'Google's Gdrive on Way'

Google Inc is preparing a service that would enable users to store data from their personal hard drives on its computers, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday in its online edition.

Users would be able to house files they would normally store on personal computers -- such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and images -- on Google's computers, the Journal said, citing sources familiar with the matter.

According to the Journal, the service could let users access their files through the Internet from different computers and mobile devices when they sign on using a password.

The service could be released as soon as a few months from now, the Journal said, citing a source.

The newspaper also said Google plans to provide some free storage, with additional storage allotments available for a fee.

Planned pricing isn't known, the Journal added.

Google has responded. And it insists on using that silly cloud computing moniker:

"Cloud computing is going mainstream. The apps people use every day, such as email, photo sharing, and word processing, are moving to the web because it's easier to share and access your data from anywhere when it's online, in one place.
Storage is an important component of making web apps fit easily into consumers' and business users' lives. That's why we've always offered a lot of free storage, and it's why we offer paid options for buckets of 'overflow' storage spanning across apps, including Picasa Web Albums and Gmail for now, with more services like Google Docs to come.
We're always listening to our users and looking for ways to update and improve our web applications, including storage options, but we don't have anything new to announce right now."

Of course, we all know that sooner or later, GDrive will arrive.

Wikiscanner.

"Wikipedia is like SecondLife for corporations...WikiScanner threatens a concept that's even more American than democracy." -Stephen Colbert

Ever heard of a Wikipedia reconnaissance tool?
Now you can with the Wikiscanner list anonymous wikipedia edits from interesting organizations.

You see, that is why Wikipedia rocks.




Try it out

Voyage of windows - I

Windows_1.01







Windows_2.03







Windows_3.00

iPhone security

iPhone security settings

- iPhone User's Guide (Manual)

- VPN technologies it works with

- Apple data leak

- iPhone Mail,Safari,VPN,Wireless settings

- & Many more ,Good reference site for quick iPhone security manual by Xeno Kovah.



Link here.

iPhone activation

Interesting stuff for security geeks:


Activation of the iPhone works in a similar manner to windows activation (standard signature handshake).

iTunes gets three things from the phone, the DeviceID, the IMEI, and the ICCID. This is called the token and is unique to every iPhone. This token is then sent to the apple server (alfred.apple.com) via SSL. Apple uses their private key to sign the token and transmits it back to iTunes. iTunes then calls AMDeviceActivate with this signed token. The device gets the token and checks whether or not the signature matches the token. If it does, the device is activated.


{
"UniqueDeviceID" = "aabbccdd......";
"InternationalMobileEquipmentIdentity" = "1234...."; "IntegratedCircuitCardIdentity" = "1234...";
}




Link here.

Google's new cookie recipe!

Following reports from ,Privacy International, a London-based organization focused on privacy intrusions by government and businesses,that analyzed the privacy practices of 22 Internet companies. Google received the lowest mark, followed by Yahoo, Windows Live Spaces, Hi5, Apple and AOL.

Reacting to this Google is thinking up a new cookie recipe!

Google Inc is scaling back how long it keeps personally identifiable data accumulated from its Web users.The world's top provider of Web search services said late on Monday that it is ready to curtail the time it stores user data to a year-and-a-half, the low end of an 18 to 24 month period it had originally proposed to regulators in March.

Google said it was studying how it can meet the concerns of European regulators over cookies, a widely-used consumer tracking technology that Web sites rely on to customize what users see and advertisers use to target ads.

"We are exploring ways to redesign cookies and to reduce their expiration," Fleischer states. "We plan to make an announcement about privacy improvements for our cookies in the coming months.

Privacy continues to be the Achilles' heel of Google, even though they didn't release millions of search queries that contained personal information (like AOL) or sent people to jail (like Yahoo).

Combinational Game Theory

A game, in its simplest terms, is a list of possible "moves" that two players, called left and right, can make. Every move is in fact, another game, such that each game can be considered a single state that the game can exist in.

Combinatorial game theory (CGT) is a mathematical theory that only studies two-player games which have a position which the players take turns changing in defined ways or moves to achieve a defined winning condition. CGT does not study games of chance (like poker), but restricts itself to games whose position is public to both players, and in which the set of available moves is also public. CGT principles can be applied to games like chess, checkers, Go, Hex, and Connect6 but these games are mostly too complicated to allow complete analysis (although the theory has had some recent successes in analyzing Go endgames).

Applying CGT to a position attempts to determine the optimum sequence of moves for both players until the game ends, and by doing so discover the optimum move in any position. In practice, this process is tortuously difficult unless the game is very simple.

CGT should not be confused with another mathematical theory, traditionally called game theory, used in the theory of economic competition and cooperation. Game theory includes games of chance, games of imperfect knowledge and games in which players move simultaneously.

The bible of combinatorial game theory is Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, by E. R. Berlekamp, J. H. Conway, and R. K. Guy; the mathematical foundations of the field are provided by Conway's earlier book On Numbers and Games.

and, believe me CGT is never complete with so much stuff around to know about.

some great links:

Combinatorial Game Theory
Introductory combinatorial game theory

Google: Champions Of Innovation

Google has added one more fantastic feature to its search queries. A Link to the Stock quote of the searched company in the first search result.



This is going to add lot more value to it.
Although this was available with Yahoo Search Engine, but I feel there interface is not so good, because it leads you to a different page with all data stuffed in a single page.

Googlers score in
1. Easy integration of Stock prices in the same web page
2. Refreshing the same in every 15 minutes.
3. Its simple not cluttered with all bits n pieces.
4. Graph representing the stock index in last 24 hrs.
5. Than finally a link which gives detailed information about the stock.

Keep tracking Google , some more rabbits may come out of Hat!

How Googling a.k.a Google works?

It takes 8 not so simple steps to Google to find millions of results in fraction of a Second.
Lets’ find out what are they-




A peep inside Google’s Web
Google searches harness one of the world’s most powerful computers. A search, which typically takes less than half a second, is the result of a complex journey that typically makes at least two stops, often thousands of miles apart.

Googlebots
Google creates its own version of the Internet, using automated programs called Googlebots, which crawl the web in search of new information. Web sites known to be important and frequently modified are scanned every minutes; sites less frequently updated may be scanned every few weeks

Feeders
Googlebots feed key information from a Web page to Google’s central network: URL, full text of the page, references to images and other embedded files and specific information the site owner creates about the page, called metadata.

Central Network
At the central network, the information is indexed; every word that could be used in a search query is listed along with information referencing Web sites where the word can be found. The index is broken into ‘shards’ and sent to data centers - facilities made up of thousands of servers wired around the world; because centers may have slightly different versions of the index, depending on when they received the last update, users in different places may get slightly different results for the same search.

Searching and ranking
When people search Google, they are asking the company to find every instance of the term in its index and rank the corresponding documents by their relevance. This is how it happens, stage by stage. The user types a search query; the typical query is two to three words, which can make finding the most relevant results challenging; roughly one in 10 queries are miss-spelt.

Locate It
Before Google provides any information, it identifies the searcher’s location through his or her Internet Protocol (IP) address. The IP helps speed up the search by sending the request to the nearest data center and allows Google to identify geographically appropriate ads.

Snippets
The query is sent to the central network, then redirected to the nearest data center. At the datacenter, the search term is run through the index; matching terms are sent back to the central network, then to the user with a summary of the Web page, called snippet.

The Secret Sauce
Google determines which web sites are the most relevant to a search term by using its ‘secret sauce’ a formula that weighs more than 200 measurements, such as the number of times the search appears on a Web page, the number of visitors to the page and the Page Rank - the number of sites linking to the page and the popularity of those sites.

Breakthrough in Chip Design : the "Airgap"

Taking clue from the nature scientists at IBM labs have proven that the electrical signals on the chips can flow 35 percent faster, or the chips can consume 15 percent less energy compared to the most advanced chips using conventional techniques.

The natural pattern-creating process that forms seashells, snowflakes, and enamel on teeth has been harnessed by IBM to form trillions of holes to create insulating vacuums around the miles of nano-scale wires packed next to each other inside each computer chip.


Using a "self assembly" nanotechnology IBM has created a vacuum between the miles of wire inside a Power Architecture microprocessor reducing unwanted capacitance and improving both performance and power efficiency.

Thus placing this new airgap technique is number ten on IBM's newly released 10 Chip Breakthroughs in 10 Years list.

The airgap

In a nutshell, IBM's "airgap" technique coats the copper wires inside a processor with an insulator that's superior to the glass that's typically used. That insulator is a vacuum, or "air" essentially. Reducing the dielectric constant of the insulation around each wire reduces the capacitance that arises when current flows through wires that are close to each other, capacitance that acts as a drag on the current flowing in the wires. This stray capacitance means that more power has to be pushed through the wires, and more power means more heat and/or slower clock speeds.

The amount of capacitance between two wires gets worse as they get closer together if the dielectric constant of the material between them isn't decreased to compensate. So as feature sizes shrink, these growing capacitances have been eating up some of the power and clockspeed gains that could potentially be derived from the finer process geometries. A number of researchers have been working on using a vacuum as a wire insulator in order to rein in capacitances as feature sizes shrink, but IBM is the first to announce that such a technology will be ready for mass production at the 32nm node.

IBM claims that their tests show that either a 15 percent power reduction or a 35 percent boost in the speed of the current in the wires is achievable with the new technique. This is definitely going to help IBM and its process technology licensees like AMD at 32nm, but as with all things in the realm of processor technology, real-world performance depends on a whole lot more than how fast the current goes through the wires. Another way of putting this would be to say that the performance increase that one generation of processors affords over the previous generation is the sum of many small tweaks, tricks, and techniques at all levels—process, microarchitecture, and ISA in some cases—each of which adds a few percent here and a few percent there to the grand total. The airgap is one of these tricks that's going to add a few points the 32nm products that use it.

One of the most important features of the new airgap technique is that it's easily integrated with standard CMOS fabrication techniques. This means that IBM won't have to overhaul its entire process to make the new technique work.

As for how the technique works, it appears that IBM replaces the masking and light etching stages of the fabrication process with a nanoscale self-assembly stage. This stage involves embedding the chip's copper wiring in a carbon silicate (glass) insulator material, and then coating it with a new polymer material. The polymer is then baked so that a mesh of very tiny, regularly spaced holes is formed in it. After the holes are formed, the glass is removed to leave a gap on either side of the wire.

Full Article at...

Key Logger – Invisible to the best in Anti-Spyware Industry

See Everything Then Type!
A new device has been introduced to the marketplace that is a huge danger to anyone who uses a PC that is not theirs. It is known as a key tracker and it sits between the keyboard and the PC. As can be seen in the pictures it is very discreet but is probably one of the most dangerous items of equipment to personal information that is readily available. These devices record every key that is pressed on the keyboard. Due to it's position (it sits between the keyboard and the PC) the information is logged by the tracker before the PC knows about it and as such is very difficult for the PC to detect. They are available in both USB and PS2 formats so pretty much any PC can be logged. The user puts the tracker in line, leaves it there for a set amount of time and then retrieves it. They can then download the data onto their own PC.

KILLER Features:
1. The 32K keystroke logger will store 32,000 keystrokes.
2. Record and save e-mail, instant messages, password recovery, internet addresses, chats, search terms and more.
3. Available in both USB and PS2 formats so pretty much any PC can be logged.
4. Due to it's position ,is very difficult for the PC to detect.
5. These trackers cost less than £30 and they are definitely out there already.

Advice:
If you intend to use a PC that is not yours (ie hotel business centre, internet café, airport etc) I would advise looking at the back of the PC to see if one of these trackers has been placed in line (scrambling under a desk is the better alternative to losing your email details). If you cannot get to see the back of the PC, I would suggest you don't use it for anything personal. If a tracker is there and you do not notice it, whoever placed it there (could be any user of that PC before you) will be able to recall all of your keystrokes - logins, passwords etc.

Google Adwords No More Safe

After Google Orkut Exploits, now it seems Google Adwords is facing some real anxious moments.
Recently Researchers at security software developer Exploit Prevention Labs have uncovered hard evidence that cybercriminals are using Google AdWords to infect unsuspecting users with malware.

Modus operandi is....

Advertisers pay Google for the sponsored links to appear following specific search queries. Clicking on one of the malicious links, though, takes the user to the real website – but along the way they are unknowingly redirected to www.smarttrack.org, which hosts a Microsoft Data Access Components (MDAC) exploit that attempts to install a backdoor keylogger.

Exploit Prevention Labs first learned of this new attack vector on April 10 when a user of the company's LinkScanner Pro safe surfing software ran a Google search on the phrase "how to start a business." The top-ranked sponsored search listing appeared to be from AllBusiness.com, a legitimate business, yet the hyperlink actually led to a site that attempted to install a password-stealing keylogger on the user's PC. LinkScanner Pro blocked the threat and automatically reported the discovery back to Exploit

Although Google has terminated this particular offending account, the discovery highlights problems facing all sponsored search vendors -- how to determine the legitimacy of any individual advertiser, and how to determine whether a redirected link is being used legitimately.


Now, Think THOUSAND times before clicking any of the links of Google Adwords, be'cas you don't want to get punched in the FACE.

Visit Exploit Prevention Labs finding here...

The First Programmer

Ever given a thought , who would have been the first programmer in history of programming.

The First Programmer Was a Lady!!!!

Over a hundred years before a monstrous array of vacuum tubes surged into history in an overheated room in Pennsylvania, a properly attired Victorian Gentleman demonstrated an elegant little mechanism of wood and brass in a London drawing room. One of the ladies attending this demonstration brought along the daughter of a friend. She was a teenager with long dark hair, a talent for mathematics, and a weakness for wagering on horse races. When she took a close look at the device and realized what this older gentleman was trying to do, she surprised them all by joining him in an enterprise that might have altered history, had they succeeded.

Ada Lovelace is popularly credited as history's first programmer. She was the first to express an algorithm intended for implementation on a computer, Charles Babbage's analytical engine, in October 1842.

Analytical Engines and digital computers are very good at doing things over and over many times, very quickly. By inventing an instruction that backs up the card-reading device to a specified previous card, so that the sequence of instructions can be executed a number of times, Ada created the loop--perhaps the most fundamental procedure in every contemporary programming language.
Even thought the Engine was yet to be built, Ada experimented with writing sequences of instructions. She noted the value of several particular tricks in this new art, tricks that are still essential to modern computer languages--subroutines, loops and jumps.

Ada died of cancer at the age of thirty-six. Babbage outlived her by decades, but without Ada's advice, support, and sometimes stern guidance, he was not able to complete his long-dreamed-of Analytical Engine. Because the toolmaking art of his day was not up to the tolerance demanded by his designs.


See me at...

Legend called Lara

"History Repeats itself" , True they say.
Another unparalleled genius left the arena in lows, but no one ever can replace him from numero uno spot.


Brian Charles Lara (born May 2, 1969) (nicknamed "The Prince of Port-of-Spain" or simply "The Prince") is a West Indian cricketer. Lara is acknowledged as one of the world's greatest batsmen, having several times topped the Test batting rankings and being the current world record holder for the highest individual innings score and the all-time leading run scorer in Test cricket.

No-one since Bradman has built massive scores as often and as fast as Lara in his pomp. Even his stance was thrilling - the bat raised high in the air, the weight poised on a bent front knee, the eyes low and level. Then the guillotine would fall, sending the ball flashing to the boundary.

Lara has shown an almost unparalleled ability to build massive innings, and holds several world records for high scoring. He has the highest individual score in both first-class cricket (501 not out for Warwickshire against Durham in 1994) and Test cricket (400 not out for the West Indies against England in 2004). He also holds the record for the highest total number of runs in a Test career, after overtaking Allan Border in November 2005. He is the only man to have reclaimed the Test record score, having scored 375 against England in 1994, a record that stood until Matthew Hayden's 380 against Zimbabwe in 2003. His 400 not out also made him the second player after Don Bradman to score two Test triple-centuries, and the second after Bill Ponsford to score two first-class quadruple-centuries. He has scored eight double centuries in Test cricket, second only to Bradman's twelve.



The elegance, the strokeplay, the sportsmanship of this great sportsman will live forever.

POland Land of coders!

"Last year's TopCoder Collegiate Challenge drew 21000 registrants from around the world, but half of the 48 finalists were from former Soviet bloc nations, including the winner, Petr Mitrichev of Russia, who also won last year's Global Code Jam."

The region's universities are producing so many top programmers that many firms are changing tack – and setting up shop at the source.

IBM, Motorola, and Google have all opened research labs here in Krakow in recent years, while Deutsche Telecom, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and other giants have come to Budapest, Prague, Bratislava, and other cities where universities churn out skilled coders.

Read the complete news here..

Best Places to Work

Technology-related companies accounted for three of the top 10 great employers—Google was number one, shooting to the top in its very first appearance in Fortune Magazine's annual list of the 100 best places to work, released Jan. 8.

Some other companies which come in list are Genentech,Network Appliance,Cisco Systems,Adobe Systems, Yahoo, qualcomm ,etc.

Complete article at here..