“BlackBerry has assured the Ministry of Home Affairs that the issue of monitoring of the BlackBerry will be sorted out soon…I am sure we will soon be on the same page and our concerns will be addressed,” Special Security (Internal Security) in the MHA Utthan Kumar Bansal told reporters on the sidelines of a function here.

Government has already warned the popular smartphone company that if it does not allow it to monitor emails and SMSes to address security concerns, it will have to close down operations in the country, spelling trouble for over a million BlackBerry users in India.

The government has said the RIM will have to address its security-related issues by allowing monitoring facility in India.

Bansal said the Department of Telecommunication was the nodal authority which makes the policy and it was working to address the issue raised by the MHA.

The MHA has asked the DoT to tell the company in no uncertain terms that its emails and other data services must comply with formats that can be monitored by security and intelligence agencies.

There are reports that China has got a server in that country and the MHA asked the DoT to check whether it is true. Government also wants a BlackBerry server in India but the company has been resisting the move. Once the server is in India, it will be easier to track the messages.

The MHA maintains that the RIM has been addressing security concerns of several other countries, including the United States, where it operates and, therefore, there is no justification to not comply with the same in India.

BlackBerry says the messages are encrypted. The smartphone’s server is based in Canada where the encryption level is very high and extremely difficult to crack. And any message going through a Canada server is encrypted and, therefore, cannot be accessed by intelligence agencies in India.

Senior officials of key security agencies at a recent meeting argued that the continuation of BlackBerry services in the present format poses danger to the country. The meeting was attended by representatives of the MHA, DoT, intelligence agencies and the National Technical Research Organisation (NTRO).

The latest development indicates that security agencies are again finding it difficult to intercept or decipher messages sent through these phones, which use codes with an encryption of 256 bits.

This encryption code first scrambles the emails sent from a BlackBerry device and unscrambles them when the message reaches its target.

In 2008, the Indian government had threatened to block BlackBerry services unless the RIM provided intelligence agencies here access to all data, especially emails, routed through these handsets.

The government had also insisted that the RIM put in place a system that would allow them to intercept data sent through these handsets as it feared that these services could be exploited by terrorists.

After several rounds of talks between the government and the RIM, the telecom department, in late 2008, had announced that the issue had been resolved.

Leading telecom companies in India such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, BSNL and MTNL offer BlackBerry services. [Story Source]

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This post was submitted by Rishi Kumar Maurya.

The iPhone 4 antennagate has seen a lot of drama and finally apple has to come with a solution of giving free bumpers. Bumpers cover the steel rim of the iPhone 4, covering the ‘problem area’ that cause network bar dipping.

InCase snap case for iPhone 4 give the customers a wide range of choice. The InCase snap cases offer a variety of colours in pastel to choose. Right now there are four colours- cyan, white, blue and pink to choose from.

The cases look great and offer great durability as well. So if you are not a bumper fan and want some other option which are really cool, you can go for inCase snap case for iPhone 4

The colours of the cases are paired with motif designs that are nowhere in the market. This really makes your iPhone 4 personal. Choose the colour, select the design of your choice and you have a unique iPhone 4 to show off.

InCase is already a good brand when it comes to offer variety as well as dynamism. The plastic and rubber cases for MacBook and its other variant are available in a number of colours which appear great. They act like a skin to the device and keep them safe from having scratches along with giving them great looks.

[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

Display

Epic 4G sports AMOLED 4” screen. It measured 124.8 mm * 64.6 mm*14.2mm and weights 155 grams. Talking about iPhone 4, the screen of size is 3.5” and measured 115.2mm*58.6mm*49.3mm and weighs only 137 grams.

At keyboard aspect, Epic has a QWERTY keyboard and iPhone 4 does not include a QWERTY keyboard.

Processor and Operating system

Epic will run Google’s Android 2.1 operating system which can be upgraded to Android 2.2 or Froyo in the future and it is equipped with 1 GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird application processor with a six-axis accelerometer which is known for its speed.

And iPhone 4 comes with iOS 4 and is equipped with 1 GHz processor. But it could be able to offer you a lot more apps, sure enough, so many you won’t know what to do with them. The Epic is not going to offer you as many apps as the iPhone 4.

Connectivity

The Epic get access to 3G and 4G speeds, which should get you download speeds somewhere between 3-6Mbps (according to the release — your real world results will differ on a constant basis). It also be turned into a 3G/4G mobile hotspot, which will allow you to connect up to 5 WiFi-enabled devices at once. As for iPhone 4 finally support 802.11n.

Multimedia

Epic 4G comes with a dual camera with a 5MP and Flash (front facing:VGA) and the ability to record video at 720p. Samsung has its own version of DLNA sharing, called AllShare. You’ll be able to share your music, movies, and pictures on all DLNA-supported devices in your home, wirelessly. And one of the better reasons to do that is Samsung’s new Media Hub, which makes the Epic 4G the first and only 4G-enabled device that is fully optimized to serve HD-like entertainment on a handset’s screen. But most of movies are DVD format.

iPhone 4 also has the dual camera settings, the primary in the rear is 5MP with Flash and the front facing is a VGA for video chatting. iPhone 4G lets you record and edit incredible HD video and the popular tap to focus feature now works while recording video. You can use the iPhone 4G‘s LED flash for both still photography and video recording. The new iMovie? app for iPhone lets you combine movie clips, add dynamic transitions and themes and include photos and music, and users can buy it for just $4.99 through the App Store right on their phone.

Epic 4G comes with a 1500mAH battery (Stand by time and talk time has not been published.) and iPhone 4 incorporates a 1200mAH battery (its supports seven hours of talk time on 3G networks, up to 10 hours of web browsing on Wi-Fi and up to six hours on 3G, and up to 10 hours of video playback and up to 40 hours of audio playback).

Unfortunately, the Samsung Epic does not have photo and video geotagging like the iPhone 4. I would stick with the iPhone 4 since it does offer more of the latest specs. There is no info on when the Samsung Epic is going to become available or how much it is going to set. So, we have to wait and hope it could be published as soon as quickly!
[Story Source]

Finally India goes 3G!!

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This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

London, July 13 (ANI): The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) has unveiled a prototype of its first unmanned combat aircraft, also called ‘Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle’ (UCAV).

According to the BBC, the Taranis is known to be a conceptual design of a quite wide range of the striker planes, which have been taking upon nearly 3 million hours of the human being to produce as the final product.

Defence Minister Gerald Howarth recently said describing it as a truly trailblazing project till now.

“It features the best of our nation’s advanced design and technology,” he said.

The aircraft is due to begin flight trials early next year.

Named after the Celtic god of thunder, Taranis is the first step in the development of unmanned strike aircraft, capable of penetrating enemy territory.

Unmanned aircraft carrying weapons are already used in service, such as the MQ-1 Predator which carries Hellfire missiles, although these are only suitable for use where the airspace is under allied control.

“This is the next generation of combat aircraft and flight trials will begin next year, it’s a technology demonstrator that could be used as a testbed which may form further potential solutions to the RAF,” Squadron Leader Bruno Wood, media ops officer for 83 Expeditionary Air Group said.

According to a report, the issue of “writing the pilot” out of the aircraft equation has long been a controversial topic, more so since the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) went into active service.

It is accepted that the most vulnerable part of a plane is the pilot. While the airframe is capable of pulling multiple Gs – the gravitational force exerted on a body when standing on the Earth at sea level – the maxim safe level for a pilot, even when wearing a protective G-suit, is 8 or 9, above which they will lose consciousness.

Many anti-aircraft missiles have also been designed to explode near the cockpit, showering the vulnerable pilot with high-speed shrapnel that can cause death or injury.

Peter Felstead, the editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly said that the development of UAVs paralleled the development of the first manned aircraft during World War I.

“This is the first step for the UK. This isn’t an aircraft that will go into service, it’s a tech demo, but it will prove technologies, demonstrate capabilities and inform the direction we are going in,” he said.

However, Felstead stressed that while we would see greater development of ground attack UAVs, there would always be the need for a pilot with a “Mk I eyeball” when it came to air-to-air combat.

“If you have, say, an airliner that is reportedly hijacked, you are going to need that human factor to evaluate just what’s going on with the plane, what he can see through the windows and everything else. That’s not something, for now, that can be done remotely,” he added.

Meanwhile, the MoD also stressed that all weaponised UAVs were under human control. (ANI)
[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

on Tuesday asked his readers and listeners to push the term ‘Google spies’ to the top of the trends charts in an effort to fight back against the company’s censorship of his films on YouTube.

Within a short time the term had hit the top spot with the “volcanic” status. Soon as the term was pushed up the charts, bloggers and journalists picked up the story and begin to document it directing millions of people towards the story.
However, within half an hour the term had been completely removed by Google and resulted in no news story links. These actions replicated Google’s activity in the days beforehand when it removed other terms such as ‘The Obama Deception’, ‘Infowars’, ‘Fall of the Republic’ and ‘Google Censorship’ all of which had become some of the most searched topics on the internet.
Google requests its users to search the term ‘Google Launches Cover Up’ to make this article one of the most widely read on the internet.

In the week that the Washington Post published it’s ‘Top Secret America’ piece, a two year study that reveals how the intelligence community has explosively expanded, there is an increased focus on the spook networks in the US and the implications for that has for liberty.
[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by Harshit Agrawal.

MIT researchers have developed technology that they say not only will make the Internet 100 to 1,000 times faster, but also could make high-speed data access a lot cheaper.

The trick to such dramatic performance gains lies within the routers that direct traffic on the Internet, according to Vincent Chan , an electrical engineering and computer science professor at MIT, who led the research team.

Chan told Computer world that replacing electrical signals inside the routers with faster optical signals would make the Internet 100 times — if not 1,000 times — faster, while also reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

What would the Internet be like if it ran that much faster? Today, a user who has a hard time downloading a 100MB file would be able to easily send a 10GB file, according to Chan.

With increasingly powerful computer processors and bandwidth-hungry applications, the Internet will reach a “choke point” within three to five years, Chan said.

Today’s routers have trouble dealing with incoming fiber-optic signals, so those signals are converted into electrical signals that can be stored in memory until they can be processed, according to MIT’s report . The electrical signals are subsequently converted back to optical signals so they can be sent back out.

That process eats up time and energy, so Chan and his team developed technology they call flow switching that would eliminate the need for such conversions.

A speedier Internet would be a huge accomplishment, said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group. “Right now, the network is the bottleneck for hosted computing . This change could transform the industry as we know it,” he said. “We are going to need a faster Internet. We need it now.”

However, analysts noted that it would be expensive to replace current routers with the new technology.

This version of this story was originally published in Computerworld’s print edition.
[Story Source]

This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

The German company said the malware is a Trojan worm dubbed Stuxnet that spreads via infected USB thumb drives, exploiting a yet-to-be-patched vulnerability in Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system.

“Just viewing the contents of the USB stick can activate the Trojan,” said Siemens spokesman Alexander Machowetz. “Siemens recommends avoiding the use of a USB stick.”

Siemens first learned of the problem on 14 July, he said.

Stuxnet is among the first to surface that attacks software programs that run Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, systems. Such systems are used to monitor automated plants — from food and chemical facilities to power generators.

Once the worm infects a Siemens system, it quickly sets up communications with a remote server computer that can be used to steal proprietary corporate data or take control of the SCADA system, said Randy Abrams, a researcher with ESET, a privately held security firm that has studied Stuxnet.

Analysts said attackers may have chosen to spread the malicious software via a thumb drive because many SCADA systems are not connected to the Internet, but do sport USB ports.

Siemens said it has so far only identified one customer whose SCADA systems were infected by the virus, a customer in Germany that Machowetz declined to identify by name.

Security experts have long theorized that hackers — including ones working for nation states or terrorist groups — would one day develop viruses that target SCADA systems. They could be used to steal sensitive data or sabotage major infrastructure facilities by instructing software to attack those plants.

“It could be very valuable to a nation-state for war-like espionage. It could be very valuable to terrorist organizations,” said ESET’s Abrams.

Microsoft spokesman Jerry Bryant said he did not know when the company would update its Windows software to address the vulnerability that Stuxnet exploits.

Now that the exploit has been publicized, other hackers will quickly rush to develop malicious software programs that take advantage of the same vulnerability, said McAfee Inc spokesman Joris Evers.

Siemens, Microsoft and security experts who have studied the Stuxnet worm have yet to determine who created the malicious software. REUTERS
[Story Source]

This post was submitted by virendra kumar yadav.

Why IPv6? Simply put, the world is running out of available IP addresses under the IPv4 protocol. According to reports released just last week, it’s estimated that there’s less than one year before the full IPv4 address table—32-bit numbers used to identify network-connected devices—is completely exhausted. That’s 4.3 billion IP addresses, a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the number of possible addresses provided by IPv6: two to the power of 128.
[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by komal.

The first version of Nuance’s free Dragon Dictation app made a minor splash last year with its ability to quickly — and pretty accurately — convert short bursts of speech to text on the iPhone, the idea being that you could bark brief text messages or e-mails without having to tap them out. (It also stirred up privacy concerns that led to changes in how the app worked; more on that in a moment.)

Cool idea, but the first version of the app was lacking a key feature: the ability to send messages from within the app. Instead, you had to copy the dictated text, close Dragon Dictation, fire up the iPhone’s messaging app, and paste the words into the input field — and by that point, you might as well have typed out your message.[Story Source]

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This post was submitted by superblogger.