Google launches Start Searching India campaign

Google today introduced its Start Searching India campaign here to help internet users get the most out of the web with its search tool. 

"Internet is no longer restricted to the domain of working professionals and is fast emerging as a life enriching tool catering to the varied needs of the people from all walks of life," Google India's director of marketing, Sandeep Menon said on the occasion. 

The objective of the campaign is to help Indian users save time, by showing how they can get instant and to-the-point answers to their most common queries, he said. 

Presenting the top search trends that the people of Bhopal search for most using using Google Trends, he said that e-governance is doing well in Madhya Pradesh with mponline.com and vyapam.com figuring in the top five web searches. 

He said that Google's mission has always been to make search into an ideal assistant: a search engine that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you need. 

Also, recent improvements to Google Search have drawn the company closer to that vision, he added.

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How to customise Windows 8 manually

Like earlier versions of the operating system, Windows 8 can check to see if software updates for your computer are available from Microsoft— and then install them for you so you don't have to remember to do it yourself. Security updates and other software patches deemed important or critical are typically installed automatically when Microsoft pushes them out. (The company often releases the updates on the second Tuesday of each month, but it can happen as needed). 

But even if you have the automatic updates option turned on, not all the software Microsoft sends you will install itself. Certain types of updates, including fresh versions of programs that have new user agreements or terms of service statements, require your attention because you are asked to read the legal fine print — or at least click the Agree button — before you can install the software. 
Some updates, like feature enhancements or updated device drivers, are considered optional and not critical to a program's ability to function. When an optional update is ready, you usually get an alert that it is available if you want it, and Windows leaves it to you to do the installation yourself.

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Step-by-step guide to protecting Facebook privacy

With the latest addition of the Graph Search to social networking site Facebook, it has become time consuming and cumbersome to customize settings for every post and each photograph. 

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, a few quick clicks here and there can help restore a profile to being less vulnerable to public access, including photographs and posts. 

To limit the way people in the friends list access the content one can simply select Friends under the 'Who can see my stuff' section in the privacy settings and further put them in the Restricted category so as to allow them access to only those posts which are made public. 

Furthermore, to save oneself from being seen in those old embarrassing photographs, a user can simply click on the Activity Log, then 'photos of me' and on the top of the page one can customize 'On Timeline' visible settings which allows for bulk-untag. 

To review the customized settings, a user can choose to view their own profile as a particular person or to public by clicking on View As in the Activity Log section, the report added.

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Indian develops tech to make software unhackable

A unique system has been designed by researchers that will encrypt software in order to make it impervious to reverse-engineering.

UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahaiand a team of researchers have developed a system which will only allow someone to use a programme as intended, while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it.

This is known as software obfuscation in computer science and it is the first time it has been accomplished.

Sahai said that the new system puts up an iron wall making it impossible for an adversary to reverse-engineer the software without solving mathematical problems that take hundreds of years to work out on today's computers.

The researchers said their mathematical obfuscation mechanism can be used to protectintellectual property by preventing the theft of new algorithms and by hiding the vulnerability a software patch is designed to repair when the patch is distributed.

The key to this successful obfuscation mechanism is a new type of multilinear jigsaw puzzle. This new technique has paved the way for another breakthrough called functional encryption.

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UK top target for cyberterrorism: Report

British lawmakers have claimed that the country has become the top target of online crooks, paedophiles and terrorists with increasing threat of cyberterrorism. 

According to The Mirror, a probe by MPs found banks did not even bother to report everydayonline thefts. 

Labour MP Keith Vaz, head of the Home Affairs Select Committee, blasted the government for being far too complacent. 

MPs have claimed that most of the attacks -- including identity theft, credit card fraud, industrial espionage and child exploitation -- were being committed from Eastern Europe. 

The report also found out that 12.5 million people had fallen prey to online crimes in the past year at a cost of 1.8 billion pounds.

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Google, others working on ‘mind-reading apps‘

In Hollywood, there are umbrella holders. Outside corner offices, there are people who know exactly how much cream to pour in the boss' coffee. In British castles, royals have their valets.

And then there is Silicon Valley, where mind-reading personal assistants come in the form of a cellphone app.

A range of start-ups and big companies likeGoogle are working on what is known as predictive search - new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it. Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting or where it was.

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your email, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require people to enter a search query. Your context - location, time of day and digital activity - is the query, say the engineers who build these services.

Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, Google Now is an important part of Google's Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.

Google Now is "kind of blowing my mind right now," said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. "I mean, I'm pretty jaded, right? I've seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven't. Google Now is doing that."

But for some people, predictive search - also in services like Cue, reQall, Donna, Tempo AI, MindMeld and Evernote - is the latest intrusion into our lives, another disruption pinging and buzzing in our pockets, mining our digital lives for personal information and straddling the line between helpful and creepy.

"To the question of creepiness, the answer is it depends who you ask," said Andrea M. Matwyshyn, an assistant professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the legal implications of technology. "What works for a group of 30-something engineers in Silicon Valley may not be representative of the way that 60-year-old executives in New York tend to use their phones."

Many software programmers have dreamed of building a tool like this for years. The technology is emerging now because people are desperate for ways to deal with the inundation of digital information and because much of it is stored in the cloud where apps can easily access it.

"We can't go on with eight meetings and 200 emails a day," said N. Rao Machiraju, co-founder and chief executive of reQall, which sells its technology to other companies to make their own personal assistant apps. "We have a technology that isn't waiting for you to ask it a question but is anticipating what you need and when is the best time to deliver that."

The services guess what you want to know based on the digital breadcrumbs you leave, like calendar entries, emails, social network activity and the places you take your phone. Many use outside services for things like coupons, news and traffic.

Google Now, which came to some Android phones a year ago and iPhones in April, tells you when it is time to leave for a dinner reservation. That is because it noticed an OpenTable email in your Gmail inbox, knows your location from your phone's GPS and checked Google Maps for traffic conditions.

A couple days before you travel, it will show you weather in your destination, and when you arrive, currency exchange information and the time back home. Ask aloud that Google Now remind you to pick up milk next time you step in a grocery store, and an alert will appear when you are at Safeway.

Successful predictive search, though, is as complicated as real life. If you are in London on business, which an app would know from the events on your calendar, you probably want a PDF related to work. But if you are there on vacation, you might want directions to Big Ben.

"By the time you search, something's already failed," said Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, a note-taking app that actively shows previous entries related to current circumstances.

Many of the apps use machine learning to get to know people over time.

ReQall's service, for instance, can block calls from interrupting you during meetings. But one day, the young son of reQall's co-founder, Sunil Vemuri, was sick at home with Vemuri's father, who was urgently trying to reach him with a medication question. Because he called more than once and reQall knew the two had the same last name and spoke often, the app interrupted the meeting.

The goal is to move beyond logistical help to sending you anything you might need to know. Google recently added book, movie and music recommendations, for instance.

"You can just imagine several years down the road, if that personal assistant was an expert in every field known to humankind," said Amit Singhal, Google's senior vice president for search.

Ads are not far off.

"The better we can provide information, even without you asking for it, the better we can provide commercial information people are excited to be promoting to you," Larry Page, Google's chief executive, told analysts in April.

Some skeptics say pushing ads and other unwanted information could be annoying or even a violation of privacy. If you watch a movie trailer on YouTube, for instance, Google Now might send local showtimes when the film arrives in your city. But what if you hated the trailer?

"People could find the interface disruptive rather than helpful," Matwyshyn said.

Baris Gultekin, a product management director at Google who helped invent Now, said the company is aware of that risk and is "very conservative" with what it shows people.

Daniel Gross, co-founder of another personal assistant app, Cue, said that is why it has started with alerts in which a person has signaled interest, by creating a calendar entry for example.

"It's a really tricky problem, because on one hand you really want to give someone the best experience you possibly can," he said. "And on the other hand, you don't want someone to have this uncanny valley type of moment: 'Oh my gosh, this feels too good.'"

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Google Glass to help students learn filmmaking

Beauty is in the eye of theGoogle Glass wearer.

At least that's what the internet search giant hopes a handful of young filmmakers will discover. Google is enlisting film students from five colleges to help it explore how its wearable computing device can be used to make movies. 

The $1,500 Google Glass headset is already being used by 10,000 so-called explorers. The device resembles a pair of glasses and allows users to take pictures, shoot video, search the internet, compose email and check schedules. 

As part of its experiment, Google will lend each school three pairs of Google Glass. 

The participating schools are American Film Institute, California Institute of the Arts, Rhode Island School of Design, University of California, Los Angeles, and University of Southern California. 

Google Inc. says it plans to share an update of how students are progressing sometime after school resumes in the fall. 

The company says the schools will explore how to use Glass fordocumentary filmmaking, character development, location-based storytelling and "things we haven't yet considered." 

Norman Hollyn, a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, said students will be encouraged to use Glass to tell stories incorporating the first-person point of view. 

He said one model that students might follow is one explored in the film, "Timecode," by director Mike Figgis, which uses four cameras to capture four different people simultaneously. Students will also be encouraged to try to use Glass's data overlays as a way of revealing elements of a story. At least two short films are expected to be done by the beginning of next year, he said. 

"We're kind of looking at it as, 'How can we push this to tell stories rather than just sit on a cool Disneyland ride and broadcast that out to people?'" he said. "This excited us in a lot of ways." 

Glass users can shoot video in "720p" high-definition quality by issuing voice or touch commands.

Google has already shown off a few examples of how people are using the device, such as tennis pro Bethanie Mattek-Sands preparing for Wimbledon and physics teacher Andrew Vanden Heuvel taking his class on a virtual field trip to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

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Hackers take down New Zealand PM‘s website

The hacktivist group Anonymous on Tuesday briefly crashed New Zealand Prime Minister John Key's website in protest at plans to allow the country's intelligence agency to spy on local residents. 

A group identifying itself as Anonymous NZ posted a clip on YouTube saying it had attacked Key's website www.johnkey.co.nz and 12 others linked to the ruling National Party to show its opposition to "a despicable piece of legislation." 

"John Key make no mistake the majority of New Zealanders oppose this bill," it said. 

"Due to your own arrogance and your unwillingness to listen to the people we have decided to take direct action." 

Key's website was operating normally by Tuesday afternoon and the prime minister condemned the hackers. 

"(It's) pretty juvenile behaviour in my view," he told Radio New Zealand. "These people are obviously doing something that's both illegal and inappropriate. They're trying to make their own political point, but their point's wrong." 

New Zealand's intelligence service, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), is currently barred from spying on New Zealand citizens or residents. 

Key argues the restriction should be removed so it can cooperate more closely with agencies such as the police and military in an increasingly complex cybersecurity environment. 

The bill is currently before parliament and expected to pass by a single vote, although groups ranging from the Law Society to internet giants Facebook and Google have raised concerns about the proposal. 

One of the strongest opponents is Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, who received an apology from Key last year after revelations the GCSB illegally spied on him before armed police arrested him for alleged online piracy. 

The Auckland-based German national took part in a street protest against the bill at the weekend but urged hackers not to attack the government, saying it was counterproductive. 

"Dear Anonymous NZ, hacking National Party websites is just giving John Key a new excuse to pass the #GCSB bill (cybercrime). Please stop it," he tweeted.

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Google gets 100m takedown requests since Jan

Search engine giant Google has reportedly received 100 million 'takedown' requests since January 2013 for pages infringing the copyright laws. 

According to the BBC, copyright holders send millions of 'takedown' requests to Google every week in an attempt to make pirated material harder to access online. 

A technology analyst at Midia Consulting, Mark Mulligan said that because file sharing has become very decentralized, there is no central sever to shut down the entire links and as soon as one page is removed, another comes up. 

As the takedown requests for this year have nearly doubled up than 2012, editor of a news site Torrentfreak.com, Ernesto van der Sar said that the increase in requests is more about publishers putting pressure on Google to do more to tackle piracy because if people want to pirate they can always find a way to do so. 

The report said that a digital content protection specialist, Degban, makes requests for about 3,00,000 link removals per week on behalf of clients and has asked for nearly 31 million web pages, or URLs, to be removed from Google's results so far. 

It was found that more than half of Degban's URL requests were made on behalf of Froytal Services, a pornography producer. 

Other major copyright owners who file the requests include the BPI (British Recorded Music Industry) and its member companies, the Recording Industry Association of America, and various film studios, such as Warner Brothers. 

BPI spokesman said that the organization removes around one million links every week to music hosted on the internet without the artist's knowledge or permission, the report added.

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Twitter launches ‘tweet abuse‘ feature following protests

Microblogging site Twitter has reportedly launched a feature that allows users to report about 'tweet abuse' following the recent incident in which a feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez campaigning for a woman to replace Charles Darwin on the new 10 pound note was faced with tweet threats of rape and murder. 

According to The Guardian, Twitter in its blog titled 'We Hear You' has reportedly claimed that it is aware of the way certain people misuse the platform for sending abusive tweets to other users and the site is in the process of exploring easier ways to report abuse. 

The site has therefore updated its iPhone app and mobile version to allow reporting of individual tweets, which will be further expanded to the Android and desktop versions soon. 

Twitter's director of trust and safety Del Harvey said that majority of the 400 million tweets sent every day are positive, and embedded into the fabric of traditional and digital media yet the site is not blind to the reality that there will always be people using Twitter in ways that are abusive and may harm others. 

Harvey further said that feedback from users; advocacy groups and government officials always plays an important role in the development of their service to protect individual rights. 

Lawmakers and police officers have equally called in for Twitter to improve reporting tools to deal with abuse, as well as doing more to deter and block unacceptable behaviour, the report added.

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MEA India becomes top app on Apple‘s App Store

In less than 24 hours after its launch, MEA India app has topped the charts ofApple's App Store. 

The application, launched by the Ministry of External Affairs, was leading in the free category of the App Store. If you have an android or iOSplatforms phone, then you can track your passport application with its help. 

In the next couple of months, people will be able to even apply for passport through this app which is available for free. 

For the first time in the world, a country's foreign ministry has been able to integrate and consolidate its entire digital presence in one's hand, thanks to 'MEAIndia' app. 

The MEA envisages the application be a "one-stop shop" for you. From getting updates from all the 124 Indian missions in the world, to getting information for consular access in case you are abroad, to booking yourself for the Kailash Manasarovar Yatra, everything is now available on your fingertips. 

The MEA is the first government department to have a mobile app for smartphone users. 

It will provide details of all citizen-centric services of the MEA like passport, visa details for those travelling to India and Haj related details among others. 

Besides providing a vast information on India's foreign policies and activities, one can even take part in quiz and win Rs 1000 e-vouchers for buying books.

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How mobile phones are making your bicycle ‘smart‘

It has happened to many a bicyclist: the car beside you suddenly cuts into your path or passes close enough for you to feel the heat of its exhaust on your leg. 
A big part of avoiding those close calls is being noticed, but for years bicyclists' only defences were bright clothing, battery-powered incandescent bulbs and the cheery ching-ching of a traditional bicycle bell. 
Now that's changing. Thanks to improved LED lights, microchips and smartphone technology,bicycles can have loud horns, brake lights, turn signals and all manner of lighting. 
You can spend a few hundred dollars on a bike headlight alone these days. At just under $300, the Taz 1200 from Light and Motion in Monterey, Calif., is said to put out one-third more light than the average car headlight and is good for riding on roads and on dark trails.
But for the average street biker there are more affordable options. 
Virtually all of today's LED headlights and taillights for bikes have static and multiple flashing modes activated with the push of a button. Add to that a blue flashing light from BikeBrightz Ltd. in Toledo, Ohio and the guy pedaling home after work in the dark could be mistaken for a squad car. Strap the light bar anywhere on your frame, and at $15 each, you can vary your colour scheme. It also comes in "mean green," "rocket red," "powerful pink" and "mellow yellow." 
And then there are the lasers. 
In England, Emily Brooke is bringing her Blaze Bike Light to customers in September. The Blaze projects a green image of a bike rider in front of the cyclist, making it possible for nighttime drivers to see the glowing image even if the rider is in a blind spot.

A price has not yet been set. 
The single-speed and customizable fixed-gear bikes, which cost $325 and up, do have drawbacks, though. They don't shine as brightly in low light as they do in total darkness. Their glow fades in time.

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