Samsung Galaxy S4 arises in India

Samsung on Friday launched the fourth-generation of its Galaxy range of phones, S4 in India at Rs. 41,500.

The phone, packed with newer imaging features as well as gesture-control technology will be available at the company’s premium brand stores in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai from 12 noon onwards tomorrow (Saturday), while pan-India availability will be in a couple of days.

“At Samsung, we are committed to innovation and to our consumers...we are proud to announce the launch of our flagship device and the much-awaited, Samsung Galaxy S4,” Samsung Electronics President and CEO (South-West Asia) B.D. Park said.

The S4 features a five-inch full HD super AMOLED touchscreen, 13-MP back and 2-MP front camera and supports 3G networks.

A new feature included in phone is ‘Smart Pause’, where users can pause a video just by looking away from the screen.

It also has ‘Air View’ feature, which allows users to hover with their fingers to preview the content of an email, S Planner, image gallery or video without having to open it by just gesturing in air.

The S4 has new imaging features like ‘Dual Camera’ and ’Dual Video Call’, allows users to click pictures and make video calls using both the front and rear cameras simultaneously.

Moving from under Microsoft’s cloud

Microsoft Office 365 is nothing like any previous Microsoft product. Office 365 is a leap into the cloud by the company that has been better known for its products that brought office work processes to personal computers. Starting June, students in engineering colleges across the country will find themselves logging on to this product — a free offering from Microsoft — courtesy an order from the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that has drawn flak from advocates of software freedom.

This writer found that Office 365 runs seamlessly on web browsers running on the Windows, Mac and Linux-based operating systems. Microsoft’s bundled package of infrastructure, storage and software in Office 365 appears to be well done. However, Office 365’s emulation of services offered by Internet search giant Google indicate a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of the cloud. Google has been running its own online office suite of spreadsheets, documents and slideshows — Google Docs — since 2007.

WHAT DOES IT OFFER?

Microsoft Office 365 is an extension of SkyDrive, in which Microsoft offered free storage of about 7GB for registered users. SkyDrive integrated into Office 365 has a close semblance to Google Drive, which is accessible to anyone with a Google account.

The web applications for Office suite and mail access uses Microsoft’s online mail server Exchange Online, which is configured with Microsoft’s mail client, Outlook. This is obviously an attempt by Microsoft to gain ground vis-à-vis Google, which is the widely acknowledged past-master in this field. Office 365 also has even an intranet-sharing platform, Newsfeed, with an appearance that closely resembles Google Plus.

The difference is in how users get to use these services. Google allows users to register as an individual and access these services on a ‘freemium’ basis — an account with an initial capacity is free, for more capacity, users need to pay. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s package is available on a freemium basis only for a ‘beginner’s education plan’. The ‘A2’ education plan, which offers storage, mail, intranet sites and a web-based office suite, come at zero cost only for registered educational institutions.

The recent controversy about the AICTE offering about 7.5 million Office 365 accounts in Indian technical education institutions is based on the A2 plan, which Microsoft is offering free of cost. But then, what is the catch?

THE CATCH?

While Google Drive allows users to upload, edit and download documents in both proprietary and open formats, Microsoft Office 365 allows users to upload and edit proprietary and open formats, but only allows the option of downloading the files in Microsoft’s proprietary formats — .docx for documents, .pptx for slideshows and .xlsx for spreadsheets.

In the case of the AICTE-Microsoft deal, when 7.5 million users are given an option to use a service that allows users to work online on Office 365 and to save their work only in a proprietary format for offline use, it is presumed that the offline tools to be used are Microsoft’s Office suite, which come with an annual license fee of Rs. 4,200 for the home edition.

It is obvious that the proprietary formats from Microsoft Office cannot be edited using Free software office suites such as Libre Office, without losing some formatting at the least. Also, while Office 365 runs on web browsers operating on non-Windows operating systems such as Ubuntu, offline usage would require the use of the Windows platform.

MORE THAN JUST MAIL

The pressing need for Indian institutions is not mail and cloud storage access, but to implement online college management systems and tools to enable online learning.

One such project, cited worldwide as an example of successful implementation of a school management system, is Sampoorna.

About 15,000 schools, 7 million students and three lakh teachers in Kerala are part of the Sampoorna school management network, which is powered by Free and Open Source software, Fedena. “Cumbersome processes such as preparation of transfer certificates, copying of admission registers, generating reports related to students, parents, teachers and non-teaching staff, preparation of scholarship lists, progress reports, examination databases, promotion list and timetable-preparation have all been made easy using this software,” claims the page on the Fedena website.

Apart from using a tool like Fedena for institution management, there are many other cloud-based services that can be offered using Free and Open Source software, to improve the use of information technology in teaching and learning.

Modular Object Oriented Learning Environment or MOODLE is a learning management system that is Free software, and can help institutions implement online courses, conduct online quizzes, and provide forums for students to discuss and share ideas.

In India, many institutions, including many in Bangalore, have implemented MOODLE-based cloud solutions, which has resulted in the reduction of paper work. It has also enabled institutions to implement better usage of IT tools in their pedagogy.

Apparently, the AICTE failed to take this broader view when settling for Office 365 as its chosen platform for use in Indian institutions.

To be fair, Indian free software activists too have jumped the gun while assessing Microsoft Office 365. Some of their comments have been way over the top; AICTE, rather than Microsoft, ought to have been the object of their ire.

(The writer is an activist of the Free software movement and teaches at an engineering college in Bangalore.)

Illegal for minors to open Facebook account: petition

The Delhi High Court on Thursday asked the Union government to explain how it was allowing children below 18 years to open accounts in social networking sites such as Facebook and Google.

A Division Bench of Justices B.D. Ahmed and Vibhu Bakhru asked the Centre to respond within 10 days when counsel for the former BJP leader, K.N. Govindacharya, the petitioner in the matter, accused the two sites of not verifying the details of its subscribers. It posted the matter on May 13 for further hearing.

The court has been seized of the petition since June 2012.

The Bench also impleaded Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. as parties to the petition and issued notices to them. Their Indian subsidiaries had responded to the petition.

Earlier, lawyer Virag Gupta, arguing for the petitioner, said the agreements entered into by minors here with the sites were against the Indian Majority Act, the Indian Contract Act and the Information Technology Act. In June 2012, Facebook, in a statement filed before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said that more than eight crore of its registered users had given false identities. This might have further increased, he noted.

The government had framed detailed guidelines for ‘Know Your Customer’ norms for all sectors and more specifically for verification of mobile subscribers by telecom companies. However, these norms were not being followed by the sites, thus posing a grave security risk to the nation, he added.

He also raised the issue of invasion of privacy of users of the sites as their data was being transferred to the U.S. for commercial use.

Cyber law experts say that there may be merit in the petition, as misrepresentation can invite penal action. “Creating a false electronic record is an offence under the Information Technology Act and the Indian Penal Code. Under Section 465, the offence would attract punishment up to two years’ imprisonment and if the account so opened is used for the purpose of cheating, it would be punishable with a maximum of seven years’ imprisonment,” said top cyber law expert Pavan Duggal.

Children “openly lying about their age to create accounts on these websites” were likely to face potential legal exposure” and even parents “who knowingly misrepresent information about their children while opening accounts in their names,” could be prosecuted under the IPC and the IT Act. “Ignorance of law is no excuse,” he said.

The cyber law expert added that the online contract between users and social networking sites is enforceable in India. Therefore, under Indian law, both sides must be competent to contract, which means that they must be adults and of sound mind and the contract must be for lawful purposes. “Therefore, any [online] contract with a minor is null and void under the Indian Contract Act. While the age of majority in India is 18 years, it varies from country to country,” Mr. Duggal said.

Google unveils service to manage digital afterlife 

  

 

Google unveiled a service designed to manage one of the most troublesome problems of digital life — how to deal with the accounts of people who die.

Called the Inactive Account Manager, the service offers users of Google’s Gmail, Drive, Google+, Picasa and other Google service an easy-to-use template that specifies what should happen in the event they die or become inactive for a specified period of time.

The service is found in users’ account settings page. It allows users to choose whether to have their data deleted or made available to specified trusted contacts.

Users can specify whether they want the service to take effect after three, six, nine or 12 months of inactivity. They can also specify different actions for different service such as giving an attorney power to go through emails and granting family members access to pictures in Picasa.

Before the system cuts in Google will notify account holders via text message and email to a designated address, Google said.

“Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind,” said Google product manager Andreas Tuerk in a blog posting.

“We hope that this new feature will enable you to plan your digital afterlife — in a way that protects your privacy and security — and make life easier for your loved ones after you’re gone.”

                                                                    

Discovered: Saturn’s rings are raining water

 

 

Cosmic rain! Astronomers have discovered that the rings of Saturn produce their own rain that falls onto the planet, having a major impact on its atmosphere.

A new study tracked the “rain” of charged water particles into the atmosphere of Saturn and found there is more of it and it falls across larger areas of the planet than previously thought.

The study, whose observations were funded by NASA and whose analysis was led by the University of Leicester, England, reveals that the rain influences the composition and temperature structure of parts of Saturn’s upper atmosphere.

“Saturn is the first planet to show significant interaction between its atmosphere and ring system,” said James O’Donoghue, lead author of the study.

“The main effect of ring rain is that it acts to ‘quench’ the ionosphere of Saturn. In other words, this rain severely reduces the electron densities in regions in which it falls,” he said in a NASA statement.

O’Donoghue noted the ring’s effect on electron densities is important because it explains why, for many decades, observations have shown those densities to be unusually low at certain latitudes on Saturn.

The study, published in the journal Nature, also helps scientists better understand the origin and evolution of Saturn’s ring system and changes in the planet’s atmosphere.

“It turns out that a major driver of Saturn’s ionospheric environment and climate across vast reaches of the planet are ring particles located some 60,000 kilometres overhead,” said Kevin Baines, a co-author of the study.

“The ring particles affect both what species of particles are in this part of the atmosphere and where it is warm or cool,” Baines said.

In the early 1980s, images from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft showed two to three dark bands on Saturn, and scientists theorised that water could have been showering down into those bands from the rings.

Those bands were not seen again until this team observed the planet in near-infrared wavelengths with the W M Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii.

The ring rain’s effect occurs in Saturn’s ionosphere, where charged particles are produced when the otherwise neutral atmosphere is exposed to a flow of energetic particles or solar radiation.

Both Earth and Jupiter have an equatorial region that glows very uniformly. Scientists expected this pattern at Saturn, too, but they instead saw dramatic differences at different latitudes.

“Where Jupiter is glowing evenly across its equatorial regions, Saturn has dark bands where the water is falling in, darkening the ionosphere,” said Tom Stallard, co-author of the study.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How To Prevent Your Anti-Virus From Devouring Your System Memory

 

Unless you’re planning to disconnect your computer completely from every network in existence, you’re going to need an antivirus solution of some kind. It’s a big, dangerous world out there on the web and an unprotected system isn’t likely to last all that long. You need a means of protecting yourself from the plethora of nasty worms and viruses to be found online.
Unfortunately, depending on what program you’re using, the process of protecting yourself might send your system memory straight into the toilet. Antivirus programs are notorious for being blatant memory hogs, taking up so much that it can honestly end up making older systems completely unusable.  It might end up being the case that you might as well just open up your computer to a virus or two – after all, it’d probably work just as well.

How can you rein your antivirus in? How can you reduce the amount of memory it’s using in order to actually get some work done? In short, how can you have the best of both worlds?

Uninstall and Find a Lightweight Option

Here’s what I’d personally recommend. If you’re using anything from Norton or McAfee, uninstall. Those two antivirus solutions are known to be some of the most memory-heavy antivirus suites in existence, and I’ve never seen a computer that doesn’t suffer a bit of slowdown simply by having them installed.
Thankfully, a number of lightweight (and free) solutions exist online. Panda is one such solution, and Microsoft Security Essentials is another. If you go this route, you’re probably not going to have a problem with memory usage any longer. Disregard the rest of this guide, if that’s the case.

Don’t Use Real-Time Protection

One of the reasons some antivirus solutions take up so much space is that they’re actively scanning for threats. They’re looking at each file you download (and each file you access, in some cases) and poring over it to see if it has any known viral signatures.
Turning this off can cause a marked increase in performance. Unfortunately, it can also open you up to a few threats if you aren’t careful. Use at your own caution.

Reconfigure The AV

Most antivirus applications have a fairly full-featured set of customization options. Take a look through your antivirus’s settings page and see if there’s any way you can reduce the amount of processing power it’s gobbling up at key moments.
Some platforms actually have an option where they’ll tone things down at a particular time of day, or if you’re working on something important. For some of the more complex suites, you can also disable individual functions and processes if you think you aren’t going to be using them. Again, do this at your own risk. You could end up borking your system if you’re not careful, after all.

Change Processor Priority

Last, but certainly not least, if you’re particularly desperate you can use the task manager (CTRL+ALT+DEL or CTRL+Shift+ESC) to locate the process (or processes) related to your antivirus platform and change the processor affinity to ‘low.’ This will ensure that, when your system starts using a particularly large degree of processing power, the platform might be denied resources.
This is hardly an ideal solution, and not one I’d generally recommend. This could end up causing you some issues with functionality, and some AV platforms don’t actually allow you to change their properties in the task manager. It’s likely a defense mechanism against a virus attempting to shut the platform down, but it serves the secondary purpose of nullifying this method in most cases.
Honestly? Just get a lightweight antivirus and call it a day.

How to download youtube Videos.

Hello everyone. Everyone must be thinking of downloading a latest movie  from youtube because it is the only best video surfing website.For this you don't need to download any thing if you have a Mozilla Firefox.The following steps will lead you to download videos.

1.  Open the specified browser. Now go to Add ons under Firefox button
2.  Now search for Video downloader professional                                                                                        
   
3. Now to youtube and select any video to download and click on the movie button                                       
   
   Now dowload the video and enjoy

Fighting Facebook’s ‘Home’

 

There are two sets of people who are looking forward to the prospect of Facebook ‘Home’ on Android. One, of course, is the group of teenage/young adults in the age range of 16 to 25, who not only partake in the externalisation of their lives through the social network, but also thrive on it.

The other is the Mumbai police department. The collision course of both these groups, besides being a train wreck-in-waiting, is the reason why Facebook Home is so troubling.

There is, of course, no doubt that ‘Home’ is the best thing Facebook could have mustered, both from a business and technological standpoint. Forking Android and producing a Facebook mobile OS would have been time-consuming, and also perhaps out of the reach of Facebook’s development team. On the other hand, another gimmick like the ‘Facebook button’ on a mobile phone would have only hurt the company’s chances.

An insidious wrapper

Nevertheless, it does not change the fact that with Home, Facebook has taken persistent data-gathering to a whole new level; wrapped in a trendy cover that millions of Facebook users will want to try out. As if what was on Facebook’s servers were not enough, this has the potential to collect among other things, home addresses and whatnot.

At this point, we are presented with an ethical dilemma. There is no debate on whether Facebook Home presents itself as an increased threat to privacy. The Mumbai police’s recent decision to set up a ‘social-media lab’ to monitor the citizens of Mumbai through Facebook and Twitter, however, only compounds the dilemma.

The most common argument to the introduction of a new piece of technology such as Facebook Home is: “If you don’t trust Facebook, you wouldn’t install Home. Others obviously trust the company with their data.. So what’s the harm? They should be allowed to do as they wish.”

At this point dilemma strikes. Should we, the tech community at large, and those who understand the true privacy implications of Home, do nothing? Is it fine because less than 10% of all people can avoid it? (This is of course excluding the small group of people who truly understand the implications involved in handing over a lot of your data to Facebook and have no problem with it.)

Choo-choo!

To this, there are two trains of thought/answers which lead me to believe that the time for the metaphorical ‘watching the world burn’ is over and that direct intervention is necessary.

The first answer to the dilemma is that the nature of technology and consequent monitoring has branched to a point that even if we leave it to the public to continue about their own ways; it will endanger us sooner or later. For instance, the Mumbai police department has now put twenty of its finest to work by sitting down and monitoring ‘social trends’.

If a friend were to tag me in anything that would be deemed inappropriate by the infamous Section 66 A of the IT Act, I could no longer take comfort in the anonymity of the social crowd so as to say. There are police monitoring us after all – if ‘liking’ a status resulted in police detention, why should be tagging without consent be any different? Likes can also result without actual clicking – Facebook viruses see to that. Therefore it is in my best interest to educate my friend before he/she tags me.

Leave the bubble

The second answer is one of moral duty. Is it truly fine for things like Facebook Home and Mumbai’s social lab to exist—just because less than 10% of all people can avoid it? Stepping outside the tech-bubble we so deeply ensconce ourselves, let us take a look at the toolbar phenomena. There are many people in the range of, let us say, 15 – 40 who are completely unable to avoid installing browser toolbars. (A side note here, browser toolbars are like little parasites, scuffing up everything while bloating your Internet surfing.)

These are not dumb people, remember. They know that some of these toolbars pass on viruses and are not really safe. But they are unable to get rid of them, because they have no idea where to look, and even if they did they wouldn’t be able to distinguish a safe program from an unsafe one. To quote Forrest Gump— shit happens, even to the smartest people. It is even worse when it happens to the more vulnerable parts of the population, like our younger brothers or sisters, or to parents.

We cannot be complacent just because Home poses no threat to those who understand it. It should bother us that we have the older population on the Internet who has no idea of what they are getting onto—and a younger generation that is increasingly growing up with the idea that there is an ‘app’ that can be downloaded for all their problems.

Both these answers put together signal that Facebook needs no apologists, what it does need is constant critique. Your personal history, your friends, what your friends like, where you went to school, where you graduated, where you began a relationship, your sexual preferences.. all laid bare. True, in the best of times, it does not matter whether the Government knows this. But do we live in those times?

We can no longer ask the Government for our privacy, we must take it back by defining it! It can only start if we make it so. Browser privacy? Use HTTPS Everywhere. Internet anonymity? Use Tor. SMS encryption? Use WhisperSystems. Digital currency? Bitcoin.

These are just tools, however. The real fight starts when we decide to define the notion of privacy on the Internet and take it from there.

Robotic spaceship: NASA plans to lasso asteroid, bring it closer

 

NASA is planning for a robotic spaceship to lasso a small asteroid and park it near the moon for astronauts to explore, a top senator said Friday.
The ship would capture the 500-ton, 25-foot asteroid in 2019. Then using an Orion space capsule, a crew of about four astronauts would nuzzle up next to the rock in 2021 for spacewalking exploration, according to a government document obtained by The Associated Press.
Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., said the plan would speed up by four years the existing mission to land astronauts on an asteroid by bringing the space rock closer to Earth.
Nelson, who is chairman of the Senate science and space subcommittee, said Friday that President Barack Obama is putting $100 million in planning money for the accelerated asteroid mission in the 2014 budget that comes out next week. The money would be used to find the right small asteroid.
"It really is a clever concept," Nelson said in a press conference in Orlando. "Go find your ideal candidate for an asteroid. Go get it robotically and bring it back."
This would be the first time ever humanity has manipulated a space object in such a grand scale, like what it does on Earth, said Robert Braun, a Georgia Institute of Technology aerospace engineering professor who used to be NASA's chief technology officer.
"It's a great combination of our robotic and human capabilities to do the kind of thing that NASA should be doing in this century," Braun said.
Last year, the Keck Institute for Space Studies proposed a similar mission for NASA with a price tag of $2.6 billion. There is no cost estimate for the space agency's version. NASA's plans were first reported by Aviation Week.

South Africa:

Where Holiday & Adrenaline Meet

South AFrica is arguably the adventure capital of the world with distinctions such as the world's highest bridge bumpy jump and the world's only crocodile cage diving. Before you think the country only has extremes adventures on offer, discovering the bewildering range of mild to wild activities available. So what are you all adrenaline junkies waiting for, we have handpicked  the 'Best Of  The Three' to tease the adventure in you.

 Shark & Crocodile Cage Diving

 As you get suspended in a steel cage tied to a boat inside the ocean, shark cage diving in South Africa  gives youa once in a lifetime  adrenaline-packed close-up enconter with the Great White Sharks in it's natural enviornment. Do not forget to try the unique crocodile cage diving  in Oud tshoornfor the ultimate up-close encounter with 4-meter long Nile crocodiles. Your specially built bite proof cage is lowered  a clear water poolinto to give you high adrenaline enconter with the acient reptiles.

Bungee Jumping

Bloukrans  Bridge is the place to go and expirence the ultimate free fall. Locted in the Western Cape, South Africa it is the highest commercial bridge bungee jump in the world , and therefore it makes to the top of our list. Now it is not everyday that you get into plunge216 metres into the stunningly beautiful gorge below. 

Canopy Tour

Storms River, the first of it's kind in Africa, Canopy Tours involve sliding from one high level forest platform to another along steel cable suspened up to thirty metres above the forest floor. The tour consist of ten platforms and slides that zig-zag down  through a pristine forest valley or acient rocky gorge, a unique wayof expressing the beautiful nature.

For more information, visit www.southafrica.net