Category Archives: Computers

LulzSec is disbanding

June 26, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

A publicity-seeking hacker group that has blazed a path of destruction on the Internet over the last two months says it is dissolving itself.

Lulz Security made its announcement Saturday through its Twitter account. In an unusual strategy for a hacker group, LulzSec has used the account as a publicity platform while remaining anonymous.

The group’s disbandment comes unexpectedly, and could be a sign of nerves in the face of law enforcement investigations. One of the group’s six members was interviewed by The Associated Press on Friday, and gave no indication that its work was ending.

LulzSec claimed hacks on major entertainment companies, FBI partner organizations, the CIA, the U.S. Senate and a pornography website.

Applications

Connected to keep track of contacts and conversations

June 24, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

Effortless personal contact management has been the promise of countless web services for years — Etacts, Gist and Plaxo come to mind — and yet most of us still manually manage our disparate contact databases and address books, which is almost always a messy process.

Perhaps Connected can get us back on track. “The main goal of the product is to help you build, maintain and leverage your relationships,” says founder and CEO Sachin Rekhi.

The web- and mobile-friendly application hooks into nearly every social network, contact database and calendar repository on the web to automatically build out a comprehensive contact and company database, free of duplicate entries.

In Connected’s perspective, your contact database includes everyone you email via Gmail or Outlook, the people you’ve scheduled meetings with via Google Calendar, and the folks you call and text via Google Voice. It also extends to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Evernote and so forth, connecting the dots between communications — email, Twitter DMs, @mentions, Facebook messages, contacts tagged in Evernote notes et al. — across all these services to build a real-time conversation history for each contact.

Connected’s higher calling is to eliminate the manual contact entry that other services mandate and to help you better mange your professional network without the management.

“Really good sales people spend a lot of time managing and building their professional networks,” says Rekhi. “Connected is a next generation contact management solution that helps the rest of us be much more efficient.”

Even with its most basic features, Connected seems sexy; but we’ve barely scratched the surface of what the app can do. Connected will email you each morning, for instance, with a daily agenda that not only includes your appointments but any relevant social and/or news items on your contacts or their companies.

Connected comes with a rather substantial (at least for personal use) monthly financial commitment. You can access the produce free of charge for a 14 day trial period, but afterwards you’ll need to pay $9.99 per month to maintain access.

Applications, Apps

iPad 2 achieves invisibility

June 23, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

Levity Novelty LLC has today released an iPad app that provides simulated invisibility of the iPad 2 screen on a table or other environment, even as the device is moved. The Invisibility™ app is available in Apple’s online App Store for US$0.99.

The Invisibility user simply takes a photo of the table, then lays the iPad flat on the table or lifts one corner. As the user rotates the iPad around its center, or a corner, a perfectly stationary image of the table underneath remains clearly visible.

By all appearances, the screen has disappeared and the user is looking through the iPad as it moves. Users can even see the inside edge of the iPad through the screen, as well as shadows seemingly cast on the table by the empty iPad frame.

Dream of Invisibility Achieved
From the Arabian Nights to the Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter’s cloak, storytellers have dreamed of invisibility. Magicians use mirrors and sleight of hand to astonish audiences and make objects disappear. While the Invisibility iPad app can’t yet be adapted to the size and flexibility of a garment or cloak, its core method – combining cameras, motion tracking software, and a large display – can some day be combined to make a greater range of objects disappear.

Entertainment setup with PS3, Laptop and External HDD

June 11, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

My current setup with a PS3 connected to HDTV along with a one TB WD MyBook 1110 full with movies photos and TV serials connected to TV via USB and my XPS 1210 running windows 7 media server. The laptop and PS3 are connected through a wireless network and PS3 is connected to TV via HDMI.

This is my latest media setup which allows me to play games as well as movies, music and photos stored on my laptop without copying to PS3.

The wireless network is secure (WEP + MAC restricted). I choose which devices can connect to my wifi network.

My XPS runs a media server which my PS3 can easily detect over the wifi network. It can play almost all the music, photos and movies that are stored on the laptop. All I had to do was configure the laptop as a media server

My TV is Samsung series 4 (nothing too fancy) HDTV and can run the content on the 1 TB HDD via USB. This doesn’t need the PS3 to be switched on.

The audio out of TV is connected to my 2.1 channel speaker system. 2.1 is decent enough as I have a rented home and I just didn’t want to go through the hassles of setting up a 5.1

I consider this an ideal setup for me for the following reasons

1. I hate to keep copying content from one device to another.

2. It keeps it hassle free.

3. As all my devices are mostly on I don’t have any issue.

4. I can play, watch movies and listen to music from the comfort of my bed.

5. The speakers are awesome. I can control the volume via the TV.

Security

Absolute security with WEP and MAC access control

June 11, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

There has been so much fuss about wifi security about how easy it is to crack WEP and all. We can have a absolutely secure setup for a wireless network by selecting which devices to be able to connect to our network by a simple feature present in all routers known as MAC address control.

Make sure you change the admin login password for your router and set it as something which is atleast 8 character and involves special case symbols as well as numbers.

Enable WEP by loging into the admin console.

Set the WEP key to whatever you want. The key can be of of varied length depending upon the following types

40- / 64-bit WEP: 10 digit key
104- / 128-bit WEP: 26 digit key
256-bit WEP: 58 digit key

Enable MAC address control.

Select Allow – This enables only the listed MAC addresses to be able to connect to the network. Rest will get a DHCP failure error. This way only the devices whose MAC addresses are entered in the table can connect. Rest can keep trying.

Enjoy your secure wifi network.

Computers, Technology

Apple’s iCloud service announced

June 7, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

Apple CEO Steve Jobs today announced an online cloud storage service called iCloud, designed to make it simple to wirelessly share music, e-mail, photos, calendars, and other data between handheld gadgets and desktop computers.

The new Apple service, which has been the subject of intense speculation for more than a year, attempts to harness the power and flexibility of cloud computing for home users. It uses techniques that have already proved popular with businesses to make it easier to move data back and forth between multiple devices and applications.

Jobs introduced iCloud this morning at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco as part of a broader announcement that also highlighted the forthcoming version of Mac OS X Lion, available in July for $29.99, and new features for iOS including a newsstand and tabbed browsing on the iPad.

iCloud represents a direct response to Google’s cloud-based offerings, which already use services like Gmail, Calendar, Picasa, and Google Docs to show users the same document across multiple devices. In addition, Google recently announced Google Music and Amazon.com unveiled Amazon Cloud Drive.

About 10 years ago, Jobs said, Apple had one of its most important insights: The PC would become the digital hub for your digital life and store photos, video, and music, which would in turn be synchronized with mobile devices plugged in to it. Now, he said, we’re at a similar turning point, where iCloud can store data and wirelessly push it to every device you own.

iCloud will be supported by new versions of applications including Calendar, Mail, and Contacts, so if information is changed for one contact, it goes to the cloud and then is pushed to the other devices. Cloud backup is another part of the service, including daily wireless backup of an iOS device. Third-party apps can also store documents in the cloud through new interfaces that will be made available to developers.

Microsoft office 365 to launch soon

June 6, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

Microsoft spokespeople have been coy about when the Office 365 cloud service will launch, saying only that it will come out later in 2011. But CEO Steve Ballmer has revealed that it will launch in June.

Speaking in Delhi, India, to an industry group last week, Ballmer said, “We’re pushing hard in the productivity space. We’ll launch our Office 365 cloud service, which gives you Lync and Exchange and SharePoint and Office and more as a subscribable service that comes from the cloud. That launches in the month of June.”

Ballmer also recently announced that Windows 8 will be released in 2012.

We’re checking with Microsoft’s public relations firm to see if June is the official launch date for Office 365.

The cloud service will replace the current Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), and include access to Exchange, SharePoint, the Lync unified communications suite, and both desktop and Web-based versions of Office tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The Office 365 beta has attracted more than 100,000 customers, and was recently expanded to become a public beta available to anyone.

In April, Microsoft would only say that Office 365 will launch later this year, but a midyear launch would make sense given the competition Microsoft is facing from Google Apps.

Computers

What is right in windows 8

June 6, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

Microsoft is finally getting serious about multitouch, which users love for its simplicity. The new UI that it showed off at D9 and in the Web video obviously draws a lot of influence from Microsoft’s recent work on Zune and Windows Phone 7. Although Microsoft says this new Windows 8 UI will be used for desktops, laptops, and tablets, the demo is on a 10-inch tablet and it’s pretty clear that this is Microsoft’s answer to the iPad, which has been doggedly eating into the sales of Windows PCs. The UI looks clean and self-evident, and it introduces some nice UI innovations for multitasking that a lot of tablet users will appreciate.

Microsoft has been doing touch interfaces for a long time. The original Windows CE (a.k.a. Windows Mobile) had basic touch. Microsoft Surface has sported advanced multitouch gestures and a multitouch UX. But, Microsoft has allowed Apple, Google, HTC, Samsung, and others to outflank them in winning over the masses to multitouch devices.

Computers

Windows 8

June 3, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

After months of speculation and leaks, most of which turned out to be fake, Microsoft finally showed off a preview of Windows 8 at the D9 conference this week. The new OS is a drastic break from previous Windows versions, and the company has learned a lot from the two competitors that most threaten its existence: Apple and Google. What we’ve seen of Windows 8 shows a clear emphasis on touch-capable interfaces and optimization for smaller devices like tablets—a market owned currently by Apple with its iPad and one that Windows 8 targets head-on.

And from Microsoft’s other would-be nemesis, Google, comes the idea of all apps being Web apps. According to Microsoft, new Windows 8 apps will be built on HTML5 and JavaScript—just like Web apps.

But the Redmond-based software giant steals from its own stable of ideas as well, most dramatically in its use of the Metro, tile-based interface of Windows Phone 7. From Windows 7 comes the ability to snap and resize an app to the side of the screen, à la Aero Snap.

Searching talent among hackers

May 27, 2011 Utkarsh Leave a comment

A Kerala-based IT firm, MobME Wireless, announced an online contest called CodeJAM to find the smartest computer hackers from the state’s colleges, an official said.

The company, incubated at Technopark here, said the contest was a unique way to reward the best programmers and was open to all regardless of their degree or educational merit. The contest will be hosted at codejam.mobme.in.

MobME CEO Sanjay Vijayakumar said that Silicon Valley in the US was created because of path-breaking solutions. The smartest of the hackers, coders and geeks who built world-class solutions in the valley were not the highest scoring students.

“With this contest, we want to find this rare breed from Kerala: the talented people who are super passionate about the code that they write and who can make a huge difference by creating path-breaking innovations for us,” said Vijayakumar.

Launching June 16, the online contest will run for a fortnight and a programming puzzle would be hosted in a specially crafted web portal at 11 p.m. for 14 consecutive nights.

Daily winners will be given a cash prize of 1,000 each during this period. On the 15th day, MobME will conduct a live coding contest at their Kochi office and the winner would walk away with a grand prize of 1 lakh.

The contest is open to any student from Kerala’s colleges who have a passion for programming puzzles. Apart from cash prizes, the winners will also be presented offer letters to join MobME.

Students interested to participate in the contest may watch out for the daily question starting June 16 at www.codejam.mobme.in.

MobME Wireless focuses on value-added services for mobile phone users and carrier-grade solutions for mobile network operators. It is the only technology company to have won the Nasscom Innovation Award twice.

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