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Google Apps for Your Domain is a new free service from Google that includes Gmail (with your own domain name) with 2 gigabytes of storage, Google Calendar, Google Talk and Page Creator. I’ve just signed up for this service to test internally within our office. It’s very easy to setup (just need to change the MX record for the domain) and found it very useful. I think it can be a great package for small to medium sized companies and startups. The privacy issues might hold some organizations from embracing the service. But no hardware, no software and free of charge for excellent email system, IM, Calendar and web for your organization, with Google’s backing is hard to resist. I think they’ll be adding Writely and Google Spreadsheets soon to make it something like Google Office, that everyone is talking about.

Bruce Schneier has an excellent article on What the Terrorists Want and how we should be fighting them.

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Amazon’s new Astore allows you to create your own Online Store. It’s new Associates product, very easy to setup, allows you to create your store in few minutes by choosing any products that Amazon has to offer. You can link the store to your blog (it stays in amazon’s domain). It would be great if you could create the store in your own domain. Here’s Nirlog Book Store, I created using Astore in 5 minutes.

Allen suggests that mind is like a muscle and weakens if you don’t exercise it regularly. He offers very simple 10 ways to exercise our mind.

1. Regularly solve puzzles
2. Play a musical instrument
3. Paint, sketch or draw.
4. Learn a new language.
5. Learn how to juggle.
6. Play Chess, Backgammon, Checkers or even Go!
7. Play computer games.
8. Write!
9. Try amateur dramatics.
10. Travel.

Desktoptwo is a Flash-based desktop suite. It’s got beautiful interface and has most of the basic application for daily use pre-installed. It comes with 1GB of free storage (you can buy more). It has email program, IM application, MP3 player, blogging client and OpenOffice. It’s in beta and not as perfect as your desktop but for those who can’t afford to have their own desktop this is a very good alternative.

SPEEDTEST.NET is a very interesting online tool that allows you to test your Internet Connection Speed, both download and upload. You can choose to test your Internet speed against servers located in different cities in US, Europe or Australia.

This is what a Russian News Pravda is reporting.

Our world is on the brink of another world war. It will originate August 22nd in the Middle East. The prediction was presented not by Vagna or Nostradamus but by an American political scientist Bernard Lewis in the acclaimed publication of Wall Street Journal. He is a man with close ties to the Bush administration as well as to the non-conservatives pushing for the radical solution of the ‘Iranian Threat.’

Live-Share is a simple, fast and free file hosting and sharing service. I just got registered, it works well with firefox (doesn’t work with safari). Anonymous users are given 300MB and registered users get 500MB of free storage. It’s really simple to use, all you got to do is:

1. Select your file and press upload
2. Receive download-link and share it

Currently the interface is clean but the terms says "advertisements will be displayed on all pages", so I guess ads will start to appear soon. Easy to use but would be great with some features like: grouping, tagging and password protection, if I wanted to share some confidential information. Anyway, it’s simple, free and works well.

This Multifunctional Broadrange Wireless Router from AUSUS is amazing. It’s a perfect one box solution for your Home Wireless Network, Internet Connection and Digital Media Storage. All this in a small box:

• Wireless Router.
• Storage Server with Raid-1 (mirroring) capability.
• Built in FTP/Web Server.
• Download master (can directly download to the device using Bit Torrent, FTP and HTTP).
• Support for iTune interface for music file management.
• Play Video/Audio directly on TV via DMA.

Firewalls have become an integral part of all corporate networks. They’re the first line of defense against attacks from outside network (Internet) and also the point of control to make sure internal users (employees) are using the Internet as they’re supposed to. Recently the UTM (United Threat Management) Firewalls have become very popular. They’ve built in gateway anti-virus, anti-spam, web content filtering and IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) on top of traditional firewall functions. These firewalls generate loads and loads of log data and it’s very difficult to analyze the traffic and security event levels by just looking at the log files. So, a firewall logging and analyzing tool becomes necessary to generate easy to understand reports. After trying few softwares, I came across Firewall Analyzer, which was the exact tool I was looking for.
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