The best of answers 2006
Since the closing down of Google answers, Yahoo answers future looks very promising.?Ç Yahoo has recently?Ç invited former Google answers gurus to Yahoo answers!
Yahoo answers is now featuring the best of answers 2006. From the yahoo answers blog,
To help commemorate Yahoo! Answers?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ upcoming first year birthday, we combed the depths of Answers to find some of the most eye-catching and memorable questions and answers from the past year.
What we came up with is Best of Answers 2006 – a repository of editorially-selected questions and answers featured throughout the year. These questions were highlighted in various places around the Yahoo! network including the Yahoo! front page, the Answers front page, the Answers blog, and places like Yahoo! Sports and Yahoo! Food. We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ve also added to the mix some of the celebrities who posted questions and answers on Yahoo! Answers.
Some of the “best of answers” are,
How do I wipe a NTFS hard drive file system?
Which products, used by few today, will be essential in five years?
How to I keep dampness out the house?
What would happen to video tapes if you stored them away for year or so?
Upload Youtube videos instantly! – Quick capture
Youtube has released a new tool called Quick Capture. This allows you to record a Youtube video instantly! Webcam or any other camera connected to your PC can be used for this. The video is automatically uploaded in .FLV format. Uploading videos to Youtube cannot be any simpler now!
What is wrong with Digg?
Digg is a democracy. Anyone can submit a story and depending on the votes it gets it is promoted to a featured story. So in theory the main page should contain all the good stuff on the net.
But reality is quite different. I admit there are good stories, but many stories are cooked up fake stories and contains no stuff at all. Another problem is that the site linked to is not the original source and hence is a waste of time.
I think the main problem with Digg is the underlying difference between individuals. Some are good at evaluating good stuff while a big majority just follows whatever is shown to them. Hence many of the votes are cast without even reading the item linked to! So getting your story a lot of diggs is simple enough if you have a couple of IDs. If your story got 10 diggs, you will get another 10 from the “follower” population.
I think majority of diggers are teenagers. This is reflected in the story comments. Sometimes I think “What! is this comment made by a mental patient?” Here is a sample comment I got from the Digg front page (I am not talking about buried comments!),
“That guys browser looks like ass, as a web developer that kinda shit makes me kringe”
Obviously reading through the comments without the profanity filter is not recommended.
The only solution to this problem seems to be enabling some kind of moderation on the site. For example, penalizing nonsense stories heavily and rewarding good stories with a lot of Karma. I know it is probably too much of a work for Digg, but they can outsource the moderation to some of the existing top diggers. Needless to say the moderators themselves needs to be moderated by Digg 
Favorite frauds – With love from India
What prompted me to write this is the recent Digg story on 450GB paper drive. This talks about a 450GB storage device on paper invented by an Indian. Looking at the discussion page of the Digg is enough to laugh for many days. Many are discussing how he might have done it. No wonder, many Indian Gurus and Yogis are able to cheat millions out of Americans and Europeans (Even now!)
For Indians, frauds are part of their daily life. Every minute they are on guard against possible fraudsters. Indians are not alone in this case, in fact Indians are nowhere near the Nigerians. Some Nigerians have perfected the art of cheating (see 419 scam). They even try to cheat Indians!, but gets caught most of the time. It is estimated that millions of dollars are cheated out of innocent westerners through 419 related scams.
Recent frauds or related stuff from India
NASA exam (Saurabh Singh) – This guy claimed he cleared NASA’s International Scientist Discovery exam and is waiting a call from NASA. Prime minister of India was going to congratulate him personally! But unfortunately the cat was out of the bag at the last minute.
450GB on paper (Sainul Abideen) – An active scam which has many takers, for now.
Gasoline from leaves (Ramar Pillai) – He invented altenative fuel for petrol and was even marketing it! He was later arrested for fraud. It turns out that it contained other petroleum products and was not herbal.
Aliens in Kerala – I live in Kerala. Yeah, some do behave like aliens, but so far I haven’t found a real one! Jokes apart, there was red rain, possibly due to the high pollution in that area.
Airport frauds – An Indian airport is one of the favorite places for a fraudster. He knows that the guy coming by plane will have some money to spare! Fraudsters can appear in the form of a Taxi driver, customs official(!), in fact in any form. It is a big topic, so I will provide some links – Delhi airport | Mumbai airport
Divine statues – Spiritual frauds are rampant in India. A recent case was when statues started drinking milk (due to capillary action). The amount of excitement it generated is unbelievable.
Divine water – Somewhere along the Mumbai coast (I don’t have the news source now), sea water color changed due to chemical pollution. Can you guess what happened? People started diving and drinking it (Many assumed it has divine powers and ended up in hospital).
Big scale scams – There are too many to write here – Hawala scam | Fodder scam | Coffin scam(!) | Stamp paper scam | Bofors scam | Oil for food scam
Further Reading
India is great if you are not a tourist!
Email into middle age!
Email turned 35 this month. Email had its origin somewhere near 1965 in MIT. It was in 1971 that the first email in today’s form (user@machine) was sent by programmer Ray Tomlinson. From there it had grown to an unimaginable level. Recently other forms such as instant messaging and orkutting is becoming popular, but as an official communication mechanism email is still on top.
Even after getting into middle age, nothing much has changed for email. It still uses old protocols which are unencrypted (means no privacy at all, unless you use PGP keys for encryption). Also many people are not aware that it is easy to spoof email. Anyone with an SMTP server can spoof any address and can send message on somebody else’s behalf. Recently some attempts were made to combat this using domain keys by various email providers such as Yahoo and Google.
Domain key verifies that the sender’s domain name is same as what is specified in email. Hence if you get a mail from Yahoo?Ç account to your Yahoo account (or any Domain keys enabled account), it will display that domain keys verify this to be sent from Yahoo. Check out the screenshot of Yahoo mail header on the left.
As email became popular, frauds involving email is also on the rise. Email spam has reached gigantic proportions and laws are passed to fight spam! Email spam is used to market various products (Viagra drugs being the favorite!), manipulate stock market by increasing interest in penny stocks and other scams such as the Nigerian scam (also known as 419 scam or advance fee scam).
Still, Happy birthday Email !
Further Reading
History of email
Wikipedia on email
All about domain keys
E-Mail Etiquette
Advance fee fraud on email
Worst emails – article by The Sun