WhatsApp turned on the encryption within the app, but why and how exactly it affects WhatsApp users ?

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April 6, 2016

WhatsApp last night turned on the encryption within the app. That has created a lot of buzz. But why and how exactly it affects WhatsApp users? Well, sit tight and let us explain it all to you :

Starting Tuesday night, all WhatsApp communication is encrypted. This means, now when you chat with your friends, cyber criminals or even government sleuths will not be able to capture the data and read your chats, even if they are stealing all your Wi-Fi traffic. Although, they can still steal, confiscate or snatch your phone and read all your chats.

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The WhatsApp encryption is end-to-end. This means the keys to encrypt the chats will be stored only with users. Even WhatsApp won’t have any key, so the government can’t demand such keys from the company that runs the chat app.

Here is how WhatsApp co-founders explained it: “The idea is simple: when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or group chat that you send that message to. No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us. End-to-end encryption helps make communication via WhatsApp private – sort of like a face-to-face conversation.”

For added security, you can even authenticate chats on WhatsApp. This, according to WhatsApp, will be done between users through a QR Code or a 60-digit number.

The WhatsApp encryption is 256-bit strong. Theoretically, it is impossible to crack it by brute force method. Although, there could be implementation loopholes that government agencies like the NSA in the US can exploit.

If you want to use WhatsApp encryption, all you need to do is download the latest version of the app. It is enabled by default.

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Now everything is encrypted on WhatsApp. Text, your selfies, the funny videos, even the PJs in school group are encrypted. Isn’t it wonderful? Cyber criminals won’t even be able to sniff out all the “photoshopped” forwards that you receive in your WhatsApp group.

The encryption is not expected to have any significant effect on the user experience. The service will, possibly, continue to be fast and free.

The big deal about the WhatsApp encryption is that suddenly over a billion people on earth have access to incredibly secure and private communication. This is unprecedented and makes WhatsApp move wonderful and scary at the same time.

According to WhatsApp, its latest feature is built using “the Signal Protocol, designed by Open Whisper Systems.” The company says that this protocol is specifically developed to keep third-parties like cyber criminals and government officials away from private communications.

At a time when the concept of privacy is almost gone, WhatsApp encryption changes the rule of the game. It will probably force other technology companies to offer encryption by default. As WhatsApp co-founders said, “we expect that (WhatsApp-like encryption) will ultimately represent the future of personal communication”.

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Apple celebrates its 40th anniversary – Here are some vital moments in Apple’s journey

By

Sabarinath

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April 1, 2016

Forty years ago Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak met in a garage to build a computer that would change modern computing as we know it. Jobs and Wozniak would go on to become celebrities of Silicon Valley; and their company would become one of the most recognized and successful brands in the world.

On Friday April 1 2016, Apple is celebrating its 40th anniversary. Over the years Apple has become one of the world’s most valuable company’s – currently worth an estimated US$584 billion – and introduced revolutionary products to the tech marketplace, like from the iMac to iPod to the iPhone.

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Here are some vital moments in Apple’s journey:

Contents

1 1976
2 1977
3 1983
4 1984
5 1991
6 1993
7 1994
8 1998
9 1999
10 2001
11 2007
12 2008
13 2010
14 2011
15 2014
16 2015

1976

In 1976, the first Apple Computer, also known as the Apple I unveiled. It was designed and built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Wozniak’s friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling the computer and the Apple I was born. The vintage computers are now worth about $200,000.

1977

Mark 2 of Apple’s computer – the Apple II – was a much more commercial product and came with its own case. It had a MOS Technology processor running at just 1MHz with 4KB of RAM. Today’s iPhones have processors running at 1,800 times the clock speed with 500,000 times more RAM.

1983

The Apple Lisa computer was groundbreaking, with an integrated screen, user interface and Apple’s first mouse. But at $10,000 (almost $20,000 in today’s money), the Lisa was never going to fly off the shelves.

1984

The company launched ‘portable’ computer. The Apple IIc could be carried about, but had no battery, which meant a power socket needed to be close by.

Portable Apple computers weren’t the only thing new in 1984, the first Macintosh computer was also released as the first ‘affordable’ computer with a graphical user interface selling for $2,495 at the time. The Mac was born.

And also Apple launches its now iconic commercial for the Macintosh Computer.

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1991

Apple’s first true laptop as we know them today, the PowerBook 100 (right), was designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple. It cost $2,500 at the time. For size comparison, the machine on the left is a 2012 13in retina MacBook Pro.

1993

Before the iPhone was a twinkle in Steve Jobs’ eye, the Newton Message pad was Apple’s first attempt at a pocket computer. It took 6.5 years to develop, had the first real handwriting recognition and coined the term ‘personal digital assistant’ or PDA. It only lasted for five years but the team that developed the software for it eventually went on to develop the first iPod operating system.

1994

The first of Apple’s short-lived digital cameras before the release of the iPhone all by crushed point-and-shoot cameras, the QuickTake 100 had 1MB of storage and was built by Kodak. It was followed by the QuickTake 150, which could connect to Windows and the QuickTake 200, built by Fujifilm.

In 1994, the first PowerPC Apple computer, this one with a 66MHz processor, the Power Macintosh 6100 paved the way for a whole series of PowerPC Apple computers that were only replaced with the switch to Intel chips in mid-2000s.

1998

The company launches the first “all-in-one” iMac computer – you know, the ones with the colourful plastic backing.

1999

Following the iMac the iBook was the next step for Apple aimed at the mass market.

2001

The product that would completely change the face of Apple, from a computer company into a devices company, the iPod was born in 2001. It had 5GB of space, a small LCD screen and wasn’t revolutionary, but was smaller than most and was marketed well, eventually dominating the market. The first iPod was Mac-only and had a physical wheel that moved to scroll.

And also in 2001, Apple dumped its legacy operating system wholesale and switched to a new incompatible version with the launch of OS X 10.0 Cheetah, which went on to form the basis of not only the current version of OS X 1o.11 El Capitan, but iOS, which runs the iPhone and iPad.

2007

Following the success of the iPod, the iPhone launched Apple into a new age. It turned the company into a powerhouse, shipping with 4GB of storage, a 3.5in capacitive multi-touch screen and 620MHz Samsung processor. The iPhone took 2.5 years to develop and was arguably the start of the internet-connected, portable computing age we live in now, even if it have rivals that did things first and didn’t even support native apps for a year.

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2008

The MacBook Air was the biggest change in Apple’s laptop line for years, and invented a whole new category of computers called ‘ultrabooks’ by Intel. The first MacBook Air had a slow, tiny hard drive, slow processor and relatively poor battery life but it heralded a new era of thin and light laptops.

2010

Apple introduces its first tablet with the iPad. The iPad’s origins hark back to the 1993 Newton when a prototype tablet was made but never released and was conceived in its current form before the iPhone but delayed until after the release of Apple’s smartphone.

2011

Siri, Apple’s snarky voice assistant, stole the show when Apple released the iPhone 4S in 2011. That was the same year the company launched cloud computing with iCloud, an online storage system.

This was the same year Steve Jobs resigned as CEO due to illness. He died of cancer in October 2011.

2014

Apple buys Beats,which made headphones and ran a music service, for US$3 billion. The headphones continue to be sold, but Beats Music morphed into the Apple Music subscription service, with radio station Beats One the lasting remnants of the brand.

2015

After years of rumours, Apple finally unveils its first wearable device – the Apple Watch.

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Windows 10 going to add Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line and lots more in next update

By

Jenna Jose

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March 31, 2016

At Wednesday’s Microsoft Build keynote, an announcement made developers the most excited was even nerdier. The crowd went nuts when Microsoft announced that a full version of the Bash command line interface is coming from Linux – an operating system that former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer once likened to “a cancer” – to Windows 10 this summer.

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Ubuntu’s bash and Linux command line coming to Windows 10

For Microsoft, it’s a big part of its crucial appeal to the developers building apps on Windows 10.

If you’ve ever used the command prompt on Mac OS X, you’ve seen Bash in action. Even though it’s entirely text-based, it offers a lot of power and flexibility for a developer or IT pro to interact with a system, and so it’s been a mainstay of most programmers’ workflows since its introduction way back in 1989.

To make it work, Microsoft partnered up with Canonical, developers of the mega-popular Ubuntu Linux operating system. Thanks to some technical wizardry work by the two companies, Windows 10 now has a way to run Ubuntu software.

Microsoft also says that running Ubuntu software on Windows has little-to-no drop in performance.

It’s also a big extension of Microsoft’s newfound love of Linux on its Microsoft Azure cloud. This takes that same philosophy and brings it straight to developers and their daily lives.

It’s a big part of Microsoft’s Windows 10 story: Microsoft needs developers on board with Windows 10 if it wants to succeed. And to do that, Microsoft needs to make the operating system as friendly as possible to the ways they like to work.

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What other features can we expect in the new update ?

For starters, the free update delivers Windows Hello biometric authentication to the Edge browser and apps.

The second feature focuses on stylus input, called Windows Ink.

“We lose notes in our notebooks, take pictures of whiteboards, and can’t do equations or music composition with a keyboard. Windows Ink is an all-new experience, putting the power of Windows in the tip of your pen, enabling you to write on your device as you do on paper, creating sticky notes, drawing on a whiteboard, and easily sharing your analog thoughts in the digital world,” Microsoft’s Terry Myerson said in a blog post.

Supported apps include Edge, Maps and Office, while Microsoft claims that developers can add the feature to their apps with “as little as two lines of code”.

Cortana is the third big focus point, as the firm introduced a Cortana Collection on the Windows Store, Cortana functionality above the lockscreen and text messaging on your phone via the desktop version of Cortana.

Microsoft also had Xbox-related news, saying that the Xbox edition of the Anniversary Update will bring the Windows Store to the console.

Microsoft’s HoloLens also saw some news, as the company confirmed that it was shipping out the device to developers.

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Google bypassed China’s Great Firewall for 105 Minutes

By

Sabarinath

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March 29, 2016

We know that China is not that much fond to Google and its services so they are blocking Google with their Great Firewall but last night somehow Google managed to penetrate through China’s Firewall for 105 minutes.

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Google Bypassed China’s Great Firewall

Usually web users of mainland China cannot access Google’s services without going through a virtual private network but yesterday night according to South China Morning Post, at about 11.30pm, a growing number of Chinese internet users put posts online saying they were able to access Google’s search engine through Google.com, Google.com.hk, Google.com.vn, Google.com.sg.

Yet Gmail and other popular foreign websites, such as Twitter,Facebook and YouTube, remained blocked during the period, according to the internet users.

Access to Google was short-lived because all the services were once again blocked by about 1.15am on Monday.

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Some Chinese media said on their official microblogs that access had become possible because Google had introduced a series of new IP servers – vn\jp\uk\in\ar\es\pk\sa\sg – for India, Japan and other countries in South-East Asia.

Because they were new, China’s Great Firewall, also referred to as the Golden Shield Project, didn’t not recognise the IP addresses as ones it should block, and allowed them to pass through the censors.

Great Firewall is a major factor in the virtual lives of all Chinese citizens, the system is not entirely perfect and this not the first time China’s Great Firewall accidently allowed access to blocked websites, in 2013, Facebook and Twitter managed to worm their way through.

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Researchers managed to transfer data at record-speed 57Gbps using fiber optic technology

By

Avinash A

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March 26, 2016

record-speed 57Gbps using fiber optic technology

University of Illinois engineers managed to put together fiber optic technology capable of transmitting data at speeds of 57 gigabits per second, all error free. The 57 Gbps threshold is not only impressive, but sets a completely new record for fiber-optic data transmission.

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Record Internet Speed To Transfer Data Using Fiber Optic Technology

Graduate researcher Michael Liu will present the research team’s developments in oxide-VCSEL technology, which underpins fiber-optic communications systems, at the Optical Fiber Communication Conference and Exposition today in Anaheim, California. The research team was led by electrical and computer engineering professor Milton Feng – who will be in attendance at the conference – and also included professor emeritus Nick Holonyak Jr. and graduate researcher Curtis Wang.

As big data has gotten bigger, the need has grown for a high-speed data transmission infrastructure that can accommodate the ever-growing volume of bits transferred from one place to another.

“Our big question has always been, how do you make information transmit faster?” Feng said. “There is a lot of data out there, but if your data transmission is not fast enough, you cannot use data that’s been collected; you cannot use upcoming technologies that use large data streams, like virtual reality. The direction toward fiber-optic communication is going to increase because there’s a higher speed data rate, especially over distance.”

Feng’s group has been pushing VCSEL technology to higher speeds in recent years, and in 2014 was the first group in the U.S. to achieve error-free data transmission at 40 Gbps. Now, in a series of conference papers, they report 57 Gbps error-free data transmission at room temperature, as well as 50 Gbps speeds at higher temperatures up to 85 degrees Celsius (185 degrees Fahrenheit).

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Achieving high speeds at high temperatures is very difficult, Feng said, due to the nature of the materials used, which prefer lower temperatures. However, computing components grow warm over extended operation, as anyone who has worked on an increasingly heated laptop can attest.

“That’s why data centers are refrigerated and have cooling systems,” Feng said. “For data centers and for commercial use, you’d like a device not to carry a refrigerator. The device needs to be operational from room temperature all the way up to 85 degrees without spending energy and resources on cooling.”

Feng hopes that the conference presentations and papers will prove that high-speed operation at high temperatures is scientifically possible and useful for commercial applications.

“This type of technology is going to be used not only for data centers, but also for airborne, lightweight communications, like in airplanes, because the fiber-optic wires are much lighter than copper wire,” Feng said. “We believe this could be very useful for industry. That’s what makes the work so important to us.”

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New wireless mouse vulnerability could let hackers to take over your computer

By

Sabarinath

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March 24, 2016

Those who are using wireless mouse, I had a bad news for you. Security researchers found that a vulnerability in wireless mouse from popular manufactures could let hackers to take over the computer or gain access to a network within seconds.

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Wireless Mouse Vulnerability Could Welcome Hackers To Your Computer

Marc Newlin and Balint Seeber, the pair working for Bastille, a startup cyber security company discovered security vulnerability, MouseJack.

The researchers are able to exploit the vulnerability and prove that hackers as far as 100 meters away could potentially exploit the affected wireless mouse or keyboard and use it as a portal to potentially take over a computer, transfer files, insert malware, delete the contents, and even infiltrate a network.

How MouseJack Attack Works ?

Wireless mice from companies like HP, Lenovo, Amazon and Dell use unencrypted signals to communicate with computers.

“They haven’t encrypted the mouse traffic, that makes it possible for the attacker to send unencrypted traffic to the dongle pretending to be a keyboard and have it result as keystrokes on your computer. This would be the same as if the attacker was sitting at your computer typing on the computer,” — said Newlin, a security researcher at Bastille.

A hacker uses an antenna, a wireless chip called a dongle, both available for the less USD $20, and a simple line of code to trick the wireless chip connected to the target computer into accepting it as a mouse.

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“So the attacker can send data to the dongle, pretend it’s a mouse but say ‘actually I am a keyboard and please type these letters,” — Newlin said.

“If we sent unencrypted keyboard strokes as if we were a mouse it started typing on the computer, typing at a 1000 words per minute,” — Rouland said.

And at a thousand words a minute, the hacker can take over the computer or gain access to a network in seconds.

It was found that Bluetooth devices are not vulnerable to this type of attack.

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To see MouseJack in action, checkout the video :

Unlike these earlier exploits which attacked the encryption schemes for dongle to keyboard communication, Mousejack shows that an attacker can entirely bypass a dongle’s encryption scheme and powerdrive keystrokes to the computer (Windows or Mac).

These keystrokes impersonate the user and thus have all the authority to steal data and damage local or network file systems that the logged-in user has.

Bastille adds that some of the larger companies with WiFi-based mice have since pushed out firmware updates to help prevent such hacks in the futurue.

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Oxford professor won £500,000 for solving 300-year-old mathematical theorem

By

Avinash A

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March 16, 2016

Believe it or not, someone just won £500,000 for solving one line mathematical equation, which remained unsolved for last 300-years. A professor from Oxford University earned this achievement by cracking Fermat’s Last Theorem.

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Professor Won £500,000 For Solving Fermat’s Last Theorem

Sir Andrew Wiles, 62, was awarded the Abel Prize by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for his stunning proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, which he published in 1994, by way of the modularity conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, opening a new era in number theory.

The Abel Prize is widely regarded as the Nobel for mathematics and the most prestigious international award for the discipline.

“It is a tremendous honour to receive the Abel Prize and to join the previous laureates who have made such outstanding contributions to the field.
“Fermat’s equation was my passion from an early age, and solving it gave me an overwhelming sense of fulfilment,” — Sir Andrew, currently a professor at Oxford University’s Mathematical Institute was quoted as saying by The Telegraph
“It has always been my hope that my solution of this age—old problem would inspire many young people to take up mathematics and to work on the many challenges of this beautiful and fascinating subject.”

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First formulated by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in 1637, the Fermat’s Last Theorem states: There are no whole number solutions to the equation xn + yn = zn when n is greater than 2. Wiles has been awarded for developing proof for this simple looking yet complex theorem.

Fermat himself claimed to have proved the theorem, but in what must rank as one of the greatest teases in the history of mathematics, claimed that the margin of the book he was making notes in was too narrow to elaborate. Over the next three centuries, mathematicians around the world tried and failed to solve the theorem.

Wiles took seven-year quest to solve the problem, working in his attic without telling anyone except for his wife. In 1993, after seven years of intense study at Princeton University, Wiles went public with his proof in a series of lectures at Cambridge. When he wrote the proof on the board to conclude the lectures, the room erupted in applause from the two hundred researchers present.

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But later that year, a mathematician who was checking Wiles’s proof found a major mistake in his workings. Wiles was devastated but vowed to fix the error, and called on his former student, Richard Taylor to help. After a year of work, the mistake was corrected and the revised proof published.

Wiles had solved the problem by combining three complex mathematical fields, namely modular forms, elliptic curves, and Galois representations. Though complicated, Wiles said the equations were not beyond the capabilities of a student. “The truth is the methods I used were not any more sophisticated than I could certainly do as an undergraduate,” he said.

In solving the Fermat’s Last Theorem, Wiles developed new tools which have since allowed researchers to make great strides in an ambitious effort to unify disparate branches of mathematics.

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Stardock’s new multi-GPU tool let you mix AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a PC

By

Sabarinath

-

March 14, 2016

What you think about mixing of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in a single PC ? Untill now I thought it was impossible to combine these two rival brands to work together but now a company came up with a new idea of multi-GPU tool that will will allow gamers to combine the power of AMD and Nvidia graphics cards in one machine.

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Multi-GPU Tool to Mix AMD and Nvidia Graphics Cards in a PC

Stardock, the company famous for its Windows customization software – such as desktop organization utility Fences, and its Start menu alternatives, come up with this new multi-GPU tool.

“Basically, it’s multi-GPU. You can mix and match cards however you want. One of the biggest problems with games is that a new video card comes out from AMD and Nvidia, and they’re like [expensive], and you have to make a call. I like my video card. I can play most games on it, and I don’t want to spend $800 on some new video card. But imagine, instead, hey, they’re having a sale [using my GTX 760 as an example]. Hey, they’re having a sale on an AMD 290 for $75. Wouldn’t it be cool to put this into your computer and double your performance. You keep this in there [the 760]. You put this in there [the 290], and your games are twice as fast without doing anything else.” – said by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell to Venturebeat

Of course, with NVIDIA’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) and AMD’s CrossFire you can link multiple graphics cards together but only of the corresponding manufacturer, and the cards must be identical.

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But with this new Stardock approach enables you to mix brands and generations of cards. So gamers will be able to throw any old card in to boost the power of their existing video board. And the interesting thing is all of these will be possible not with a new hardware peripheral but via software.

Stardock and Microsoft have supposedly been working together for about a year now to take advantage of a feature found in DirectX 12 that will make this possible. Name of the product and details of the requirements still remain undisclosed.

This new multi-GPU tool could even benefit monitor makers. Instead of needing to buy beefier cards to run games at 4K resolution, you could just get one or two older cards to help you meet that threshold. It could also help motherboard manufacturers. People may need more PCIe spots, and it’s cheaper to upgrade a motherboard and use a cheaper card than to buy the newest, most powerful GPUs.

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