Google’s Chrome OS Designed for Netbooks, Not Tablets

Google unveiled its cloud based Chrome OS running on a 12.1-inch laptop on Tuesday. The laptop which is dubbed the “Cr-48” has a simple clean design and it sports a full size keyboard, large clickpad, 3G chip, 802.11n dual-band Wi-Fi, webcam, flash storage, and eight hours battery life. While the specifications and design are quite impressive, Google will only be giving out these laptops for testing purposes and pilot programs, as the Chrome OS is still in Beta. Google says the Intel-based systems from Acer and Samsung will ship by mid-2011.

 

Google has this week announced that its much talked about Chrome operating system (OS) won’t be ready for widespread circulation until some time during the first half of 2011—at which point it will be initially offered on Acer and Samsung computers.

                             

                            “We’re not done yet, but Chrome OS is at a stage where we need feedback from real users. Some of the features of Chrome OS require new hardware, but we didn’t want to sell pre-beta computers,” outlined Linus Upson, vice president of Engineering, in an official blog post.

                              

                            “Instead we’re launching a pilot program where we will give test notebooks to qualified users, developers, schools and businesses,” he added. “We’re starting with the U.S. and will expand to other countries once we get the necessary certifications.”

                                                             

                            Google Chrome OS is the search engine’s ambitious move to upend the traditional PC model cultivated by Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac computers for the last few decades.Chrome OS is the base platform for the Chrome Web browser, which has more than 120 million users around the world.

                              Google hopes these users will run Web applications from its new Web store, which include 500 apps from the likes of Amazon, Sports Illustrated and the New York Times at launch today.

                              The Google engineers added that “simply by logging in, all of your apps, bookmarks and other browser settings are there. Setting up a new machine takes less than a minute. And even at this early stage, we feel there is no consumer or business operating system that is more secure.”

                              The BBC reported that Google had delayed its own branded laptop, but company sources said that the firm could release a model with Google branding in due course.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested in London

The founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was reportedly arrested in the U.K. on Tuesday after surrendering to London’s Metropolitan Police in connection with charges related to alleged sex crimes in Sweden.           

A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: ‘Officers from the Metropolitan Police Extradition Unit have this morning arrested Julian Assange on behalf of the Swedish authorities on suspicion of rape.

‘Julian Assange, 39, was arrested on a European Arrest Warrant by appointment at a London police station at 9.30am.

‘He is accused by the Swedish authorities of one count of unlawful coercion, two counts of sexual molestation and one count of rape, all alleged to have been committed in August 2010.

‘Assange is due to appear at City of Westminster Magistrates’ Court today.’

              The 39-year-old Australian denies allegations he sexually assaulted two women in Sweden, BBC reported.

Assange’s lawyer, Mark Stephens, has criticised the Swedish prosecutors, saying Assange had been offering to meet them since August.

Facebook Profile in a new look

Facebook launched a new profile page layout Sunday night that emphasizes the most important parts of your life, including your biographic information, photos, education, work experience, and important relationships. The new profile layout was announced during 60 Minutes as part of an interview with company CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

• Browse over to this page.
• Hit the green button at the top right.
• Revel in the latest redesign of your profile page.

                     Instead of listing biographical information under the profile picture on the left, the new design places the information at the top of the page. A row of recently tagged photographs will appear below a brief bio.

                    The company said users will be able to determine who can and cannot see profile page photos. People who are not allowed to see a user’s tagged photos will see photos from the members profile picture album instead. People who are not allowed to see either tagged photos or profile picture album will not see any photos at the top of a user’s profile page.

                    The new Facebook profile design isn’t immediately available. The company is planning to roll it out gradually, with the goal of reaching all of the site’s users by early next year.

YouTube introduced Past Ad skip feature

YouTube has launched a new format that lets people bypass ads or pick which ones they are willing to view.Google-owned YouTube added to videos on Thursday an ad-skipping button that has to be pressed within the first five seconds to be effective. The advertiser will choose whether to offer the option.

                             YouTube said the so-called “view-through” rates were “encouraging,” with rates between 20 to 70 percent. Why do this? Consumers will watch ads that are relevant to them, skipping the others – benefiting viewers and advertisers both, YouTube said.

                             “Thus far, we’ve seen about a 40 percent view-through rate and since we only pay when potential customers actually watch a video, we have more control over our budget,” said Lee Topar, director of online marketing for GoPro, in a statement to Google’s Inside AdWords blog.                             

                            The new ad format has been launched in the U.S. and Canada and is being tested in the U.K., according to YouTube. The company plans to launch it in other countries as well.

Change your Facebook profile picture to change the world

Cartoon pictures for Facebook profile, choose a cartoon character for you. Though people are fascinated by it, in my view it will not create awareness as it is woven around cartoon characters with no resemblance with the issue at hand- children’s rights.I’ve already changed my picture to my favourite Sasuke as you can see below:-

                             The proliferation of cartoon pictures for Facebook profile had indeed hit the viral stage and now we can assume that about 30% – 40% at most of the whole 500 million users of Facebook had participated in the so called campaign for the promotion of child rights.

                               The fever will continue till December 7, according to Facebook. Interestingly, the fad started in mid-November.

                               It first surfaced in Greece and Cyprus. Then it spread like wild fire among the internet community. A trend-tracking website Know Your Meme has confirmed this. Since then the users have been catching up with the campaign. A notice on Facebook read: “NewGame: Change your profile picture to your favorite cartoon from when you were a kid. The goal of this game is not to see a human picture on Facebook, but an invasion of childhood memories until Monday. PLAY AND PASS ALONG!”

Google unveiling Chrome OS Netbook on Dec. 7 ,Tuesday.

Google is unveiling it’s long-awaited Chrome OS this Dec. 7th, Tuesday in a Chrome event.It is expected that it where it will likely demonstrate a netbook based on its long-awaited Chrome Operating System and has also heard a similar December 7th launch date of the Chrome Web Store.. The Atom-powered laptop isn’t going to be a mass market device — there will only be around 65,000 units available to Google’s closest “friends and family” — and that the Cloud-based OS is still very much in a beta, non-consumer-friendly state.

                              Google’s Chrome OS smartbook will likely be based on an ARM mobile processor. Chrome OS is a web-focused operating system designed for netbooks, but Google has previously mentioned the possibility of bringing it to other device types like smartbooks and tablets.Google won’t be selling the device through stores, so it’s likely going to be something you purchase online, like the Nexus One.

                                Google released Chrome OS to open source in November 2009 with the stated goal of getting Chrome OS machines from partners  such as Acer, ASUS, HP, Lenovo and Toshiba to consumers in time for the holiday shopping season.Google has clearly been testing Chrome OS netbooks in house, which is what company engineers will probably show off at an event in San Francisco Tuesday.

                                Expect a mass consumer launch for 2011, and the market reaction should be interesting to watch. The questions on peoples’ minds include: when can the public get them, and will Chrome OS machines be relegated to niche product status thanks to tablets?

Top Websites are sniffing your Privacy

Researchers at University of California, San Diego have discovered that 485 of the 50,000 most popular Websites in the world are exploiting a flaw that lets them read your browser’s Web history.  The offending sites include YouPorn.com, Gamesfreak.com, Newsmax.com, and TwinCities.com, according to the researchers.

                                    “Many of these websites seem to try to obfuscate what they are doing,” UC San Diego researchers wrote in the paper, “An Empirical Study of Privacy-Violating Information Flows in JavaScript Web Applications.”

                                   “We found that several popular sites – including an Alexa global top-100 site – make use of history sniffing to exfiltrate information about users’ browsing history, and, in some cases, do so in an obfuscated manner to avoid easy detection,” the report states. “While researchers have known about the possibility of such attacks, hitherto it was not known how prevalent they are in real, popular websites.”

                                       Called history sniffing, the combination of JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) properties enables the sites to figure out where you’ve been on the Web. The researchers’ findings are published in a new study entitled “An Empirical Study of Privacy-Violating Information Flows in JavaScript Web Applications.”

                                       The study also detected code on sites maintained by Microsoft, YouTube, Yahoo and About.com that perform what the scientists called “behavioral sniffing.” They employ JavaScript that covertly tracks mouse movements on a page to detect what a user does after visiting it.

                                       Chrome and Safari, researchers said, are not vulnerable to history hijacking and that the most recent version of Firefox has closed loopholes. Internet Explorer users can turn on “private browsing” to stop the flaw from divulging histories.

India CBI’s website hacked by Pakistani Hackers

Hackers from Pakistan hacked in Indian CBI website, http://cbi.nic.in, on Friday, Dec 3, and left a warning note which submitted that, “Indian cyber army should not attack Pakistan websites,” the hackers exclaimed that they are from Pakistan cyber army.

The warning note also carried the information regarding controls provided by the National Informatics Center, an authority which works computer server across the country.

The WikiLeaks revealed that  India is afraid of Pakistan and this incident supported that statement. It happen to be an embarrassing occurrence on Indian security and prove there is no point in projecting itself to be a IT super power and also evidences India has never thought of using professional help to safe guard the Cyber properties.

Lady GaGa’s Laptop hacked by German Hacker

Just proving that none of us are safe in this technology driven era, celebrity laptops too, find themselves attacked by hackers operating around the world. According to reports circulating in the media, Lady GaGa and Justin Timberlake among several other pop stars from the United States were the latest victims of vice of hacking.

                                   If reports circulating in the media are to be believed, the hackers, identified as one 17-year-old and another 23-year-old boys from Germany, hacked the laptops of several pop artistes including Lady GaGa and Justin Timberlake because they wanted to gain access to unreleased music content, intimate pictures of the celebrities, their financial details and personal mails. Though the media is not sure about which music the German boys could lay their hands upon, it has been reported that one of the laptops revealed pictures of singer Ke$ha in a state of near nudity.

                                 If you are thinking that the German boys used the hacked content to make money for themselves by selling it to various websites, you are thinking wrong. It is being said that the two young hackers from Germany are using the material available in their hands to blackmail the victimized artistes. In fact there have been reports of blackmail calls being made to Ke$ha. The question often arises as to how did they gain access to private computers?

                                 According to reports, the hackers made use of a program called Trojans to break through to the private content of these celebrities. The two boys may be very happy about their priced haul, but will they be able to escape the law for long?

Javascript-How to use?

Javascript is embeded into HTML pages and <script> tag is used to insert a JavaScript into an HTML page.

<html>
<body>
<script type="text/javascript">
document.write("Hello World!");
</script>
</body>
</html>


The document.write command is a standard JavaScript command for writing output to a page.By entering the document.write command between the <script> and </script> tags, the browser will recognize it as a JavaScript command and execute the code line.

Web pages aren’t made of HTML alone, JavaScript provides access to more than just HTML objects. JavaScript also provides access to browser- and platform-specific objects. Browser plug-ins (such as RealPlayer and Adobe Acrobat), the name and version of a particular viewer’s browser, and the current date are all examples of non-HTML objects that you can work with by using JavaScript.