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Home » Archived Article(s) by Author: netpyxAdmin

Author: netpyxAdmin

Web Security in Suspicion after Detection of ‘Heartbleed’ Flaw

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

Millions of websites, social networks and online stores were on stake when operating with a major security flaw, exposing user’s personal and financial info to hackers.

Monday afternoon, the entire IT world got a wakeup call, when an emergency security advisory from the OpenSSL warns about an open and dangerous bug ‘Heartbleed’. The security flaw could be used to grab a portion of working memory from any server. There was an emergency patch, but in the meanwhile, many servers were exposed.

A flaw known as ‘Heartbleed’ Bug could allow attackers to gain access to even highly sensitive and protected information, including usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and other important data. Computer security researchers and web administrators on Tuesday crawled to fix a serious vulnerability in OpenSSL encryption.

In simple words cyber criminals or hackers can use the Bug to steal your private encryption keys from server running on OpenSSL protocols. According to reports, the servers of Flickr, Imgur and Yahoo have been affected. This is around two-year-old flaw and hence no one have any idea about how many servers have been compromised and how many people have exploited.

Heartbleed.com reads, “Operating system vendors and distribution, independent software and appliance vendors have to fix as well as notify their users. Service providers and users have to install the fix as it becomes available for software, networked appliances and operating systems they use.”

The problem was discovered by a team of researchers from Codenomicon and Google Security. Their research found Yahoo, Twitter, Steam, Tumblr, GitHub, PostFinance, HypoVereinsbank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Regents bank are all affected by the bug. Apple, Microsoft and Google seem to be unaffected.

The researchers said that your popular social site, commerce site, hobby site, company’s site might using vulnerable OpenSSL.

 

Google Bringing Out Cleaner Search Results Page, removes Underlines

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

Google has rolled out certain changes to how it displays results on its search page – delicate but noticeable change.

When talking about the two big changes – first is the removal of lines from the search results and second is the introduction of a yellow label. This yellow label is called “Ad/Ads”, these modifications are to redesign the search pages and making them cleaner.

Have a look:

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Design lead for Google – Jon Wiley wrote on Google+ on Wednesday that, “We’ve expanded the size of search result titles and removed the underlines as well as evened out the height of lines. The move aims at improving readability and creating a look that is clean. We’ve also introduced our latest ad labels from mobile, to make multi-device experience more exciting.”

Web users started noticing the changes in the last two days, but officially confirmed by Jon Wiley on Thursday via Google+. The lines you are used to were adopted in the 1990s, being a part of web designing ideology. But in the last few years many sites have moved away from underlining links, to make their pages look cleaner.

Along with these changes, Google has also removed that light pink background you must have noticed at the top of the search page. The search giant has increased the font size for titles and it clearly means less character appears. The new layout will feature a dark gray color, rather than black.

Some users welcome the modifications but some didn’t. According to some users – the changes will definitely improve readability while others say it’s too blurry. They say that the font size is too bigger and the search giant also failed to use the full width of the screen.

The changes also looked different on different browsers and seem to be effective on Chrome as compared to Firefox.

Hope, the changes will not make it difficult for web users to use Google….

Why Web Founder Tim Berners-Lee Called ‘Internet Bill of Rights’ the Next Crucial Step?

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

The World Wide Web turned 25 yesterday and it’s a landmark anniversary for Tim Berners-Lee and he is like a proud father. He says, “I feel like inventor’s pride and my greatest pleasure has been the spirit of collaboration we’ve had for the last amazing 25 years.”

Berners-Lee has watched the web grow through a cheerful childhood and bitter adolescence, reaching to a more serious stage. He said that it’s time to make some crucial decisions for the fate of Internet especially when it’s under attack from different authorities who think they can easily control people through web.

He said during an interview, “Our rights are being violated more and more, and the worst side is that we get used to it. We need a Bill of Rights for Internet to make things more safe, secure and genuine.” He also added, “After 25 years of contribution, we need independence of the World Wide Web for democracy.”

The recent years were not at all good due to revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA as well as other agencies. The use and stock of illegal and immoral material has grown in bulk. The Bill of Rights he is talking about is to protect freedom of speech on the Internet and rights of users after revelations about government wiretap of online activity.

The World Wide Web Consortium – a global community and Berners-Lee united with a mission to lead the web to its full potential. They have launched a campaign called ‘the Web We Want’ in order to urge people to push ‘Bill of Rights’ for every country. The founder of web is clear that our ability to associate freely and speak is under threat.

Following are the principles an Internet Bill of Rights advances:-

• The protection of user’s personal information and the right to communicate in private
• Affordable access to a globally available platform of communication
• Decentralized, diversified and open infrastructure
• Neutral networks
• Freedom of expression online as well as offline

Berners-Lee said that unless we have an open, neutral web we cannot say anything about what’s happening at the back door. We can’t have good democracy, connected communities, good healthcare and open government until we have Bill of Rights.

Mozilla Commences on a Mission to Speed Up the Web: Transforming JPEG

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

JPEG, the decades-old format for images, shows literally no signs of disappearing and dominates a large portion of the web. That’s why Mozilla announced an interesting project on Wednesday to make the format compatible for 21st century.

Mozilla Firefox announced a project called “mozjpeg” that intents to compress JPEGs by shaving 10 percent of images. Smaller JPEG file size means Web pages load faster and users can enjoy an improved performance. This way home or office surfers can enjoy huge speed and bandwidth savings, especially to those with restricted mobile data connections.

As you probably be aware of the fact that that images, in particular JPEGs, make up the huge majority of a web page’s complete size. Text, scripts, style-sheets are the other elements but they usually account for just a small portion of the total page size. The JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) file format gained popularity since 1992.

This particular compression algorithm is very popular with the web where the images play an important role apart from the text. But the fact is – it wasn’t originally designed and introduced for the wen, but due to its small file size and high quality it became so popular. In 1987 – GIFs were popular and in 1996 – PNGs were introduced as an alternative to GIFs. Despite of so many formats available for the web, JPEG’s popularity has never faded.

Version 1.0 of ‘mozjpeg’ – a fork of libjpeg-turbo with built-in Loren Merritt’s jpgcrush functionality. If users use mozjpeg to develop their images, they should be able to compress JPEG file size by a full 10% without affecting compatibility. A 10% reduction is huge especially when an average web page has near about 1MB of images on it and the figure is increasing by 2-3% every month.

This reduction could save hundreds of megabytes over a month to those who use their Smartphones for surfing websites. In order to make this concept a reality, image editors such as Gimp, Fireworks and Photoshop required to tool this new mozjpeg library. Implementing this new library will take time, but it’s much more effective and realistic than getting every web browser to support an alternate image standard like WebP.

We believe that JPEG will continue to gain popularity, but of course improvements are very much required at this stage of technology.

Google Wants to Make Authentication More Strong: Acquires SlickLogin

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

The search engine giant Google is acquiring an Israeli developer of sound-based password – SlickLogin. It’s an ‘acqui-hiring deal’, which implies that the firm’s staff and knowledge will be unified into Google.

SlickLogin is a start-up behind the technology that allows websites to authenticate a user’s identity by using sound waves. The technology works by playing an individually generated, nearly-silent sound from computer speakers. The sound is picked up by an app on the Smartphone used by the person. The app analyzes the sound and transmit a signal back to verify the identity.

The sound-based password technology can be used either as a substitute for a password or an additional security layer. Instead of forcing users to insert in a long code, the firm sends the verification information through sound waves. The acquisition was confirmed by SlickLogin on its website on Sunday but no financial details were disclosed.

The firm announced the acquisition with the statement that, “Today we’re announcing that the SlickLogin team is joining Google, a platform that shares our core beliefs that logging in should be easy instead of frustrating, and verification should be effective.” One of the three founders, Xinhua also stated that , “We couldn’t be more excited to join their efforts.”

SlickLogin launched just five months ago at TechCrunch Disrupt where the firm gave a demo of its sound-based password technology. The company’s motto is to enable end users to log-in easily into those websites which are password protected by using a uniquely generated sound.

SlickLogin hasn’t launched any commercial product, so we can say that the deal actually means an acquisition of the technology itself by Google. Today, many firms have been adopting a two-step authentication for users and the steps include matching their name and the password along with a second layer of verification.

According to the analysts, firms like bank and other government possessions were keen to use even more secure methods to protect their users against any piracy or data theft. According to them, the more individually a technology identifies the user, the safer the system would be.

Let’s wait and watch, what’s the search engine giant has to offer us!!!!

IBM’s Cost Cutting Plans Reached Indian Shores: To Cut Few Hundred Jobs

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

When Indian Tech companies are hiring a large number of candidates, several MNCs in India are repatriating employees into other divisions or letting go of them in sizable numbers.

IBMs cost-cutting plans, “resource actions”, reached Indian shores this week and at least a few hundred job cuts are warn of by insiders at the Big Blue’s unit. The company has already asked about 40 employees at its Systems Technology Group to resign, as per the sources. STG is well-known as IBM’s hardware division.

IBM is said to have more than 100,000 staff in India which is the largest presence of the giant outside the US. According to the Chief Financial Officer of IBM, Martin Schroeter – the hardware business, which includes mainframes, storage and servers, was facing some difficulties and would see few job cuts.

Sources in the company said that IBM had been qualified for a large job cut in April last year but the dismissals were not effected and staff was told that they wouldn’t receive any hikes in salaries till December 2013. The employees at STG who were asked to leave were also asked to return laptops within two hours, said a post.

But this was shocking that they were asked to surrender their official laptops within 2 hours and leave. The employees were told STG business has been suffering from huge financial woes and several middle level executives have resigned in the last few weeks. Last month a news also broke that the company agreed to sell its low-end server business against $2.3 billion to Lenovo.

IBM reported a 5% fall in revenue in the December quarter and the company also plans up to 15,000 cuts worldwide in the first quarter. This is of course a bad news for the employees in IBM as it’s very difficult to find and get a good job.

Intel Corporation Takes ‘Intel Inside’ to Cloud: To Head Off Competition

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

Intel Corporation, an American multinational semiconductor chip maker, is taking its ‘Intel Inside’ into cloud computing.

Intel Inside marketing campaign goes cloud computing to give smaller rivals a tough competition. The giant said that the data center service providers would begin offering their clients details about the Intel chips. The company wants to help customers make smart buying decisions by providing them appropriate information.

The awesome thing about cloud computing is that you don’t have to think what kind of hardware is used to run your virtual machines. Intel is all set to take its long-running processor in the cloud world. It controls nearly all of the server market and is driven not to hand over ground to Advanced Micro Devices.

Raejeanne Skillern, the marketing director Intel, said in an interview, “Strengthening awareness of the features, quality and impact of Intel technologies is a challenge to competing vendors and architectures.”

The campaign namely “Intel Cloud Technology” expands on an agreement with Amazon Web Services last year. The aim was to provide the specifications about the different kinds of Intel chips used in AWS services. Amazon has long been appreciated for informing customers about cloud.

The marketing campaign was not just a shallow one, Intel would appear to be able to justify the promised performance differential by using Intel silicon in cloud applications. Rackspace, AWS, Virtustream and Expedient were all used as examples in the briefing materials.

Today, market is obsessed by ‘higher performance’ like things and there’s no scope for low quality materials. Hence, companies, big or small, are trying their best to offer cutting-edge solutions to the customers at best possible price.

Whatever the main reason behind turning cloud computing, high-quality and higher performance is always appreciated. The extra information always help customers avoid making wrong buying decisions.

Adobe Photoshop Entering into 3D Printing with Shapeways and MakerBot Integration

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

Today, everything has started going three-dimensional with 3D printers taking charge for high-end printing. This lets you produce some artfully designed 3D type products or whatever your imagination can perceive. Adobe is entering into 3D printing today, i.e. on Thursday, with a news update to Photoshop CC. The graphics editing program is adding in a new 3D-printing tool to make it simple for anyone to take a model.

You just have to put some finishing touches and get your imagination printed. Through it already includes some 3D modeling features, the platform does not expect most of its users to start building objects from starting. Instead, the tool is meant to make the platform a better option for those who are just trying to print a preexisting model.

3D printing isn’t a straightforward task, as it takes a while to install and you will need various programs, but it can be done with some time and effort. Adobe is adding a lot of features to make printing a model easy. The automatically generated temporary support will not let the model falling apart and it will also make sure that it does not breakdown during printing.

Adobe is going to work with MakerBot and Shapeways in order to make the platform more advanced so that Photoshop can automatically generate previews. The previews will let the users know how a model will look when it’s made by the printer. Another feature called ‘printer-specific preview’ will also be available for 3D Systems’ Cube printer.

The 3D modeling options in Photoshop have been vastly improved in CS6, with more instinctive onscreen controls that gives ability to produce models from flat photographs, artwork, or your imagination. Other newly added features consist of a new pencil tool for Illustrator, to make drawing freehand lines and curves much easier. Typekit, font tool of Adobe, is now bringing its fonts to the desktop and InDesign is getting better with EPUB support and simplified hyperlinks.

As a part f this update, the platform is also resetting all of its Creative Cloud’s 30-days trials. So, if you have ever signed up for a trial since its launch, you are eligible to start another free 30-day trial. According to Adobe, it’s time to give users another chance to try the most recent versions before committing to a subscription.

This update comes for free as Photoshop CC is part the subscription service of Adobe and will be made available for download today.

So, get ready to put your imaginations into reality!!!!

R Chandrashekhar – the Next President of NASSCOM, India

Posted on by netpyxAdmin

The National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) announced former telecom secretary R. Chandrashekhar to be the next president. He took over as president of a this well-recognized body representing the $108 billion Indian IT-BPM industry on Sunday. He succeeds Som Mittal, who has been the part of NASSCOM from 2007-13. The announcement was made during an Executive Council meeting held at Pune on Sunday.

R. Chandrashekhar said, “I feel privileged and look forward to lead the platform in its next journey of achieving vision and mission of $300 billion revenues by 2020. The opportunities are countless at this particular juncture and the future looks very positive for the Indian IT-BPM industry.” He also added that our industry is evolving dramatically in terms of scale, innovation and complexity.

Mr. Krishnakumar Natarajan, Chairman NASSCOM said commenting on the announcement, “We are privileged to have Mr. Chandrashekhar and look forward for his share to build a world class innovative industry. His capability and experience in building feasible ecosystems will help us cope up with the latest market trends and drive the transformational agenda.”

Mr. Chandrashekhar has extensive experience of planning and implementing policies and action plans to promote the growth of the IT industry. He was the chairman, telecom commission and secretary of the department of telecom till March last year. He also held many key assignments, both at the Center ann State level.

As far his accomplishments are concerned, he had established the first department of Information Technology in India in Andhra Pradesh and worked as its secretary from June, 1997 to December, 1999. A Msc graduate in Chemistry from IIT-Bombay, Chandrashekhar also received a M S degree in Computer Science from the well-known Pennsylvania State University, US.

Mr. Som Mittal, said “It has been pleasure working with NASSCOM over the past 6 years and it was an outstanding phase of my life that has witnessed superb growth in the industry in a challenging environment. We all are excited to have Mr. Chandrashekhar as his deep knowledge and leadership will help us accelerate out platform in emerging areas.”

Hope, NASSCOM will achieve its transformational agenda soon in the leadership of Mr. Chandrashekhar and our country will reach a sky high position in tech.