September 10, 2010

How to Avoid Phising Websites

This pie chart shows the business categories targeted by phishers and their respective proportion of fake sites, according to PandaLab's latest report.
This pie chart shows the business categories targeted by phishers and their respective proportion of fake sites, according to PandaLab's latest report.
(Credit: PandaLabs)

September 8, 2010

Backup your Gmail Inbox Online

If you want to backup your emails from Gmail to the local computer, enable POP3 access in your Gmail settings and then use a desktop mail client to download a copy of all your messages from the Google cloud to the local disk. That’s easy!
Windows Live Mail, Outlook and Thunderbird are some nice email clients that can automatically and easily bring your entire archive of Gmail messages offline.
Why you should backup Gmail to the cloud?
If you are not a huge fan of desktop applications or if you think that setting up a Gmail backup plan involves way too much effort, you can consider creating a backup of your Gmail account in the cloud itself. Before we get into the details, here are three situations where an online backup of Gmail messages will come handy:
Reason #1 – If your main Gmail account gets hacked , you will still have access to all your previous emails.
Reason #2 – If you delete an important email from your Gmail Inbox by mistake, you can easily retrieve it from the online backup. Google Apps Premier has Postini to restore deleted emails, here you’re getting that facility for free.


Google’s Realtime Search offers you a convenient way to search through status updates, news articles and other links that are shared on the social web, mainly Twitter and Facebook.
Microsoft too has a similar search product called Bing Social and though both these tools are powered by the same data coming from Twitter and Facebook, I find Bing’s Social Search a slightly better product than Google’s Realtime Search.

Both Bing and Google display search results from Facebook and Twitter in a self-updating river of news format but with Bing Social, you have an option to filter out status updates by source.
That means you can limit your search results to either Twitter or Facebook, something that is currently not possible in Google’s Realtime search.


LG has announced its intentions to launch its first Tegra based phones by the end of 2010.

These new devices would be based on the second generation NVIDIA Tegra mobile processor - also known as the Tegra 2 System on a Chip (SoC). This processor is a powerful dual core number cruncher that would provide hitherto unheard of processing power for hand-held devices.

September 6, 2010

B-schools Going Green

As the market for green managers is growing in the country, B-schools are offering management lessons in environment-related disciplines to their students. Leading B-schools in the country like Birla Institute of Management Technology, Institute of Chemical Technology and IIMs are offering courses covering areas like sustainability and green manufacturing, reports Rajiv Tikoo of the Financial Express.


Facebook is rolling out a new security feature that lets users log out of their accounts remotely from another computer.

To do this, go to "account settings" on your Facebook page and click on "change" next to "account security." There, you'll see where else your Facebook account is logged in, including the type of device and the city it's in or near. To log out of any of them, click "end activity."



Facebook is making this available over the next couple of weeks. It will be accessible on computers, but not mobile devices.

The feature is similar to what Google Inc.'s Gmail offers to its users, and Facebook says it's designed to help users keep their logins secure.


When you want to establish an Online business the first thing you need is a Website for your venture. For a website, the first thing you need is some Online Web Hosting Space and skilled professionals who can create a proper website for you. But what are the things you should keep in mind while selecting the best web host? What are the most common misconceptions while deciding the best web host?

Unlimited Web Hosting and bandwidth means no worry
Most users are tension-free that their unlimited hosting account will help them enjoy a tension free life. But, most Unlimited hosting accounts do no guarantee unlimited disk usage. The more processing that takes places on the server may cause problems for your website as your Disk Usage takes place (can be understood as Processing usage)

Shared hosting and dedicated hosting are similar
Most users have a misconception that shared and dedicated hosting servers don’t really make a difference. Just imagine that another website which is hosted on your shared server used up all the processing power or gets infected by any malicious software, then what? You may loose all the precious data on your site and may also cause a lot of problems. A dedicated server would be your personal server and may allow you to do anything at the expense of your own site. So, if you mis-manage something, then you are responsible for your own actions as others are no way related to you.

All cheap web-hosting services are unreliable
Everyone wants to use the Best Web hosting services, but most people are not on a big budget, so they keep looking for cheap options. But it is a misunderstanding that all cheap web hosting services are unreliable, there are many web hosting services which give you the service at affordable rates and they are very reliable too.

Any website can work on any type of server (without any issues)
Web hosting server is not your requirement! A PROPER hosting server is your requirement. So you must first ensure that the package which the hosting provider is giving you fits your needs. For example: Its a tiresome job to make the .NET framework to work on Linux based servers. It may take up your valuable time and may even land you into trouble. Most people do not think before purchasing a hosting package and then repent over it.

Good hosting providers don’t have any problems/issues
This is the biggest misunderstanding. You can face web hosting issues with any hosting provider, its just the service each provider delivers which makes them expensive and good. If your site is not properly protected from outbound access, then it can be hacked. You cant blame your provider for that.

Also, most web hosting companies allow affiliate sales, which can help you to earn some cash fast by referring their service to others. Many companies also allow the Web Hosting Coupon system, which can help you give discounts to people whom you refer.

Google's ultra popular doodles are back in the news again as the search engine giant is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the buckyball on Saturday, Sep 4.


G
oogle's latest doodle features interactive buckyball in place of the yellow second 'o' in Google. The spinning buckyball can be brought to life by the movement of the mouse.
With the doodle, Google has effectively managed to plague several minds as to what exactly a buckyball is, thus shedding light on the landmark discovery by sending millions of netizens searching for information on it.

A buckyball is a spherical fullerene, which is a molecular compound made up entirely of carbon [C60].

The buckyball, which is actually called buckminsterfullerene, was discovered on Sep 4, 1985 by Harold Kroto, James Heath, Sean O’Brien, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley at Rice University in Houston, Texas.

The name buckminsterfullerene comes from Richard Buckminster 'Bucky' Fuller, who was an architect and designer, whose geodesic domes and spheres the buckyball resembles. Besides this, 'fullerine' also stands for a molecule made entirely of carbon.

Buckminsterfullerine, the first of the ball-shaped family of particles, came to be known as Buckyball due to the unusual spherical arrangement of the molecule.

This unique particle family is studied and applied in several fields of sciences including electronics and nanotechnology.

Google will pay to settle a privacy lawsuit filed in the wake of the Google Buzz launch. The social-media service was heavily criticized for automatically including users' frequent Gmail contacts on public Buzz profiles when it first went live in February. Google scrambled to make changes to give users better clarity about how the privacy settings worked, but that didn't prevent lawsuits such as the one filed by Gmail user Eva Hibnick in February.

Proceeds from the settlement--after the lawyers get paid, of course--will be donated to as-yet unspecified Internet privacy groups, according to a copy of the settlement made public Friday. Google is also required to "undertake wider public education about the privacy aspects of Buzz," although no specifics were provided. Google will, however, have to notify all Gmail users that it has reached a settlement.



Greenpeace has launched an effort to pressure Facebook to stop polluting with coal, but Facebook counters by saying its newest data center will be a model energy efficiency.


On Wednesday, Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo sent a letter sent to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, urging him to take steps to lighten Facebook's environmental footprint.Naidoo said that the environmental watchdog group was dismayed by Facebook's plans to build a large data center in Prineville, Oregon. Due to Facebook's rapid growth, that facility will be twice as large as first anticipated and the local utility runs an "electricity mix that is disproportionately powered by coal, the largest source of global warming pollution," Naidoo wrote.

Since February, meanwhile, Greenpeace has been running an "Unfriend Coal" protest on Facebook that has gathered more than 500,000 people. Backed by its supporters, Greenpeace wants Facebook to commit to phasing out coal-powered electricity, lobby for climate change and clean energy policies, and disclose its greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

On Thursday, Facebook's director of policy communications, Barry Schnitt, responded, saying that Facebook's planned Oregon facility was chosen with energy efficiency in mind. Also, he noted that Facebook, like any other company, doesn't have control over the fuel source for its electricity.

It's true that the local utility gets 58 percent of its power from coal, compared to a national average of about 50 percent, Schnitt said. But the location was chosen because of its temperate climate, which allows Facebook to use more efficient evaporative coolers rather than the traditional power-hungry mechanical chillers.

Also, by consolidating into a single location, rather than leasing space at various locations, Facebook can design for efficiency. He said that the Oregon facility will have a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.15, far below the industry averages for efficiency. Google, considered an industry leader, was about 1.17 in the past quarter.

"We strongly believe that the best way to minimize our impact is to concentrate on efficiency and building servers that work towards that goal," Schnitt wrote.

The director of Greenpeace's Cool IT program then responded to Schnitt, arguing that Facebook and other Internet providers need to take a more active stance on energy policy.

"Efficiency is certainly important, but is only the beginning of taking responsibility for your rapidly growing energy and environmental footprint," wrote policy analyst Gary Cook.

The back-and-forth, done publicly to maximize exposure of the anticoal campaign, sheds some light on the reality of procuring huge amounts of electricity to run data centers.

Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others are investing billions of dollars to build out data centers to meet growing demand for Web services, adding to the pollution from computing.

Given that energy is a cost, these Web providers have a financial motivation to use as little electricity as possible. That, and growing environmental concerns, has led to designs that optimize cooling, which is about half the energy used in data centers.