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Friday, June 17, 2011

Hackers attack ADAG chief Anil Ambani's work email ID

9:09 PM Muqthar Mohammad No comments

NEW DELHI: Unidentified hackers last month attempted what seems to have been a cleverly disguised phishing attack on billionaire Anil Ambani , who may have suffered a resultant breach of security on his computer.

The attack, now the subject of an investigation by the Cyber Crime Cell of the Mumbai Police, happened on May 8, when the 52-year-old chairman of the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group and the fourth-richest Indian received an email that appeared to have been sent by an India-based reporter of global financial newswire service Bloomberg.

The hacking attempt was revealed when the group's corporate communications department got in touch with the reporter and it became clear that no such email had been sent.

"We have received a complaint from ADAG. We have been investigating the matter and we expect to have some leads in the matter in a week or so," Deven Bharti, additional commissioner of Mumbai Police, said.

According to a person familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be named, the email carried a malicious code, commonly referred to as a virus, that might have compromised the data security on Ambani's email .

Bharti said while that appears to have been the case prima facie, he could not comment on the extent of the breach till the technical investigation was completed. The hackers seem to have used a commonly used technique called email spoofing. The email appeared to have come from an ID on the Bloomberg.tv domain. The wire service uses the Bloomberg-.net domain for its email service.

The Bloomberg.tv domain redirects to Bloomberg.com and appears to be a domain owned by that company. Experts say it is easy to 'spoof', or replicate, a domain and make an email look like it has come from a person known to the recipient, and is commonly used by hackers looking to steal information from a computer, in what are called "phishing" attacks.

"The email headers can be easily replaced by a hacker and an email system does not authenticate where it has originated from," said Sanjay Katkar, chief technology officer at Quickheal Technologies, a Pune-based maker of anti-virus solutions.

In this case, hackers cleverly spoofed the email ID of a person known to Ambani, prompting him to instinctively trust the sender. The email carried an attachment, and Ambani received it on his work ID. It is not clear if he opened the attachment. Some kind of viruses are activated when the recipient clicks on an email attachment.

The Invisible iPhone - A new interface lets you keep your phone in your pocket and use apps or answer calls by tapping your hand.

3:49 AM Muqthar Mohammad No comments

The Invisible iPhone

A new interface lets you keep your phone in your pocket and use apps or answer calls by tapping your hand.

Over time, using your smart-phone touch screen becomes second nature, to the point where you can even do some tasks without looking. Researchers in Germany are now working on a system that would let you perform such actions without even holding the phone—instead you'd tap your palm, and the movements would be interpreted by an "imaginary phone" system that would relay the request to your actual phone.

The concept relies on a depth-sensitive camera to pick up the tapping and sliding interactions on a palm, software to analyze the video, and a wireless radio to send the instructions back to the iPhone. Patrick Baudisch, professor of computer science at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, says the imaginary phone prototype "serves as a shortcut that frees users from the necessity to retrieve the actual physical device."

Baudisch and his team envision someone doing dishes when his smart phone rings. Instead of quickly drying his hands and fumbling to answer, the imaginary phone lets him simply slide a finger across his palm to answer it remotely.

The imaginary phone project, developed by Baudisch and his team, which includes Hasso Plattner Institute students Sean Gustafson and Christian Holz, is reminiscent of a gesture-based interface called SixthSense developed by Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of MIT, but it differs in a couple of significant ways. First, there are no new gestures to learn—the invisible phone concept simply transfers the iPhone screen onto a hand. Second, there's no feedback, unlike SixthSense, which uses a projector to provide an interface on any surface. Lack of visual feedback limits the imaginary phone, but it isn't intended to completely replace the device, just to make certain interactions more convenient.

Last year, Baudisch and Gustafson developed an interface in which a wearable camera captures gestures that a person makes in the air and translates them to drawings on a screen.

For the current project, the researchers used a depth camera similar to the one used in Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox, but bulkier and positioned on a tripod. (Ultimately, a smaller, wearable depth camera could be used.) The camera "subtracts" the background and tracks the finger position on the palm. It works well in various lighting conditions, including direct sunlight. Software interprets finger positions and movements and correlates it to the position of icons on a person's iPhone. A Wi-Fi radio transmits these movements to the phone.

VIDEO

In a study that has been submitted to the User Interface Software and Technology conference in October, the researchers found that participants could accurately recall the position of about two-thirds of their iPhone apps on a blank phone and with similar accuracy on their palm. The position of apps used more frequently was recalled with up to 80 percent accuracy.

"It's a little bit like learning to touch type on a keyboard, but without any formal system or the benefit of the feel of the keys," says Daniel Vogel, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo. Vogel wasn't involved in the research. He notes that "it's possible that voice control could serve the same purpose, but the imaginary approach would work in noisy locations and is much more subtle than announcing, 'iPhone, open my e-mail.' "

Gmail in Offline mode....! A blow to Outlook, THunderbird

8:17 AM Muqthar Mohammad No comments

Gmail as we all know a short form for Google Mail is one of the products of Google INC. In the race of email clients Gmail is coming up with more and more abilities which has attracted millions of users from other mail accounts like yahoo, msn. They have introduced much extra features through lab features which are presently in testing stage but users can still use it .You can view and enable them from the tab which appears in right most corner of the gmail.

The latest lab feature is the ‘offline gmail’ – to access gmail from computer,which ultimately gives the power to download all or selected gmail mails or messages to your pc for the offline use. Offline Gmail is still an early experimental feature

How to enable Offline Gmail

Offline Gmail is available to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK English, so if you don’t see it under the Labs tab yet, it should be there soon. Once you see it, just follow these steps to get started:

1. Click Settings and click the Labs tab.
2. Select Enable next to Offline Gmail.
3. Click Save Changes.
4. After your browser reloads, you’ll see a new “Offline0.1″ link in the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username. Click this link to start the offline set up process and download Gears if you don’t already have it.

When you hit save, Gmail will synchronize new messages you didn’t have downloaded before and remove the ones you’re not planning to read from your hard drive. You can always change your settings back to keep fewer or moremessages later on — fewer messages means Offline Gmail runs faster

New Features of Gmail Offline

The feature that Google implemented through Gmail Labs, Gmail offline, just received new functionality. That is, even when offline you can write an email and attach any file that when you have Internet access, the email will be sent automatically. It manages to offer a little more versatility in equipment such as netbooks or laptops.

The good thing about this is that being able to read messages while offline, and now write to attach a file, compared with a desktop mail client virtually no difference.
The new functionality to attach files offline has been integrated transparently to users, so if you had “Offline” live in GMail Labs, enjoy it directly and by activating the service, too.

To activate the new functionality, simply visit the Google Labs tab, select the Offline Gmail option, provided they had not previously checked, and save your changes. . Then in the top right corner of the Gmail page you will see a link “Offline”, that we will be able to click to start using the application.
A blow to popular applications like Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird or Windows Live Mail

ICS Internet Connection Sharing on Windows XP

8:12 AM Muqthar Mohammad No comments

Internet Connection Sharing on Windows XP

This trick shows you how to share your internet connections on multiple computers within a workgroup with Windows XP. Windows XP has a built-in feature that called "Internet Connection Sharing" (ICS) that allows home users to share their internet connections on multiple computers.
If you are not familiar with the network configurations, the easiest way to share your internet connection is to purchase a router or hub. Use this trick only if you don't have a router, or don't want to use a router, or if you just want to try out the feature.
A simple way to understand this feature is, you are making your host computer (the computer directly connects to the internet) functioning as a router for other computers.

What do you need?

A "Host" computer that running Windows XP. This computer must have at least TWO (2) network adapters. One adapter - let's call it "Adapter #1" - connects to the internet and another, "Adapter #2", connects to a hub or directly to other computers.
Client computer(s), which run any version of Windows. A client computer can be connected to the host computer directly by a cross-over cable or indirectly through a hub.
This trick assumes that the host computer is connected to the internet and you are able to access the internet on this computer.

Configure the Host Computer

Logon the host computer as Administrator.
Click Start >> Control Panel.
Click Network and Internet Connections.
Click Network Connections.
Right-click the connection that you use to connect to the internet (the connection with Adapter #1). This connection can be either a high-speed internet connection or a dial-up connection.
Click Properties.
Click Advanced tab.
Under Internet Connection Sharing, select the Allow other network users to connect through this computer's Internet connection check box.
If you are sharing a dial-up Internet connection, select the Establish a dial-up connection whenever a computer on my network attempts to access the Internet check box if you want to permit your computer to automatically connect to the Internet.
Click OK. You'll reieve the following message:
When Internet Connection Sharing is enabled, your LAN adapter will be set to use IP address 192.168.0.1. Your computer may lose connectivity with other computers on your network. If these other computers have static IP addresses, it is a good idea to set them to obtain their IP addresses automatically. Are you sure you want to enable Internet Connection Sharing?
Click Yes.

Configure the Client Computer(s)
To use the shared connection from the Host computer, a client computer must be configured with "Automatic IP address". The main configurations are:

Configure TCP/IP Automatic IP
Configure Internet Connection

The steps for the above two configurations are vary on different versions of Windows.
The following procedures are for Windows XP client computers.

Log on to the client computer as Administrator or as Owner.
Click Start >> Control Panel.
Click Network and Internet Connections.
Click Network Connections.
Right-click Local Area Connection, and then click Properties.
Click the General tab, click Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in the This connection uses the following items list, and then click Properties.
In the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) Properties dialog box, click Obtain an IP address automatically (if it is not already selected), and then click OK.
Click Start >> Control Panel
Click Network and Internet Connections.
Click Internet Options.
In the Internet Properties dialog box, click the Connections tab.
Click the Setup button. The New Connection Wizard starts.
On the Welcome to the New Connection Wizard page, click Next.
Click Connect to the Internet, and then click Next.
Click Set up my connection manually, and then click Next.
Click Connect using a broadband connection that is always on, and then click Next.
On the Completing the New Connection Wizard page, click Finish.
Exit Control Panel and test the internet. You might need to restart the computer.

Beautiful Wordpress Themes...........Blog by TechieAsk!!

11:43 AM Muqthar Mohammad No comments

We have written so many posts on WordPress themes in the past but these WordPress themes that I have brought for you today are special because I think that these are the most beautiful WordPress themes that we have published till now. These WordPress themes are really very beautiful and provide great flexibility for working on your website. They also have a demo version so that you could have a look at them and select them as per your needs.

The download link for these WordPress themes are also been given so that you can download them easily and start applying them straightway to your websites. These WordPress themes are premium themes and won’t weigh much on your pocket.