Category: Ask DLS

It's an odd thing; everybody seems to want to get out of the Great Firewall of China. Intensive googling has revealed nothing but ways to bypass, circumvent, or otherwise get around the firewall from within China. But what if I run a website, and I want to see what it looks like from within China? I don't mean just the website itself; I also want to see what search terms it shows up for, what it ...

I had gotten some very well-informed and interesting replies when I asked you guys about the stock market, so I figured I would try my luck again with something at least as shady, scammy and rife with get-rich-quick artists: Google AdWords affiliate marketing. The basic idea, to those of you unfamiliar with the concept: Company A offers its product for sale (say, an anti-virus). If I get ...

Today I tried doing something which seemed really simple at first glance: I set out to get a list of Facebook status updates on my desktop. Just the updates. No pictures, no pokes, no Farmville. I kind of wanted to be able to post replies, but that wasn't super-important. And after spending quite a bit of time, I simply couldn't find anything worthy. I found Seesmic and TweetDeck. Beautiful ...

We often get comments from readers who would like to be able to subscribe to specific feeds here on Download Squad -- Windows, Google, Firefox -- you get the picture. As it happens, you've always been able to do that. Here's how! The easiest method is to check out our Feeds Page. You'll find direct links to dozens of specific RSS feeds for the categories we use. Whether you're an Open ...

So Google finally let loose with a real glimpse at Chrome OS today, unveiling it at an event in Mountain View today. It's pretty much what we've thought all along: a bootable browser with an affinity for web apps - especially Google's. As you'd expect from a "browser OS," Google pretty much admits that Chrome OS isn't really intended for offline use. They see devices running Chrome as a ...

Ok, I know all the cool kids like to take shots at Internet Explorer. Heck, I'll admit it -- I've done it myself. And yes, I do prefer using Google Chrome. But there's something I just don't like about the way Google plans to get Chrome Frame onto users' systems. Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell told TechCrunch that Google "won't be explicitly advertising ...

Late last night I posted about the infamous "hey that's my wife advertising a singles site" screenshot that Cheryl Smith blog shared on her blog. Hold the phone, says Facebook. That was an embedded ad in a third-party application. As AllAboutFacebook rightly points out, I got that part wrong: The information used for the photos were scraped while accessing Facebook applications by a third-party ...

Maybe you noticed this ages ago, but the thought just occurred to me (and most of the rest of our crew after I pinged the list) this afternoon. Why is it that every web browser has a round icon/logo? Don't get me wrong - we kicked it around on the list and there's the obvious roundness in the phrase World Wide Web. But is there any other sector where the iconography is this uniform? Netscape ...

I've seen some teases in my day, but this one ranks right up there with the best of them. In just a few days, Opera is going to unveil something they claim will reinvent the Web!!! The image above is pretty much all the information that Opera has provided. Oh, yeah, it might be called Opera Freedom and there's one more cryptic clue buried in the page's source: We start our little story with the ...

I don't demand a heck of a lot from my browser anymore. I've weened myself from dependence on add-ons and plugins and moved to as many bookmarklets as possible so that I don't miss a beat when switching among the myriad of browsers installed on my system. While I've been using Firefox for ages, I've been playing with Chromium for quite some time and become used to its speed. I downloaded ...

I'd like to think Microsoft's new FixIt gadget is a good idea, but I'm just not sure yet. Here's why I'm having trouble reaching a decision one way or the other. First, it's difficult for me to imagine a home user wanting this on their sidebar. If you're having so many problems with Vista that you need FixIt always at the ready, you'd probably just dump it and roll back to XP anyway. Also, FixIt ...

Sophos Labs' Graham Clulely authored a blog post today asking users for the best Conficker headline they've read. Pretty much all the major antivirus providers have announced that 1) most users are safe because the required Windows patch has been available since October via Windows Update and 2) there's a good chance nothing at all will happen tomorrow. Since it's April 1st, though, let's have a ...

It's no secret that Internet Explorer has a history of thumbing its nose at web standards. IE8 is supposed to change all that, bringing improved (how could it not be?) compliance. An unfortunate side effect, however, is that some sites that have been designed to display properly in IE7 (or older) don't look so hot in the new version. I particularly like one excerpt from the IEBlog: Site owners ...

WinSuperSite was talking about an interesting feature in Windows 7 the other day. Apparently you can drag files to an application pinned to your taskbar to associate it with that program. At least, that's what some other users have said. I gave it a try, and met with no success. I tried with PNG and JPEG images, but dragging them to FastStone MaxView didn't do anything - the file just scooted to ...

I need some help with this one. I don't understand why people get so excited about sub-30 second boot times in Windows 7, or with Vista's apparently horrid slowness. See, I never shut my machine off. I close the lid, it goes to sleep. I open the lid, it resumes in a few short seconds. Windows 7 is especially quick, but Vista was fast, too. Unless I'm toying with an OS that can't pull off the ...