Author: Anand Kapre

  • Skype – Cross Platform Video Calls Now on Android

    Skype – Cross Platform Video Calls Now on Android

    Skype announced that its Android client now supports cross platform video calls, so desktop users can now see mobile users and vice versa. At the moment, this functionality is limited to only four Android handsets, the Desire S, Xperia Neo and Pro and the Nexus S. If you have one of these phones, you can now make video calls to your friends over WiFi and 3G both.

    Video Calls between android devices have been possible for a while now, but the option to make video calls to desktops/laptops has been limited. Most Android users won’t be affected by this update although Skype promises to add other handsets “soon”.

    The new Skype client can switch between front and rear facing cameras, so you can show people your face as well as what you are seeing. It can connect to all Skype clients including the iPhone as well as many Skype enabled TV’s.

    the Desire S, Xperia Neo and Pro and (of course) the Nexus S
  • SENTINEL – The First Women’s Security App

    SENTINEL – The First Women’s Security App

    MindHelix Technologies LLP, a Kochi based IT company, has launched an app called SENTINEL which is the first app designed with women’s security in mind. The app can send instant alerts in case of any problems. A forced power-off of the phone or an improper exit of the application will trigger an alert to be sent. Prolonged signal loss will also cause a ‘fail safe’ alert SMS and email to be sent from the company’s server.

    Co-Founder & CEO Christin Emmanuel George said

    [quote]We want to add a direct emailing or texting to nearest police station as soon as possible. We hope to get their consent in receiving and acting on such information.[/quote]

    According to a survey by Assocham Social Development Foundation, more than 53% of women feel unsafe in their workplace, especially at night. With crimes against the fairer sex on the rise, applications like these could provide a sense of security for women. Records show that crime rates against women have increased dramatically in the metros.

    Sentinel can send multiple SMS and e-mail alerts to preconfigured numbers and e-mail ids. The alerts would include last known location, direction of travel, mode of transportation and vehicle number (which the user can enter). The app has been designed for smart phones including all devices with Android, Blackberry, Symbian, iOS and Java operating systems. The application was designed with the urban woman in mind and requires a continuous cellphone signal.

    The free app can be downloaded from http://sentinel.mindhelix.com/

  • Angry Birds – Now on Windows Phone 7

    Angry Birds – Now on Windows Phone 7

    For those of you who own a Windows Phone 7 Smart-phone, there’s some good news! You can now download  Angry Birds from the Marketplace onto your phone. The first time we heard that this game was coming to the platform was in October 2010, even before the mobile OS was launched. A few days before its launch, Microsoft included an image which hinted at the game being a part of the platform. However, Rovio, the company behind the physics game, had not developed a version for the platform.

    Microsot and Rovio later made up and the software giant hinted at a 2011 release. The game was scheduled for mid May and then pushed back to 29th June. On Wednesday, users from around the world could download the game from the Marketplace.

  • Al-Qaida Communications Offline

    Terrorist group Al-Qaida has been left without a distribution channel on the Internet, says terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Partners. In an e-mail he sent on Wednesday, he said

    [quote]I really can’t say for certain how or why this happened, other than that it involved apparently separate attacks on both the domain name and data server used by al-Qaida’s trusted forum, Al-Shamukh. That kind of coordinated event doesn’t typically occur by happenstance.[/quote]

    Kohlmann, who has spent a decade tracking Al-Qaida, has said that other jihadi forums have been left online for the “rabble” to communicate. However, none of these forums are trusted by members of Al-Qaida. The incident, which started around 72 hours ago, began with the hijacking of the primary web domain used by the Shamukh chat forum, which disseminates propaganda on behalf of Al-Qaida. The next phase of the attack involved crippling the Shamukh website along with two other top level jihadi forums, including the Arabic-language Ansar al-Mujahideen Network.

    He said that Al-Qaida most certainly had a backup of the Shamukh forum database, but there are no other channels left for the terrorist organisation to distribute new material. Either the forum must be brought back online, or they must establish a new relationship with another forum.

    A list of potential suspects who brought down the Al-Qaida site includes government sponsored hackers from the US and the UK as well as independent cyber vigilantes.

  • Google+ Blocked in China

    Google+ Blocked in China

    China, as a country has banned Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Foursquare. Its newest target has been the Google+ service, which promises to give a better social networking experience than Facebook. A Chinese Internet Analyst Sage Brennan had this to say:

    [quote]This was the quickest blockage I can remember … The speed with which they moved to block Google+ was surprising, but I couldn’t be less surprised to see it blocked.[/quote]

     

    China has discouraged the use of online forums with a political tinge and has been wary of all foreign social networks after growing fears of uprisings in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia and Libya which were fuelled by social networks. Instead of continuing under a Chinese censorship, Google opted to pull out its search engine from mainland China last year. A few weeks ago, there were allegations that Google’s email service, Gmail, was hacked by Chinese hackers.

    With the launch of Google+, Google wants to redefine social networking by fixing the alleged imperfections in the Facebook model. They say that the way we connect with people has to be re-worked. Right now, they say that the existing social network model has reduced friends to the status of fast food, where people wrap each other in friend paper. At the moment, we’re bombarded with updates from all of our ‘friends’. But in reality, you share something with your friends, another thing with your parents and a third thing with your boss.

    The core of Google+ lies in its ability to define ‘circles’. Circles are basically groups that allow you to define what you are sharing and with who. There are also a host of other services like +Sparks (Strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything), +Hangouts (stop by and say hello), +Mobile (share what’s around), +Location, +Instant Upload, +Huddle and +You.

    The service is going through a limited trial at the moment and is scheduled for release soon.

  • Spice M9000 PopKorn Cinema Projector Phone Unboxing and Hands On

    Spice M9000 PopKorn Cinema Projector Phone Unboxing and Hands On

    We recieved the Spice M-9000 Popkorn Cinema Projector Phone for review. The box contents were as follows:

    • The Spice M-9000 Phone
    • 1200 mah Battery
    • A tripod mount and tripod
    • An auxilary battery powered speaker
    • USB to proprietary Spice Jack (Charging and Syncing)
    • Male 3.5mm to Spice Jack
    • Female 3.5mm to Spice Jack
    • Handsfree Kit
    • USB cable to charge Auxilary Speaker
    • AC Charger
    • Laser Pointer with in-built Torch

    The technical specifications for this device are as follows:

    • Price: Rs 6699/-

     

    Product type Bar
    Network(MHz) 850/900/1800/2100
    Dimensions(in mm) 119.2 * 50.3 * 17.35
    Weight(in gms) 123g
    Talk Time Up to 3.5 hrs
    Stand by Time Up to 300 hrs
    Antenna Type Internal
    Battery Power (in mAh) 1200 mAh
    Phonebook Capacity 1500
    Memory Card Type T-flash
    Memory Card Support Capacity 16 GB
    Phone Memory** 87 MB
    Screen 6cm QVGA
    Screen Size (Pixels) External 320 * 240
    Ring Tones 64 Poly, Mp3
    Speakerphone(yes/NO) Yes
    User Profiles Yes
    Caller Group Yes
    Language Support English
    Predictive Text Yes
    SMS Yes, 1000
    SMS Templates Yes
    MMS Yes
    Concatenated Messages Yes
    Send to Many Yes
    Send to Group Yes
    SMS Counter Yes
    Email Yes
    JAVA Enabled Yes
    Java Games & Applications Yes
    Games Yes
    Incoming Call Guard Yes
    World Clock (Format12/24) Yes
    Alarm Yes
    Calculator Yes
    Currency/Unit Convertor Yes/No
    Calendar Yes
    To-Do List Yes
    Caller Group Yes
    Vibrator Mode Yes
    Auto Power On/Off Yes
    FM Radio Yes
    FM Recording Yes
    Scheduled FM Recording Yes
    Wireless FM Yes
    WAP Yes
    GPRS Yes
    Bluetooth Yes
    Bluetooth version 2.1
    Data Cable Yes
    Handset Manager Yes
    TV OUT / Webcam No/Yes
    Remote Control for PC via Bluetooth Yes
    Camera Yes
    Photo Storage Capacity 87 MB+T-flash
    Single Touch Camera Operation Yes
    Zoom Level Yes
    Brightness Level Yes
    Multi Shot Yes
    Night Vision Yes
    Photo CLI Yes
    Video Recording @ 15 fps
    Video Storage Capacity 87 MB+T-flash
    Wide Screen Video Yes
    Video Playing (FPS rate) @ 25 fps, 3gp, mp4, avi, flv, rm, rmvb
    Pixel Size(coreband) 3.2 MP

     

    You can watch the Unboxing Video below. Please stay tuned for the full review.

     

     

  • DropBox Security Failure

    DropBox Security Failure

    On Monday, DropBox, the cloud storage giant revealed that for four whole hours on Sunday, its entire storage system was available to the public without providing a password. From 1:54PM to 5:41 PM their entire security system failed. DropBox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi wrote on the company blog that:

    [quote]This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again.[/quote]

    The site has 25 million members and has emerged as the the leader in the cloud storage market. The company claims that it is dedicated to security and that during the time of the failure, less than 1% of its users were logged in. When they discovered the breach, the company said they ended all logged in sessions immediately. On Tuesday they also notified users who were logged in about the event.

    Such events highlight the problems with cloud storage services. Is your data really safe when you hand it over to another company to hold for you? This is the main reason lots of large enterprises have witheld from the move to the cloud.

  • Governments vs Hackers – Cyberwar Continues #AntiSec

    Governments vs Hackers – Cyberwar Continues #AntiSec

    The AntiSec Campaign which started a few days ago as a partnership between hacker groups LulzSec and Anonymous, is a cat and mouse game between the hackers and the governments they target. One member of LulzSec, Ryan Cleary, a 19 year old from Wickford, Essex, UK, is suspected by authorities to be a leader of the group as well as being the brains behind the attacks on the FBI, CIA and Sony sites. He was arrested by British Police yesterday in a “pre-planned intelligence raid”. He has allegedly performed these acts from a computer in his mother’s house.

    In another part of the world, the Brazilian wing of LulzSec seems to be accomplishing their mission(s) quite well. In a tweet from Lulzsec, the group congratulated their Brazilian unit.

    [quote]Our Brazilian unit is making progress. Well done @LulzSecBrazil, brothers![/quote]

    Meanwhile, Anonymous has not been sitting idle. In a video released a few hours ago, the group urged anyone from around the world who believed in freedom of speech and anti-censorship of the Internet to stand up for their rights and join them.

     

    This cyber war seems to be heating up, with the hackers targeting governments around the world. We shall keep you updated on the action as it happens. Stay tuned.

  • Nokia Play 360 Bluetooth Speakers

    Nokia Play 360 Bluetooth Speakers

    The Nokia N9 stole the show today but the company came out with another release, the Nokia Play 360. The 360 is a wireless bluetooth speaker that comes equipped with NFC. What this means is that you can pair your NFC capable device with the speaker just by tapping it. It has a cylindrical design and directs its audio upwards for a better spread. The speaker can also pair with another speaker to create a separate left and right channel. It has a touted battery life of 20 hours and a small sleek design. It is scheduled for release in the third quarter of this year and will cost $213.

  • Japanese Supercomputer in First Place after 2004

    Japanese Supercomputer in First Place after 2004

    The Kobe based Riken Advanced Institute For Computational Science has a supercomputer capable of 8.16 petaflops of computational power, which has reclaimed the #1 spot in the Top 500 list. The new machine has handsomely widened the gap from the now #2 Chinese Tianhe 1A which delivers almost a quarter of the computational capacity at 2.57 petaflops.

    The last time Japan held the #1 spot was in 2004 with their Earth Simulator. The new supercomputer, dubbed the K Computer, uses only CPUs to deliver the massive 8.16 petaflops. It does not use any GPUs or other accelerators. It is comprised of 68,544 eight-core SPARC64 VIIIfx processors which equals 548,352 individual cores.  When the machine is commissioned, it will be capable of even higher performance and will deliver more than 10 petaflops using 80,000 of the eight core SPARC CPUs (640,000 cores).

    This behemoth comes at a price though. It uses a whopping 10MW of power. This is almost two and a half times the power used by the existing top ten systems at 4.3 MW.

  • iPad 2 Jailbreak Around the Corner

    iPad 2 Jailbreak Around the Corner

    The iPad 2 Jailbreak has been long overdue. Many iPad 2 users have lost hope of there ever being a jailbreak. In response to a tweet from Whyike, jailbreak developer Comex said that ‘Its almost Ready’. There has been no information from Comex about which firmware the jailbreak will unlock.

    With the release of iOS 5 around the corner, there is speculation that the release of the 4.x jailbreak would be pointless. The only thing that would make this jailbreak worthwhile is if it is a hardware related, which iOS5 would not be able to patch. The more plausable reason for it not being released is that the new iOS has patched whatever exploit Comex has found for the jailbreak.

  • Anonymous and LulzSec Announce New Campaign

    Anonymous and LulzSec Announce New Campaign

    The two most famous hacker groups in recent times have united in a campaign which they call AntiSec. The targets include banks, government organizations, and other high profile targets. They are urging hackers from around the world to unite to steal and leak classified documents, e-mails, and other information. [quote]We hear our #Anonymous brothers are making progress with #AntiSec, we also have reports of many rogue hacker groups joining in. :D[/quote]  the group tweeted a few hours ago.

    The campaign seems to have hit its first official target target today. The website of UK based Serious Organised Crime Agency was down today. In another tweet, it appears pastebin, the text sharing site appears to be down. LulzSec suspects the UK Government to have perpetrated an attack against the site as the group uses it to distribute materials. They tweeted:[quote]#DearGovernment did you DDoS @Pastebin b/c of this pastebin.com/9KyA0E5v #AntiSec or is that b/c of us reading it?[/quote] When we visited the website, this is what we found:

     

     

    LulzSec is a group that recently targeted the CIA, the FBI, and Sony among others. The group seems to want to embarrass their targets just for kicks and are speculated to be an offshoot of Anonymous.

    Anonymous is a group that targets governments and organizations for political reasons and mostly in the support of freedom of speech. In the past they have targeted the governments of Iran, Turkey and Egypt. They have also targeted Sony for the company’s legal action against PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, and Paypal, MasterCard and VISA after they removed their services from the WikiLeaks website which enabled the site to receive donations.

    Stay tuned for more news on the on-going cyber war.

  • SEGA – The Latest Victim of Hackers

    SEGA – The Latest Victim of Hackers

    SEGA Corp, makers of games like Sonic the Hedgehog and Comic Zone, was the victim of a large scale attack on its Sega Pass website. The database of its Europe based website has been hacked and the personal information of all its 1,290,755 registered users has been stolen.

    On Friday, the company sent an e-mail to all the affected users, who are mostly based in Europe and North America, that their member’s e-mail ids, dates of birth and encrypted passwords were obtained, however no payment details were compromised as the company used external payment providers. The company also warned users that if they used the passwords for other online services then they needed to change them immediately.

    No hacker group has come forward to claim responsibility for the attack but LulzSec, the group behind the recent attacks on Sony, the FBI and CIA websites among others, had this to say:

    [quote]@Sega – contact us. We want to help you destroy the hackers that attacked you. We love the Dreamcast, these people are going down.[/quote]

    These attacks leave us wondering about the motives of these hacker groups. Are they trying to improve online security or is this just an in-your-face I can do whatever i want type raid?

  • Intel 710 and 720 Series SSD Specs Leaked

    Intel 710 and 720 Series SSD Specs Leaked

    The upcoming 710 Series, codename Lyndonville, and the 720 Series, codename Ramsdale, SSDs from Intel have had their specs leaked via a German Website. Both series are due for release in the next few months and set as replacements for the X-25E series of SSDs.

    The 710 series will be available in 100, 200 and 300 GB capacities and will use MLC NAND storage. They will have a read speed of 270 mbps and write speeds of 210 Mbps. While these speeds are not exceptional, these drives are geared towards the enterprise. They come with AES-128 encryption and a mean time between failure of 2 million hours. The 710 series is launching in this quarter and we should have a pricing soon.

    The 720 series is what we’re really exited about. It will come in flavours of 200 and 400 GB and will use the more reliable SLC NAND flash storage and will also come with AES-256 encryption. It will be the first Intel SSD line to switch from the SATA interface to a PCI Express interface. This will allow the drives to have a phenomenal read speed of 2200MBps and an unheard write speed of 1800 MBps. That is not a typo. The speeds are in Mega Bytes per second. These devices are expected to launch later this year at prices that would probably be through the roof.

  • LulzSec Reveals Motives Behind its Hacks (PR)

    LulzSec Reveals Motives Behind its Hacks (PR)

    LulzSec has been on a hacking rampage for a while now. On reaching a 1000 tweet milestone, they have decided to reveal their motives to friends and foes alike in a Press Release they posted on PasteBin.

    [toggle title_open=”Collapse Press Release” title_closed=”Expand Press Release” hide=”yes” border=”yes” style=”default” excerpt_length=”0″ read_more_text=”Read More” read_less_text=”Read Less” include_excerpt_html=”no”]Dear Internets,

    This is Lulz Security, better known as those evil bastards from twitter. We just hit 1000 tweets, and as such we thought it best to have a little chit-chat with our friends (and foes).

    For the past month and a bit, we’ve been causing mayhem and chaos throughout the Internet, attacking several targets including PBS, Sony, Fox, porn websites, FBI, CIA, the U.S. government, Sony some more, online gaming servers (by request of callers, not by our own choice), Sony again, and of course our good friend Sony.

    While we’ve gained many, many supporters, we do have a mass of enemies, albeit mainly gamers. The main anti-LulzSec argument suggests that we’re going to bring down more Internet laws by continuing our public shenanigans, and that our actions are causing clowns with pens to write new rules for you. But what if we just hadn’t released anything? What if we were silent? That would mean we would be secretly inside FBI affiliates right now, inside PBS, inside Sony… watching… abusing…

    Do you think every hacker announces everything they’ve hacked? We certainly haven’t, and we’re damn sure others are playing the silent game. Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value.

    This is what you should be fearful of, not us releasing things publicly, but the fact that someone hasn’t released something publicly. We’re sitting on 200,000 Brink users right now that we never gave out. It might make you feel safe knowing we told you, so that Brink users may change their passwords. What if we hadn’t told you? No one would be aware of this theft, and we’d have a fresh 200,000 peons to abuse, completely unaware of a breach.

    Yes, yes, there’s always the argument that releasing everything in full is just as evil, what with accounts being stolen and abused, but welcome to 2011. This is the lulz lizard era, where we do things just because we find it entertaining. Watching someone’s Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister’s shocked response is priceless. Receiving angry emails from the man you just sent 10 dildos to because he can’t secure his Amazon password is priceless. You find it funny to watch havoc unfold, and we find it funny to cause it. We release personal data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it.

    Most of you reading this love the idea of wrecking someone else’s online experience anonymously. It’s appealing and unique, there are no two account hijackings that are the same, no two suddenly enraged girlfriends with the same expression when you admit to killing prostitutes from her boyfriend’s recently stolen MSN account, and there’s certainly no limit to the lulz lizardry that we all partake in on some level.

    And that’s all there is to it, that’s what appeals to our Internet generation. We’re attracted to fast-changing scenarios, we can’t stand repetitiveness, and we want our shot of entertainment or we just go and browse something else, like an unimpressed zombie. Nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan-nyan, anyway…

    Nobody is truly causing the Internet to slip one way or the other, it’s an inevitable outcome for us humans. We find, we nom nom nom, we move onto something else that’s yummier. We’ve been entertaining you 1000 times with 140 characters or less, and we’ll continue creating things that are exciting and new until we’re brought to justice, which we might well be. But you know, we just don’t give a living fuck at this point – you’ll forget about us in 3 months’ time when there’s a new scandal to gawk at, or a new shiny thing to click on via your 2D light-filled rectangle. People who can make things work better within this rectangle have power over others; the whitehats who charge $10,000 for something we could teach you how to do over the course of a weekend, providing you aren’t mentally disabled.

    This is the Internet, where we screw each other over for a jolt of satisfaction. There are peons and lulz lizards; trolls and victims. There’s losers that post shit they think matters, and other losers telling them their shit does not matter. In this situation, we are both of these parties, because we’re fully aware that every single person that reached this final sentence just wasted a few moments of their time.

    Thank you, bitches.

    Lulz Security[/toggle]

    The press release states that they have been causing mayhem and chaos throughout the Internet, attacking several targets including PBS, Sony, Fox, porn websites, FBI, CIA, the U.S. government and online gaming servers. In their defence they claim that they have publically announced their hacks (not all of them), and that other hacker groups have not been so forthcoming. It appears that they will continue on their hacking rampage until they are brought to justice.

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