Let's celebrate google's 13th birthday

World's #1 search engine Google is celebrating its 13th birthday today on 27 September, 2011.

As we know Google is providing very good services to us so wish Google a happy birthday.





Wikipedia says:

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at Stanford University in California

While conventional search engines ranked results by counting how many times the search terms appeared on the page, the two theorized about a better system that analyzed the relationships between websites. They called this new technology PageRank, where a website's relevance was determined by the number of pages, and the importance of those pages, that linked back to the original site.

 Read more about Google's 13th Birthday

Top 10 Most Trusted US Brands

Tech brands have earned consumer trust for privacy, rubbing shoulders with some of the most established brands in America says a new study released by The Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe.

Ponemon Institute and TRUSTe conducted a two-stage survey to gauge the privacy policies and practices of leading consumer brands. First, the companies were rated as “most trusted” in an unaided survey of 6,486 adult-aged U.S. consumers. Second, an expert review panel at the Ponemon Institute judged the companies based on rigorous criteria, including the clarity and readability of privacy statements, notice, access to account information, cookie management, in- and out-of-network data sharing practices, as well as the availability of customer service staff.

According to the 2009 survey results, eBay is the Most Trusted Company for Privacy, proving that the e-commerce site can protect consumer privacy, while handling massive volumes of sensitive data. For the first time a telecommunications company made the top 10. Verizon earned the ranking as the second most trusted company. Despite negative press coverage on Facebook’s privacy problem, the 300 million user social networking company broke into the top 10, indicating Facebook’s new privacy practices re approved by both their user community and privacy experts.

Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute said, “Year in and year out our Most Trusted Companies for Privacy study is a fascinating snapshot of public sentiment toward business.With the banking industry at the center of a national financial crisis, it’s no surprise to see a loss of trust reflected in the rankings of even those top performers on this list. Meanwhile, the continued strong showing of e-businesses such as eBay, WebMD, Yahoo!, and Facebookseems to demonstrate consumers’ growing comfort with doing business online.”

2009 Award Winners

1. eBay
2. Verizon
3. US Postal Service
4. WebMD
5. IBM
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Nationwide
8. Intuit
9. Yahoo!
10. Facebook

The Ponemon Institute is a privacy-focused research center. TRUSTe is a privacy services and seal provider. The #1 ranked auction site eBay, the #2 ranked cell phone provider Verizon and #10 ranked Facebook are Gold Award Winners in their respective categories on TopTenREVIEWS.

Best Games All Weekend

Weekend Shopping: New Low Prices on Wii, Palm Pre and Xbox 360

This is the weekend to pick up newly reduced must-have electronics, assuming you can fit in a quick shopping trip between football games. Count on us at TopTenREVIEWS to make it as easy as possible. We’ve got a rundown on the big games scheduled for the weekend and all the information you need on these new lower priced products.

First up: The Products

Nintendo Wii: This week saw a $50 price drop for the ever popular Nintendo Wii. This is a full package including the motion-sensing Wii Remote™ controller, Nunchuk™ controller and Wii Sports™ software. The Wii remains the best selling game console http://video-game-consoles-review.toptenreviews.com/ of the big three: Wii, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. Watch all the college ball you want on Saturday because this deal doesn’t start until doors open on Sunday.

Price: $199
Where to buy: Try Wal-mart, Target, Best Buy and Toys ‘R Us (in that order)
If you go to Wal-mart, you can pick up some used Wii games as well.

Xbox 360: At the end of last month, Microsoft cut $100 off the Xbox Elite, that’s the 120GB version with built-in DVD player and Netflix support.

Aaron Greenberg, director of product management for the Xbox 360, summed up the Xbox price cuts,
"With the Pro console we are dropping the price down $50 to $249 while supplies last. Moving forward we will have two, the $199 Arcade and the Elite console for $299."

The only difference with the $299 Elite versus the pre-price cut models, is the $299 does not include an HDMI cable.

Price: $299
Where to buy: Gamestop, Best Buy, Target, Wal-mart (in that order)

Palm Pre
Amazon announced today it would sell the Palm Pre for $99 with two year contract. It’s a great phone, often compared to the iPhone sans all the apps. This deal is only available through Amazon right now, so don’t go down to your neighborhood Sprint store and expect to pay less than $150 for it. Hey, that just means more time for watching football.

On to Saturday’s games:

Illinois vs #13 Ohio State
This game will be worth watching with lots of fun elements in it. We’ve got mobile quarterback versus mobile quarterback , Illinois’ Juice Williams up against Ohio State’s Terrelle Pryor, both teams coming off of wins and Illinois hoping to upset Ohio State to vault them back into the top 25. Illinois came into this season with high hopes , but were quickly disappointed a 37 – 9 humbling at home to Missouri. Hopefully Illinois will live up to its potential and pull off an upset. Ohio State is still vulnerable after almost losing to perennial whipping boy Navy in week one. Tune in at 3:30 ET.

#6 Cal (3-0) vs. Oregon (2-1)
As the Cal Bears and the up and coming Heisman candidate, Jahvid Best look to extend their good fortune against the Ducks, they just may do so. However, Oregon is coming off of a big win at home against 16 games-in-a-row winner, Utah. They’ll be looking to ruin the season of Cal as well in this big Pac-10 matchup. Catch it at 12:30 p.m. PST.

#3 Alabama (3-0) vs. Arkansas (1-1)
The top five teams this year have definitely been in danger more than once. We’ve already seen some big ones fall, most recently Ole Miss, and Oklahoma to BYU at the start of the season, so if Alabama thinks this’ll be a dance through the daisies, they’ve got another thing coming. The Razorbacks aren’t coming to mess around. Look for this one to be close, but we’ll see if Alabama learned their lesson from last year’s Sugar Bowl and puts ‘em away early. Tune into CBS at 3:30 p.m. EST.

Now if you’re aiming for the Wii on Sunday, work your shopping around these NFL games. TopTenREVIEWS resident football expert, Scott Wimmer, says these are the ones to watch. And this guy knows his football: he’s currently ranked in the top 100 of the hhgregg Pro Football Expert Club. Top prize: 55” LED TV from Samsung and additional weekly prizes.

Sunday’s Must-See Games:

New England Patriots (1-1) vs. Atlanta Falcons (2-0) 1:00 p.m. EST
New England coming the biggest upset thus far this year look to rebound, this will be a tough rebound as the once run heavy Falcons have come out of nowhere and started throwing on everyone. This one is intriguing for the quarterback matchup, Tom Brady v Matt Ryan, old dog vs the young up-and-comer. Even though I’m pretty sure the pats will most likely come out on top it’s still fun to watch.

Buffalo Bills (1-1) vs. New Orleans Saints (2-0) 4:05 p.m. EST
Who doesn’t like to watch T.O. (Terrell Owens)? And, who doesn’t like to see lots of throwing and a dynamic offense with the league’s most accurate passer, Drew Brees? This game should be a shootout, at least New Orleans should do plenty of scoring, let’s hope Buffalo can keep up.

Minnesota sVikings (2-0) vs. San Francisco 49ers (2-0) 12:00 p.m. CST
Power Running vs. Power Running, this is a game for people who like to see football the way it was played back in the day: running the football and running some more. All eyes will be on the matchup between league MVP, Adrian Peterson, and last week’s big surprise Frank Gore. Sorry Frank, don’t think you’ll be running for 200+ this week, although I hope so.

How to Prevent BlackBerry Outage

North American Blackberry users suffered their second outage in a week early Tuesday evening. For about eight hours, messaging, email and some Internet service were out, but users could still send and receive phone calls and texts.

During the outage, Twitter lit up with BlackBerry users asking if anyone else was having problems with their phone email. Within five hours of the outage, BlackBerry was the top search query on Google and a trending topic on the Twitter homepage.

In a statement issued to the Canadian press, Research in Motion (RIM), manufacturer of BlackBerry phones, wrote:

"Based on preliminary analysis, it currently appears that the issue stemmed from a flaw in two recently released versions of BlackBerry Messenger (versions 5.0.0.55 and 5.0.0.56) that caused an unanticipated database issue within the BlackBerry infrastructure," the spokesperson wrote. "RIM has taken corrective action to restore service."

BlackBerry Messenger is RIM's proprietary instant messaging system that offers messaging from one BlackBerry user to another. It can be used worldwide without additional international charges. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the BB Messaging Service was one of the only open communication channels available to emergency responders. It's a valuable system, but one potential weakness is that it must be updated by users on a routine basis.

The fix

Surprisingly, the fix that RIM issued has no obvious connection to the most common problems resulting from the "flaw" — email failure.

RIM recommends "anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since Dec. 14 should upgrade to version 5.0.0.57, which resolves the issue. The update is available now through BlackBerry browsers at blackberry.com/messenger or BlackBerry App World.

Even users who do not use BlackBerry Messenger should install the update as it apparently affects them as well. Enterprise clients using BlackBerry Enterprise Server software were not affected.

Damage control is a real problem for RIM. Yes, the technical issue seems to have been repaired, but communicating the news and its solution to BlackBerry users fell short this time. And RIM has repeatedly broken its promise that such outages will not happen again. After an outage in 2007, RIM CEO Jim Balsillie said, "It was a process error that we had that's been fixed. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again."

But subsequent widespread outages occurred on Feb. 11, 2008, Dec. 17, 2009 and — the most recent one — Dec. 22, 2009. According to a comScore report issued in Oct., 14 million Americans use a BlackBerry compared to 8.9 million iPhone users.

Users deserve better communication

If millions of users turn to Twitter, RIM could do the same. On July 3, 2009, Authorize.net, the Internet's largest online transaction provider, went down due to a fire in a Seattle data center. Within an hour, Authorize.net launched a Twitter page that reported the problem, updated the status of the service, and responded in real time to customer questions.

In addition to a Twitter page, RIM could also put news front and center on its webpage. A visit to the site revealed the last Troubleshooting Tip for Top Issues was dated Sept. 9, 2009.

Old-school communication is not sufficient for alerting millions of users to a problem with their phone service. Advanced devices deserve advanced news distribution..

PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010

Websites:	Homepage
Category:	Security
Manufacturer:	PC Tools
Platform:

Overview

PC Tools Internet Security 2010 is a complete suite of protection utilities against malware and hackers fpr your Windows PC. It includes Spyware Doctor which is an award wining anti-malware protection utility. Also included is ThreatFire which is behavioral intelligence that protects you from Zero-Day threats. PC Tools Internet Security is advanced technology designed especially for people, not just experts. It is automatically configured out of the box to give optimal protection with limited interaction, so all you need to do is install it for immediate and proven ongoing protection.

Installation

Installation is straight forward following the install wizard. You are recommended to uninstall any other security applications before proceeding with installation as they may conflict with operation.

If you don’t want the Thunderbird Toolbar make sure to uncheck that option before proceeding.

After you enter in your license key, you’re offered to get the latest updates right away.

A reboot is required to complete the installation.

Features

This is a complete computer security solution and contains different features that help protect your machine. From the main screen you can control the malware protection and the Firewall protections.

The most notable feature to point out is incorporation of Behavior Guard which is powered by the ThreatFire engine. ThreatFire is also available as an individual download and works along side your Antivirus app and provides protection against Zero-Day attacks.

Since it includes Spyware Doctor you will be familiar with the IntelliGuard Protection that allows you to control different features of your security protections.

Browser Defender is added to Internet Explorer and acts as phishing protection and points out other shady sites.

It is installed automatically for IE but if you want it for Firefox, you will need to install it from a separate download.

When you do a search on Google, there is a small icon next to each result that tells you if a site is safe or not.

You can get more information on a site if it is determined to be unsafe.

For unsafe sites, a complete safety analysis is performed and you can check the results of potentially infected downloads.

A new Anti-Spam engine incorporates spam filtering with clients like Outlook and Thunderbird.

Control the applications that are allowed access to your network through the Firewall.

You can also use the slider to set the level of protection of the firewall.

Smart update provides the latest malware database and product updates.

You can schedule full and Intelli-Scans to take place daily, weekly, and monthly at times you specify.

Ease of Use

After installation is complete an update and scan kicks off right away which allows for up to date detection and removal of malware out of the box.

After the scan you get detailed results of what was found. You can go through and decide which detections you want to remove.

It allows you to do an Intelli-Scan, Full System Scan, or Custom Scans.

For a manual scan simply kick off a scan from the main interface.

You can monitor the progress while the scan takes place.

It allows you to scan individual files from the context menu as well.

Right-click on the tray icon to access a menu of different functions and features such as enabling Game Mode.

Performance

We ran our tests on a Windows 7 system with a dual core AMD processor and 2 GB of RAM and there was no slow down while doing day to day mutli-tasking. Intelli-scans are quick but full system scans are time consuming.

Product Support

As with all of their products, PC Tools provides several ways to get quick support for Internet Security 2010. On their site they provide FAQ, a Knowledgebase, User Manuals and Live Chat for support. They also include Email and Telephone support for users who have purchased a license.

Conclusion

PC Tools Internet Security 2010 is a comprehensive package of security protections for your PC. What really makes all of PC Tools new 2010 security apps great is the inclusion of the ThreatFire Behavior engine that protects you against Zero-day threats which we have covered previously. The one thing you may find annoying at first is the Firewall that needs to be trained to allow or deny applications…but it will remember your selections. It is relatively light on system resources and isn’t overbearing like some security suites can be. If you’re a gamer, you’ll love the easy Game Mode option that will turn off components of the suite that can hinder game performance simply by starting the game in full screen mode. All of the utilities can be downloaded as stand a lone apps, but having them all in one suite is very convenient. They offer a free limited trial and is $49.95 for a license to protect up to three computers.

Works with XP (SP2), Vista (32 & 64-bit), and Windows 7 (32 &64-bit)

Download PC Tools Internet Security 2010

Disable "Your computer might be at risk" Popup in Windows XP SP2

Since upgrading to XP SP2 a long time ago, I constantly get nagged by a popup message that tells me my computer might be at risk because I don’t have an antivirus software installed. Here’s how to turn off that annoying message.

Note: You should probably have antivirus software installed.

You will want to open up your control panel, and then open the Security Center icon.

On the left hand side of the security center window, you will see a resources section. Click the bottom link, “Change the way Security Center alerts me”

You can choose which alert to disable here. Since I don’t have antivirus software, I unchecked the bottom checkbox.

No more annoying popups!

Top 11 must-have Internet Explorer Addons

In case you’re one of those folks using that other browser (aka Internet Explorer or IE),this post is for you. Here, you’ll find a bunch of cool browser extras (other then Google Toolbar) to make Internet Exlorer way more usable.

Update: IE7 Pro was moved to the front due to the fact that it incorporates several frequently used features in one addon.

(1) IE7Pro (only IE 7) – little overwhelming and takes some time to get used to, but totally worth it. Includes powerful tab manager, AD or Flash blocking utility, Crash recovery, Proxy switcher, Web accelerator, User Agent switcher, Webpage capturer, Greasemonkey scripts support, Firefox style inline search, spell checker and some more.

(2) LeechVideo – handy IE addon that lets you download favorite videos from popular video sharing websites (i.e. Youtube, Google Video, DailyMotion, etc.). Other alternatives: Viloader |Video Downloader

(3) Inline Search – integrates an in-page search feature to Internet Explorer. Use ‘CTR+F’ to launch it in the left-bottom corner of your browser window.

(4) ShareThis – lets you quickly (1) email webpages (or embedded pictures or videos) to friends or contacts (gmail, myspace, facebook…) and (2) post notes to your Facebook/Myspace profiles.

(5) Convert with Zamzar – browser addon from a comprehensive, web-based file conversion service, Zamzar. Lets you convert and download desired files from your favorite websites at the click of a button on your browser toolbar. It can be a Youtube video that you want to play in Windows Media Player, a Flickr image that you need in JPEG format, or a word file that you need in PDF.

(6) Browster – integrates link preview capabilities into your browser. For instance, each time you search on Google, Yahoo, MSN or visit some popular website Browster places a special icon next to each link, hovering your mouse cursor over it triggers a pop-up window displaying the contents of the destination page. Other alternative: Cooliris

(7) FeedsPlus (only IE 7) – in case you’re using your browser to follow-up on feeds, then this is for you. It adds couple of handy features, i.e. ability to read feeds in a combined view and receive pop-up notifications when there are new items to read.

(8) ieSpell – allows you to spell check text input boxes on any webpage (i.e. web mails, forum posts, blog comments, etc.)

(9) McAfee Site Advisor (only IE 5.5 – 6.0) – slim and easy-to-use security addon, features include:

• protects you from adware, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams
• advises you about the safety of websites using a colored button in your browser
• places website safety ratings next to each search result

(10) IeSessions – lets you save the current state of all open windows/tabs, store it to a file and restore it anytime afterwards. Especially useful if you have to switch between multiple computers (i.e. office, home) during the day.

(11) Videoronk (only IE 7) – add ‘Videoronk’ to your search toolbar and you’ll be able to search on top 8 video sharing websites simultaneously (Youtube, Google Video, Vimeo, Metacafe, iFilm, Blip.tv, Revver, DailyMotion and Myspace Video).

BONUS: Internet Explorer Shortcuts

Here is another EXCELLENT find for Internet Explorer users. We put together a list of essential IE shortcuts for you. This will make you more productive and save you tons of time. You can download the printable shortcut sheet for Internet Explorer from here.