Dead OS walking, yes! surprisingly Microsoft Windows XP still powers an estimated 181 million PCs around the world, even after Microsoft end its support two years ago, according to data from a web metrics vendor.
Microsoft ended their support of Windows XP back on April 8, 2014. So consumers were completely cut off from patches, with no alternatives other than to switch to a newer operating system or continue running an insecure machine.
But report after two years shows that nearly 11% of all personal computers continue to run the OS, data for March from U.S.-based analytics vendor Net Applications showed. Meanwhile, Windows XP accounted for about 12% of all Windows-powered PCs.
The 12% represented approximately 181 million PCs when compared against the 1.5 billion Windows personal computers worldwide, a number that Microsoft has regularly cited.
That number put XP as No. 4 among Microsoft’s editions, behind Windows 7, which powered an estimated 861 million systems, Windows 10 (235 million), and Windows 8/8.1 (199 million).
And the interesting fact is Windows XP users share also exceeds all versions of Apple’s OS X by 40%.
At XP’s current 12-month rate (image above) of decline as tracked by Net Applications, the operating system will drop into the single digits in May, but will remain above 5% until March 2017, nearly three years after its expiration.
Part of the difficulty in leaving XP is that there is no direct migration between it and Windows 10, Microsoft’s latest edition. Instead, users must first upgrade to Windows 7, then next to 10. Or more likely, dump the system and purchase a new PC with Windows 10 pre-installed.
Solar cell has changed the way many people bring energy into their homes and rain is normally a solar energy cell’s worst nightmare. But now a group of scientists developed a new solar cell prototype that will generate power from raindrops.
Scientists from the Ocean University of China (Qingdao) and Yunnan Normal University (Kunming, China) have created an all-weather solar cell that works both in the sun and in the rain.
The technology takes advantage of graphene they use to coat their solar cells during testing. Graphene is known for its conductivity, among many other benefits. All it takes is a mere one-atom thick graphene layer for an excessive amount of electrons to move as they wish across the surface. Water actually sticks to the graphene, creating a sort of natural capacitor — the sharp difference in energy between the graphene’s electrons and the water’s ions produces electricity.
Like most solar panels, the new solar cell can generate energy from sunlight on sunny days using existing technology. When the clouds roll in and raindrops start to fall, the solar cell then can switch to its graphene-based energy collection system.
Researchers hope to move their research beyond a proof of concept stage and begin to develop the technology into a viable method for generating electricity. These all-weather cells would provide a boost to solar cell technology which currently only works when there is ample sunlight. In climates or seasons that are dominated by clouds and rain, an all-weather solar panel could provide a clean form of energy that is not possible with existing technology.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
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.
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.
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.
