Google tests using drones to deliver goods

Google on Thursday said it is testing using drones to deliver items brought online, putting its own spin on similar efforts by internet retail titan Amazon.com.

     Two years of research into what Google referred to as "Project Wing" was capped this month with test flights delivering candy, water, medicine, dog treats and other items to two farmers in Queenland, Australia.

"Self-flying vehicles could open new approaches to moving goods," California-based Google said in a blog post disclosing the project.

"Throughout history, major changes in how to move goods from place to place have led to new opportunities for economic growth and generally made consumers' live easier".

'Project Wing' seems much closer to Google's automated car. This is also a fact that 'Project Wing' and automated car both are developed in same lab 'Google X lab'.

Online business  titan 'Amazon' sought permission for drone test flights in the U.S.A last month saying it is moving forward on plans for deliveries using unmanned aircraft.

Source: Hindustan Times

Phishing

Phishing is old and evergreen attacking method to steal confidential information like passwords, credit card numbers etc. With this attack, an attacker creates a page that look likes original page and make us to believe it is genuine. If we cannot identify the difference, we may enter confidential information.

How to protect ourselves from these types of attacks.

Which website is this?

A fake page which looks like Gmail page

Everybody is very much familiar with this design. Whenever one sees a page like this, his brain says it’s a Gmail page because of more belief in visual stuff.

Now let’s have a look to Original Gmail page

Original Gmail page

Observe these two images very carefully. So what are the differences?

• Protocol: https in the original page while the protocol is missing in the fake page.
• SSL (lock symbol):  SSL is present in the original page which is not there in the fake page.
• Correct Domain Name: In address bar i.e. account.google.com in the original page where in fake page have some other domain.

Hope you will not enter your confidential information in a fake page from now. 

How to make a bootable USB Stick/pendrive

Guys Here is discussed to make a Bootable USB Pendrive. To boot from a pendrive is much more convenient than that of CD/DVD as it is a faster process. It is difficult to take care of CD/DVD because with regular use scratches are introduced and this reduce reading speed and also take to long time to boot. You can use a bootable pendrive to change/recover the operating system.

There are a lot of tools available in the Market but these can be hazardous as they left your USB pendrive with permanent memory loss i.e. you might not be able to use your pendrive for data storage further.

Here is demonstrated Power ISO. Don't worry this is a trusted application and wont cause any memory loss to your pendrive. You can download it here. So here we go.

     Step 1. Plug-in your Pendrive.

     Step 2. Open PowerISO in Run as adminstarator mode.

     Step 3. Goto Tools menu and select Create Bootable USB Drive.

     Step 4. A dialog box will be as in image below.

     Step 5. Here select Image Source File and click Start (Relative tabs are highlighted).

     Step 6. Your USB Pendrive will be ready for use when processing is completed.

Note: It is recommended to select a .iso file.

Social Engineering

This is a technique where we use brain rather than tools. We obtain critical information from victim’s ignorance or lack of knowledge.

How a password should be??

A password must be a combination of small letters, block letters, numbers and symbols with a minimum of 12 characters. Most of the time one set his passwords related to his personal life like flowers, actor/actress names, mobile numbers, date of birth, pet name, mother’s or father’s name, lover’s name or common words like 123456 etc.

If your passwords are in this category then it’s very easy to compromise your account within a short time interval. So never set password related to your personal life and make sure to categorise your password into five types.

• Confidential Password
• Financial Password
• Useless Password
• Average Password
• Normal Password
• Confidential Password:

Is it required for everyone to know what you are chatting at midnights with your personals??? If your answer is “NO” then set confidential passwords to those specific websites like Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo etc. And don’t use those confidential passwords anywhere else.

Financial Password:

Set a very strong password for websites where you do financial transactions and never use that password anywhere else.

Useless, Normal, Average Password:

Based upon the priority of the site set useless, normal, average passwords.

Wrong is always right:

Never set a correct answer for your recovery questions. Always set a wrong answer for it and don’t forget what you set.

Keyloggers

Keylogger is hacker’s and script kiddies’ favourite tool. Keylogger is a software which records each and every keystroke you enter including mouse clicks. Hardware keyloggers are also available which will be inserted between keyboard and CPU. It hardly takes a minute to install this software/hardware in victim’s system and from next second onwards attacker will get each and every activity going on victim’s computer. What they are chatting, which site they are browsing, victim’s username, passwords what’s not? Each and every activity happening in victim’s system with screenshots will be recorded. This activity will be saved on victim’s system or it can be mailed to attacker’s email.

Let’s see how attackers do this along with protection techniques

Hardware keylogger: This is a thumb size device. It records all the keystrokes you enter from the keyboard then saves it in its memory. Later this data will be analysed. The drawback of this device is that it can’t record mouse clicks, can’t take screenshots and even can’t mail and it requires physical access to the machine.

Software keylogger: This can be installed in victim’s system even if they use updated antiviruses. There are a lot of softwares available in market which make a keylogger undetectable by latest antiviruses.

How to fool a keylogger?

Yes we can fool a keylogger. Keylogger’s job is to record all the key strokes we enter. So to fool a keylogger, enter unnecessary keys along with passwords. Confused?

Say your password is 1234. Now how will you enter it. Enter 1 then any unnecessary character say jksfh then 2 then again "£%mygb then 3 then &^%% then 4 then £fsg$^ then 5. Now remove unnecessary characters.

If it is a Hardware Keylogger use Onscreen Keyboard. To open this go to run and type “osk”.

Shoe Charger

Anand Gangadharan (left) and Mohak Bhalla with their portable shoe mobile phone charger

The two school boys namely Anand Gangadharan and Mohak Bhalla who are just 15-year-old come up with a innovative shoe charger which is capable of charging a mobile phone while walking.

      This is a compact device which works on the principal of Electromagnetic Induction. This prototype work  as an attachment that can fit below a sports shoe. This portable device is named as 'Walkie Mobi Charger' and generates electricity up to 6 volts which is comparatively more than 5 volts plug point that ensures charging phone battery at a faster pace. It is 15% faster than plug-in charger.

   

      Electromagnetic Induction occurs as a result of compression and relaxation caused by walking, creates pressure on the sponge attached in the middle which produces electricity. Two LEDs, blue and red, indicates the supply of electricity and battery charging respectively.

Source: Hindustan Times

   

Earn Free Recharge with LINE

This offer is available for Android/IOS users. [Validity: 20/08/2014 to 18/09/2014][Ended]

What is this offer.

It is FREE TALK TIME 4 offer

For this:

• Make a Group.
• Invite Members to the Group (at least 3 members are needed to join including you).
• After joining the members send a sticker daily in the Group created to earn points.
• When 5 points are collected you will receive a Recharge Link from Line India.

Source: Line India

Speed up your windows operating system.

It happens with most of us that our systems becomes slow and show lagging while opening applications and running various processes. So here is discussed some important things in detail which help your PC give optimal performance.

1. Remove unnecessary startup objects.

2. Defragment hard disk.

3. Scan hard disk for errors.

4. Disk clean-up & Remove temporary files.

5. Scan for viruses regularly.

6. Check spyware & adware.

7. Uninstall unnecessary programs.

8. Check for registry errors.

9. Remove unnecessary running processes and services from running.

10. Adjust Virtual Effects.

11. Enable Hibernate.

12. Increase Virtual Memory.

Remove unnecessary start up objects:

• Open run dialog box with windows key + r and type msconfig and press enter. Goto Startup tab. Here you will find a list of startup objects. Keep only necessary objects and disable rest of them.
• Else press ctrl + shift + esc. It will open task manager and here also you can goto startup tab.

Defragment hard disk:

• Our hard disk data wont saved sequentially. So we need to defragment it to decrease the seek time of your hard disk.
• Goto: My Computer-> Select drive-> Right click-> Properties-> Tools
• Chose Defragment or Optimise (You will see any one of the two)
• Select drive and chose Defragment or Optmise

Scanning hard disk for errors:

• This action recovers bad sectors and fixes file system errors.
• Goto: My Computer-> Select drive-> Right click-> properties-> Tools-> Check.

Disk Cleanup & Remove temp files:

• We perform this step for removing temporary files.
• Goto RUN type %temp% and press enter then delete all files,
• Goto RUN and type Prefetch and press enter then delete all files.
• Instead of the above steps you can also use Disk Cleanup and for that Goto: My Computer-> Select drive-> Right click-> Properties-> General-> Disk Cleanup

Scan for viruses regularly:

• Update your antivirus and scan for Viruses and Trojans regularly.

Check spyware &Adware:

• Download antispyware and adware tools and check your system. Using these softwares could slow down your internet speed.

Uninstall unnecessary programs:

• It’s better to uninstall softwares which you don’t use any more.

Check for registry errors:

• Download Registry error checking tools like tune-up utilities and scan for registry errors.

Remove unnecessary running processes and services from running:

• Use Process Explorer or task manager and remove processes which are not using.

Adjust Visual Effects:

• Right click on My Computer-> Properties-> Advances System Settings-> Advanced-> Setting tab under Performance-> Select Best Performance or Best Appearance as per your requirement.

Enable Hibernate:

• Use Hibernate instead of Shutdown. It is 10 times faster in switching on your system with previous state before you used your PC.
• Goto: Control panel-> Power options-> chose what do power buttons do-> Select Hibernate.

Increase Virtual Memory:

• Virtual memory works like extended RAM. So it helps to increase speed of your applications.
• For this: Right click on My computer-> properties-> Advanced System Settings-> Advanced-> Setting tab under performance-> Advanced-> Change.
• It’s better to set 2-3 times of your RAM size.

How to create a recovery media for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed on DU laptops

Delhi University has given Laptops to the students so that they may use it for their studies. They have installed Ubuntu 12.04 LTS operating system. This OS is far more different from Windows OS. With this Laptop no DVD/CD reader-writer is available. So here is discussed how to create a backup image of present Ubuntu OS to recover the Laptop to factory state. So it starts with creating a backup image (.ios file).

This is how your home screen look like.

Step 1. Goto Dash Home and type Startup Disk Creator and open the application.

Step 2. A dialog box will appear. Here click on OK.

Step 3. It will ask you to choose a location to save the iso file. You can select any location. Let’s select Desktop and click choose.

Step 4. It’s almost done. Wait for a while.

Step 5. The backup file is created as HP_Recovery on the desktop.

Step 6. Now create a Bootable USB Stick with this image (iso file). Use this USB Sick to recover Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. 

How to hide a file behind a image.

This technique is called as Stenography. It involves hiding data behind images so that only the intended recipients can read the message being sent.

There are so many S-tools available to hide data behind images. But here you don't need any tool for this.

We'll use command prompt for this. So here we go:

1. Firstly add the data files to a single .rar file and place a image file in the directory containing the rar file.

2. Press windows key + r.

3. Type cmd and press enter. It will open black box.

4. Select the Disk Drive by writing drive_name: and peress enter. E.g. desktop: or c: or d:. Now type the command copy /b <Image.jpeg> + <File.rar> <New_name.jpeg>. And press enter and its done.

Here the folder Data is firstly added to archive

Secret is the new image created containing Data.rar archive

Note: Don't include < > while running the command. These sign(s) are only enclosing a file_name with it's extension.

Now you would like to know how to excess that hidden file.

What you have to do is only to open that image file with winrar. It will open the rar file hidden behind image file.

For that:

1. Right click on image file containing the hidden rar file.

2. Goto Open with and chose Winrar. And the hidden rar file is opened.

Note: Don't make winrar a default program to open that file. Else it will open the hidden rar file whenever you open it by double clicking on it.