Avast! Mobile Security For Android Market

Avast! comes with full-featured anti-virus and anti-theft security for your Android phone. It is for free and carries no advertising. You can now protect your personal data with automatic virus scans and infected-URL alerts. The application comprises six distinct parts and the seventh one is optional. Those six parts are virus scanners and the optional component is a comprehensive anti-theft system. This part of the application stands alone so you have to download it separately. And, you can rename it so it appears in your application drawer as something other than the rather obvious Avast! Anti-Theft. For more details Click Here To download Avast Mobile security Click Here

Facebook To Release Its Core C++ Library This Year?

Facebook cares more about its back-end than its front-end, which means its C++ code must be pristine. 

Tuesday, February 07, 2012:  Facebook is now looking to open source some of its core C++ library code. Andrei Alexandrescu, Facebook research engineer, who works on Facebook’s core C++ library, revealed in an interview with Server-Side magazine that this year may also see the launch of Facebook’s core C++ library code. The exact timing is still unknown.

Facebook uses C++ heavily on its back-end systems for performance reasons. But, then there are drawbacks as well, such as compilation times. If the C++ code is open-sourced, it could be quite useful. Facebook obviously cares more about its back-end than its front-end, which means its C++ code must be pristine, at least when compared to its PHP code.

Lenovo ThinkPad U300e Price – ultrabook

The new Lenovo ThinkPad U300e is an affordable price ultrabook powered by the Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge processor . It is encased in aluminum chassis and sports a chiclet keyboard with a large trackpad .

Lenovo ThinkPad U300e ultrabook specifications :

• Display : 13.3-inch HD display
• Processor : Latest Intel 3rd generation Ivy Bridge processor
• Operating system : Windows 7
• Memory : up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
• Storage : 500GB HDD , 32GB flash storage
• Built-in microphone and webcam
• Ports : 1xUSB 2.0,1xUSB 3.0, HDMI output, Ethernet LAN , Power , 3.5mm audio
• Battery backup : up to 8 hours
• Wireless LAN WiFi b/g/n
• Gigabit Ethernet LAN
• Bluetooth v3.0

Lenovo ThinkPad U300e Price in India : Around Rs.45,000 . Coming in Q2 2012 .

Acer Aspire S5 Price – World’s Thinnest Ultrabook

The new Acer Aspire S5 is the World’s Thinnest Ultrabook launched till date . It is merely 15mm thin (most of the mobile phones are around 15mm thin ! ) and weighs only 1.35 kg . It is a 13.3-inch display ultrabook with premium built quality (encased in a brushed magnesium alloy body) . The new Acer Aspire S5 comes with a unique covered panel at the back (motorized) , called “Acer MagicFlip I/O” , housing ports like USB v3.0 (2) , Thunderbolt , and HDMI , and a stylish fan exhaust above it .

Acer Aspire S5 ultrabook specifications :

• Display : 13.3-inch
• Processor : Latest Intel second generation or the upcoming Intel 3rd generation Ivy Bridge CPU
• Operating system : Windows 7
• Memory : up to 8GB DDR3 RAM
• Storage : SSD
• Bulit-in microphone and webcam
• Dolby Home Theater audio
• Chiclet keyboard
• Acer Green Instant On technology for fast boot and wake from sleep
• Battery backup : up to 10 hours
• Weight : 1.35kg
• Thickness : 15 mm
• Connectivity : Wireless LAN WiFi b/g/n , Gigabit Ethernet LAN , Bluetooth v3.0

Acer Aspire S5 Price in India : Around Rs.60,000 . Coming in April-May 2012 .

45,000 Facebook Passwords Leaked!

According to a warning released from the security firm Seculert, a malware called Ramnit has stolen around 45,000 Facebook passwords. Ramnit is out on a rampage and has created havoc by stealing login credentials of the Facebook users, based out of UK or France. According to the official blog post of Seculert, “The attackers behind Ramnit are using the stolen credentials to log-in to victims' Facebook accounts and to transmit malicious links to their friends, thereby magnifying the malware's spread even further. In addition, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the fact that users tend to use the same password in various Web-based services (Facebook, Gmail, Corporate SSL VPN, Outlook Web Access etc) to gain remote access to corporate networks.”

iPhone 4S Consumes Double Data!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Apple's latest iPhone 4S consumes double data as compared to the previous iPhone and iPad tablets. The data consumption in the new iPhone is believed to have increased due to the extensive use of online services like the virtual personal assistant, Siri. According to a study conducted by the telecom network technology firm, Arieso, iPhone 4S users transfer on an average three times more data than users of the older iPhone 3G model. The study showed that data usage of the previous model, the iPhone 4, was only 1.6 times higher than the iPhone 3G, while iPad2 tablets consumed 2.5 times more data than the iPhone 3G. [Via Tech 2]

Apple power adapters could remember your passwords

Apple has worked out a way in which the power cords for computers or smartphones can help people recover their forgotten login passwords - or the answers to secret questions (like "what was the name of your first pet?") that are often used to recover them. But crucially, Apple's system does this in a way that's designed to prevent anybody who steals the laptop or smartphone from recovering the password.

The technology is predicated on the fact that when you lose a laptop, or have it stolen, you don't tend to lose the power adapter as well. So it makes the power adapter a critical part of the recovery routine for forgotten passwords.

In US patent filing 2012/0005747 Apple proposes a power adapter whose transformer unit has a small memory module built into it. This stores either an encrypted password (or recovery question) whose key is stored on the laptop or smartphone. This way only the correct computer or phone can access the recovery data. For added security, part of the encrypted password could reside on a network server, too.

There's a clear need for this, says Apple: "If the password is not easily and conveniently recoverable, the consumer is likely to choose either not to use a password at all or to use a trivial password. Both choices increase the threat of data loss," it says in the patent.

Of course, once the bad guys know the adapter is important, they'll steal that too if it's available - but Apple suggests further security can be added by storing some of the password recovery data in other (not generally mobile) peripherals, like printers and Wi-Fi routers, too.

Computer Scientist Composes 3D World From Snapshots

Computer engineers have designed a program that can stitch together still photos of a the same area to form a comprehensive three-dimensional picture of it. The software looks for small details shared between photos and builds a video game-like 3-D picture. The user can see an entire scene, but also zoom in on individual photos for close-up views.

s your digital pictures quickly add up, going through them can be overwhelming. But experimental software makes it easy to find just the picture you want -- and gives you a 3-D view into photo collections.

Click by click by click ... you quickly build up your collection of digital photos, until...

"I don't want to take the time to go through all these pictures," said Wilmot Li, an amateur photographer.

But experimental software from the University of Washington organizes your photos in a special way, so you can look through them as if you were there.

"So you could seamlessly move from one photo to the other and have the experience that a real person would have standing in front of the building and looking around," said Steve Seitz, associate professor from the University of Washington.

Computer scientist Noah Snavely helped develop the photo tourism software using computer vision techniques. Click on each pyramid to see a picture of the building from a different angle. You can zoom in and out, move left and right -- almost like a video game. The software can also sort through thousands of online pictures of a place. It looks for overlap in the images.

"It takes these photos, reasons about where they must have been taken, then builds up a 3-D model of the scene automatically," Snavely said.

The ultimate goal -- to create an online index so we can take a virtual tour through the entire world. Snavely will continue to develop photo-tourism for his doctoral thesis. He said real estate agencies, museums and hotels could use it to give potential customers a virtual tour of their products. Microsoft is already using a version of the software.

The Optical Society of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.

BACKGROUND: Anyone with a digital camera knows how easy it is to take so many pictures that it can be difficult to find one specific photo later on. New software developed by scientists at the University of Washington helps you sort your vacation photos in a snap. The software goes well beyond simply organizing a photo collection, according to the UW researchers. It recreates a particular scene or location at the resolution of the photos.

HOW IT WORKS: The UW researchers turned to recent advances in computer vision research to solve the problem. They wrote computer software that analyzes each image and calculates where it was taken. To do this, the software looks for small details shared between different photos that can be used to compare them, and stitch them together in three dimensions. The photo is then represented by a small square placed in the appropriate position in a sketch of the original scene. Even though you are sifting through hundreds or thousands of photos, it feels more like playing a video game. By moving right or left, zooming in and out, the computer will fade to an appropriate shot. Highlighting a feature -- such as the statue of Neptune at the center of Trevi Fountain in Italy -- brings up a high-resolution photo of that object. The current user interface presents each photo as a little box, and photos fade into one another to give the impression of a 3-D zoom. The next version will create an even more fluid, game-like interface so that users feel they truly are navigating in a 3-D world.

WHO COULD USE IT: Real estate agencies, restaurants, museums and hotels might find it useful as a means of presenting a virtual tour, because viewers could zoom in to read a restaurant menu or to view a painting, for example. Archaeologists and biologists would be able to create realistic visual representations of their research sites. Military and surveillance organizations also would like to organize photographs in a more intuitive fashion. Sports fans could even recreate their favorite game by combining all the photos taken at an event. By far the most promising potential application is organizing the millions of photos that currently exist on the Internet -- sort of a visual Wikipedia. Contributors could upload photos and the program would combine them to create an increasingly comprehensive picture of the world. Further in the future, combining the photos with a digital map like Google Earth would mean users could keep zooming in closer without the image ever going fuzzy.

Tongue-Drive Wheelchair Electrical And Computer Engineers Design Wheelchair Controlled By A Magnet On The User's Tongue

Electrical and computer engineers designed a system based on magnets that enables disabled persons to use the tongue to control the movement of a wheelchair. Movement of the magnetic tracer attached to the tongue is detected by an array of magnetic field sensors mounted on a headset outside the mouth. The sensor output signals are wirelessly transmitted to a portable computer, which can be carried on the user's wheelchair. A unique set of specific tongue movements can be tailored for each individual based on the user's abilities, oral anatomy, personal preferences and lifestyle.

New assistive technology could be the key to more independence for thousands of people with disabilities. Soon, controlling their environment may be as easy as moving their tongue.

Two years ago an accident left Justin Cochran paralyzed from the neck down, but he doesn't let his wheelchair get in the way of much.

"I know what I want to do and how I want to live my life, and I'm not going to let something like a spinal cord injury stop that," said Cochran.

Cochran counts on sip-and-puff systems to help him control his environment; but soon, this tiny magnet could give him more possibilities. It allows people to control wheelchairs and countless other devices by moving their tongues.

"It lets them use their tongue motion and translate it to different commands," said Maysam Ghovanloo, Ph.D., assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Ga.

Electrical and computer engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology developed the system. Equipped with a magnetic sensor, the tongue acts like a joystick. A special headset tracks every move, whether the tongue moves from its resting position or it touches a certain tooth. In less than a second, each movement is translated into a command to control a wheelchair, a computer cursor or other device.

"Theoretically, there are an unlimited number of commands that the user can define in order to control their environment," Dr. Ghovanloo said.

The next step is letting people with disabilities test the system themselves. Cochran says he's ready to be the first. "Yeah, I can't wait to try it," Cochran said.

WHAT MAKES MATERIALS MAGNETIC? Magnetism is the result of the constant movement of charged electrons in atoms. As electrons swirl around an atom, they create an electrical current, and whenever electricity moves in a current, a magnetic field is created. So magnetism is a force between electric currents: two currents flowing in the same direction attract each other, while those pulling in opposite directions repel each other. The reason some materials are magnetic, while others are not, has to do with how the electrons are arranged. A magnet is an object made of magnetic materials; naturally occurring magnets are known as lodestones. Every magnet has at least one north pole and one south pole. In fact, if you take a bar magnet and break it into two pieces, each of the smaller pieces will still have a north and south pole. The Earth itself is a giant magnet with a north and south pole, which is why a magnetic compass's needle always points north/south.

ABOUT THE TONGUE: The tongue is a versatile group of muscles anchored in the mouth and throat. It is integral to creating articulate speech and other noises. Its top surface is covered by taste buds able to detect the bitter, salty, sour, sweet, and umami (or savory) qualities of food. The tongue, which acts both as a voluntary and involuntary muscle, filters germs and also moves food around within the mouth before transferring it to the esophagus.

Protecting Computers at Start-Up: New Guidelines

 A new draft computer security publication from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides guidance for vendors and security professionals as they work to protect personal computers as they start up.

The first software that runs when a computer is turned on is the "Basic Input/Output System" (BIOS). This fundamental system software initializes the hardware before the operating system starts. Since it works at such a low level, before other security protections are in place, unauthorized changes -- malicious or accidental -- to the BIOS can cause a significant security threat.

"Unauthorized changes in the BIOS could allow or be part of a sophisticated, targeted attack on an organization, allowing an attacker to infiltrate an organization's systems or disrupt their operations," said Andrew Regenscheid, one of the authors of BIOS Integrity Measurement Guidelines (NIST Special Publication 800-155). In September, 2011, a security company discovered the first malware designed to infect the BIOS, called Mebromi. "We believe this is an emerging threat area," said Regenscheid. These developments underscore the importance of detecting changes to the BIOS code and configurations, and why monitoring BIOS integrity is an important element of security.

SP 800-155 explains the fundamentals of BIOS integrity measurement -- a way to determine if the BIOS has been modified -- and how to report any changes. The publication provides detailed guidelines to hardware and software vendors that develop products that can support secure BIOS integrity measurement mechanisms. It may also be of interest to organizations that are developing deployment strategies for these technologies.

This publication is the second in a series of BIOS documents.BIOS Protection Guidelines (NIST SP 800-147) was issued in April, 2011. It provides guidelines for computer manufacturers to build in features to secure the BIOS against unauthorized modifications. The detection mechanisms in SP 800-155 complement the protection mechanisms outlined in SP 800-147 to provide greater assurance of the security of the BIOS.

Copies of the publication can be downloaded from

http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/drafts/800-155/draft-SP800-155_Dec2011.pdf

What is Blueray technology?

Many years ago, the floppy disk was used with storage space of 1.44MB for secondary memory to computers. These were replaced by the Compact Disc (CD), which has storage capacity up to 700MB which was eventually replaced by Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) whose capacity ranges from 4.7GB to 9.27GB.

Now, with the new generation of technology, these DVDs might get replaced by blueray disc, whose storage capacity varies from 25GB to 50GB. It can be considered the same as a collection of DVD’s. Thus blueray disc can be more compatible for using computers and the technology involved in blueray disc is a wonderful thing.

In older versions of the DVD it does not employ the concept of dual layer writing, which leads to having DVDs with a storage capacity of 1 to 2GB. But the DVDs emerging today employ a different concept of writing. It uses a technology called dual layer writing which allows the DVD to have storage capacity of up to 9Gb.

Blueray disc also employs the same concept of dual layer writing technology. But blueray discs have more storing capacity than DVDs, this is because blueray disc involves another technology of writing data. Here a laser beam is projected into the disc which occupies less space with high intensity of data to be written. Thus DVD laser beam writes less data in a space when compared to blueray disc.

In the same way blueray is more resistant to scratches, whereas DVDs cannot withstand it. Blueray discs needs no special type of reading device. It can be used by an ordinary DVD reader/writer used in computers for reading data, but whereas in writing the data to a blueray disc needs a blueray writer. But an ordinary computer with a dual layer reading technology can be used for reading the data in the blueray disc.

Whether or not the Blueray completely replaces the DVD, it is still an advanced technology will great features. With high amounts of storage space on a single disk, one could make backups of regular files or even high definition movies. The more space allowed on the single disk presents a whole world of possibilities. However, the discs are still somewhat expensive and it’s questionable whether or not they are really worth it. Technology is moving so fast, they might come out with something exponential better before Blueray is fully adapted.

written by Harikrishna Patel

Latest Computer Technologies

The world has changed a lot in the last decade and people have improved their living standards as well. The basic reason for this improvement in the last decade is the introduction of new technology. There have been a number of revolutions in new technology over the last decade, and progress is continually being made. Computing has changed as well. Now, users are not always aware of the myriad services they enjoy on a daily basis. They receive services, but they no clear concept of how these services work. They have only a basic idea of the services, but the platform of that service is hidden. Cloud computing is a type of computing in which a user cannot pinpoint the exact physical location of the service provider. They have the ability to access some services and they can utilize them as well, but there would be no chance for them to follow their data through the whole cycle.
Cloud computing utilizes a combination that includes numbers of services to the users. All users can access network storage, software and many other resources, but the exact location of the server and processing is a complete cloud for all these users. They could never guess the exact location of these resources. They get services from the network, but this network is actually a combination of different service providers. The concept of virtualization is also regarded as the same, and it can be considered the next alternative of this style of computing. This alternative concept means that there would be something in particular that is not actually there in a physical way. There is something hidden, which we call virtual.
This is quite relevant to the new style of computing in which users are unable to find the platforms of the services they use. They could be using some advanced networking features like NAS storage, and they would still be unaware about the exact location. This is the new style of technology, and the Internet has played a great role in the improvisation of this new computing style. Users are able to access the servers that provide them services. They are utilizing the services of all those servers, but they are unable to know that if the server is located in their own country or not. People all over the world use computers and they do get in touch over the Internet as well.


New technology like cloud computing, virtualization and NAS storage promotes social development.