Reliance Broadband is an ISP in India and they use a web browser based authentication system to log the user onto their network. One of their most popular plans the – Night Booster 4X offers 4 times more speed than day for unlimited  downloads from 10PM to 8AM. Now if there was a way to turn on your system at 10PM, automatically login to Asianet and turn your download manager on and then shutdown at 8AM it would have been perfect. The only problem is that the http based authentication system makes it a bit unwieldy to automate. Well not really . I found a bash script to automate this login process.

Features

- Automatically connect to Asianet Dataline without having to sign in via the browser.
- In startup and free mode the script will keep the connection alive.
- The script will automatically reconnect if connection breaks because of a power failure or a line problem.
- In free mode the script will call any related startup and shutdown scripts placed inside the ~/.auto-login/startup and ~/.auto-login/shutdown folders.

Setup Instructions

a) Copy script to your favorite scripts folder.
b) Edit script to update username and password with your Asianet login information.
c) Add script to your startup process. See different ways of using the script below to know more.
d) If you want to start and stop other applications at the time of starting the script then create a folder ~/.auto-login and inside that create sub-folders startup and shutdown. Place other scripts that have to be called during startup and shutdown of this script into the respective folders. Make sure that these scripts have their executable bit set.

Different ways of using the script

1) Add a shortcut to your task bar to launch the script with the parameter “auto”. Use this shortcut to start the connection with one click and stop the connection with one click. Remember that the connection will time out if there is no activity. But that should not be a problem because you can connect again with a single click.
2) Add the script to your startup process with parameter “startup”. This will keep the script running in the background and the script will keep the connection alive with keep-alive requests.
3) Add the script to your startup process with parameter “free”. This will keep the script running in the background and the script will connect only during the free download hours and then it will keep the connection alive with keep-alive requests until the free time ends. When free time ends it will disconnect the connection. In this mode the script will also run any related startup and shutdown scripts placed inside the ~/.auto-login/startup and ~/.auto-login/shutdown folders.

The latest source can be downloaded from http://github.com/anoopjohn/Asianet-Auto-Login-Script

If there are issues with the script please use the github issue queue at http://github.com/anoopjohn/Asianet-Auto-Login-Script/issues

I liked its layout even though it felt a bit like Twitter, the idea of sharing videos, images and audio seems to be novel and as far as options go, makes it more versatile than Twitter.

Yahoo Meme

• The layout is very similar to Twitter. But you can share images from your desktop, post mp3 links for audio and share videos from YouTube or Vimeo.
• The concept of ReTweet becomes Repost which is something they have clearly borrowed from Twitter. There is also Popular section which shows the post which has been reposted the most number of times.
• Something they borrowed from Facebook was the option to comment on other peoples posts.
• Yahoo Meme takes a different path from Twitter when it comes to the number of characters you can enter. At Twitter its 140 with a focus on updates from mobile phones and with Yahoo Meme the limit is 2000 characters.

So now you have a social networking site which has borrowed somethings from Twitter and Facebook. It seems to be confused on who it wants to challenge or what exactly it wants to give internet users. It surely does not have anything really different from other websites for people to actively want to be a part of Yahoo Meme. It still is early days but at the moment it just looks like Yahoo Meme is a clone of Twitter without the high number of users.