Techspace: December 2010

Viruses Smuggling Android Phones

A Trojan virus which has been developed for Android phones can create botnets(A botnet is a collection of software agents that run autonomously and automatically).

Trojan named Geinimi is the most sophisticated Android malware so far. Once it's installed on a user's phone, Geinimi can receive commands from a remote server that lets that server's owner control the smartphone. Geinimi is spreading through pirated versions of Android apps, games and is being distributed in third-party Android app stores in China.

When a smartphone user launches an infected application containing Geinimi, the Trojan collects information in the background. This information includes location coordinates and unique identifiers for the device and its SIM card. Every five minutes, the Trojan tries to connect to a remote server using one of 10 embedded domain names. These domain names include www.widifu.com; www.udaore.com; www.frijd.com; www.islpast.com and www.piajesj.com

Pirated applications that include the Trojan that are available in Chinese app stores include "Monkey Jump 2;" "Sex Positions;" "President vs. Aliens" "City Defense" and "Baseball Superstars 2010".

The original versions of these apps that are in the official Google Android Market have not been affected. So please download apps and games from Google official site :)

Hide your FRIENDS List on Facebook from others

As you have seen the most dominated social networking site(earlier) ORKUT gives the authority for the user to hide his/her scraps, photos and etc.. from others. FACEBOOK the most promising and undoubtedly the most users LOGGED-IN social networking site provides the user to hide his/her photos, messages and etc from others. Now, you can even hide your FRIEND's list from others so that your FRIEND's list can be seen only by you.

Procedure to hide your Friends List in Facebook:

First login to your Facebook account.

Once logged in, go to Privacy Settings.

You will see an option “Connecting on Facebook” in the next page. Click on “View Settings”.

Now scroll down the page and select “See your friend list”.

You can choose “Custom” to completely hide your friend’s list from everyone and make its visibility to “Only Me”.

Thank you for reading this post :) Do comment :)

Holograms on cell phones(IBM Next Five in Five)

IBM researchers say that, in another five years, cell phones will be able to produce holograms of friends and colleagues talking and moving in real time.

We will be able to see the 3D video projected from cell phone from which we can actually see the caller or called person's real time video as a hologram:) With a cell phone hologram, a user would be able to walk next to a hologram of a friend, or a worker and he/she could project an enlarged 3D image of a product needing repair to walk inside it and detect problems.

IBM is already working on the cell phone hologram concept in its labs. The cameras that are being used to create early versions of holograms still need to be miniaturized, and software needs to be written to for receiving input from those cameras.

Here, you can watch the featured video of IBM related to this post here.

Please do comment if you like this post :) :)

Thank you :)

Microsoft MIDORI, Cloud-Based Operating System

Windows is the operating system which is being used my most of the computer users. This operating system has ruled with millions of users from 1985 by PC-DOS, Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows NT, Windows Xp, Windows Vista and currently running most awaited operating system Windows 7.

Now, MICROSOFT is working on a new generation of operating systems called Cloud-Based Operating System and rumors are there that MIDORI will be their first such operating system, which will replace Windows fully from computer map.

Features of MIDORI :-

MIDORI is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM).

MIDORI includes "Virtualization" as a mean to solving issues within contemporary computing.

MIDORI is to develop a lightweight portable OS which can be deployed easily to lots of various applications.

In the current working system, operating system is loaded onto a hard disk physically located on that machine. In this way, the operating system is tied very tightly to that hardware. As Windows is dependent on hardware, this will not be used by mobile people. Due to this trend installing different applications on a single computer may led to different compatibility issues whenever the machine require updating.

The new operating system will solve these problems by the concept of Virtualizing. This will solve problems such as widespread security vulnerabilities, unexpected interactions among different applications, failures caused by extensions, plug-ins, and drivers and many more.

Ubuntu manual and custom notifications

In UBUNTU, you will see notifications in the right top corner from the Audio/Video applications and also from the Update Manager, but what if you like to send notification for your computer(Individual computer) or to send notification from your computer to any LAN connected computer?

Before notification, you should install the library file. To do this, go to TERMINAL and type

[stextbox id="info" width="300"]sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin[/stextbox]

Now you can go ahead and start with notifications :)

1. Simple Notification

notify-send can be used to send simple notification as shown below.

[stextbox id="info" width="200"]$ notify-send 'Hi Srikanth' 'Welcome'[/stextbox]

2. Notification with an icon

notify-send can be used to send notification along with an icon using -i option.

[stextbox id="info"]$ notify-send -u critical -i "notification-message-IM" 'Boss !!' 'Am done with the execution'[/stextbox]

notification-message-IM is a type of icon that can be used in the notify-send program.

3. Notification with custom icon

You can use your own custom icon using the notify-send -i option as shown below.

[stextbox id="info"]$ notify-send -i /home/sathiya/deal.ico 'Deal success'[/stextbox]

4. Show output of any command

For example, you can display the last few lines of syslog as shown below.

[stextbox id="info"]$ notify-send syslog "`tail /var/log/syslog`"[/stextbox]

In the same way, you can use any command (for example, date) and display its output as desktop notification using notify-send.

Thanks for reading this article :) Do comment :) :)

1000 cores on a single processor

Our PCs have a processor with two, four or 16 cores to carry out tasks, but the central processing unit ( CPU ) developed by the researchers effectively have 1,000 cores on a single chip. That means our system will be 20 times faster than the current speed. This new SUPER computer uses less power and works with high speed w.r.t current computers.

Scientists used a chip called a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), which contains millions of transistors, But FPGAs can be configured into specific circuits by the user, rather than their function being set at a factory. This enabled the team to divide the transistors within the chip into small groups and make them to perform different tasks. By creating more than 1,000 mini-circuits within the FPGA chip , the researchers effectively turned the chip into a 1,000-core processor, each core working on its own instructions.

The chip is able to process around five gigabytes of data per second in testing, making it approximately 20 times faster than modern computers.

Grub customizer - Organise your GRUB

GRUB is the boot loader for your Ubuntu system.

By default, it looks something like this :

Boring and Black & White.

If you want to change the view of this GRUB, then the easiest way that i've found is the Grub Customizer. Grub Customizer is a graphical interface to manage your grub loader.

Here are some of the features of it :

Manages various entries to be displayed on the grub

Helps you reorder the grub menu entries

Allows you to set the timeout duration

Allows you to set the default menu selection

Can change the appearances of the grub. You can add background to your grub loader and as well change the various color schemes provided.

The screenshot of Grub Customizer is here :

Whenever you have a kernel update, there will be a new entry in the grub loader and in course of time, your grub gets messy. So you can use grub customizer to completely clean the list, re order it and manage it.

To install Grub Customizer go to your terminal and type the following

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

If you have any queries then please feel free to comment.

JotForm - Efficient Form building for email / web

JotForm is one of the best tools to create a form for your website or to mail some group and get responses.
Its features are -
1. Easy to use Interface
2. Drag and Drop form elements
3. Choose from the 40 form elements
4. Variety of themes
5. Customizable email responses
6. No registration required

All that you need to do is just log on to their site

http://www.jotform.com

And start building your new form.

You can add captcha, a rating scale, a grade scale, and many more survey tools. You can also apply validation rules to your fields. Most common fields like email and phone numbers are automatically validated.

When you save the form it asks for your email id to which responses of that form will be sent to. Best part is that you can completely customize the responses using another simple interface. You can get the URL of the form or the code that links to it so that you can then embed it into your website.

Following screenshots will help you understand it better.

Creating a form using JotForm. Add any tools from the side pane.

Saving your email id to which your form responses will be sent.

Customizing your email responses

Use the tools in top panel to edit Email Alerts, Thank you message, Share the form, Get Source Code or to set the preferences.

The finished form. Look at the URL. This is created for you.

Google Body Browser - An educational tool by google

Google has released the new Body Brow ser in its Lab website. It is an educational tool built to completely browse the various parts of a human body. Initially you find a woman dressed in a blue attire and on the left side are your controls that guide you to browse through her. You can rip her skin off(not the clothes) and see the organisation of various organs, bone structure, muscular tissues, nervous system and much more.

Google Body Browser gives you a variety of controls. You can control the depth of visibility of bones, organs, muscles and nerves either individually or in a chained way. Enabling the labeling option will label the various visible parts. Search option given in marvelous in giving instant result by animating the body.

Google Body Browser is yet another showcase of HTML5's beauty. The Body browser also needs WebGL support which is not implemented in most browsers other than Firefox and Chrome Beta. Download the beta version of the Chrome from here and try the Body Browser by logging in to bodybrowser.googlelabs.com or you can just check out the video on youtube here.

The Body browser is still in Google Labs and expected to have much more features in the times to come.

Get started with Google Chrome's Web Store

Chrome has come out with a new store for webapps called Chrome Web Store. Not probably a completely new concept if you look at Apple's AppStore and Android's 'Market', but definitely a new functionality for browsers. Chrome web store is probably a small step of Google's towards the Chrome OS which is in its beta testing side. Initially launched only for US users, it is now open to the world. So what exactly do you find in the Chrome Web Store?

After I logged on to their web store, I installed few and realized that they're only packaged bookmarks which doesn't do anything more than just redirecting to the website(the very first app I downloaded was the Blogger app which only redirected me to http://blogger.com). Disappointing? yes. But it doesn't end there. There are some exclusive apps that use HTML5, which is the latest major revision of HTML and still under development (see wiki). Some of them are mentioned later in this article. Consider Web apps as feature rich versions of their website.

Chrome Web Store provides a variety of categories to download from. Some free and some paid but helps any kind of users, be it shoppers, bloggers, students, gamers, developers etc.. Some of the best app that you can start off with could be Scribble, Aviary's Advanced Image Editor or NYTimes and you also have some games like the classic PacMan.

With the introduction of WebStore, Chrome has made available, the extensions and themes under one roof.

All you need to do is download Google Chrome stable version, access the Chrome Web Store and select an app and click Install as shown in the screenshot below.

Once you've installed a web app, you will find them when you open a new tab just before your Last Visited section.

With extensive work going on in HTML5, I'm sure Google's new Chrome Web Store is going to be a hit among the other browsers.

CCleaner - for a faster cleaner windows

If you're using Windows then this is probably a must-have application for you.

CCleaner is less than 3MB and a freeware privacy and cleaning software. It deletes all the unnecessary and unused files from your computer safely and frees considerable hard disk space from your computer. It cleans the temporary files from you IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and also some locations on your computer like the Recycle bin. It also supports cleaning some third party applications and is integrated with a fully featured registry cleaner. CCleaner has topped the Popular Downloads list of Filehippo.

Screenshot:

CCleaner

Download Link

You can download CCleaner from their website or from the filehippo which is my favorite.
Post your reviews on it.

How to Block Ads when you're browsing?

If website ads are really annoying you then here is a simple way to get rid of it.

Answer is AdBlock.

This is a simple extension available for Google Chrome and as well as Mozilla firefox. Install them and select your preferences to activate the AdBlock. Now just go to any page and see the ads disappeared.
You can configure AdBlock to display only text ads or allow ads on certain websites or just block everything.

Download links are given below.

Chrome users click here.

Firefox users click here.

Configuring AdBlock settings is very intuitive (Go to Tools -> Extensions -> Options of AdBlock), but if you still find it difficult somewhere, feel free to comment and we will be glad to help you.

Arista Transcoder - Video conversion tool for Ubuntu

Every now and then, you find it necessary to convert your video format to some other format to fit it into your mobile device, ipod or any other video player. If you're on windows you may use Videora, or Total Video converter. But when you're on Ubuntu, you may find it very difficult to find the right package. But here's one which's too good, very simple and very intuitive.

Arista Transcoder.

As its website says, it is the easiest way to convert your media. Arista comes with a whole lot of features.

Video formats it supports are : H.264, MPEG2, MPEG4/DivX, VP8, Theora, Flash Video.

And some of the audio formats are : AA3, Vorbis, OGG, FLAC, Speex and WAV.

If you're not sure of the format you want to convert it to, you can just right away select the device to which you're converting the file to. Just select any of the following device from the list: Android, Computer, DVD Player, iPhone/iPod/iPad, Nokia N Series or Web.

In addition to all this, you can create a video using your webcam directly and store it in any of the formats as said above. You can also create presets and store them and share them with others. You can visit the preset page of arista transcoder for more information.

Screenshots: http://www.transcoder.org/screenshots/

Installation Instruction

Arista Transcoder being Open-source, you can download the code from their website and compile it.

Or you can straight away download it from your Ubuntu Software Center.

Or in your terminal, you can just type in

sudo apt-get install arista

Hope that saves a lot of time for you.

Download email id's of FACEBOOK friends and add to GMAIL, YAHOO or any other Webmail service or Social Network

You might have tried to export email id's of your friends in FACEBOOK and you would have end up saying Man!! This is not possible, have to copy each email id and should add to GMAIL or YAHOO. But this process is very tedious :( I have a better solution to export your FACEBOOK friends email addresses to GMAIL or YAHOO. You can export all email address within 2mins :) Isn't this a great news? Then let's go ahead and start to export FACEBOOK friends addresses :)

To export, you should have YAHOO account or else it is not possible to export. If you do not have YAHOO account, then sign up now and get started :)

Now go to address.yahoo.com and click the FACEBOOK icon. A login dialog will pop-up. Just sign-in with your FACEBOOK email-id and password and within seconds, you entire FACEBOOK address book will be available inside your YAHOO account. Once the import is done, click this link to download a CSV file with the email addresses of all your FACEBOOK contacts to your desktop.

Now to import it to GMAIL, go to Contacts-->More Actions-->Import and then choose filename.csv or vcard which you downloaded :) Now all your FACEBOOK contacts will be saved in GMAIL address book.

You can follow the same procedure as mentioned above to import email addresses to other sites too :)

Thank you for reading this post :) Please do comment :)

Make your software PORTABLE using CAMEYO in WINDOWS

We all have installed softwares in WINDOWS but have you ever tried to make it PORTABLE? I guess not. So make changes from now onwards with pretty cool software CAMEYO which makes your software PORTABLE.

Why should YOU USE this software?

You will install WINDOWS once in a while and many times you will end up with VIRUS WINDOWS. Haha!! lol!! So, now you will have to re-install your WINDOWS and all the softwares which you had previously installed :( This is very tedious way :( Moreover, if you install more and more software in your system, your WINDOWS performance will slow down gradually and make hell lot of problems for you. Process of re-installing all the softwares will take more time and it's not an easy task. So to get rid from all these problems, here is the solution THE CAMEYO :) :)

Here is the steps to go ahead and create your own PORTABLE SOFTWARES.

Download CAMEYO software from here.

Install CAMEYO software.

Now open CAMEYO software and you will see the main interface as shown below.

Now click on Capture Installation and it will start Taking initial system snapshot before installation.

Once the above process is done, it will show a new window asking you toinstall the software you wish to package. At this point, you have to install software on your computer that you wish to make PORTABLE.

After installation of your software, click on INSTALL DONE. This will starttaking post-installation snapshot.

After the completion of above process, it will ask for the path/directory to save PORTABLE software and the name. Enter those fields and click ok :)

That's it. Your PORTABLE SOFTWARE is ready to use it anywhere and on any system. You can even copy your PORTABLE SOFTWARE to USB stick and share it with your friends :)

Thank you for reading this post and please do comment :)

Make sound quality better with PulseAudio equalizer in Ubuntu

Pulseaudio is the audio system which will be used by Ubuntu. You can go to hardware settings tab and select the output type for your system.[choose Surround or digital output] Here, you cannot change the output mode. To change the output mode, we will make use of PulseAudio equalizer.

Newer version of Ubuntu's will have Pulseaudio installed. If it is not installed, then go to terminal and type

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install pulseaudio

To get equalizer, first download pulseaudio equalizer from here.

Download

Now go to Applications->Sound and Video->PulseAudio Equalizer.

Here you can see the snapshot of pulseaudio equalizer :)

You can select the mode of output and save presets :)

Enjoy with better quality sound from now on :)

Thank you for reading this article :)

Change Ubuntu 10.04 Log-in and Log-out sounds

Do you want to change your LOGIN and LOGOUT sounds in Ubuntu? If yes then, you just need to convert your music file to ogg format.

Now write the following command in terminal :)

sudo chmod -777 /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo

Browse to /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo folder and backup the desktop-login.ogg and desktop-logout.ogg. Copy and paste your .ogg format created music files into this folder and rename to desktop-login.ogg and desktop-logout.ogg.

You can follow above steps for all types of Ubuntu Sounds.