How to hide the YouTube grey bar in Firefox

YouTube added a new long grey bar at the bottom of videos that form part of a playlist. Although some find it useful, a lot of people see it as a distraction. You can minimise it but you cannot close it.

Solution for Firefox users

If you're a Firefox user, there is a way to permanently hide the YouTube grey bar. For it to work, you must have the the AdBlock Plus Firefox add-on installed (this is a brilliant add-on anyway since it hides all ads on sites).

Visit youtube.com, then click on the small AdBlock Plus (ABP) icon top-right or bottom-right in the browser.

The Preferences dialog box will appear. Click on Filters > Add filter.

Enter the following:
youtube.com##DIV#quicklist-tray

Repeat the step and add another filter containing:
youtube.com##DIV#quicklist-bar-container

Repeat the step and add another filter containing:
youtube.com##DIV#quicklist-bar
Click OK.

They grey bar will disappear permanently!

Similar bars on other websites

You can also use the method explained above to hide similar bars on other websites. It would be easier to hide them by installing the Element Hiding Helper Firefox add-on as well.

Then browse to an applicable site (e.g. news24.com which also recently added a social bar at the bottom of their site), right-click on the AdBlock Plus (ABP) icon in the browser and select "Element to hide". Hover over the bar you want removed and click on it. A dialog box will appear, click on "Add filter rule" and that bar will permanently be removed from view!

Reverting back to old settings

Of course, if you want to, you can always change it all back by clicking on the ABP icon and simply deleting or disabling the applicable entry under "My Element Hiding Rules". Read more on "How to hide the YouTube grey bar in Firefox"!

Google Street View available in South Africa

Google Street View has finally launched in South Africa, enabling internet users to view images of streets and surrounding buildings at street level. All faces and car number plates are blurred to protect your privacy. Considering that the FIFA World Cup tournament starts on Friday, this will undoubtedly assist tourists since they'll be able to view sights and stadiums before they arrive.

Of course, the first thing I did was to see if a Google Street View Car captured me in front of my home. Luckily not, but you can see my car in the driveway. I'm a fan of Google and use a lot of their online services; Google Maps with Street View is fantastic.

A view of Chapman's Peak Drive in Cape Town

Google Street View in South Africa is currently available in the major cities and a few other towns. I assume the rest of the country will be mapped during the rest of the year. All the major soccer stadiums are available in 3D with a 360 degree view inside.

3D model of Cape Town Stadium

Video: Street View on Google Maps



A lot of websites are dedicated to displaying funny images that have been captured on Google Street View. Here's a few interesting images.

The only downside to Google Maps and Street View is that it tends to use quite a lot of bandwidth so if you have a slow connection, good luck.

Related links
Google Maps with Street View - Google Read more on "Google Street View available in South Africa"!

Facebook's new privacy settings

Facebook announced new privacy settings to address some of the negative public backlash they received these last few weeks. Your name, profile picture and gender will remain publicly available but you can set privacy controls for the rest. The new privacy features will be rolled out during the next few weeks.

Video: How to take advantage of Facebook's new privacy settings



They've definitely made it easier for the end-user to change the privacy levels by adding global settings and the fact that you can now opt-out of applications altogether will be good news to those who demand absolute control over their privacy. Just a pity you don't have the option (when applying the setting to disable all applications) to exclude applications you actually want to use. Maybe that will come in future.

Step in right direction

A lot of people will be pleased with the new privacy settings but some privacy advocates will still have a problem with Facebook's general lacklustre approach to Privacy. Instead of thinking it through and respecting the user's privacy from the start, Facebook tend to expose their users by decreasing their privacy and then they simply fix it later, if the public outcry warrants it.

Sharing your personal info with 3rd party applications should be OPT-IN, not opt-out! As long as I have the choice to decide beforehand to share information or not, everything is fine. Just don't share it without my permission.

Related links
Making Control Simple - Facebook (CEO Mark Zuckerberg)
Controlling how you share - Facebook Read more on "Facebook's new privacy settings"!

Privacy concerns with Facebook

When I joined Facebook I felt comfortable sharing personal information because Facebook's privacy settings were very good, allowing the user to fully control every bit of information you publish to Facebook. But times have changed! Facebook has changed direction and privacy seems to be a mere afterthought now.

Facebook started off with an attitude of respecting the user's privacy, which was great. Unfortunately they have changed their privacy settings over time to make it increasingly difficult to protect everything you publish on Facebook.

Facebook's privacy changes in April - frowned upon

Their latest privacy changes (announced at Facebook's F8 conference in April) were frowned upon by most analysts. It's almost as if Facebook does not listen to their users at all, ignoring any backlash after a major privacy update.

Facebook's new Instant Personalization Pilot Program lets you share your information with third party websites... I'm not comfortable with that at all. Facebook always seem to make the changes regardless of whether their users like it or not and users only find out afterwards, once it's already been done. Then those who are concerned about their privacy have to quickly jump around and "fix" the privacy settings (again) but it's getting more and more difficult to do that.

Opting out

Case in point, I was logged into my Facebook account and then visited another website Engadget (or it could have been Mashable, can't remember), then Facebook granted access to apps from those sites automatically. I then visited my Facebook Applications Settings page and that website was already listed there! At no point did I give explicit permission to share information with external sites. Facebook gladly did that "on my behalf". I had to manually visit the Facebook application page for that site and block the application explicitly. So they're making it tougher to 'opt-out' as time goes by.

Facebook is feature-rich but please respect my privacy

Facebook makes sharing info with friends a pleasure and there's a multitude of other fantastic features that the social networking site offers. But a lot of users are uninformed about Facebook's persistent drive to open everything up for all to see, since that will obviously have financial benefit for Facebook due to marketers having access to your info/preferences for better advertising revenue.

The flip side of the coin is that it's perhaps convenient for the user to visit different websites and always be recognised on those websites since you're already logged in to your Facebook account. The part that I have a problem with... is the fact that I'm having less and less of a CHOICE in the matter. I'd prefer to opt-out beforehand instead of trying to solve a privacy issue afterwards.

Instructions on how to protect your privacy after Facebook's latest privacy changes in April

Opt out of Facebook's Open Graph personalization - WikiHow
Opt out of Facebook's Open Graph personalization - AllFacebook
How To Opt-Out Of Facebook’s Instant Personalization - Electronic Frontier Foundation

With Twitter the situation is different because you know from the start that everything is public, so you (should) only make statements you are willing to make in public anyway. But with Facebook there's a trust that was initially established between Facebook and the user, based on the initial strict privacy settings that was available. That trust is now being tampered with.

If Facebook loosen up their privacy settings to such a degree where I'm left without any control over the (access to) information I publish on Facebook, I'll have no choice but to consider closing my account.

Facebook plans privacy summit

It was announced today that Facebook will be holding a privacy summit after a large group of users, critics and lawmakers showed their dissatisfaction about the growing Facebook privacy issues. I hope something positive comes out of this because Facebook is a great social networking platform, if the privacy issues are addressed.

Video: Funny look at what Facebook would be like if played out in real life



Related links
How to Keep Your Privacy Safe(r) on Facebook - PCWorld
Facebook: Confirm or Deny? - TechNewsWorld
Are you a victim? - MyBroadband Read more on "Privacy concerns with Facebook"!

Live event: Introducing the iPad - Apple's CEO Steve Jobs

Leo Laporte from Twit.tv covering the event - live video feed



Also see gdgt live for transcript and photos of the event.

Steve Jobs with the Apple iPad

Video: Apple iPad hands on



Related links
Full specs of the iPad - Apple
Apple's iPad: What you need to know - CNET Read more on "Live event: Introducing the iPad - Apple's CEO Steve Jobs"!

Find fastest DNS servers with Google namebench

Google released an application called namebench, which will find the best DNS servers for your computer to use, by analysing usage patterns and calculating the fastest DNS service available.

What is DNS?

Every computer online has a unique IP address. The DNS (Domain Name System) is a service that translates domain names into IP addresses. This is very helpful because humans easily remember domain names since it uses the alphabet (e.g. it's easier to remember www.google.com instead of 209.85.227.99).

Whenever you type a website address in your browser, a DNS server then resolves the domain name by translating it to an IP address and loads the website. There are several DNS servers around the world which does this translation for your computer. The big question is, is your computer currently using the fastest DNS service or not?

Normally your ISP automatically assigns it's own DNS servers to do the job for you. Since it's perhaps the closest DNS servers to you, it's assumed it's the fastest but sometimes that is not the case. Everyone has experience downtime at some point in their life where your internet connection appeared to be dead right? A lot of times it was simply your ISP's DNS servers that was down which effectively meant there was no way for you to browse any websites, since there was no service to translate that web address into the corresponding IP address.

Google namebench

Google namebench tests a number of DNS providers like Public DNS, OpenDNS, UltraDNS, including your own ISP's DNS. It takes a few minutes for the test to complete, a report is then generated which will list the performance of each, indicating the best DNS providers for you to use.
Namebench runs on Windows, Mac OS and UNIX.

If the generated namebench report suggests there are faster DNS servers than the ones you're currently using, perhaps you should consider changing it to enhance your all-round browsing experience.

Related links
Google's namebench and your name server Read more on "Find fastest DNS servers with Google namebench"!

Facebook's new privacy settings

The new Facebook privacy settings were activated today. I just amended mine and I'm not impressed, clearly a lot less privacy than before!

What I like

Some of the settings have been combined and it's a lot simpler now. Convenient.

What I don't like

I've never had a problem with Facebook's privacy settings before, simply because the user always had the option to set a specific privacy setting for just about everything. However, with today's new privacy settings, a lot of those options have simply been removed which means as a user you now have less control over what is made public.

You don't have the option to hide your Friends List from Search anymore; that setting has simply been removed altogether, which means the list is now public. I'm sure Facebook will get a huge backlash on this issue alone!

You can now disable your Friends List from being displayed on your Profile page but then the people currently on your Friends List can't see it either, so it's not a good workaround. If someone finds your Facebook profile via Google search, they can now see random friends from your Friends List at first glance. There are several reasons why people would want to hide their Friends List from the public - There must be millions of divorcees who don't want their ex's to see the list to perhaps avoid the possibility of harrassment, for example.

Now you can't hide the Pages you're a fan of, from the public either. This is less of a worry to me since I only belong to a few music pages but then again some users may be fans of some sensitive Pages and the public can now see which Pages they belong to. Zero privacy.

People use Facebook for different reasons

For me it's mostly a tool to stay in touch with my real friends out there and share things about my life only with them and nobody else. It's personal. That goes out the window if the public can see that information too, especially if I have no option to set it to private anymore.

I expect a lot of people who use Facebook for the same reason I do, will now be forced to remove a lot of information from their Facebook profiles which sort of defeats the purpose of using the social network in the first place.

There has always been a huge concern over the so-called third party applications that is used on Facebook, since once you decide to use these applications, they have access to your profile information. Previously it was possible to control to a certain extent how much of this information was made available to the applications. Those API settings have now (seemingly) been removed too. I've never given access to third party applications anyway since it's a waste of my time and because I feel uncomfortable with the idea that some developer out there now have access to all my info. A lot of people who use those applications will now have to accept the fact that their personal information is at risk of being abused by those third parties. No thanks!

The rest of the new privacy settings seem OK... from what I'v seen so far. I'll update this page if I notice anything substantial.

Twitter

I use Twitter as well but for completely different reasons than why I use Facebook. Twitter by design is public, so I tweet about things that are (hopefully) in public interest. Comments about new technology or 'discussing' new trends with other people on Twitter, even if I don't know them. That's fine because there's no security necessary, since it's the same comments I could have made while sitting at a public venue.

Facebook for me is different. The comments I make there only apply to my friends and as such I need some guarantee that those comments are not public, even if the comments themselves are nothing to write home about. It's a matter of principle.

Simply put, Facebook has failed to provide users with the option to really control their privacy and that is simply unacceptable. All it means is I'll use Facebook a lot less than before (did you read that Mr Zuckerberg!). Read more on "Facebook's new privacy settings"!

Webby Awards - 10 Best internet moments of the decade

The Webby Awards, an award for excellence on the internet, named their top 10 most influential internet moments during the last decade:

• Craigslist  - Online classified site expands outside SFO (2000)
• Launch of Google AdWords (2000)
• Launch of online encyclopedia Wikipedia (2001)
• Shutdown of Napster, a file-sharing site (2001)
• Google's IPO (2004)
• Online video revolution - led by YouTube (2006)
• Facebook and Twitter launches (2006)
• Apple's iPhone (2007)
• Use of the Internet in the US presidential campaign (2008)
• Use of Twitter during the Iranian election protests (2009)

Video - Highlights of Online Webby Awards 2009

Read more on "Webby Awards - 10 Best internet moments of the decade"!

Easier Wi-Fi on the way

A new technology called Wi-Fi Direct is on the way (expected mid 2010) which will allow regular electronic devices to act as wireless hotspots.

For most non-technical people, setting up a wireless network at home is considered a hassle. You need to setup an access point to which all the wireless devices like your laptop need to connect to, in order to go online or communicate with each other.

Turn gadgets into wireless access points

However, with Wi-Fi Direct it will be possible to turn a gadget into a wireless access point so you'll be able to connect one device directly to another which would e.g. make file sharing much easier to do. This technology will effectively allow Wi-Fi clients/devices to create adhoc peer-to-peer networks among one another.

Wi-Fi Direct will be built into consumer electronics in the future and scan the surroundings for other wi-fi enabled devices it can connect to (similar to bluetooth and quite frankly, bluetooth is much slower than wi-fi so it's bye-bye to bluetooth as well). This can e.g. include phones, computers, TVs and gaming consoles.

If you already have a wireless network, you will be able to upgrade to Wi-Fi Direct through a simple software upgrade at the time.

Consumer devices are not only used to access the internet; a lot of users would want all their devices to access each other directly as well and this technology will make that easy to do.

With Wi-Fi Direct you could eventually turn all cellphones and television sets into wi-fi hotspots. Imagine your TV having wi-fi capability - you'll be able to transfer photos from wi-fi enabled cameras, camcorders and laptops to the TV with ease, using no wires at all. Very convenient!

Security

I have a wireless network setup at home using a wireless router and although the router is used to access the internet, it has many other functions as well like routing traffic to different computers on the network but most importantly... for security reasons. The hardware firewall on the router prevents most unwanted prying eyes from taking a peek at my network.

So although it will clearly be convenient to enable consumer devices to connect to each other directly through this new Wi-Fi Direct technology, I'm just wondering how this will affect the security of these devices since they won't necessarily be hiding behind a router anymore. The level of encryption between the ad-hoc devices will be crucial. I wouldn't want any device to become vulnerable for the sake of convenience.

Related links
Wi-Fi Alliance® announces groundbreaking specification to support direct Wi-Fi connections between devices - Wi-Fi Alliance
Wi-Fi Alliance Announces Wi-Fi Direct Spec - PCWorld Read more on "Easier Wi-Fi on the way"!

GMail down - 502 server error!

I use GMail on a daily basis and it's without a doubt a web service I have come to rely on. So when it goes down... I'm in trouble!

Today, when I try to log in at GMail, I get a "502 server error" message instead. It has been noted on the official GMail blog so at least they're aware of it. You can also check out the Google Apps Status Dashboard.

Usually GMail is very reliable but I've had the 502 errors before, maybe a year ago and then it only affected a certain subset of users and was down for about a day (for me anyway). Of course, being without email for a whole day when you rely on it... can be extremely troublesome and create havoc in your life, for several reasons.

Maybe you had to send that important email to a client? Perhaps you need to access an email to access an important attachment you haven't read yet? Will possibly miss important deadlines if the service is not up again soon!? Heaven forbid.

Yeah I know, don't rely on a free service, rather have a paid email service with a local hosting company since they offers support you can actually use but the reality is that GMail is out of the beta stage now so I expect it to be a reliable service.

Let's hope it's up again soon.

UPDATE 02/09/09
GMail is back up again. Gmail outage blamed on capacity miscalculation Read more on "GMail down - 502 server error!"!

My Facebook profile gives Page Not Found error

I noticed a strange problem today; when I access my own Facebook profile page, it says "The page you requested was not found". Huh?

I can log in to my FB account, view my friends' profiles, see myself in the listings if I do a search for my name but if I click on the actual profile link, I get that error message. When I type in the full web address for my facebook profile, I also get the error. Never had this problem before.

Previously, when I loaded my FB profile, e.g. www.facebook.com/username it would re-route to en-gb.facebook.com/username which I found strange since I'm not in Great Britain (or perhaps it's because I have the language set as "English (UK)"), but at least it worked. Now when I type the address in, it stays www.facebook.com/username but gives the error. When I log in to www.facebook.com my personal information that usually appears on the left and my list of uploaded photo albums are gone too.

Maybe it's a temporary propagation error? I didn't change any settings anywhere. I'm hoping it's just a temporary problem which will automatically be resolved soon.

Anyone else getting this error when they try and view their own Facebook profile?
So far I've not had any luck in getting any feedback from the FB Helpdesk on this matter.

UPDATE 27 AUGUST 2009
My profile is fixed. I reported it to Facebook, not sure if they acted on it but a week after I first experienced the problem, it just went away and my profile is visible again.

UPDATE 7 OCTOBER 2009
More people are experiencing this problem today, than back in August when I had the problem. I suggest you report the profile "Page Not Found" problem directly to Facebook as well, via this online form which was set up for this specific problem.

Alternatively, you can also try the Facebook profile bug report form. The more people submit, the more they have to take the problem seriously.

You can also add your comments about this problem on the last page of this thread at the Facebook Help Centre. Read more on "My Facebook profile gives Page Not Found error"!

Changes to Labels in GMail

Image source: Google's GMail Blog

GMail announced a few changes today regarding the functionality of Labels. When GMail was released, it opted for a Labels approach instead of Folders, therefore moving away from other traditional email software in how they treated archiving of email messages. I'm an avid GMail user and think their approach to labelling emails instead of moving them to Folders, is unique and logical.

However, GMail has indicated that a lot of their users still try to use Labels as if it's Folders and have decided to make a few changes to accommodate both approaches:

1. New location for Labels - Labels will now be grouped with your standard labels like Inbox and Drafts.


2. Label display - You can now control whether a Label must be displayed or not. If you have a lot of labels, this can come in handy; especially if you have labels you rarely use.


3. Drag and drop - You can now drag messages on to labels, and labels on to messages (similar to the behaviour of moving messages to Folders in other email software)

More information on these changes in GMail Read more on "Changes to Labels in GMail"!

Wolfram Alpha - Computable knowledge

Cape Town to London? South Africa's GDP? R250 + 38% ? Ohm's law? weather tokyo 1971? 2 slices of swiss cheese?

Wolfram Alpha is a new knowledge search engine that will interpret your question and calculate any possible mathematical answer for you. It offers something completely different to the Google search engine. Here's some examples of the type of queries you can enter. I had a lot of fun playing with it, try it out! Read more on "Wolfram Alpha - Computable knowledge"!