving him 171 million names of which were 100 million unique.
"As I thought more about it and talked to other people, I realized that this is a scary privacy issue. I can find the name of pretty much every person on Facebook," he wrote.
"Facebook helpfully informs you that "[a]nyone can opt out of appearing here by changing their Search privacy settings" — but that doesn't help much anymore considering I already have them all (and you will too, when you download the torrent). Suckers!"
"Once I have the name and URL of a user, I can view, by default, their picture, friends, information about them, and some other details," Bowes added. "If the user has set their privacy higher, at the very least I can view their name and picture. So, if any searchable user has friends that are non-searchable, those friends just opted into being searched, like it or not! Oops :)"

PageRank, in simple English, works something like this. Google assigns a fixed number of points to a page that are then equally divided among the other pages that are linked from that page.
For example, assume that Google has assigned a web page some 100 points and there are 5 hyperlinks on that page. Each of these pages will therefore get 20 points from Google. If two of these hyperlinks are written using the rel=nofollow attribute, Google won’t give them any points but the remaining three pages will still get 20 points each as before. The balance 40 points (100 – 20*3) are lost.
So should you use the nofollow attribute at all in your internal links? Google’s webmaster site recommends the use of nofollow in some scenarios:

Search engine robots can’t sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there’s no reason to invite Googlebot to follow “register here” or “sign in” links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you’d prefer to see in Google’s index.

This stand is however completely different from what Matt Cutts has suggested in one of his recent videos (embedded below).


Matt has unequivocally advised that web publishers should not use rel=nofollow when linking to any of their internal pages even if they don’t want to see those pages in search engines.
He didn’t share any specific reason that made Google to change their original stand on the use of nofollow in web pages but, as a publisher, what matters more to us is the current recommendation which is ” no nofollow on internal links.”

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