Facebook is adding profile pictures to its facial recognition technology

Facebook is mulling using its controversial facial recognition technology on profile photos, saysReuters.

The firm’s chief privacy officer, Erin Egan, claimed that the move would protect users’ privacy. “Our goal is to facilitate tagging so that people know when there are photos of them on our service,” she said, adding that Facebookers worried about the issue could always opt out of the Tag Suggest feature. “Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not. If we decided to use it in different ways we will continue to provide people transparency about that and we will continue to provide control.”

Ironically, the news comes a couple of weeks after the social network announced that all access to the site via apps and web browsers would be SSL encrypted, a response, perhaps, to theNSA‘s X–Keyscore program, which monitors the Internet on a vast scale.

The relationship between the state and larger tech firms is becoming more tense––Facebook received 38,000 official requests from government agencies worldwide in the first half of this year––hence the open letter to the U.S. government last month that pleaded for more transparency on the matter.

New bug in town to crash IOS.....

There's a new bug in town, and it's here to crash your Mac and iPhone applications. Posters in a HackerNews thread from late yesterday have discovered that it's possible to crash Web browsers and other apps running on current versions of iOS and OS X by making them render a specific, nonsensical string of Arabic characters. The title of the HackerNews thread implies that the issue is with the WebKit browser engine, but it actually affects any browser or application that uses Apple's CoreText API to render text. Ars Microsoft Editor Peter Bright has taken great pleasure in sending the text string to his co-workers, which has crashed the Limechat IRC client and Adium chat client, among other programs.

Safari crashes in both OS X 10.8.4 and iOS 6.1.3 when it attempts to read the text string, and rendering the string in the current stable release of Chrome prompts the browser's typical "Aw snap!" error page (though Chrome's sandboxing implementation keeps the bug from bringing the whole browser down). Firefox, which uses its own font rendering engine, can display the text just fine. This supports the idea that it's a CoreText issue and not a problem with any particular application.

Some Mac and iOS device users on Twitter were only half joking when labeling the string the "unicode of death." Text messages that display the characters caused some people's iMessage apps to spiral into an extended crash loop, since the string would be displayed each time the user loads previously sent messages. Many e-mail programs were also felled by the text. It can even be triggered by including the text in the network name of a wireless access point, creating problems for vulnerable devices that encounter the name when a user looks for available connections. Tweets and other social networking dispatches were enough to cause browsers to crash, so within a few hours of the bug becoming public, Facebook was already preventing the characters from being posted to user walls and timelines by displaying the message below.

Human brain in size of a pea????

Scientists have grown a miniature "human brain" the size of a pea, in a feat they hope will transform the study of neurological disorders.

The structures have reached the same level of development as that of a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought.

The team from the Austrian Academy of Sciences have already used the technique to study certain developmental defects, and say they hope to be able to use it to research disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.

Differences in Linux and windows file System

Linux’s file system has quite a few differences from the Windows file system. You won’t find any drive letters or backslashes, but you will find an alien-looking layout where files can have the same name, differing only in capitalization.

This isn’t an exhaustive list. It is intended for new Linux users who aren’t aware of all the differences between Linux and Windows. There are many more differences that apply.

Directory Structure:

You won’t find any Windows, Program Files, or Users folders if you start browsing around the file system on your Linux computer. (Although the /home/ directory is very similar to the Users folder.)

The Linux directory structure doesn’t just use different names for folders, it uses an entirely different layout. For example, on Windows, an application might store all its files in C:\Program Files\Application. On Linux, its files would be split between multiple locations – its binaries in /usr/bin, its libraries in /usr/lib, and its configuration files in /etc/.

Case Sensitivity:

On Windows, you can’t have a file named file and another file named FILE in the same folder. The Windows file system isn’t case sensitive, so it treats these names as the same file.

On Linux, the file system is case sensitive. This means that you could have files named file,File, and FILE in the same folder. Each file would have different contents – Linux treats capitalized letters and lower-case letters as different characters.

Drug used by Reasearchers to test participants honesty

The problem every survey administrator faces is how to assess the authenticity of the responses. When it comes to surveying young adults and teenagers it becomes even more difficult as the respondents will often answer facetiously and not take the survey seriously. When it comes to assessing drug use and abuse, researchers include fictional drugs to weed out respondents who are simply taking a done-it-all approach to answering the questions. The most common fake drug used is called Derbisol (or a variation like Derbs or DB). Other less commonly used fake drugs include metabene, shimeron, and nazuphan–all drug names with no relation to any real substance of abuse.

What is an SSD????

A solid-state drive (SSD) is simply a data storage device that uses integrated circuits to store persistent data. This solid state storage is a contrast to the electro-magnetic media (such as traditional platter-based hard drives and floppy disks) that dominated the data storage market for the later part of the 20th century.

While solid-state technology has existed since the 1950s in various forms, it wasn’t until the 1990s that it began to appear in the consumer market. Flash drives, the ubiquitous little USB-based drives used for portable data storage, are an early example of a compact solid-state drive widely adopted by consumers. Astronomical pricing kept computer hard drives based on solid-state technology out of consumer reach until a few short years ago. Now it’s possible to enjoy the benefits of a solid-state drive–such as lightning fast seek times and silent operation–without taking out a loan to do so.

Smurf Attack

A Smurf Attack is a specific form of denial-of-service attack in which a large volume of ICMP packets with the victim’s spoofed IP address swapped in place of the senders IP address are broadcast over a computer network using one of the IP broadcast addresses available on that network.

As a result, any ICMP request (like a ping request) sent via Smurf Attack to the IP broadcast address of the network would prompt all the computers within that broadcast address block to response, effectively burying the unsuspecting IP address (and attached computer equipment) of the targeted user under a mountain of misdirected responses, rendering their connection unusable until the deluge of replies stops.

Smurf Attacks were extremely easy to execute prior to the late 1990s as most networks were poorly configured and unable to resist abuse in such a fashion. Since then hosts and routers have been routinely configured not to respond to ICMP requests addressed on the IP broadcast level or to forward requests they receive.

The Creator Of Which Iconic Comic Book Character Also Helped Create The Lie Detector?

William Moulton Marston was quite the renaissance man. A Harvard-trained psychologist, he was also an inventor and writer. While many people, especially in the comic community, remember him most for his creation of Wonder Woman in the 1940s, one of his lesser known contributions was an invention that would serve as the foundation for modern lie detectors.

In addition to his accomplishments within the field of Psychology and as a comic book writer, Marston studied the use of systolic blood pressure as a component of lie detection analysis. After hearing his wife talking about how her blood pressure went up when she got made or excited, he began exploring the idea of using blood pressure to analyze emotional states and ultimately used it to study physiological responses to deceptive speech.

Marston’s research would make an appearance in his later comic book writing. Much like a band around the chest of his subjects revealed whether or not they were lying, Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth also bound up suspects and helped her to uncover their deceptions.

Which Popular Web Site’s Name Is The Result Of A Misspelling?

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page sat down to register the name and domain of their young search engine, they wanted a name that invoked a sense of the magnitude of information their search engine indexed. What better word than googol–a mathematical term that stands in for 10 to the hundredth power, or 10,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000,­000.

If Googol was what they were going for then how did we end up with Google instead? While Brin and Page might be brilliant computer scientists, they’re terrible spellers.

The Eiffel Tower Was Saved From Demolition By What?

Video might have killed the radio star, but the radio star saved the Eiffel Tower on his way out. Or, more precisely, radio technology saved the Tower.

The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889 and was never intended to be a permanent structure. It was erected for the 1889 Exposition Universelle (Universal Exhibition); the City of Paris only gave the building a 20 year lease. In 1909 it was slated for demolition but a stay was put on the process as the Tower had proven to be a fantastic platform for radio broadcasts.

The Tower was later outfitted with radio jammers in World War I and used to jam German radio broadcasts. After the War War I, it was returned to use in civilian broadcasting and, in 1957, was outfitted with the current broadcast array.

Over a century after its construction, the Eiffel Tower has gone on to become the most iconic piece of France: an instantly identifiable symbol for both Paris and France as a whole.

Who Invented the Light Bulb? Edison....??Are you sure???

Thomas Edison, the renowned and prolific American inventor, sports a laundry list of accomplishments including the invention of all manner of gadgets. What’s interesting about the list, however, is that a significant number of things we attribute to Edison were simply refined by him in some fashion–like the humble light bulb.

Edison didn’t invent electrical lighting or even the light bulb. He did, in fact, experiment widely with filaments and light bulb construction to help produce one of the first economically viable light bulbs. He also played a big role in the early development of power grids and power distribution. The actual invention of the light bulb is an accolade reserved for Sir Humprey Davy.

In 1806 Humprey Davy gave a the first demonstration of a light bulb. The device, what we now refer to as an arc lamp, arcs huge amounts of electricity between two charcoal rods. The illumination was extremely bright and impractical for residential application. The original demonstration was more a proof of concept demonstration than anything else as the arc lamp quickly drained the battery it was attached to. With the advent of more advanced electrical delivery systems (such as electrical grids and on-location generators) the arc lamp became more practical, albeit with limited application. The lamps were used for light houses and for public areas in need of bright illumination.

Various experimenters attempted to tame Davy’s brilliant arc lamps into something more practical for small-scale use (such as in a home or business) but with limited success. Early attempts to create filaments were unsuccessful as the filament would eventually burn up thanks to the oxygen rich environment around it. Throughout the 19th century experiments were conducted with different filaments but it wasn’t until inventors, starting with Frederick DeMolelyns, began pumping the air out and creating vacuum-chambered light bulbs that the filaments stood a chance.

Near the end of the 19th century, Edison turned his attention to the problem of electric illumination and, after much experimentation and studying of failed prior light bulb designs, began using strands of carbonized bamboo as a filament. His early light bulbs has a light span of only 600 hours, but that was long enough to catch the attention and interest of the public. Edison light bulbs were installed at prominent locations around New York City such as the downtown Macy’s store; it was the first store in the world to be illuminated by electric light.

The Location Of The World’s Tallest What, Is Kept Secret????

Deep in Redwood National Park in California there is a giant that has been quietly growing since the Middle Ages. Named Hyperion by the researchers that discovered it in 2006, the 379 foot tall Sequoia is the tallest tree on record–taller than both the Statue of Liberty and Big Ben.

Despite the kind of fame that being the tallest tree would normally afford such a magnificent and long-lived specimen, the tree receives few visitors. The researchers were concerned that tourism to the area would upset the local ecosystem or, worse, that people might vandalize or otherwise damage the tree because of its status as the tallest in the world. Outside of a small circle of researchers the location of the tree remains secret.

Speed of a computer mouse is measured in??????????????

Mickeys:

In a light-hearted nod to the ubiquity of Disney’s Mickey Mouse character, a “Mickey” has been a long standing measurement of mouse movement in the computer industry.

Traditionally, a Mickey is 1/200th of an inch; the term is often used in a modified form to refer to more specific measurements such as pixels-per-Mickey (to indicate how far the cursor moves on the screen relative to the movement of the physical mouse), as well as horizontal Mickey count and vertical Mickey count to refer to horizontal and vertical movements.

Which is the hottest planet in our Solar system????????Know the anwer...check this

Although it would be easy to assume that Mercury, as the innermost planet in our solar system, is the hottest planet, that isn’t the case. The next in line, Mercury’s neighbor Venus, is the hottest planet in the solar system thanks to a dense and carbon dioxide rich atmosphere that is effectively insulating and smothering the planet like a giant blanket.

This thick atmosphere is also responsible for the temperature stability on the planet. Unlike other planets that experience significant temperature swings as a result of daily rotation, seasonal orbits, and other variables, Venus has a nearly vertical axis (only 3 degrees of tilt compared to the Earth’s 23 degrees) as well as high speed winds at the top of the clouds (190 miles/300 km per hour) that distribute the heat from the Sun-exposed side to the shaded side. As a result of the atmosphere, tilt, and winds, the entire planet maintains a constant and scorching temperature of 864 degrees Fahrenheit (462 degrees Celsius).

GSLV launch called off...

The Indian Space Research Organization called off the much-awaited launch of GSLV-D5 after scientists detected a leak in the second stage liquid propellant tank.

The mission was called off about an hour before the designated lift-off at 4.50pm on Monday. GSLV-D5, powered by an indigenous cryogenic engine, was to launch telecommunication satellite GSAT-14 from Sriharikota.

"A few minutes ago we detected a leak in the fuel system of the second stage of the vehicle. We are calling off the launch," Isro chairman K Radhakrishnan said.

Scientists are draining out liquid propellants from the rocket, which would soon be taken to the vehicle assembly building for an assessment. "We need to look at what went wrong and what action needs to be taken before further preparations for the launch," the Isro chairman said.

When asked if the leak posed a threat to the vehicle while it was at the launch pad, a scientist said it can be assessed only after studying the vehicle further.

GSLV-D5 launch is crucial for the country as it would demonstrate its ability to develop and use cryogenic engines which are inevitable for the launch of big telecommunication satellites and Isro's ambitious projects including manned missions.

The PSLVs, which India has mastered, can carry only satellites that weigh less than 1,500kg.

The Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota remained tense since Sunday 11.50am when the countdown began.

Weighing on the scientists mind were two consecutive failures of GSLVs in 2010. The April 15 failure of GSLV-D3 meant the first attempt with an indigenous engine had come a cropper.

Scientists, however, remained confident till about 3.50pm, when the leak was noticed.

A virus competing HIV ;)

Experts in virology and infectious diseases say that while they already have unprecedented detail about the genetics and capabilities of the novel coronavirus, or NCoV, what worries them more is what they don't know.

The virus, which belongs to the same family as viruses that cause the common cold and the one that caused Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), emerged in the Middle East last year and has so far killed seven of the 13 people it is known to have infected worldwide.

     "What we know really concerns me, but what we don't know really scares me," said Michael Osterholm, director of the U.S.-based Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy and a professor at the University of Minnesota.

Less than a week after identifying NCoV in September last year in a Qatari patient at a London hospital, scientists at Britain's Health Protection Agency had sequenced part of its genome and mapped out a so-called "phylogenetic tree" - a kind of family tree - of its links.

"There's nothing in the virology that tells us this thing is going to stop being transmitted," said Osterholm. "Today the world is one big virological blender. And if it's sustaining itself (in humans) in the Middle East then it will show up around the rest of the world. It's just a matter of time."

  

Lyme disease Estimates 300000 cases a year

 Lyme disease is about 10 times more common than previously reported, health officials said Monday.

As many as 300,000 Americans are actually diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced.

Usually, only 20,000 to 30,000 illnesses are reported each year. For many years, CDC officials have known that many doctors don't report every case and that the true count was probably much higher.

The new figure is the CDC's most comprehensive attempt at a better estimate. The number comes from a survey of seven national laboratories, a national patient survey and a review of insurance information.

"It's giving us a fuller picture and it's not a pleasing one," said Paul Mead, who oversees the agency's tracking of Lyme disease.

The ailment is named after Lyme, Conn., where the illness was first identified in 1975. It's a bacteria transmitted through the bites of infected deer ticks, which can be about the size of a poppy seed.

Symptoms include a fever, headache and fatigue and sometimes a telltale rash that looks like a bull's-eye centered on the tick bite. Most people recover with antibiotics. If left untreated, the infection can cause arthritis and more severe problems.

In the U.S., the majority of Lyme disease reports have come from 13 states: Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin.

The new study did not find anything to suggest the disease is more geographically widespread, Mead said.

Comedian Robot...Responds to the Audience

One of the comedians that performed standup at the Barbican Centre earlier this month had a somewhat robotic delivery—for obvious reasons. And RoboThespian doesn't just tell jokes; it also reads the crowd.

Researchers from Queen Mary’s Cognitive Science Research Group are using RoboThespian to study how the audience relates to a robot performer, and what adjustments the robot can make on the fly to better connect with its audience. PhD student Kleomenis Katevas programmed the robot and comedian Tiernan Douieb wrote the jokes. But Katevas explains that RoboThespian's programming allows it to make small adjustments to its delivery:

   “We used computer vision and audio processing software to detect the response of each audience member simultaneously– something a human comic cannot do. The machine used this information to determine who to look at and which gestures to use.

“We still have to analyse the performance but it’s clear already that even relatively small changes in the timing of delivery make a big difference to audience response.”

According to Professor Pat Healey, leader of the Cognitive Science Research Group, the team is hoping that by studying how audiences respond to robots like RoboThespian, they can create robots that are "more entertaining and engaging." Now it just needs a subroutine for dealing with hecklers.

Rolls-Royce Wraith launched; priced at Rs 4.6 cr

Premium luxury cars maker Rolls-Royce on Monday unveiled added another car to its inventory here in India, the Wraith.

The new luxury car is priced at Rs 4.60 crore (ex-showroom, New Delhi).

The Wraith, with its 624 BHP, is Rolls’ most luxurious four-seater coupe in its segment. Not only that, the Wraith also qualifies for being the most powerful Rolls-Royce car probably ever made!

Under the hood, the car packs a twin-turbo V12 engine with 8-speed automatic ZF transmission. Now that means the Wraith can clock 0-100 km/h in approximately 4.6 seconds.

With the new car’s addition, Rolls Royce now has seven different models available in the country, ranging from Rs 3.6 crore to Rs 7.5 crore (all ex-showroom, New Delhi).

"We believe there is immense potential in India market. In 2005 we started with one dealership. To cater to different regions, we will be opening two more dealerships this year, taking the total number to five," Rolls Royce, General Manager Emerging Markets Asia, Herfried Hasenoehrl, told reporters here.

Rolls-Royce Wraith will be made available to customers by year end.

Rupee Hits 63 against dollar .......

The rupee dropped to a record low of 62.45 per dollar in late morning trade today on persistent demand for the US currency from banks and importers coupled with capital outflows from foreign funds.

A firm US currency in the overseas market also affected the rupee value against the dollar, a forex dealer said.

The rupee resumed lower at 62.30 per dollar as against the last weekend's level of 61.65 at the Interbank Foreign Exchange (forex) Market and dropped further to a new record low of 62.45.

However, it recovered to 62.21 before quoting at 62.34 per dollar at 1045 hours.

It showed a loss of 69 paise, or 1.12 per cent, from its last close.

The US dollar edged modestly higher in the early trade ahead of key Federal Reserve events this week that may offer more signals about when policy makers will begin tapering monetary stimulus.

Meanwhile the benchmark BSE-30 share Sensex dropped by 209.58 points, or 1.13 per cent, to 18,388.60 at 1050 hours

AirPano......3D arieal Panoramas

AirPano is a non-commercial project focused on high resolution 3D aerial panoramas. The AirPano team is a group of Russian photographers and panorama enthusiasts. During the next 2-3 years, we plan to shoot a variety of aerial panoramas and create virtual 3D tours of the most interesting places of our planet.Experience the virtual tour of the world around.................go to the website

A bridge taller than Eiffel tower in France...Are u nuts??????

MILLAU VIADUCT

                

The Millau Viaduct (French: le Viaduc de Millau, IPA: [vjadyk də mijo]) is a cable-stayed bridge that spans the valley of the River Tarn near Millau in southern France.

Designed by the French structural engineer Michel Virlogeux and British architect Norman Foster, it is the tallest bridge in the world with one mast's summit at 343.0 metres (1,125 ft) above the base of the structure. It is the 12th highest bridge deck in the world, being 270 metres (890 ft)^[1]between the road deck and the ground below.^[5] Millau Viaduct is part of the A75-A71 autoroute axis from Paris to Montpellier. Construction cost was approximately €400 million. It was formally inaugurated on 14 December 2004, and opened to traffic on 16 December.^[6] The bridge has been consistently ranked as one of the great engineering achievements of all time. The bridge received the 2006 International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering Outstanding Structure Award.

Is linux secure from malware...???Think again...

So you thought you were safe from all the internet nasties – worms, Trojans, spyware and so on whilst tapping away on your Linux flavoured computer? Well, you might want to think again.

Reports today have surfaced of a new kind of malware that’s specifically targeted at Linux users, which is being hawked on underground cybercrime forums for the very reasonable price of just $2,000.

Called “Hand of Thief”, the so-called banking Trojan is almost unique among malicious code in that it’s geared to attack computers running the world’s most popular open-source operating systems. Even more interesting is that this particular nasty is about as vicious as they get, being able to run on all major browsers and incorporating everything from nasty form-grabbers, not to mention the ability to block access to the websites of security companies and general updates. The virus is also said to have been built with virtual machine detection that makes it even harder for security researchers to pin it down. Even worse, it apparently works on just about every Linux flavour known to man – with Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian and various desktop environments such as KDE and Gnome all said to be vulnerable, according to the Russian makers.

Hand of Thief was discovered by researchers at the RSA security firm. In a blog post, Limor Kessem says that the virus is being offered for sale on a number of popular cybercrime forums. Currently available for $2,000, it’s expected that this price will increase to around $3,000 once new features have been added to it.

Researchers develop acoustic based data transfer system for phones

Near Field Communication technologies incorporated in some of the latest smartphones can be used for applications such as contactless payments or data exchange between two devices. Although NFC support has found its way into some apps such as the Commonwealth Bank's Kaching payment system, it's still far from achieving widespread adoption.

One factor in this has been the lack of NFC support even in some leading smartphone models; for example Apple is yet to issue a handset that supports NFC. However, researchers at Microsoft have developed an alternative system that can offer NFC-like capabilities, but without requiring dedicated wireless hardware to make it work.

Instead, their system – which the team at Microsoft Research India, Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, Krishna Kant Chintalapudi, Venkata N. Padmanabhan and Ramarathnam Venkatesan dub 'Dhwani' – uses sound.

[ Keep your finger on the pulse with the latest developments in mobile technology—such as phones and tablets—in Computerworld's Mobility & Wireless newsletter ]

Dhwani uses the speaker and microphone on phones to securely exchange data, achieving speeds of up to 2.4Kbps; short of the peak rate of 424Kbps possible with NFC but "sufficient for most existing NFC applications" the researchers write in their paper.

As with NFC, the range of Dhwani is far shorter than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and will work effectively only over a distance of a few centimetres.

In addition to being software-based and hence not requiring specialised hardware for transfers, the researchers also believe that it is more secure than NFC. The researchers managed to monitor NFC communications from around 20-30cm away, and believe that with a more sophisticated antenna monitoring from distances up to a metre may be possible.

For security Dhwani relies on a 'JamSecure' approach which "uses self-jamming coupled with self-interference cancellation at the receiver" to protect any data transmissions.

Essentially this relies on the receiving device transmitting pseudorandom noise while the transmitting device is sending data. Then this noise can be compensated for by the receiver.

Any eavesdropping device would be able to only listen to a combination of the pseudorandom noise and the (data transmitting) noise from the sending device.

The basis of Dhwani's communication system is an 'Acoustic Software Defined Radio'. The researchers conducted tests in noisy environments and established that 6KHz was the lower limit for the system, below which typical ambient noise would interfere with transmissions.

Google goes down for 5 minutes

In an event that lasted for mere five minutes and meant almost end of world for the internet junkies around the world, the Google’s services, including Google search and Gmail the suffered a snag at 4.20 am IST. During that time the Gmail and Search Engine displayed 502 error.

In wake of the world of twitter was bombarded with tweets such: “I wonder how many people checked their wifi connection first before realizing it was Google that was down.”

During the snag period the Google’s services dashboard that keeps a check and shows the status of Google services carried a pink dot in front of each one which meant that they were in offline mode for mentioned duration. The user by clicking on these dots could read the generic message.

The tab meant for Gmail read: “We’re aware of a problem with Gmail affecting a significant subset of users. The affected users are able to access Gmail, but are seeing error messages and/or other unexpected behavior. We will provide an update by 8/17/13 6:07 AM detailing when we expect to resolve the problem. Please note that this resolution time is an estimate and may change.”

Ten minutes later the dashboards ere updated with the message that the problems had been resolved and the services have been restored.

Later a website, closely monitoring the snag mentioned: “Google.com was down for a few minutes between 23:52 and 23:57 BST on 16th August 2013. This had a huge effect in the number of pageviews coming into GoSquared’s real-time tracking — around a 40% drop, as this graph of our global pageviews per minute shows. That’s huge. As internet users, our reliance on google.com being up is huge.”

Malware attacks 480 million smartphones in China

 A staggering 480 million smartphones in China have fallen victim to a malicious software malware in the first half of this year, almost equal to the total registered complaints in 2012. 

More than 450,000 trojans, malware and malicious advertisement plug-ins were intercepted by a mobile security product in China, state-run news agency Xinhua reported. 

Trojans intercepted on Android phones accounted for 97 per cent of the total. 

The number of Chinese mobile phone users crossed a billion mark last year touching 1.11 billion users. 

About 47 per cent of Chinese urban residents have smartphones, according to a report released by Google. 

Over 60 per cent of malware takes at least two kinds of malicious action, secretly collecting information on users such as location, phone records and text messages. Information is then uploaded to specific servers, the report said. 

Data from the China Internet Network Information Center showed that 464 million Chinese citizens used mobile phones to access the Internet as of the end of June, up 4 per cent compared with the end of 2012.

New Android malware affecting up to 25,000 devices.....

Security software developer Dr Web on Friday said it has come across malwareon Google Play, which is the internet search giant's platform for apps used on Androidoperating system.

The malware deplete subscriber's accounts by sending short messages to premium numbers.

The Russia-based firm said about 11,000 to 25,000 devices are infected by these malicious programmes.

"Dr Web has discovered several malicious programmes on Google Play that install Android.SmsSend Trojans on mobile devices. The Trojans send short messages to premium numbers and deplete subscriber accounts ," it said in a release. Google was promptly notified about the incident, it added.

The programmes, discovered by Dr Web's analysts, belong to the Vietnamese developer AppStoreJsc. They are disguised as audio players and a video player that displays adult content. The total number of installations of these three programmes ranges between 11,000 and 25,000," it said.

Although, these applications appear harmless, they have an extra APKfile that contains an Android.Sms-Send Trojan, Dr Web said.

While running these applications , dubbed Android .MulDrop, Android.MulDrop .1 and Android.MulDrop.2 by Dr Web, they can prompt the user to download the content they need, but their consent initiates the installation of another application rather than the downloading of files, it added.

WhatsApp Upgrades Voice messaging features

As more people around the world use smartphone messaging apps like WhatsApp, Line and WeChat to communicate with each other, the companies running those apps are offering additional features to retain users.

WhatsApp, developed by a Mountain View, California-based startup, this week launched a new feature that simplifies the process of sending recorded voice messages. A similar feature helped WeChat, a massively popular text-and-chat app in China, expand in domestic and overseas markets.

WhatsApp users are already able to record a “voice note” and send it as a message, but the new Voice Messages service makes it easier to do so, and comes with additional functions such as notifying the sender that the recipient has heard the message.

The move by WhatsApp marks a rare moment in which an app developed in the U.S. is making more prominent a feature that first rose to popularity on a Chinese mobile product.

TALLEST BUILDING....

Burj Khalifa (Arabic: برج خليفة‎, "Khalifa tower"), known as Burj Dubai prior to its inauguration, is a skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and is the tallest man-made structure in the world, at 829.8 m (2,722 ft).^[3][8]

Construction began on 21 September 2004, with the exterior of the structure completed on 1 October 2009. The building officially opened on 4 January 2010,^[1][9] and is part of the new 2 km² (490-acre) development called Downtown Dubai at the 'First Interchange' along Sheikh Zayed Road, near Dubai's main business district. The tower's architecture and engineering were performed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill of Chicago, with Adrian Smith as chief architect, and Bill Baker as chief structural engineer.^[10][11] The primary contractor was Samsung C&T of South Korea.^[12]

In March 2009, Mohamed Ali Alabbar, chairman of the project's developer, Emaar Properties, said office space pricing at Burj Khalifa reached US$4,000 per sq ft (over US$43,000 per m²) and the Armani Residences, also in Burj Khalifa, sold for US$3,500 per sq ft (over US$37,500 per m²).^[13] He estimated the total cost for the project to be about US$1.5 billion.^[2]

The project's completion coincided with the global financial crisis of 2007–2012, and with vast overbuilding in the country; this led to high vacancies and foreclosures.^[14] With Dubai mired in debt from its huge ambitions, the government was forced to seek multibillion dollar bailouts from its oil-rich neighbor Abu Dhabi. Subsequently, in a surprise move at its opening ceremony, the tower was renamed Burj Khalifa, said to honour the UAE President Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan for his crucial support.^[8][15]

Because of the slumping demand in Dubai's property market, the rents in the Burj Khalifa plummeted 40% some ten months after its opening. Out of 900 apartments in the tower, 825 were still empty at that time.^[16][17] However, over the next two and a half years, overseas investors steadily began to purchase the available apartments and office space in Burj Khalifa.^[18] By October 2012, Emaar reported that around 80% of the apartments were occupied.^[19]

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