UPDATE: A recent tweet by @opindia_revenge reveals that Anonymous has successfully managed to take down the Department of Telecom’s website - dot.gov.in

UPDATE: Looks like both the sites - supremecourtofindia.nic.in and aicc.org.in are back in action again! However, @opindia_revenge has tweeted with the following message:

Anonymous group has successfully taken down the website of Supreme Court of India (supremecourtofindia.nic.in) and the official website of the All India Congress Committee (aicc.org.in). The reason being due to the fact that the Indian Government is taking Internet Censorship quite seriously, and has ordered most of the Indian ISPs to block websites including, Vimeo, ThePirateBay, Pastebin, Dailymotion, and many others.

Since yesterday, many users on Twitter were reporting that popular file sharing and torrent sites were blocked by major ISPs like Airtel, Reliance, MTNL and You Broadband ISP. Upon visiting the blocked sites, the following message is displayed – “Access to this site has been blocked as per Court Orders.”

Within hours, the government websites were taken down by Anonymous, an act of revenge, due to the very fact that the Indian Government had ordered ISPs to block ThePirateBay and other sites.

The first tweet came in from @opindia_revenge indicating that they’re going to “paralyze” the two websites. An hour later, a confirmation tweet followed stating – “We have successfully taken down our main enemy –>> http://dot.gov.in Department of telecom +1 for #opindia”

Although they mentioned that they had managed to take down the Department of Telecom’s websites (dot.gov.in), but at the time of writing this article, the website was fully functional.

The government websites are reportedly down since 17th May 2012, 15:30 IST

Back in June 2011, Anonymous has successfully hacked the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) websites due to the action taken against Baba Ramdev’s anti-corruption campaign by the Delhi Police. They also managed to hack the Indian Army’s website, which was down for an hour or so.

In response to this, the Indian Twitter and Facebook account of Anonymous were suspended and all videos from its YouTube account were removed completely.

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made Mothers.

The above quote reflects the importance of mothers and motherhood, who is one of the greatest living teachers on Earth. It is said that being a mother is a one of the highest salaried jobs, since the payment is pure love. In significance to the love and sacrifice called motherhood, the entire world today celebrates Mother’s Day, a great opportunity to thank and give love to the lady who has done everything that is possible from her hands.

To honor and celebrate Mother’s Day, the search engine giant – Google, has come up with a very lovely and beautiful doodle highlighting the love and affection between a mother and her kids. In the animated Google Doodle, you will see two children give their mother a flower and big hug.

The animations begins with the two children (the two Os in Google) opening a door and stealing a look to see if their mother (the letter “L” in Google) is there. The mother notices the two children coming inside and gets anxious. The children then run to their mother with a flower and give her a big fat hug. The characters then line up to form letters in the Google logo.

Since 2000, Google designs a doodle on the occasion of Mother’s Day every year, and replaces the classic logo on its home page with the doodle to compliment to mothers all over the world. As usual, clicking on the doodle will take you to the results page that details the significance, purpose, and its traditions.

While Mother’s Day is celebrated in different part of the world on different days, it is generally the second Sunday of May (May 13, 2012) that is most widely celebrated. The origin of Mother’s Day can be dated back to 1908 in the United States, when Anna Jarvis held a memorial in remembrance of her mother Anna Reeves, who spent over 20 years teaching at a Sunday school.

With this memorial, Anna Jarvis began a campaign to make “Mother’s Day” a recognized holiday in the United States. By 1914, she was successful enough and the day was known to many people around the States. However, she began hating the very idea of the holiday thing due to extensive commercialization as early as the 1920s. This, however, is considered to be the modern holiday of Mother’s Day.

Today, almost the entire world celebrates Mother’s Day on the second Sunday of May. This includes Canada, Australia, Brazil, most parts of Europe, India and other parts of Asia, as well as many countries in Africa.

Also Read: Google Celebrates International Women’s Day with a Symbolic Google Doodle

Watch the Google Doodle in action -

Yes, you heard that right! The digital music service provider Spotify has teamed up with two dating websites and has released two new apps called Tastebuds and Fellody, basically to create a social dating platform that not only matches and filters out users with similar tastes in music, but also provides matches based on their personalized playlist.

By installing the new Spotify apps, users can find their potential partners based on their musical likes and dislikes. Both the apps work in a similar fashion. Once you are connected with Facebook or with a unique username, the apps examines through your music playlists and library to find your favorite artists and songs.

Once this is done, the app then presents you with a list of profiles (Spotify users) with similar taste in music. This search can, however, be refined based on your preferences like gender, age, and location. This match-making feature has been provided by the two dating websites, Tastebuds.fm and Fellody.com.

For instance, here’s how the Fellody app will work. It uses a mechanism, or rather a technique in finding your potential partner. It first begins by dropping your music library on the app, and will start rating potential love interest. Along with that, the app will generate a ‘compatibility’ score, and also enables you to send a ‘flirt’ (very much similar to Facebook’s Poke feature), while browsing your matches’ tastes.

The Tastebuds app on the other hand will help find a user his/her potential partner based on the artists they’ve been listening to on Spotify. It also scans through the user’s playlists. The app then filters out a list of profiles based on matches by gender, age and location, and message matches in real-time. Users can also arrange an offline meet-up by showing their tracking with the Songkick Spotify concert app.

Tastebuds.fm helps you ‘meet people who share your love for music’. Of late, Tastebuds.fm has been creating a lot of buzz around the Web with an increasing number of users, mainly in the UK. The social dating site was founded by two musicians – Alex Parish and Julian Keenaghan from London, who are the founder members of the band Years Of Rice And Salt.

According to Tastebuds.fm co-founder Alex Parish, 43% of first messages get a reply on Tastebuds. He also states this is “a much higher response rate than non-music based dating sites.”

Fellody founder Robin Simon says, “After our successful launch with Spotify in Germany, we are now very happy to welcome all Spotify users on Fellody, where they might get more groupies with their taste in music than Robbie Williams during the 90’s.”

So, all you single fellas out there, are you all set to mingle?

Facebook plans to bring in the file-sharing feature to all Facebook Groups as the company made and announcement that it will soon roll out the new file sharing feature to all Groups, enabling members to send and receive files to each other.

The new feature started to roll out yesterday to a small number of Facebook groups, and will eventually be rolled out to all Groups in the next few days, according to Kate Freeman of Mashable. As Freeman got in touch with Facebook, the company said that groups that don’t yet have the file sharing abilities will get it “soon,” perhaps in by next week.

Users can upload files up to 25 MB in size and make the uploaded files available to anyone inside a group, however, music and executable files are not allowed to be uploaded. E-books, comics, and video files are fine up to 25MB.

The restriction to 25MB is to eliminate users from uploading copyrighted video, and also not allowing them to upload music files is probably because the social networking giant seems to be trying to avoid being associated with any disreputable activity like piracy. It is also trying to keep hackers at bay by eliminating executable files from being uploaded.

Like its conventional feature where users can report problems, users can as well be able to report files as a way for the social network to try to prevent sharing of copyrighted or malicious files.

Earlier in April, Facebook launched Groups for Schools, and Facebook did mention about the file sharing feature then. The file sharing service is designed “to make it even easier to share lecture notes, sports schedules, or class assignments,” according to the announcement. Now it pretty much looks like all Groups are getting the feature.

Also Read: Why Facebook Groups is a Powerful Tool for Teachers

Facebook acquired the file-sharing service Drop.io for around $10 million in October 2010, but that didn’t last for a long time. The company had to close down the site’s operations in December in the same year. On that note, Mashable speculates that Facebook will use Drop.io’s services to add a conference calling service to groups, but before predicting anything further, its best that we wait and see on that one.

Image Credits: Mashable

It’s not just Robert Scoble who faced problems while posting comments on Facebook, I faced the same problem and a few other Facebook users as well. For an unknown reason, Facebook’s automated spam filter stopped my comment from being published and flagged it as “irrelevant or inappropriate” comment.

The problem I faced was when a friend of mine on Facebook shared a scam message about “free online recharge,” and I tried adding the comment — “This is a fake offer.” Facebook blocked me right there from posting the comment with the following message:

This Comment Can’t Be Posted

This comment seems irrelevant or inappropriate and can’t be posted. To avoid having your comments blocked, please make sure they contribute to the post in a positive way.

Robert Scoble faced the same problem while posting a comment. However, according to Facebook, Scoble’s comment was specifically blocked because of its length, and the length of the comment thread it was on.

When the issue was reported by major blogs, Facebook stated that it is not censoring comments, but the limitation was caused due to Facebook’s automated spam filter system.

Here’s the official statement that Facebook posted -

To protect the millions of people who connect and share on Facebook every day, we have automated systems that work in the background to maintain a trusted environment and protect our users from bad actors who often use links to spread spam and malware. These systems are so effective that most people who use Facebook will never encounter spam.

They’re not perfect, though, and in rare instances they make mistakes. This comment was mistakenly blocked as spammy, and we have already started to make adjustments to our classifier. We look forward to learning from rare cases such as these to make sure we don’t repeat the same mistake in the future.

Scammers usually target long threaded comments to post malicious links and scam messages. The automated spam filter monitors such threads and makes sure that it filters out spammy comments to keep the thread clean and safe. Of course the system also blocks comments that have inappropriate words, but other types of comments that go against positive conversation, which includes some ASCII art are also blocked.

In my case, my comment was blocked either because I used the word “fake,” or maybe because I tried commenting on a spam post. Facebook also mentioned that “the error message made it sound like the message was blocked because of the content of the message, not because it looked spammy.”

Yet another Google Doodle dedicated to an American artist – Keith Haring, who was inspired by street styles and dance music of the 1980s and mentored by Andy Warhol. The doodle is featured on Google’s home page on the occasion of the 54th birthday of the great artist.

The doodle uses normal Google colours – blue, red, yellow and green, but it has been created in a way, which looks beautiful and energetic. it is designed to show a set of people dancing forming the letters “Google.”

Keith was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, and grew up in in Kutztown with his mother, Joan Haring, and his father, Allen Haring, who was a cartoonist. From his childhood days, Keith showed keen interest in art, and from the year 1976 to 1978 he studied commercial art at The Ivy School of Professional Art in Pittsburgh. He then moved on to study Fine Arts.

At the end of his teen-age, he moved to New Your City, and got inspired by graffiti art, and studied at the School of Visual Arts. He came into public attention when he started off with his chalk drawings on the New Your subway in the late 1970s.

He then achieved fame and recognition in the 1980s, and also took part in several exhibitions. All his career life, he devoted a lot of time to public works, which often carried social messages.

In 1988, Haring was diagnosed with AIDS. He spent the last couple of years of his life is spreading awareness about this disease. Haring passed away at a young age of 31, due to an AIDS related complication. His most renowned work was ‘The Radiant Baby,’ which later became his symbol. After he passed away, a musical of the same name was also created in his memory.

Here are some of his works available on Wikipedia –

Watch the video of Keith Haring painting a giant mural as part of his artist residency at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center -

Flickr today announced that  it has partnered with the newly launched social networking site, Pinterest, providing users a new way to share Flickr photos, favourites, groups and galleries, in order to attribute them appropriately.

On the Flickr blog, Kay Kremerskothen, a Flickr community manager, announced that Flickr, having worked closely with Pinterest, will now allow users to easily share content to Pinterest.

Along with the other social networking buttons including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, the new social networking site’s social button will appear in the share menu above the photos. This button will only be visible if the Flickr user has allowed the photo or video to be shared with other users.

When a user pins Flickr photo to Pinterest, a proper attribution statement will be seen under the pin’s description. This attribution will contain the name of the Flickr user or photographer, the title of the photo, and a link back to the photo page on Flickr.

Whatsoever, this attribution cannot be edited, and taking that into consideration Flickr assures that pins and repins of their images will be credited and linked back as well, ensuring people can leave comments, fave the photo, or contact you directly on Flickr. Here’s how it looks in real -

The attribution will be included for embedded photos as well. For instance, a photo that has been posted or embedded on a blog and then shared to Pinterest will still contain the attribution with a link back to the original Flickr photo page.

“Attribution is a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources,” Pinterest said in a statement. The company is also today rolling out attribution for Behance, Vimeo and YouTube.

With this partnership, Flickr hopes that its users’ photos will get more visibility and exposure, and also make see a rise in the number of visits. Flickr also anticipates a significant pop in the rate at which images are pinned to Pinterest.

Back in 2009, Google launched the automatic message translation tool in Gmail Labs, which enabled you to translate emails that are in foreign language into a desired language that you understand. The auto translation of messages became immensely popular and successful, and thus Google decided to graduate it from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. That is, the feature will now be enabled by default to all users.

Google Translate has always been a very friendly and immensely useful tool. Incorporating the same feature in Gmail is a good move from Google, as many times we do receive email messages that are not in a language we understand.

Unlike the earlier days, we would not be required to copy the text and translate it using either Google Translate or a different translation engine. With the integrated translation, it’s not only easy to translate messages, but also save your time.

This is how the feature works in action -

All you need to do is click on “Translate message” to translate the message in your desired language.

You can as well choose to permanently translate a particular language to your desired language by clicking on “Always translate: [language]” option on the top-right of the message. You can always disable the feature if you’re a bi-lingual and don’t need translations for a language. All you need to do is click on “Turn off for: [language].”

If you have accidentally turned off the message translation feature for a particular language, or don’t see the Translate message header on a message, click on the down arrow next to Reply at the top-right of the message pane and select the Translate message option in the drop-down.

Also Read: Translate Google+ into More Than 50 Languages

In addition to this, Google has also graduated the Smart Mute and Title Tweaks feature from the Gmail Labs. The smart Mute feature is basically used to mute noisy email thread and makes sure that it stays out of your inbox. Click here to know more about muting email threads.

The Title Tweaks feature changes the title in your browser’s tab to tell you that you have new messages. The tab now reads “Inbox (20) – user@example.com – Gmail” instead of “Gmail – Inbox (20) – user@example.com.”

Along with the new features, the Gmail team has retired some older and less popular Lab features in the next few days. Those features include – “Old Snakey, Mail Goggles, Mouse Gestures, Hide Unread Counts, Move Icon Column, Inbox Preview, Custom Date Formats and SMS in Chat gadget. Please note that the SMS in Chat lab is not being retired, just the gadget associated with it.”

Facebook‘s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new feature for the social networking site, which he claims that it will help save lives of thousands of people all over the world. The new feature – Organ Donor, will enable users to register as an organ donor through the website and share their intentions with family and friends.

According to a press release published by Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, the new feature provides an ability to add your organ donor status on your Timeline, which may inspire others to sign up as donors as well. It is also said that there are over 14,000 people in the US are waiting for a heart, kidney or liver transplant, and millions of people worldwide are waiting for a similar organ donation. A huge percentage of people die, since the required organ is not available. Zuckerberg and Sandberg write:

Medical experts believe that broader awareness about organ donation could go a long way toward solving this crisis. And we believe that by simply telling people that you’re an organ donor, the power of sharing and connection can play an important role.

Zuckerberg stated that the idea was first inspired from his girlfriend Priscilla Chan, but the motivation to start the project came from his friendship with the late Apple founder Steve Jobs, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

The organ donor feature lets users Facebook users share their experience and own personal stories with their friends on their Timeline. They can share the reasons why they opted to become an organ donor and how they did it. If any user on Facebook is interested in donating his/her organ to save a life, then Facebook has a provided a way to sign up for their state or national organ donor registry.

Follow the steps below to add that you’re an organ donor to your Timeline -

• Click Life Event at the top of your timeline
• Select Health & Wellness
• Select Organ Donor
• Select your audience and click Save

The new organ donor status feature is now available in the United States and the United Kingdom, and will eventually be rolled out to other countries in the future. Apart from this, Facebook also has other life-saving features like, sets of suicide prevention and anti-cyber bullying tools.

Here’s how the feature works –

Google has officially shut down Google Wave, a real-time service for sharing docs, sending emails and messages with friends and relatives. Google announced about the shutdown in November 2011, stating that – from January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. As a part of the shutdown, all Waves will be deleted automatically.

Google launched the online real-time sharing tool back in August 2009. That year, Google Wave was the most anticipated product of the year with people desperate to get their hands on an invite. Google Wave was then released to the general public on May 19, 2010. Despite the hype and intensive publicity, Google Wave failed to survive.

Google Wave was launched in order to compete with Facebook, however, the new networking site didn’t offer features as advanced as Facebook, and it is where it failed to pick up its user base.

Google Wave did have some great features in terms of collaboration and editing documents. However, users showed no interest, since they found the service confusing and perhaps not very intuitive. A year after the launch, Google realized that Wave was going nowhere towards success, and thus it finally announced that the Wave project was getting killed.

Later, it was announced that Wave was going to end up as an open source project hosted by the Apache Foundation. Wave did have a lot of great features for collaboration, and the move to open source was welcomed by many.

Now that Google has shut down Wave completely, visiting the page – google.com/wave will redirect you to a support page, where Google explains the two stages of closing down of Google Wave -

Stage 1: Google Wave is read-only — January 31, 2012

In this stage, you will no longer be able to create or edit waves. Marking a wave as read will also not be saved. Robots that try to write to a wave will stop functioning.

During this time, you will continue to be able to export your waves using the existing PDF export feature. You’ll still be able to read existing waves and access the Google Wave client.

If you want to continue using Wave, there is an open source project called Walkaround that includes an experimental feature to import all your waves from Google.

Stage 2: Google Wave shut down — April 30, 2012

In this stage, all the Google Wave servers will be shut down and you will no longer be able to get to your waves. Make sure to export any waves you want to save before that time.

For those users who really loved Google Wave and are interested in continuing to use Google Wave service, the service can be found at the Apache Software Foundation, where development of Wave has continued since 2010. You can take a look at it - Wave In A Box.