Akshay Jain

Although I am not a user of Airtel Broadband, but I would like to point out the unethical business practice that Airtel is following. It is redirecting all the mistyped domain names to their own page which shows advertisements in collaboration with Yahoo!.

Thus, if you are using Airtel’s DNS servers then you would see that a wrongly typed domain name such as www.sdkajhdjkashdajdkhausd.com (I hope that does not exist ) will take you to a Airtel page which shows advertisements.

Why Unethical?
Now, this is a very unethical practice as the customers are mislead into believing that these are search results. Moreover, Airtel is benefiting from a such a service which is not giving any “benefit” to the user.

Precedence
There was a case filed against Verisign some time back and they were sued for it. They were successfully barred from using this kind of an unethical practice.

Here is an excerpt from the suit against Verisign:

“VeriSign’s redirection of .com and .net traffic not only is earning, or is intended to earn, profits for VeriSign, but it subverts the basic infrastructure of the Internet, to the detriment of numerous entities,” the suit says.

How to Prevent Airtel
The only way to prevent Airtel from hijacking your typos is to use OpenDNS DNS servers which are not only really fast but also are also more reliable. (If that went above the head, then just go to OpenDNS website: OpenDNS

OK, so finally after a lot of drama, chaos and all kinds of shady tactics, the results are out and the Congress led UPA government has finally won the NO-Confidence motion. This means that the current government will continue for atleast some time. Not only just winning by establishing their majority over the Lok Sabha they managed to pass the threshold mark of 272 which signifies that they are truly in majority even if we take the abstentions into account.

What this means for Indian economic growth?

• The government will be able to take independent policy decisions which they were unable to take till now due to the Leftist support (or rather the lack of it).
• More economic reforms are expected in Banking, Insurance and Investment sectors which the Left parties were opposing.
• This paves the way for the Nuclear Deal with the United States without any more expected hurdles. Although, I am not personally confident about the deal but in my opinion this is better than what we could have got in any case.
• Boost for the Stock Market:The investor sentiment had touched new lows with continuing inflation, instability in the government and global economic slow-down led by the sub-prime crisis.

I am quite sure that this would surely reflect in the Investor sentiment in tomorrow’s Stock Trading.

Overall, I welcome the winning of this confidence motion by Dr. Manmohan Singh Government.

Recently, the much awaited versions of two of the greatest browsers ever made were released. Opera 9.5 with its brand new theme and a much faster browsing experience and Firefox 3.0 which is claimed to be the fastest browser on the planet.

I personally use both the browsers because they both have their pros and cons. Opera for me is basically a “one package” for all things. It has a inbuilt E-mail client, IRC software, RSS reader, Torrent Client, Notes manager and some widgets (which I am not particularly fond of).

Firefox on the other hand comes with a great and enthusiastic team of developers and coders who are constantly developing new extensions/addons to this great browser. They make like easier for a webmaster and for many other people.

So, I decided to do a little test to compare the RAM usage of both as my computer is not really overflowing with RAM and the single difference between my computer running and crawling is of RAM. I have many applications open simultaneously and therefore would want some browser which takes the minimum amount of RAM.

For doing some kind of benchmarking, I restarted both the browsers so that the memory consumed in the previous sessions does not affect the results. After the restart, I opened five very popular websites on both these browsers. Here is an image showing those websites:

Now, the second job is to see the task manager to get to know which browser is using the lesser amount of RAM. Here is a screenshot for that:

I can clearly see that firefox is taking far lesser amount of RAM right now and therefore, Firefox clearly wins in this comparison. But I would like to point to my fellow readers that Opera has got loads of other functions that might be consuming more memory. (The EMAIL client, IRC, RSS reader, Notes etc). Therefore, considering the fact that any average email client will also use some sort of memory overhead, I would prefer Opera because everything fits so neatly into its interface.

Anyways, the decision is purely yours. If you do not use those other functions then I would suggest using Firefox, but if you are using those other functions by additional applications then I think Opera wins hands down.