Good morning dear readers.

Most of you might already have heard about twitter but you are still hesitating to jump into the world of tweets and tweeps. To help you build your network, this post might help you to find Mauritian tweeps and leave your username so that others can follow you.

Without any doubt, the #awesome #mauritian #blogger @yashvin should be the first one in your list, isn’t it?

While I agree that creating or mentioning a list might be the simplest, I will use a totally different approach to give the possibility to Mauritian tweeps to be different.

Anyone who wants to get followers are the most welcomed to drop down a few words along with their twitter username.

Abuse of Twitter might be bad for health, take care!

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If you landed on Wikipedia on the 18th January 2012, you most probably though that something was wrong. Wikipedia was all black with only 1 paragraph of text on it. Perhaps you did not even bother to read about it, you just said “Damn it, it is not working today!”.

The objective of this post is to briefly explain the blackout of the web on the 18th January 2012 and also, why everyone kept talking about SOPA and PIPA. If you feel that you already know what we are talking about, you should try to read some other articles as what will follow here will be pretty straight forward, just for the sake of explaining what is happening on the web.

What happened exactly?

There was a huge protest going on during the last days.  Everything was happening online, right on the web. Different web sites, organisations as well as individuals (like you and me) were publicly showing that they were against SOPA. Web sites talked heavily about this SOPA/PIPA for days and on the 18th January, many among them have put a halt to their activities by just displaying a Black page with some text, explaining their position on this matter.

What is SOPA/PIPA?

SOPA : Stop Online Piracy Act

PIPA : Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP Act)

Both of them are aimed at stopping online piracy of copyrighted items, though they are a bit different but we will not go into deeper details. However, the way that SOPA/PIPA handle copyright issues is highly unacceptable and controversial.

If SOPA becomes a reality, it will give the power to the US government to block the access to whole web sites that are accused to violate this bill with just a court order. SOPA will also allow internet service providers to monitor your traffic usage and block any web sites suspected of copyright infringement.

For example, if YOU, as a user, upload a video featuring a copyrighted music to youtube, the US government can ban the entire YouTube and no Americans will be able to view any youtube page. Copyright owners can then sue Youtube for hosting such copyrighted materials.

In short, the accused web site will just be killed.

Who are supporting SOPA?

Basically all web sites/organisations who create, produce and commercialise copyrighted materials, in the form of movie, music, photography, designs etc.

Right at the start, godaddy.com showed its interest in the SOPA. A huge boycott campaign was immediately launched and web site owners started to move their web sites and domains from godaddy to some other domain/hosting company which are against SOPA. After a few days, godaddy.com reviewed its position and changed sides. It is now against SOPA.

How does it affect web site owners and you?

Censorship. The internet will become a place where everything will be censored. There won’t be any freedom of speech. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, or any sites that allow user generated content CANNOT exist under these laws.

Megaupload. You have surely heard what happened. No?

Well, on the January 2012, the US government together with New Zealand’s authorities have arrested the people behind this huge file sharing web sites after copyright infringement complaints on behalf of copyright holders. The web site was immediately closed down and if you visit it right now, that’s what you will find :

This is not a joke. This is the kind of things that will happen to every web site and the owners if the actual SOPA/PIPA comes a reality.

And for people outside US?

While the SOPA/PIPA is only applicable to the US, the whole world will be directly affected since a big majority of web sites are hosted and these organisations are based in within the United States. You should not forget that mostly everything happens there, and if anything bad happens there, you are the ones to be affected, in all cases.

That means no web sites offering music/video among others will exist and managed from there.

What’s next?

After the historical protest of the 18th January, S. Smith, the US Representative who proposed SOPA/PIPA, decided to postpone the voting of the bill until there is a wider agreement on a solution to handle copyright issues. Lawmakers are now trying to find better alternatives to fight online piracy.

Despite I really wanted to make this blog go “black” on the 18th January too, I did not do so at the expense of the high traffic on the blog on that special day, especially on the BMW on the Mont Choisy beach post.

Hope that you have a better overview of what took place during the last days and why you could not access some of the web sites you regularly visit. If ever some of the material I have written above is misleading or wrong, please correct me by writing a comment below. Again, I have simplified things a lot just for the sake of simplicity.

Leave you here,

Take care!

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Since a few weeks, SBM has introduced a new card in its game. The SBM Smile Prepaid Card.

As you perhaps guessed, the card works a bit like your prepaid sim card. You can for buy pre-loaded cards (Up to Rs20,000) and non-loaded cards (Rs30-150,000) and use it anywhere, just like a debit card and also, use it for online purchases.

The similarities/differences as compared to a debit card or a credit card :

• Limit of Rs10,000 per day for the MUR card and up to Rs20,000 for the foreign card.
• Similarly as the debit card, the money is yours. So no interests charged like the credit card.
• You have a PIN code to protect unauthorized access to the money onto your card.
• The card is valid only 6months
• Any money unused after the 6months can be transferred back to your main account.
• The prepaid card is VISA branded.
• Whenever needed, recharge your prepaid card by transferring money to it (through banks)
• Card activated on the same day of application made.
• For those travelling, there exists 6 different currencies for the foreign card and unlike the MUR card, this one can be recharged through internet banking.

What can make me get hold of a smile prepaid card?

Below are some desirable features to make the prepaid MUR card more widely accepted :

• Very important : Allow recharging through Internet Banking or ATMs to remove the hassle of going to a bank for recharging the card.
  For example, it does not really make sense for a parent to lose precious time going to the bank monthly when he needs to top up his kid’s pocket money onto the card.
• Remove (or Increase) the Rs10,000 daily limit (The card holder needs to understand the risks)
• 6months validity is a too short period. Increase it.

Without the above mentioned, the card is not too different from the debit card I use daily, while doing my purchases in the supermarket or to withdraw money from an ATM. The limit is still Rs10,000, there is still an application fee each time I need a new card and if am not mistaken, there is no interest accumulated for the money on the prepaid card, unlike for the money which is accessible through my debit card.

More or less similar to the debit card, except that it normally allows internet purchases. No more credit card needed. I am much tempted to get one of the cards to verify if it really works for online purchases through Paypal/eBay.

Anyone wants to try it and let us know? Please share your suggestions/critiques about this new card.

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MyT users should stop reading right now because they will be somewhat angry, especially when they will read what Mauritius Telecom said regarding the myT service.

As you read in the title, the price is going down as follows, as from 1st Dec 2011 :

ADSL Home

• 256 Kb/s : From Rs399 to Rs 349.
• 512 Kb/s : From Rs759 to Rs 699
• 1 Mb/s : From 899 to Rs 799

Small and Medium Enterprises will get a decrease of %50 while Call Centers(BPO) from -10 to -40% and ADSL Business gets a discount of -50%.

btw, @Defimedia : you got your figures wrong! Double check next time!

Coming back to myT subscribers, I quote from l’express.mu :

S’agissant de My.T, ce service de Mauritius Telecom permettant à la fois de téléphoner, de visionner les films et de surfer sur Internet, il n’y aura aucune réduction des tarifs.

Price update for myT (Announced on 28 Nov 2011) :

In my opinion, if you don’t mass download like most of your friends, or you don’t use your myT to watch TNT or do international calls, the best thing to do is to buy a wifi router, connect it to a 256K ADSL line, that’s it. You can enjoy wifi as well as a much lower price.

However, be careful, you might need a permit from ICTA in case you are shopping online!

btw, always keep in mind : price might decrease but the speed will still s*ck, as well as some of their technicians and their customer care hotline!

With these words, I wish you a happy weekend ahead!

Have a nice time!

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For a few minutes, let us just forget the yearly trade fair known as Infotech.

In office this evening, we asked ourselves this simple question :

What would you like to see at Infotech?

Frankly speaking, I have not got an answer till now. As a geek, I read, view and follow the technological advances right from my browser. Internet has become is now part of my life. I have never really felt the need to rush and gaze at gadgets that have been available since months or that are much more than overpriced in Mauritius.

Infotech is for those people who are not internet addicts, those who are amazed to see a touch screen device, those who are stunned by the fact that Orange actually provides up to XMbps/sec and those who simply wish to buy a mobile phone for example.

And how can I forget last year‘s visit? It lasted only 15minutes.

Or the previous years : 2009, 2007, 2006 and 2005.

Save your time and money. Spend the time more wisely instead of being part of the 85, 000 visitors expected. So, don’t come and say (or post on Facebook) that it was not worth the visit or there was nothing new.

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While giving away my email address, I frequently get weird looks and comments like

“Euh, li marser meme sa?”

In some way, having a family email address makes you feel cooler (yeah!) and more geek that those who having the usual @gmail, @yahoo or @hotmail inbox. And believe me, some people use @orange.mu too!

My family email address runs on gmail, i.e. the same size, features (most of them), looks etc.

What does it cost?

Only around $12 (approximately Rs360) yearly per domain. I mean that if you got 2 sisters, 5 brothers, 10 cousins and 12 kids, you pay only about that much per year!

The steps

1. First of all, you need to buy the domain name. On Godaddy.com for example or you can do it directly from Step 2 in case you don’t have a domain. (btw, NO, I cannot buy it for you, don’t even think to mail me about that!)
2. Register for Google Apps (Click here)
   While writing this post, I noticed that Google gives you the possibility to do the setup pretty straightforward. The purchase and configuration is done directly from there itself.

   

3. If you choose to do the DNS settings manually, you can have a look at the various articles on the web, or just leave a comment here.
4. Once everything is set up, please give up to 24-48 hours for the DNS to propagate.

Just imagine how cool it might be: dad@family.com, mum@family.com, firstname@family.com, me@family.com…

You can even use it for your MSN Messenger and Google Talk too. Finally, don’t forget to change your email address everywhere : Facebook, twitter, newspaper subscriptions (and your porn sites[!!!])

The switch

Most probably, you won’t be able to change email address abruptly. You need to do it over certain weeks or months so that people actually start contacting you using your new email add. During that transition period, you can redirect or forward your old emails to your new inbox or vice versa. It is even possible to compose/reply to emails using different “from” email add :

Now, please update your address book.

After months of smooth transition, I made the final jump. My email is yashvin[@]awootar[dot].com and please keep your spam for yourselves or everything from you will go to the junk yard (Gmail handles this pretty good, you have been warned!).

Hope that this post was informative and interesting! Waiting to see more personalised email addresses while you comment here!

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Hello everyone!

1. Tomorrow has a special date : 11.11.11 -> 11th November 2011
2. Different web sites including the famous LifeHacker (and even Forbes) are talking about it, the “No Email Day“, on which people are highly encouraged to forget using email for a day. Instead, communicate directly to the persons if possible. btw, email turned 40 years this year!

As for me, one thing for sure, I will definitely be away from mails tomorrow because together with my DCDMC project team, we will be heading towards Ile Aux Cerfs! YAY!

Will you be able to live without your mail box tomorrow?

Let’s see who can take up this challenge? I am, definitely!

Please share around, and let’s see!

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Hello!
A short week coming ahead One more day to go, a public holiday and then 2 more days before the weekend. hehe. Anyway, thanks for tuning to the blog. I hope that you will find this post interesting and informative.

Coming to today’s topic, for those who already know what I am talking about, you can stop reading as from here and click on a link in the right sidebar ->

If you continue reading this, then most probably, you always believed that when you empty your recycle bin , the content is definitely deleted and lost. False. What you delete through your recycle bin actually remains on your disk drive, physically. To simplify things, I would say that the operating system(Windows for example) only removes links to your data.

For example : consider your kitchen trash can. When the scavenger guys collect your trash, they normally dump them into some remote area, for example Mare Chicose. This means that people can still recover your rubbish (for whatever reason).

Well, it applies exactly the same way for computers. Sensible data, even when deleted, can land into wrong hands.

Some computer software enable people to recover and gain access to those files again. Yeah, you probably saw that in films! They really do exist and are accessible to everyone. While this is sometimes useful, for example if you deleted a file by mistake, the same technique can be dangerous. People can recover the deleted data and get back your personal files and secrets.

To end this post :

If you wish to prevent people from accessing your ‘deleted’ data, you can either sanitize your disk or burn it, just like your garbage.

Take care!

Note  : Geeks, I just wanted to share this with my readers. Perhaps it might be useful. And yes, yashvinblogs recommends the use of original software and does not encourage burning of your dirty stuff.  Do what you want at your own risk!

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On the 16th August 2011, the minister of Information and Technology announced the installation of free wifi areas around the island. These wifi hotspots will be placed around governmental buildings such as municipalities, village councils, bus terminals and even beaches!

As per the announcements made,

• The wifi antennas will offer a 1km coverage wide
• Users won’t be able to abuse the system through mass downloading.
• Investment of Rs5.2 million for the installation and Rs10,000 monthly
• 10 such areas (including 1 in Rodrigues) will be operational in December 2011 for a pilot phase of this project.

Yes, this sounds exciting to get free access to internet through your mobile, laptop or even Kindle while waiting for your turn in the hospital or while waiting for your bus. CarrotMadman6 also wrote on this topic a few days back.

Factors that will determine its success :

• Bandwidth available
• Support (Whom will we call? Orange? or some governmental call center lol)
• Coverage efficiency
• Security and privacy issues while connecting to a public network.

A few side notes : Everyone knows there’s free internet available in the labs of The University of Mauritius. It is either effing slow or not working! Everyone surely remember about the cheaper wimax powered Nomad? We are a cyber island, but yet, there’s only one company with a monopole over the internet connection. Or how instead of price going down, they just double the speed to be able to cover their costs?

Its not about boasting about the “wifi-free island”, but rather about its efficiency and effectiveness among others, else it would be like having free transport for students and our elders and hundreds of complaints registered.

What do you think?

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You have always thought that Paypal is one of the safest methods for paying your online purchases, isn’t it?

Yes, you are indeed right but that does not mean that you should give away your credit card details everywhere on the web. Not even login using your Paypal credentials. Yes, you should be careful not to enter these details onto fraudulent web sites, more or less identical to the genuine one.

People are always looking for new ways to commit frauds, through various methods including the rather famous “You have win $10,000,000″ emails or through any other mails. While Nigerian scams are much known nowadays,  other forms of phishing/scam exist where people create fake web sites/mail addresses to ask for your credit card details/login credentials.

A mail from “Paypal”

Today, I was quite surprised to receive a mail on behalf of Paypal, claiming that access to my account has been restricted. On top of that, it was written in French. This was pretty weird.

Scrolling downwards, I found a link and a mouse hover allowed me to display the masked link towards some fraudulent server, identical to Paypal.

The aim of this email is to get you

1. Log into the fake web site using your real username/password
2. Enter your credit card details into the fake web site

A few small tips

• NEVER trust the “From” email addresses.
  It is so easy to fake anything in there.
• ALWAYS verify if any links are actually hosted on the actual site (paypal.com) and not some other site/ip address (screenshot above).
• If you get weird mails asking for your passwords etc, do not hesitate to contact the company (banks for example) to inquire why and report the mail.
• Whenever you are SUSPICIOUS about the identity of a web site/person, keep yourself away or ask for advice around you.
• IMMEDIATELY suspend your credit card(s) in case you suspect having entered your details onto some fake site.

Does yashvinblogs.com do that? No, because this is a trustful blog

Cheers!

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