Basit Ali's Blog

Less popular code signing and SSL Certificate authority Thawte announced today that they have completed the acquisition process of the secure certificates business of VeriSign. The digital certificates business of VeriSign will now be under Symantec, that is the parent entity of Thawte. Server hosting and domains business will still stay with Verisign.

I’ve been using Google Wave for quite some time now but I admit, I couldn’t find many active users and the use was very limited. A communication and collaborative discussion tool without many users is useless. Google Wave has not seen a wide spread user adoption and due to the same reason, Google has decided [...]

Skype is down on Fring and its not a good news. The way things are going, I don’t see it coming back to Fring at all, at least not in a few years to come. What do I do? If you are one of those lucky ones who have a phone that supports the native [...]

As we’ve covered already, Skype calls and instant messaging is not available for Fring users anymore. Fring calls it a cowardly act by Skype. Skype on the other hand says that they have not blocked out Fring without any reason. According to Skype, Fring was using Skype API in a way it is not supposed [...]

What do you use your computer for? Surfing Internet, chat, gaming, social networking, downloading, desktop computing including documents, spreadsheets or presentation making or just watching your photos and videos? Today’s mobile phones are capable of doing it all, rather sometimes more than the traditional phones. They have faster processors, more ram, faster  wireless Internet connectivity [...]

This is interesting to see that Lahore High Court has once again ordered to ban 9 sites including Google, Amazon, Yahoo, MSN, Hotmail, Youtube and Bing in Pakistan. Quite interestingly, 3 of these are popular search engines and usually do not have content of their own. According to a news article, the decision has been [...]

According to the local court’s original order, social networking site Facebook has been unblocked by PTA, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority. The site was blocked due to the blasphemous page titled “Everybody Draw Muhammad day” that has offended Muslim population all across the globe. In addition to Facebook, Flickr the photo sharing site, Youtube the popular video [...]

It has been a year Google has launched Google Wave. Since it’s a communication tool, it doesn’t make much sense without many people using it. While the product has been its preview mode from Google Labs, you don’t expect many people being online when you log on to your wave account. That is why I [...]

We’ve covered Google Latitude in the past. Google Latitude is an-add on to the Google Maps and a location based service that allows you to share your location with your friends and family. In case of mobile version of Latitude + Google Maps, you control who gets to see your location but with Google Latitude [...]

Facebook was blocked yesterday after the Court’s order against the blasphemous Facebook Page and now it looks like the start of a social websites blackout in Pakistan. Youtube, the popular video sharing site, Wikipedia, a crowd sourced encyclopedia and Flickr, the popular photo sharing sate has also been blocked in Pakistan.
It has been reported that [...]