Hipatic

Nokia is planning to use the Windows Phone 7 OS for its future mobile offerings. That means no more Symbian and Maemo (and now MeeGo ). While Symbian had its shortfalls and had a very successful run, Maemo had just started and was(or is) a lot more promising than Symbian and even comparable to other mobile OSes on offer. Nokia going the Windows way may even turn out to be the right decision for Nokia and Symbian might have just run its course, but nipping MeeGo in the bud seems hasty and cruel.(Nokia released N9  which runs a MeeGo instance ) Wish to support the " We want Nokia to keep MeeGo " petition over at twitition. Follow the link and sign in  to support. Spread the message on twitter and facebook too.

People have had enough of 30 second (90 seconds in some places) previews before deciding whether or not to buy a song. Unless the song is on radio, which most album-only songs aren't, chances are that the only place where you could legally hear the song before buying it is if you are lucky enough to have a friend who has already bought that song. Letting somebody else listen to songs you bought on your player, is that legal?(Well that is a completely different debate!) Otherwise, let me list the sources where you could hear the song(Most common on top): 1. Youtube - Popular albums find their way to Youtube, with users uploading videos with lyrics. This is perhaps the most common place where people can listen to songs before they buy them. However, posting copyrighted songs on Youtube by third parties (users) is either a grey area in terms of piracy (at best) or blatant piracy. All most all get marked by Youtube as containing content from the particular artist, and some get remo...

Recently affiliates of co.cc might have received a "Malware Detected" page on browsing to the Referrals section of the co.cc website.The screenshot attached is from Google Chrome. On browsing to http://www.co.cc/affiliates/affiliates.php, the user is warned that the website contains content from  http://lookfeel-201002[dot]co(dot)cc  The link in question is used in a reference to an animated gif used as a display banner to promote co.cc on publisher websites. One of the embeddable links that co.cc presents on the affiliate page also includes the link in question. Apparently the website lookfeel-201002[dot]co(dot)cc that co.cc uses to serve the banner has been labelled as a site serving malware. The Google Safe Browsing advisory report gives further details.It says that the site was found to host malware and infect a website 1 time in the past 90 days. It rates the website as suspicious. If publishers have been using this embed link to promote co.cc, u...

Jimmy Wales and friends have been appealing to users of Wikipedia for donations to the Wikimedia Foundation to fund Wikipedia and sister projects through 2011. Wikimedia Foundation runs various sister projects along with Wikipedia.For eg. Wikibooks is a free textbook initiative and Wikiversity is an interactive learning platform. For this Wikimedia employs 58 salaried staff. To cover costs for staff and maintenance of the world's fifth largest web property, Wikimedia is aiming for 16 million USD in donations for 2011. The fundraising started on 12th November 2010 and so far they have collected 13.4 million USD . To donate, you can goto  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate Update(1 Jan 2011) : The fundraising is over and the goal has been met. Jimmy Wales says thank you , but we say thank you Jimmy! More power to Wikipedia and people this new year! Sources: 1.  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/FAQ/en 2.  http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Special:Fundrais...

Youtube will now allow users with a good track record to upload videos longer than 15 minutes . While youtube has been largely free from pirated movies and full length TV episodes (recently ofcourse), due to their Content Id system and the restriction of uploaded video length to less than 15 minutes by regular users, this move could really test the effectiveness of their Content ID system, because pirates will try every trick in the book to bypass the automatic content recognition and filtering system that youtube employs. This could also give rise to a large number of websites offering tricks to upload copyrighted movies, by altering the audio or the video to bypass the filters. On the positive side,you will not have to slice your home movies into parts of 14.59 minutes each.We can expect some full length movies from Shay and Co. .

While Google's Chrome is blazing through version numbers, Firefox 4 has a drawn out roadmap ahead of it. On December 9 2010, Firefox released 3.6.13 update, with some security and stability fixes. Firefox 4 Beta has been out from June 24 2010, with new features being added in every beta iteration till Beta 7. The beta 7 feature set will then be refined through beta 8 to beta 10. Beta 10 will be the last beta release and is expected in January 2011. The Firefox 4 RC is expected in early 2011. Mozilla expects to give Firefox 4 a run of around 6 months before the final release candidate, exposing the browser to around 1M to 4M users. This should polish rough edges. Using Firefox 3.6.12? http://getfirefox.com should give you the stable version. Firefox 4 beta is available here as of now Sources: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/4/Beta

Various news sources are reporting about Google +1, Google's social networking tool, much like the Facebook 'Like' button. TechCrunch a screenshot of the currently confidential service, on it's website. The screenshot is of Chrome browser on a Mac, displaying the Google News(http://news.google.com) page. A google accounts user is logged in and there a few additional buttons on the top-right area of the page. There is an additional link name 'Loop' on the top left side. The screenshot is probably from Nov 15 2010, based on the date on a News article. There is a 'Confidential' label, which perhaps indicates that the service is in private beta. This is followed by a share button, not unlike Facebook's 'Like', followed by a google user thumbnail, and user name. The user logged in is a google.com user, probably indicating a Google employee, This is followed by a gray box with the number '0' in it, probably a score, followed by a Settings/...