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If you’re a Firefox user, you should download Firefox 4, which was released yesterday and provides a much-needed speed boost. Many people had given up on the Firefox due to its sluggishness, instead using Chome or Safari which are built on the faster webkit engine. See Lifehacker’s What’s New and Awesome in Firefox 4 for more information on updates in Firefox 4.
Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera English has a live stream that has the most in-depth coverage of events in Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Iran:
Tweet Mashup
From the MIBAZAAR Blog, there is a Twitter Mashup of protests:
Here’s a look at Middle East “Protests” on Twitter which are mapped out on Google Maps. This Google Maps Mashup shows the latest tweets from around Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Iran tagged with the respective country names. The map animates thru the latest protest tweets from the region. The tweets are displayed at geotagged location on the map at an interval of 5 seconds.
By selecting the country name on the left of the map (via radio buttons) you can view the tweets from those countries.
The Transparency Report from Google shows that queries from Libya have dropped enormously over the last couple of days. See the chart showing a drop off from the afternoon of February 18, 2011. This is what shutting off the Internet to a country looks like.
Most people who have websites are regularly emailed to join or place links on their site to be part of link farms. These are bogus links (links unrelated to the site’s content) that have the goal of tricking Google into improving the site’s search rank. Horrible SEO (Search Engine Optimization) companies sell this sleazy service. If you take part, you’re risking Google catching you and then demoting or banning your site.
See the NY Times article The Dirty Little Secrets of Search detailing how J.C. Penney rigged their results and then got demoted. It was a very successful strategy over Christmas, but Google just responded.
On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.
At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”
Two hours later, it was at No. 71.
At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”
By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.
In other words, one moment Penney was the most visible online destination for living room furniture in the country.
The next it was essentially buried.
A colleague working abroad wanted to get streaming Internet content (videos from Netflix and Hulu, music from Pandora). But those services only have content distribution deals for US customers so they block non-US subscribers. How can those services be tricked? By connecting through a US server. Here’s how.
VPN
A Virtual Private Network or VPN is used by many companies to secure traffic and make your computer appear as if it is on the local corporate network. Internet traffic is typically tunneled through the corporate servers making it appear as if the web browsing is originating on those corporate servers.
Finding a VPN Provider
You can set up a VPN yourself with OpenVPN, but it’s fairly complicated.
I suggest using a paid VPN service. Because all your traffic goes through these servers and your bandwidth is limited by the speed of the VPN servers, you need to chose a VPN service that you can trust. Most VPN providers that I found look a little shady. There are lots of fake review sites as well that are clearly promoting particular sites.
StrongVPN
StrongVPN is a provider that describes their corporate history, locations, and services in detail. Their corporate headquarters is in California and by all appearances, they aren’t a shady company. As of this writing, they have 94 servers in the US in 8 locations.
They have setup instruction for Windows, Mac and Linux.
They have a page explaining how to make sure that Hulu, etc. will work for you:
Unblocking Geographically Blocked Sites
My colleague used StrongVPN without any problems. There is typically additional lag by going through the extra hop of a VPN, but the bandwidth from StrongVPN was good and it worked well enough to watch streaming shows while outside the US.
Slingbox
Unrelated to VPNs, another solution for video when traveling abroad (or anywhere) is Slingbox, which allows you to access your home cable box or DVR. See my old post: Watch Your Home Team with Slingbox.