Have you ever wondered how you can be safe on the net?

If you answered NO, Think again!
If you answered YES, then you know the hazards on the net.

We know that Internet provides immense data to quench any thirst. But, beware there are places on net you might not want to be in but may end up being if you are not alert.

Here are few steps you can take to make sure you are safer on net than before.

Choose the right browser

Safe browsing starts with choosing the right browser. We all know Internet Explorer (‘blue e’ on your desktop) is the browser to surf the net. There are other alternative to it like, Mozilla Firefox (www.getfirefox.com), Opera (www.opera.com), Google Chrome (www.google.com/chrome), Apple Safari (www.apple.com/safari).

You might want to use the alternate browser for few simple reasons. Those browsers work pretty well on all sites, they are faster, they are free, they have low market share when compared to Internet Explorer.

Let me explain why you need to choose browser with lower market share. Lets consider you are the doing a business with a choice to choose a market with ten lakh prospects or few thousand prospect. Which one will you choose? Most of the business men/women will choose market with ten lakh prospects. Same applies to the browsers, if you are using a browser with lower market share, probability of someone writing a software exploit for your browser is less than browser with bigger market share.

Also, make sure you are using latest version of the browser.

Keep your Operating System up-to-date.

Always keep your operating system up-to-date. If you are using Windows then make sure Windows Update is enabled. If you use Linux make sure your distribution is upto date.

Always use user with no administration privilege

As Uncle ben tell in the Spiderman movie “With great power, comes great responsibility”. with a less privileged user, even if you end up in a infected site, you will not affect other users or entire system.

Install Antivirus / Antispyware

Make sure you have installed security software like Antivirus, Antispyware and Windows Firewall is enabled. Let me suggest few free Antivirus, Antispyware.

Microsoft Security Essentials (antivirus, atispyware) – (www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/), Avira Antivirus (www.free-av.com/en/download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html – use only for personal use), AVG antivirus (www.avg.com/in-en/homepage). Or you can spend on some paid antivirus/antispyware software.

Never provide personal information

Personal information like home address, phone number, social security number (uniqueid we are going to get soon), passwords, names of family members, credit card numbers, bank account number are something which are not required for operation of any website. Refrain from providing information which you feel are not related to the service provided by the website. Most genuine websites will not ask for these details. If some website is asking for such details then they should be providing service related to them. DON’T TRUST EVERY WEBSITE you visit.

Phishing / Malware sites

Phishing is a fraudulent activity where a site will look like a legitimate site but will have different url. These websites are hosted by cyber criminals to gather private information of the internet users. These links are usually sent through emails or instant messengers.

So, DON’T CLICK ANY LINKS on a email sent by unknown person. Check these links for further information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing, http://www.microsoft.com/protect/fraud/phishing/symptoms.aspx

Ok, you might want to know which sites are safe. Fortunately, there is solution to your problem. Internet Explorer 8.0 has something called SafeScreen which takes care of identifying a site as trustable or not. Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome also has similar feature which identifies whether a site is safe or not and warns you when you visit a page which is suspected to be either fraudulent or is infected and will harm you or your computer.

Always make sure that the url in the address bar is same as the url of the site you think you are in before providing any information. This might save you from sleepless nights and prevent you from giving away your credit card/bank information to phishing sites.

Protecting your kids

There are many parental control software available which can protect your kids from landing into unwanted sites and also lets you to monitor their online activity. Let me suggest you few of them. Windows live family safety (http://download.live.com/familysafety), it is part of windows live essentials package. K9 web protection (http://www1.k9webprotection.com/).

Firefox 3.5 the much awaited release to counter IE 8 was released today. Fasten your seatbelt: Firefox 3.5 includes the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which gives the browser dramatically better performance than ever before. Firefox has always been fast, but this is the fastest Firefox ever (more than twice as fast as Firefox 3, and ten times as fast as Firefox 2), meaning Web applications like email, photo sites, online word processors and more will feel snappier and more responsive.

Performance

Flash is an excellent technology for dealing with data visualization. It being client-side, it can reduce the amount of work your server has to perform in order to generate graphs and charts. Because of its robust ability in dealing with sleek and fluid animation and complex user interactivity, Flash is an excellent web and (and even desktop) application technology for dealing with graphing data.

In this article, you will find ten excellent Flash components that will help you in building stunningly attractive, complex, and interactive data visuals. These components will help you create an assortment of graphs and charts to aid in presenting otherwise boring and stale numerical data.

Open Flash Chart is an open source Flash-based graphing and charting solution developed using ActionScript 3 and compiled using Flex. Open Flash Chart’s features include interactivity of your charts with tooltips, the ability to resize your charts client-side, and being able to save your graphs as images.

Its native data format is JSON, which makes it a breeze to work with for developers who know C-style language like Perl, Python, PHP, and of course, JavaScript. There’s some great Open Flash Chart tutorials to get you started right away.

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Today we’re excited to announce Google Ventures, Google’s new venture capital fund. This is Google’s effort to take advantage of our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies. By borrowing the best practices of top-tier, financially focused venture capital firms and bringing to bear Google’s unique technical expertise and brand, we think we can find young companies with truly awesome potential and encourage their development into successful businesses.

At its core, Google Ventures is charged with finding and helping to develop exceptional start-ups. We’ll be focusing on early stage investments across a diverse range of industries, including consumer Internet, software, clean-tech, bio-tech, health care and, no doubt, other areas we haven’t thought of yet. Central to our effort will be our fellow Googlers, whom we view as a critically important resource to help educate us about potential investments areas and evaluate specific companies.

Economically, times are tough, but great ideas come when they will. If anything, we think the current downturn is an ideal time to invest in nascent companies that have the chance to be the “next big thing,” and we’ll be working hard to find them. If you think you have the next big idea, or if you just want to to learn more, please see our website at www.google.com/ventures.

MySpace just announced that it will bring its Open Platform to Windows Mobile phones. The new MySpace mobile application for Windows Mobile will be built on top of Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. In addition, MySpace also announced its MySpace Silverlight SDK, which will make it easier for developers to build OpenSocial applications using Silverlight.

MySpace also announced that LG will preload the MySpace Mobile application on the next-generation of its Windows Mobile 6.1 phones.

According to Microsoft, the company will also release a kit on April 2 that will allow developers to use Visual Studio and Expression Blend to create OpenSocial-based applications.

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How do you determine the global market share of a browser?

It’s hard to give a proper answer to this – there are so many factors that go in to determining an exact global market share. How do you track users? If you’re tracking web sites, which web sites do you track? No matter how you look at it, it’s hard to pin these down.

The Mozilla Metrics team has been blogging recently, discussing different ways in which market share can be evaluated. In a recent post breaking down the various metric services they looked at some of the most popular ones, analyzing their quality of data.

One of the services that we make a lot of use of to get a decent global view of browser market share is Net Applications. Their data comes from a wide selection of sources and tracks over 160 million users.

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