Technology Effect

Red faces at the U.S. gossip site Gawker: last weekend hackers hijacked the front page and released the usernames, e-mail addresses and encrypted passwords of 1.3 million registered users of Gawker and its affiliated sites. They also decrypted 200,000 of the least secure passwords. So anyone could see not just the relatively simple password used by Gawker’s founder, Nick Denton — but the fact that he used the same one for other online accounts, including e-mail, Twitter and Gawker’s internal messaging system. “More than 3,000 Gawker users chose ‘123456’ as their password,” says Michael Brunton-Spall, from the web team at the Guardian. “But lots of people used just one simple word — ‘starwars’, say, or ‘princess’ ‘Letmein’ was quite high up the list. And ‘trustno1’, which was Fox Mulder’s password in The X Files, was popular too.” Bad mistake. “If you use the same insecure password for everything, you’re laying yourself open,” Brunton-Spall says. “Already Gawker user...

After 3G and 4G, its the time for the NGNs Bangalore: The telecom industry is currently experiencing a period of unprecedented change. The rapidly expanding range of telecommunication services is causing consumers and companies to adjust their expectations at the same time forcing operators to respond with an ever-increasing urgency to develop strategies to give a stiff competition to their competitors, build new revenue streams, improve margins, reduce churn and capture new subscribers into previously untapped markets.The demand for powerful new communications and to enhance customer service has paved its way to new technological change as 3G LTE and 4G wirelesses. At the same time, Next Generation Networks (NGNs) represent a fundamental paradigm shift in the wireline and wireless core networks from circuit switching to packet switching. Next generation network is a key architectural evolution in telecommunication core and access networks. The general idea behind ...

Facebook takes to facial recognition to identify friends San Francisco: Facebook has gone on to enhance its face detection feature, launched in July, and has come up with a new feature called "tag suggestions". The new feature makes use of face recognition technology to suggest which friend is probably featured in which photo. How it works is, say you have uploaded a huge number of photographs, Facebook will group together the faces that look similar, based on the premise that they are photos of the same person. Facebook also goes and looks into the past photo tags and suggests who in the picture.Facebook believes the new feature will simplify the process of photo sharing. Also for users who want to maintain their privacy and not have their name suggested, they can use the privacy settings of the site and turn off the feature. The earlier face detection feature allowed users to only tag the photos and not suggest the faces. The feature will start off ...