First, the most noticeable one: Google has changed its name to Topeka, in honor of Topeka, Kansas recently announcing it would change its name to Google, to get in on Google’s experimental ultra-high-speed broadband project.

“We didn’t reach this decision lightly; after all, we had a fair amount of brand equity tied up in our old name,” says Topeka CEO Eric Schmidt. “But the more we surfed around (the former) Topeka’s municipal website, the more kinship we felt with this fine city at the edge of the Great Plains.”

He also says the initiative “will have no bearing on which municipalities are chosen to participate” in the broadband project.

Google announced a new mobile search feature called, “Where am I?”. Go to Google.com on your phone and search “where am I” it will tell you your location. When I checked, I was in Mordor, Middle Earth.

“Note that in this alpha release, we are finding that our results can be slightly off,” says Google software engineer John Eric Hoffman. “However, accuracy should improve with greater usage. So if at first the answer is not what you’d expect, please continue to try it over the next couple of days and ask your friends to do the same.”

Google launched Google Romance, which let’s you “pin all your romantic hopes on Google.”

“When you think about it, love is just another search problem. And we’ve thought about it. A lot,” the company says. It offers users the following: uploading your profile, meeting your soulmate, contextual pre-date advertising, meeting for drinks, the main course, unexpected results, contextual dating advice, and contextual courtship.

Google Voice introduced standard voicemail mode with features like:

– Automatic voicemail deletion
– Numeric keypad access
– Beeper interoperability
– Message maximums
– Numeric page

Google Wave introduced Google Wave wave notifications, which features a human coming up to you and waving to you when you have a new wave.

YouTube introduced TEXTp, a way to watch YouTube videos in text-only mode, to save YouTube bandwidth and money.

Google announced you can now upload and store anything in the cloud with Google Docs. “For example, do you ever wish you could CTRL+F your house keys or your TV remote? Store your keys, remotes, rail passes, and other objects you commonly lose with Google Docs, and you’ll never have to worry about finding them again,” explains Google Docs Product Marketing Manager Peter Harbison. “Having trouble moving your piano from New York to California? Upload it from your home in New York, then download it once you’re in California. Change your mind and want to share it with your friend in England instead? No problem. With one click you can have your piano delivered to anyone you choose, anywhere in the world.”

Google Books announced that it is offering books in 3D:

In the UK, Google has launched a new animal translation app for Android:

Gmail experienced a vowel outage. Chrome got a new extension:

Taking an earful of inspiration from the HTML5 audio tag, we’ve spent the past few months deep in psychoacoustic models, the Whittaker-Nyquist-Kotelnikov-Shannon sampling theorem, Franssen effects, Shepard-Risset Tones, and 11.1 surround sound research to build a cutting-edge audio-driven user interface for our users, available through a new Chrome extension. With this extension, Chrome will provide audio feedback as you browse to web pages and interact with the browser.

Google no doubt has various other pranks in place in different countries, and possibly others that will be uncovered throughout the day. It’s clear that they’re having a good time with this, and it’s still pretty early in the day. In Mountain View, it’s really early.

Update: Update: Google’s Picasa announced LifeSize photos, Google physicists have discovered an extra dimension in Street View, and the Google Analtyics team is saying that there is only one metric that matters in analytics.

–
Original Article by: By Chris Crum – http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/04/01/google-has-all-kinds-of-april-fools-day-fun

Buy cheap laptop with older technology
Rapid advance in technology makes it meaningless to buy the latest technology at a high price. When laptop with wireless capability first came to the market, a unit with this technology can cost up till US$2500. Now after 2 years, you can get a relatively fast centrino laptop for less than US$1000

Buy used or refurbished laptop
The depreciation of a laptop value is so high, that after one year in the market, a laptop can easily lose half its value. So if you are looking for a cheap laptop, look for one which is close to one year old. Not all used laptop are in bad condition. You will be surprised to find that some used laptops are still in good condition because their owners are power users or gamers.

Buy laptop from power users or gamers
I like to buy electronic gadgets including laptops from hard core power users or gamers. Let me share with you why. Gamers or power users usually require the latest and most powerful technology to run their games or power hungry applications. They often will not settle for second best. They also have the tendency to chase after the latest technology. So after one year, they will be bored of what they have and will look to sell off their laptops so that they can buy a new one. Now if you are looking to buy cheap laptops with up to date technology and you happen to have friends who are gamers, do ask them if they are looking to sell off their laptops. Who knows, maybe you can buy a good and cheap laptop from them.

Scan through gaming forums and local gaming community
if you do not already have friends who like to play computer games, then scanning through gaming forums on the internet is another way to get good and cheap deals for used laptop. Internet makes it easy for you to do this. Go to google.com and start searching for gaming forums. Visit each and everyone and see if they have a Trading Section. You will definitely find many post from gamers looking to sell their gaming laptops.

Scan through local bulletin boards
Do scan through local bulletin boards near you for cheap deals on laptop.Especially if there are software companies around the area. Software companies do offer their used computers or laptops for sale when their software projects end. I personally had gotten a few good deals for my family and friends.

Look for cheap laptop with at least 1gb memory
This is especially important for used laptop. If the processor speed is slow, then having more memory can compensate for the lack in speed. In fact, The size of memory plays a big part in determining how fast a laptop runs an application. Just by increasing the memory size, you can see a huge difference in speed. A cheap laptop with at least 1gb memory can run most non graphic intensive application easily.

Get cheap laptop from reputable manufacturer
This is very important because if you are buying used laptop, then the chances of requiring servicing is higher than a new laptop. So if you buy from a reputable manufacturer, you will save alot of trouble and time if your laptop do require servicing. :big_smile:

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In 2003, President Bush signed the “Can Spam” bill, in December of 2003 which is the first national standards around bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail. The bill, approved by the Senate by a vote of 97 to 0, prohibits senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail from using false return addresses to disguise their identity (spoofing) and the use of dictionaries to generate such mailers. In addition, it prohibits the use of misleading subject lines and requires that emails include and opt-out mechanism. The legislation also prohibits senders from harvesting addresses off Web sites. Violations constitute a misdemeanor crime subject to up to one year in jail.
One major point that needs to be discussed about this: spam is now coming from other countries in ever-greater numbers. These emails are harder to fight, because they come from outside our country’s laws and regulations. Because the Internet opens borders and thinks globally, these laws are fine and good, but do not stop the problem.

So what do you do about this? Her are the top 5 Rules to do to protect from spam.

Number 1: Do what you can to avoid having your email address out on the net.
There are products called “spam spiders” that search the Internet for email addresses to send email to. If you are interested, do a search on “spam spider” and you will be amazed at what you get back. Interestingly, there is a site, WebPoison.org, which is an open source project geared to fight Internet “spambots” and “spam spiders”, by giving them bogus HTML web pages, which contain bogus email addresses
A couple suggestions for you: a) use form emails, which can hide addresses or also b) use addresses like sales@company.com instead of your full address to help battle the problem. c) There are also programs that encode your email, like jsGuard, which encodes your email address on web pages so that while spam spiders find it difficult or impossible to read your email address.

Number 2: Get spam blocking software. There are many programs out there for this. (go to www.cloudmark.com or www.mailwasher.net for example). You may also buy a professional version. Whatever you do, get the software. It will save you time. The software is not foolproof, but they really do help. You usually have to do some manual set up to block certain types of email.

Number 3: Use the multiple email address approach.
There are a lot of free email addresses to be had. If you must subscribe to newsletters, then have a “back-up” email address. It would be like giving your sell phone number to your best friends and the business number to everyone else.

Number 4: Attachments from people you don’t know are BAD, BAD, BAD.
A common problem with spam is that they have attachments and attachments can have viruses. Corporations often have filters that don’t let such things pass to you. Personal email is far more “open country” for spamers. General rule of thumb: if you do not know who is sending you something, DO NOT OPEN THE ATTACHMENT. Secondly, look for services that offer filtering. Firewall vendors offer this type of service as well.

Number 5: Email services now have “bulk-mail” baskets. If what you use currently does not support this, think about moving to a new vender. The concept is simple. If you know someone, they can send you emails. If you don’t know them, put them in the bulk email pile and then “choose” to allow them into your circle. Spam Blocking software has this concept as well, but having extra layers seems critical these days, so it is worth looking into.

To programs are mentioned that will help encrypt information. There are many more programs out there that will help, but these programs are good and a good place to start as any. They have the added benefit of both being free with source code available.

Will encryption stop people from accessing my information?
Encryption simply makes it harder for people to gain access to important information, like passwords or sensitive information in a file. The first thing you should know about encryption is that the algorithm that is used to encrypt can be simple or more complex and that affects how securely what you have encrypted is protected. Encryption systems have been broken when the method of encryption is understood by hackers and is easy to break.

Why bother to encrypt my email?
It should be noted that email is far less secure than paper mail for two very good reasons: first, electronic data can be accessed easily over an Internet and secondly, electronic data is really simple to copy. There is a very good chance that someone has snooped around in your email despite your best intentions to stop it.

How do I go about encrypting my email?
There are many programs out there that can help you encrypt your email. A very popular one is PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) or its Gnu offshoot GPG.

PGP (http://www.pgpi.org/) self-describes itself this way: This “is a program that gives your electronic mail something that it otherwise doesn’t have: Privacy. It does this by encrypting your mail so that nobody but the intended person can read it. When encrypted, the message looks like a meaningless jumble of random characters. PGP has proven itself quite capable of resisting even the most sophisticated forms of analysis aimed at reading the encrypted text.”

Why bother to encrypt my files?
The answer to this boils down to what you store on your computer. If you have financial data with important information like social security numbers, email addresses, account numbers and passwords, then you open yourself up to losing very valuable information. Most corporate Internet security employees will attest to the widespread theft of very valuable information. As long as you are connected to the Internet you are vulnerable.

How do I go about encrypting my files?
AxCrypt File Encryption Software (http://axcrypt.sourceforge.net/) Self-described as “Free Personal Privacy and Security for Windows 98/ME/NT/2K/XP with AES-128 File Encryption, Compression and transparent Decrypt and Open in the original application.”

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According to Mary Landesman, a researcher in ScanSafe’s security threat alert team, the cybercriminals have embedded a malicious iFrame into tens of thousands of Websites to fire exploits at unsuspecting PC users who surf to one of the rigged sites.

The iFrame points to an intermediary exploit site which in turn loads additional exploits and malware from up to seven different malware domains, Landesman said.

She ran a Google search of the iFrame script tag and found it embedded on about 54,900 sites, many  of them legitimate online destinations.
Victim sites include www.feedzilla.com, latindiscover.com, and a number of charitable and nursing facilities, including howellcarecenter.com, sweetgrassvillagealf.com, www.foodsresourcebank.org, and morningsideassistedliving.com.

At the time of writing this blog post, the number of hacked sites listed in Google results climbed to 56,000.

It is not yet clear which vulnerabilities are being exploited in this attack but, judging from recent history, end users should ensure that operating system and desktop software programs are fully patched.

The most common programs under attack include Adobe Flash, Adobe PDF Reader, Apple’s QuickTime, WinZip and RealPlayer.  In addition to Microsoft Windows patches, these desktop applications should be updated to the newest version immediately.