এ বছরেই আসছে মোজিলা স্মার্টফোন

২০১২ সালেই বাজারে আসবে মোজিলা স্মার্টফোন। ফায়ারফক্স ওয়েব ব্রাউজার নির্মাতাদের বানানো নতুন এই স্মার্টফোনটি চলবে বিটুজি (বুট টু গেকো) নামের নতুন এক অপারেটিং সিস্টেম-এ। খবর বিবিসির।

বিবিসি জানিয়েছে, মোজিলার এই স্মার্টফোন বাজারে আসবে ২০১২ সালের শেষের দিকে। তবে স্মার্টফোনগুলো ঠিক কোন মোবাইল নির্মাতা প্রতিষ্ঠান তৈরি করবে তা নিশ্চিত না হলেও ‘বুট টু গেকো (বিটুজি)’ অপারেটিং সিস্টেমটি প্রাথমিকভাবে শুধু ব্রাজিলের টেলিফোনিকা ভিভো’র মোবাইল নেটওয়ার্কেই পাওয়া যাবে বলে জানা গেছে।

মোজিলার এই স্মার্টফোনের বিটুজি অপারেটিং সিস্টেম হবে অনেকটাই মোজিলা ফায়ারফক্স এর মত আর এর মূল প্রতিদ্বন্দী হবে গুগলের অ্যান্ড্রয়েড স্মার্টফোন।

মোজিলার এই নতুন স্মার্টফোন আর বিটুজি অপারেটিং সিস্টেম সমসাময়িক মোবাইলফোনগুলোতে সফটওয়্যারের ব্যবহারের ধারাই বদলে দেবে বলে ব্রাজিলের সাও পাওলোর এক সংবাদ সম্মেলনে জানান মোজিলা চিফ এক্সিকিউটিভ গ্যারি কোভাকস।

মোজিলার এই নতুন স্মার্টফোন কোন মোবাইল নির্মাতা প্রতিষ্ঠান তৈরি করবে তা নিশ্চিত না হলেও জানা গেছে, এর দাম অন্য যে কোনো স্মার্টফোনের মতই হবে। আন স্মার্টফোনটি এ বছরের শেষ ভাগে না হলেও ২০১৩-র শুরুতেই বাজারে আসবে বলেই নিশ্চিত করেছে ব্রাজিলের টেলিফোনিকা ভিভো।

Computer power stacks up for flood mitigation

The best tools to mitigate the effects of floods such as those we’ve seen recently literally splashed across our TV screens may not be levies or sandbags, but computers.

Wee Waa, Moree and Wagga Wagga – towns that to many people have previously been just dots on maps – recently made headlines, for all the wrong reasons. TV news footage showed these towns deluged with murky water from rivers swollen by record downpours. Residents, emergency services and local mayors could only assess the damage and do the best they could as they waited for damaging flood waters to recede.

While floods like this will always occur, it is possible for agencies and communities to prepare and respond more effectively. Computer power is the key: it can model fluids such as flood waters incredibly accurately. Data about specific landscapes and regions can be combined with mathematical equations of how fluids behave and move, helping emergency managers, town planners and even insurance companies be prepared for future floods.

The data deluge in sciences such as environmental modelling is every bit as awesome as the real-life deluges experienced recently in NSW. Resource managers and planners are beginning to take notice of the power of computational fluid modelling for understanding and analysing vast amounts of environmental data, and for predicting changes due to floods. Computer modelling power is based on both the power of computers themselves and the power of the algorithms (computer processing steps) that run on computers.

Twice each year, the world’s fastest supercomputers are ranked in the ‘Top500 list’. A standard test called the Linpack benchmark compares computers' speeds and energy consumption. Computer owners such as universities and government data centres, technology companies such as Intel, and supercomputer geeks all eagerly await the latest list. In November 2011, for the first time, the number one computer on the list – Japan’s ‘K computer’ – clocked in at more than 10 petaflops, doing more than 10 quadrillion calculations per second.1 Less than three years ago, these speeds were unimaginable. Every ten years, supercomputers speed up about 1000 times. (This acceleration in processing power eventually makes its way to our desktops, mobile phones and other devices.)

CSIRO’s greenest supercomputer – a relatively new type of supercomputer called a graphics processing unit (GPU) cluster – has made the Top500 several times since its launch in November 2009. It ranked 212 in the November 2011 list. Located in Canberra, it’s one of the world’s fastest and least energy-hungry supercomputers. Intriguingly, the GPUs at its heart started out as graphics rendering hardware for computer games. So, it’s no surprise that the cluster – now a workhorse for many scientists in CSIRO – can produce informative and stunning animations as it rapidly crunches enormous numbers of numbers. ‘In recent years, the huge increase in computer power and speed, along with advances in algorithm development, have allowed mathematical modellers like us to make big strides in our research,’ says Mahesh Prakash of CSIRO's computational modelling team, led by Dr Paul Cleary. ‘Now, we can model millions, even billions of fluid particles,’ says Dr Prakash. ‘That means we can predict quite accurately the effects of natural and man-made fluid flows like tsunamis, dam breaks, floods, mudslides, coastal inundation and storm surges.’

A dam break, for example, is essentially a human-made flood. Like a flood caused by excessive rainfall, a dam break can be modelled on computer.

The models create colourful and detailed animations that show how rapidly the water moves and where it goes: where it ‘overtops’ hills and how quickly it reaches towns or infrastructure such as power stations. This information can help town planners plan structures such as levies and help emergency services respond more efficiently.

CSIRO’s dam break models have been validated using historical data from the St Francis Dam break, which occurred in California in 1928 and killed more than 400 people. Dr Prakash and his team have used the validated modelling techniques for a range of ‘what-if’ scenarios for other dams.

Working with the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping, the CSIRO team simulated the hypothetical collapse of the massive Geheyan Dam: one of the world's biggest. CSIRO combined their unique modelling techniques with digital terrain models (3-D maps of the landscape) to obtain a realistic picture of how a real-life disaster might unfold.

These evidence-based fluid-modelling tools can also help decision makers manage dam operations during excessive rainfall, for example, allowing them to determine when to undertake controlled water releases and how much water to release.

The future of computer modelling of floods and other natural disasters can only improve as computers and algorithms become more powerful. CSIRO's own supercomputer arsenal will be given a boost when its GPU cluster is upgraded this year. The tender was won by Xenon Systems of Melbourne and the upgrade is currently taking place. The leader of CSIRO’s computational and simulation sciences team, Dr John Taylor, says the upgrade will open up even more possibilities. ‘We're anticipating a significant boost in computational performance and greater compatibility with the next generation of accelerator cards, all achieved using less energy per calculation,’ says Dr Taylor.

Flood modellers, regional planners and emergency managers – watch this space!

View a clip on computational fluid modelling for disaster management here.

Hackers Amplified DNS

Anonymous hacker group is known worldwide for taking down a number of important sites, including FBI, Interpol, Panda Security, and the US Department of Justice. Now they move further and are going after the Web’s entire Domain Name System.

Of course, bringing the whole DNS down isn’t a very easy task. Anonymous is now planning on using the DNS itself as a weapon, and is developing a next-generation instrument named DNS amplification to reach this goal. The so-called “gadget” is expected to hack into an integral part of the web’s global address book, sending enormous data packets to the affected machines without revealing the source of attack. The suggested scheme becomes possible thanks to vulnerability in the DNS system, which actually exists for a decade already.

If you take a look from the inside, you would see that the DNS system is working on a strict hierarchy. At its top there are “root” nameservers. You can accomplish DNS lookup just by obtaining access to various levels of the hierarchy. Meanwhile, there’re 2 methods a DNS resolver is working: the first is iterative mode, and the second is recursive mode. In the first mode, the resolver first queries the root nameservers for the top-level domain’s nameservers, and after this it queries the top-level domain’s nameserver for the 2nd level, and so on. When contacting the various nameservers, the resolver will either find an answer or give up because of lack of it.

In the second case (the recursive mode), the resolver’s task becomes easier – it will be asking for one DNS server for the whole name, after which the server will do all the necessary requests for it.

There are numerous benefits of DNS amplification. For instance, the source of the attack could be hidden with UDP via forged headers. In addition, different VPNs could also be used as extra-precaution, because Tor’s services don’t function on UDP traffic. Therefore, due to the fact that DNS amplification relies on UDP (a connection-free protocol), the sent packets can’t be easily circumvented.

The industry experts seem worried. They point out that if Anonymous do manage to pull this stunt, there won’t be much that they can’t do in retaliation to the ongoing anti-piracy cyberwar, started by the US authorities.

New Platform for Freelancers, Content Creators and Businesses

FileQu is a recently launched Internet-based file-sharing and storage platform. Its creators have decided to build a communications bridge between freelancers, musicians, small businesses, and everyone else using the web.

Created by Bonheur Media, the new service is a fully customizable file-sharing platform which provides its users with possibility to easily and securely upload, store, and share files with anyone else online. The service is fully customizable, which means that you will be able to add your corporate logo, select colors and themes, and do whatever you want to make your business look how you want it to.

The platform is using an enhanced method of sharing files, but this isn’t all. You won’t even have to install software on your PC in order to view or upload files, because everything can be done via your account.

In addition, Bonheur Media has incorporated a user-friendly e-mail sharing system that will allow users to invite and share files with someone outside of their accounts by providing that individual with a secure link through e-mail for instant file downloads.

The Chief Executive Officer of Bonheur Medias and founder of FileQu, Ignacio Garcia-Huidobro, added that the system in question would also allow users to set an expiration date on the invitations they sent out. In other words, when the invitation expires, it won’t be valid any longer, and the invited user won’t be allowed to view the file any longer as well. The company is sure that its users will be absolutely satisfied. The platform isn’t free, it is currently offering a price tag of $4.99 per month, which will provide you with 100GB storage limit, 2GB upload limit, and many other features.

Microsoft Roadmap Revealed True Release Dates

One of the Dutch developers has stumbled across a Microsoft roadmap and announced that it indicated that the next version of Microsoft Office would not ship until the first quarter of the next year.

Maarten Visser, the Chief Executive Officer of Meetroo, has found the roadmap when he clicked on a link published on Microsoft’s Dutch site – it turned out that the PDF file wasn’t password protected. He posted the data he found in a YouTube video – it appeared to be quite interesting for him because his firm was building SharePoint apps and the release date of SharePoint 15 was very important for him.

Actually, there wasn’t much in the roadmap that wasn’t already known: it confirmed that Vole would release a public beta of Office along with betas of supporting products such as SharePoint and Exchange. However, it seems that the suite’s final release won’t see the light of day until the 1st quarter of 2013. That’s what doesn’t tally with what the software giant has been saying earlier. In case you accept the roadmap, the Office beta is marked as smack-dab between the 3rd and 4th quarters.

Meanwhile, Microsoft hasn’t yet officially revealed a timetable for Office, but a few months ago Office group executive promised that everyone would have a chance to try the Office 15 public beta in summer 2012. One more section of the roadmap showed timelines for Windows, Internet Explorer 10, and Windows Phone. As for Windows 8, its schedule only showed last September’s Developer Preview marked, while Windows Server 8 was labeled “Historical Release Cadence” lasting from the middle of the current year through early 2013. Finally, Internet Explorer 10’s launch was marked as somewhere in the second half of 2012. 

Half-Naked Australian Woman Led to American Hacker

Photos of a lightly clad Australian girl resulted in the arrest of a hacker who is claimed to break into American law enforcement and government sites. Higinio Ochoa III seemed to be great at breaking into police sites, but failed to hide when it came to half-naked Aussie woman.

Ochoa, known as a member of an Anonymous off-shoot, was charged by the US authorities with hacking into the online services of at least 4 American law enforcement websites. The local media confirmed that the guy was caught thanks to a headless picture of a bikini-clad woman in Wantirna South, who held a message taunting American authorities, which was posted on the Internet.

The FBI explained that a Twitter account named @AnonW0rmer has led the followers to a site where they could find data lifted from the law enforcement websites. The bottom of the site featured a picture of a girl known as Ochoa’s Australian girlfriend. She held a sign saying “PwNd by w0rmer & CabinCr3w <3 u BiTch's”.

However, the photo contained data that revealed it was taken by iPhone, including GPS co-ordinates indicating the Wantirna South street, as well as the house where it was taken. Twitter account had another link that led the FBI to a site that railed against oppression by police departments across the globe. This one revealed a picture of a woman holding a sign saying “We Are ALL Anonymous We NEVERForgive.

We NEVER Forget. <3 @Anonw0rmer.” Of course, it was the same woman and the authorities found 2 references to the pseudonym “'w0rmer'” on unconnected websites, one of which had hacker’s name.

His apartment was put under surveillance, and then the FBI found the hacker’s Facebook page, which named an Australian girl as his mate – the same woman in the picture in South Wantirna. The woman is in the US with Ochoa now, who will appear in court this week.

University Will Reveal Value of Personal Details

Special Android application will intrude on privacy on a daily basis. London’s Queen Mary University decided to carry out a research into how people value their own personal information. Within the frames of this research, the volunteers agreed to install a free Android application on their mobiles.


At first, this application will ask the volunteers some basic information about their background. Later, it will ask for more details every day over the next 2 weeks. The university claims that this will emulate the kind of data Internet companies are collecting from their users daily. The questions that the app will ask are intrusively private, but the kind of answers apps can take from user behaviour which is taken for granted – for example, what the user is doing, how he feels about what he is doing, where he is, who he is with, and how much the data would be worth to him. Everyone knows that this kind of data is given away for free, on the Internet, on a daily basis.


As for volunteers, they will get the chance to win £10-100 in Amazon vouchers via a prize draw for their participation. The leader of the research, Dr. Bernadette Kamleitner from the School of Business and Management, claimed that personal data is a huge but poorly regulated business. Despite the fact that the consumers are able to benefit from the use of their data through receiving customized offers that may be interesting for them, others can also use their private details to make money.


Queen Mary University hopes that that the research will help them understand which information people believe is more or less valuable to them. In addition, the results would show whether people really believe that personal data has no price or not.

Three Threats to Online Freedom

According to Google head Sergey Brin, there were 3 biggest threats to online freedom, and they were Facebook, Apple, and the authorities that censored their citizens.

While Facebook, Apple, and the government would have a similar list featuring Google high on it, Sergey Brin continues to claim that the multinational corporation he listed and the government that try to filter their citizens are the largest threats to the Internet freedom.

During the interview to the local media, Sergey Brin explained that the rise of “restrictive” walled gardens like Apple and Facebook became a major threat as the companies tightly control the kind of software that can be released on their platforms. In fact, it was just as bad as the efforts of countries like China, Saudi Arabia or Iran to filter and restrict use of the worldwide web. Brin claimed that Facebook and Apple could both stifle innovation and balkanise the Internet, with a lot being lost, since that information is not crawlable by Internet crawlers and you can’t search it.

In the event that Facebook existed before Google, the search engine would have had no chance to survive, added Brin, because search engines require an open Internet, and too many rules not just close it down, but they stifle innovation. Meanwhile, Sergey Brin didn’t mention anything about Google’s Search plus Your World (SPYW) feature that mainly prioritizes Google+ over other social networks. In addition, the industry observers point out that Google has already banned Facebook from accessing Gmail contact information by changing the terms of service for its Google Contacts Data API in such a way that the sites which access Google Contacts had to offer access to their information in response. 

How To Make VPNs Even More Secure

From being a niche product used by the few, in the past few years VPN services have hit the big time. These days more and more Internet users see running a privacy enhancing service as a requirement rather than just a luxury. Today we take a look at a few tips and tricks that can enhance the security of any VPN.

While simple to set up and use out of the box, it may comes as a surprise that the security of VPN anonymity services can be improved. Of course, when things run absolutely to plan there’s little to worry about, but there are occasions where there may be a hiccup or where an extra level of security is needed.

Securing your privacy when your VPN fails

Ok, so you’ve purchased your VPN subscription, enabled the service, and you’re enjoying your new found levels of privacy. Then – disaster strikes. While you were away from your machine somehow and for some unknown reason your VPN disconnected and now snoopers have a clear view of your IP address.

Fortunately, there are solutions.

“To protect against the event of VPN failure/disconnection, disable any internet access that does not tunnel through your VPN service provider,” Andrew from PrivateInternetAccesstold TorrentFreak. “This can be achieved using specific Firewall rules (Ubuntu) or bychanging TCP/IP routes.

But of course, not everyone wants to spend time with these manual configurations that could potentially cause problems if they’re not done properly. So, TorrentFreak spoke with the creators of two free pieces of software that do the job more easily.

VPNetMon

“VPNetMon continuously watches the IP addresses of your PC. If the IP address of your VPN is not detected anymore, VPNetMon closes specified programs instantly. The program reacts so quickly that a new connection through your real IP will not be established by these applications,” creator Felix told TorrentFreak.

VPNetMon (Windows) can be downloaded here.

VPNCheck

“VPNCheck helps you to feel safe if your VPN connection breaks, this is done by shutting down your main network connection or programs of your choice and showing a notification box,” Jonathan from Guavi.com told TorrentFreak. “Basically it constantly looks for a change in your VPN network adapter. You can connect to either PPTP or L2TP with VPNCheck.”

VPNCheck (Windows/Linux) can be downloaded here.

Stop DNS Leaks

When using a VPN service one might expect that all of the user’s traffic will go through the privacy network, but on rare occasions a phenomenon known as “DNS leakage” might occur. This means that rather than using the DNS servers provided by the VPN operator, it’s possible that the user’s default DNS servers will be used instead or otherwise become visible.

“A DNS leak may happen whenever a DNS query ‘bypasses’ the routing table and gateway pushed by the OpenVPN server. The trigger on Windows systems may be as simple as a slight delay in the answer from the VPN DNS, or the VPN DNS unable to resolve some name,” explains Paolo from AirVPN.

A tool for checking for leaks can be found at DNSLeakTest.com and a solution for fixing any problems can be found here. Alternatively, anyone using the pro version of VPNCheck will have this feature built in.

Double up your security for extra sensitive data transfers

What if you don’t have 100% trust in your VPN provider and worry that even they might snoop on your communications? Admittedly it’s a very unusual hypothetical situation, but one with an interesting solution.

“If you don’t trust your VPN provider 100%, use two VPNs,” explains Felix from VPNetMon. “This way you are tunneling your already encrypted connection through another tunnel.”

In Windows this is easily achieved. First, simply set up at least two VPN accounts as normal (if you’d like an extra one for testing purposes you can get a free limited account fromVPNReactor). Then connect to one VPN, and when complete connect to another without disconnecting the first. Like magic, a tunnel through a tunnel.

Its also possible to VPN over TOR, but please please don’t use TOR for file-sharing traffic, it’s not designed for it.

“VPN over TOR gives several security advantages, for a performance price, above all partition of trust,” explains Paolo from AirVPN. “In case of betrayal of trust by one party, the anonymity layer is not compromised in any way.

A VPN over TOR tutorial can be found here, further discussion here.

Fix the PPTP / IPv6 security flaw

As revealed here on TorrentFreak in 2010, people using a PPTP VPN and IPv6 are vulnerable to a nasty security flaw which means that Windows and Ubuntu users could leak their real IP addresses. The following fix comes from Jonathan at VPNCheck.

For Windows Vista and above:
Open cmd prompt and type:
netsh interface teredo set state disabled.

For Ubuntu 10+:
Copy and paste all four lines into a terminal:
echo “#disable ipv6″ | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
echo “net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1″ | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
echo “net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6 = 1″ | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
echo “net.ipv6.conf.lo.disable_ipv6 = 1″ | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf

Pay for your VPN with untrackable currency.

“When anonymity is a factor, pay with an un-trackable currency,” explains Andrew from PrivateInternetAccess.

“For example, signup for an anonymous e-mail account using Tor and use a Bitcoin Mixer to send Bitcoins to a newly generated address in your local wallet. Alternatively, use theBitcoin-OTC to purchase Bitcoins ‘over the counter’ from a person, rather than an exchange.

“Then, use a patched Bitcoin client, such as coderrr’s anonymity patch to avoid linking the newly generated address to any of your pre-existing Bitcoin addresses.”

Only use VPN providers that take your privacy seriously

We’ve said this before but it’s worth repeating. VPN providers who heavily log are useful if all you’re concerned about is securely communicating with the Internet through an open public WiFi connection, but not beyond that. For a run down of providers who do not log any data which would enable a 3rd party to identify a user, see our previous article here.

Do you have a helpful security tip for VPN users? If so, feel free to add it to the comments below.

Homeless People Became Wireless Hotspots

An unusual marketing stunt has totally backfired,when advertising agency called BBH came up with a splendid idea to turn homeless people at SXSW into wireless access points. The company is sure that it isn’t demeaning.

Now the homeless people are equipped with technology that literally turns them into human routers, thus making otherwise charity-givers into Homeless Hotspot users. If you make a small donation, you would be allowed to log on and use the Internet.

Advertising company BBH, which remains behind the scheme, claims that it set out with the best of intentions. The company does realize the concern which has since erupted over social networks. The advertising outfit’s initiative describes itself on its Twitter page as aiding “bring Street Newspapers into the digital age” introducing itself as a modern take on such initiatives as the Big Issue.

The company’s official blog first announced that people will notice “strategically positioned individuals” wearing T-shirts saying “Homeless Hotspot”. Later, an updated entry tried to soothe the furious Twitter backlash.

Despite the fact that it could be argued that turning homeless people into a way for others to check their email is thoroughly dehumanizing and demeaning, the advertising company keeps insisting that such activity becomes the business of the individuals involved, because they can keep all the income they received from providing access to the web. Meanwhile, the company itself has virtually nothing to gain from this except from, probably, exposure. And the expectations are that it will certainly get that.

Although the SXSW trial is regarded as a “beta test”, BBH still hopes that the platform could later be adopted “on a broader scale”.