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 ...

Bangalore: With the technology becoming the top echelon for any business, information dissemination is no more confined to any particular medium. After the success of internet, mobiles could prove to be more advantageous as it is user friendly and is not place dependent, allowing freedom to the user to access internet as per his or her convenience. Internet mobile applications seems to be easy and interesting but putting all kind of content on a cell phone is quite a task to be accomplished. Addressing these issues, Siliconindia had organized the Mobile Applications Conference, to provide a platform for the mobile application developers and entrepreneurs in mobile technology. "There is lot of complexities with mobile applications. Mobile device is not a PC. It has different versions, editions, feature packs, firmware updates and all of them have to be dealt separately," said Vishwanath Alluri, Chairman, CEO & Founder, IMImobile. Alluri figured out some of the prob...

Bangalore: After the end of the much hyped and delayed 3G auctions in India, which is yet to see full implementation, it is 4G implementation that is going to make big changes in the fast growing telecom market in India by 2013. "Soon after the success of 3G auctions, we have proactively started exploring 4G technology. Trai has already floated consultation papers regarding 4G. The technology is likely to make headway into India by around 2013," said Vijayalakshmi Gupta, Member (Finance), Department of Telecommunications. The 4G networks will allow users to stream mobile multimedia, such as TV broadcasts and online games, with speeds of up to 20 times that of 3G networks. Speaking at the 6th 3G India 2010 conference, organised by Bharat Exhibitions, Gupta said, 3G it will drive the next round of sustainable growth for the Indian market through convergence of entertainment, infotainment and voice communications into a single device. "The key drivers of 3G growth in...

Technological advances in mobile devices and the increasing presence of the Internet have transformed the business of innovation. Instead of operating within the existing social-political framework using the same incentives and elements that are not producing results, there are people who are asking questions that promise to alter the system and enable large numbers of citizens to participate in — and drive — social change.While social innovators grow in leaps and bounds, voices are emerging to question the efficacy of the prevalent models.www.Aarogya.com is the case in point. The comprehensive health portal is a web-based initiative that offers video-testimonials, counsellors and relevant information in the audio-visual format and has a database of 64,000 doctors. The portal facilitates job fairs and matrimonial services for people with cancer and AIDS, and profits when pharmaceutical companies advertise on it. “Every health service seeker needs a health service provider, and we...