It’s now a fact: every second you spend reading this article produce about 20 milligrams of carbon dioxide environmentalists frown upon. Don’t underplay the seemingly minute green house gas you produced upon you finish reading this article, think about how many of you are surfing the Web at this moment – the resulting amount is enough for Greenpeace to clench.

How could you be producing carbon dioxide when you are snuggled in your bed while pounding your laptop’s keyboard? You are breathing right? . . . no seriously, your computer is consuming energy produced from burning coal, which is among the top green house gas producer in the world. If not the power plant in your area, maybe the website you are visiting’s facility is using energy produced from burning fossil fuel. It’s a great possibility.

For a website to be available to you, it uses massive buildings, supercomputers, servers, or what have you to store and make available the data you need. Where do you think your wedding photos you uploaded on Facebook are stored? These website facilities gobble up tremendous amount of dirty energy – although not all maybe – to run. And retrieving big pockets of data such as music or video from the Web is using more energy than say pulling up a Craigslist.org Web page.

Google’s Erik Teetzel told CNN that they estimated a 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide is produced every time you use their search engine. This energy is dedicated to receive your search query and send back the result to you. And if you add up all the emissions produced by all Google users every second, the numbers certainly pile up. In fact, some experts believe that the Internet will contribute 20 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas in about a decade – certainly not sustainable decried environmentalists.

The Climate Group and Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI) estimated that 76 million tons of carbon dioxide emission in 2002 can be attributed Internet use. And the number could more than triple in the coming decade.

Websites and companies involved, however, are taking heed of the call for a green Internet. Google announced their efforts to make their six 5megawatt server farms and small data centers around the world are in place. They’re turning to energy efficient software as well as recycling water to save on energy. Yahoo, too, are claiming to have installed similar measures.

Cleanbits in Netherlands are pushing for websites to use hosting providers that uses renewable source of energy such as the California-based AISO.net. It’s these small efforts that can slowly transform Internet’s impact to global climate change. Not to mention that the Web itself is a good source of information regarding climate change.

There is no question whether the Internet is here to stay or not. For now, however, knowing that Internet use can contribute to carbon emission is enough to start the shift. And the efforts made by the pillars in the Internet business are good evidence that they are taking the right path to clean up the Web.

It’s now possible to remote control a PC by sending an SMS, email, or a tweet to it. TweetMyPC is an open utility that can be used to remotely control a Microsoft run machine using a cell phone or another computer connected to the Internet.

How many times this has happen to you? You’re exited to go home because your shift is finally over. You can’t wait to be departed from your oppressing office PC; just when you are settled in your pajama, snuggled in your warm bed, you remembered you forgot to turn off your office PC. If only there isn’t any sensitive information in it, you could call someone from the office to turn it off for you. But you can’t since you know this is an invitation for an office crime; you have to get to your office quick – there goes your much awaited beauty sleep.

Now you don’t have to rush to your office just to turn off your computer. You can just send an SMS, email, or a tweet and your machine will pick up the command and execute it for you. Because you use the Internet or a cell phone service to send the command, it doesn’t matter whether you are only a block away or an ocean away, you can turn off any Microsoft run computer remotely.

In order to do this, you have to install TweetMyPC, a free application, in the machine that you want to remotely control using your cell phone or another computer connected to the Internet. You have to associate your Twitter account to the application in order for it to work using Twitter. (For added security, you might want to sign up for a separate Twitter account with the “Protect my Updates” option activated for this purpose.)

TweetMyPC is not only capable of turning off PCs remotely; it can do a whole lot of other stuff. Among the commands you can remotely execute using the version 2 are the following: shutdown, hibernate, standby, lock, screenshot, kill + the process ID, among many others.

Here are other options you can send the command and how you can set them off.

1. via email: You can associate your Twitter account to Posterous and you can send the command as email to twitter@posterous.com.

2. via SMS: For selected countries like Germany, Canada, U.S., U.K., Sweden, and New Zealand, you can associate your Twitter with your mobile phone to control your PC via SMS.

3. via IM: Add twitter@twitter.com to your Google Talk buddy list and you can send commands via instant message.

If not for the other commands, perhaps retrieving a real time screenshot of your computer will get you. This is particularly useful if you have one employee you want to monitor about. Now you have an easy, free way of checking if they are doing what you are paying them to do. Of course there’s added security risk here also, but if you are just going to practice enough caution, there should be no problem.

Many Internet users would back me up when I say Firefox is the number one Web browser of choice. And, the popular open source Web browser has just released the new Firefox 3.5, which brings Web browsing to new heights. Now let me introduce to you new or enhanced features of our favorite browser – yes, Firefox is my Web browser of choice too.

New technology injected

As early as now, Firefox 3.5 picks important features of HTML 5 to go with the browser and help Web developers achieve what’s possible from new programming technologies. For one, the new browser supports integrated video element avoiding the need for proprietary plugins installed. Weaving video contents are now easier through Document Object Model (DOM), that is to say applying JavScript and CSS.

Enhanced Privacy

Firefox 3.5 finally has private browsing feature that allows you to surf the Net without leaving Internet file bread crumbs such as cookies, cache, or history that could compromise your job – or your marriage, who knows (but don’t get any ideas). The Firefox’ version of private browsing may differ from other browsers’ though. When you click private browsing from the Tools menu, Firefox will close your current session (don’t worry your open tabs is saved and will be available upon ending the private browsing session) and transforms your browsing to private. This is different from other browsers’ version wherein you can use normal and private browsing simultaneously in separate windows.

Enhanced user interface

The crash recovery feature in Firefox 3.5 is made superb by adding a feature that allows you to choose which tabs should be open when you restart Firefox after a crash. If you’re a fan of using multiple tabs in a single browser window, you might be all too familiar with the problem of crashing after opening a suspicious or overly heavy site. And when you restart the browser, all the tabs are restored; you could not block the tab that caused the crash from launching. In Firefox 3.5, you are given a chance to choose which tabs you’d like restored through the session restore screen. I don’t know about you, but I find this a great relief since my only solution to the problem before is to open an entirely new session thereby closing the rest of my working tabs from my previous session that crashed. A waste of time, I must say.

Dragging and dropping tabs to new position or to a new window is easier, too, with the thumbnail containing a translucent snapshot of the site you are dragging. I thank Firefox for this feature as I seem to always forget what’s in the tab I just drag – yes, my short attention span is betraying me.

Enhanced speed

Firefox 3.5 improves JavaScript performance to delight the users with lightning execution speed. Oh okay, not quite lightning speed yet, but it’s faster compared to other browsers’ technology. This feature opens door for the development of complex Web applications that could rival desktop application.

These are just some of the new and enhanced feature of Firefox 3.5 that’s welcomed by both Web developers and Internet users alike. The best way for you to enjoy these features is to install the new browser yourself – happy browsing!

Currently internet has become a lifeline for each and every individual. It is hard to carry out our routine work without internet. All the mails, daily news updates, new product launches, searching for different service providers and communicating to our friends and relatives; we completely look out for internet to do all this. Just imagine a day without internet: all the transactions blocked; no flow of news, no means of contact and a lot more. Slowly but surely internet have made human its slave and makes a human feel handicapped without its presence.
But is our internet system Crash Proof? Is it vulnerable to hazards like earthquakes, accidents or any natural calamity? A series of disastrous failures suggest that the answer is NO. People think internet as a way of transformation which does not require physical connections of cables. But the fact is that the net is hanging around the world by means of fiber optics which is exposed to accidents and hazards making our internet system unsafe.
Currently a failure can cause much bigger commotion than in 2001. Infrastructure of our internet is decades old. Up gradation is badly required, but undoubtedly we can’t just destroy the parts of the network and remodel them from scratch. And even governments and telecom companies will also not put up with the massive costs of putting down additional connections just to insure against such temporary problems. What shall we do then?
The answer lies in the statement by a famous scientist Nick McKeown “Answer to an enhanced net lies with a banal black box called a router. Technically, routers are the controller of internet traffic. At present a million of routers are serving us by linking thousands of networks making our internet. In technical terms, they verify the addresses on data packets and guide them to the shortest physical path (route) to reach the right destination. When a particular connection breaks, they divert the route for transferring the data.
At the present time, however, routers are elements of the problem, not the solution. Because they can become very slow in finding the right path, and in the time it often consumes, internet traffic gets jammed and a huge amount of data becomes redundant.
Despite the fact that a large number of likely solutions to this problem exists, the additional important point to regard as is that there is no place to assess them. Every modernization of router software has first to be systematically checked on a big network which has all the complication of the internet but which is actually cut off from it. Up till now not anything like that exists.
Still if we could test it, it would very hard to install new router software. Every router is pre-programmed according to international standards set 15 years ago mostly by the manufacturers themselves. They contain vendor dependent circuits, and the software controlling the routes of data packets are operates statically thus does not allowing any change.
Experts are developing the ways to work out all these problems: a method that can modify a router’s control software as well as providing the ideal place to test it safely.