Samsung Galaxy S IV was launched recently by huge pomp and show by Samsung.Mobile communication is taking a transition where innovation is backed by more processing power in terms of speed and better graphics and better display by offering new products and services. Mobile handset makers are delivering the unique selling proposition to the customers to stand out from others.

Samsung has launched it new flagship device which is certainly market leader in terms of processing speed and display and all in all ahead of its competitors Apple and  Htc whose flagship devices are Iphone 5 and Htc One are fighting for the top spot in the market.These companies certainly are setting standards but are they are lacking innovation which was spurred by Apple in the past.They are merely increasing their screen size and processor speed. Is this innovation or giving some bloatware is innovation which offers so called features is a big question to think upon.Indian market consumers are all price tag conscious and believe in value for money buying.The rates these flagship are too high that common people can think of buying.I guess that's why they are called flagships.

Now coming to the specifications of recently launched Samsung Galaxy S IV.

GENERAL	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100
	4G Network	LTE (market dependent)
	SIM	Micro-SIM
	Announced	2013, March
	Status	Available. Released 2013, April

BODY	Dimensions	136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 in)
	Weight	130 g (4.59 oz)

DISPLAY	Type	Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	1080 x 1920 pixels, 5.0 inches (~441 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes
	Protection	Corning Gorilla Glass 3
		- TouchWiz UI

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 64 GB
	Internal	16/32/64 GB storage, 2 GB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Yes
	Speed	HSDPA, 42.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v4.0 with A2DP, EDR, LE
	NFC	Yes
	Infrared port	Yes
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0 (MHL 2), USB On-the-go, USB Host

CAMERA	Primary	13 MP, 4128 x 3096 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, check quality
	Features	Dual Shot, Simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization, HDR
	Video	Yes, 1080p@30fps, dual-video rec., check quality
	Secondary	Yes, 2 MP,1080p@30fps, dual video call

FEATURES	OS	Android OS, v4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
	Chipset	Exynos 5 Octa 5410
	CPU	Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7
	GPU	PowerVR SGX 544MP3
	Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, temperature, humidity, gesture
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
	Browser	HTML5
	Radio	No
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support and GLONASS
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	White Frost, Black Mist
		- Wireless charging (market dependent) - S-Voice natural language commands and dictation - Smart stay, Smart pause, Smart scroll - Air gestures - Dropbox (50 GB storage) - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - TV-out (via MHL 2 A/V link) - SNS integration - MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player - Organizer - Image/video editor - Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) - Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa - Voice memo/dial/commands - Predictive text input (Swype)

BATTERY		Li-Ion 2600 mAh battery
	Stand-by	(2G) / Up to 370 h (3G)
	Talk time	(2G) / Up to 17 h (3G)
	Music play	Up to 62 h

World biggest DDoS attack that almost broke Internet

The last week has seen probably the largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack ever. A massive 300Gbps was thrown against Internet blacklist maintainer Spamhaus' website but the anti-spam organisation , CloudFlare was able to recover from the attack and get its core services back up and running. 

Spamhaus, a group based in both London and Geneva, is a non-profit organisation that aims to help email providers filter out spam and other unwanted content. Spamhaus is pretty resilient, as its own network is distributed across many countries, but the attack was still enough to knock its site offline on March 18.

Five national cyber-police-forces are investigating the attacks.  A group calling itself STOPhaus, an alliance of hactivists and cyber criminals is believed to responsible for bombarding Spamhaus with up to 300Gbps.

The attacks on Spamhaus illustrate a larger problem with the vulnerability of systems fundamental to the architecture of the Internet, the Domain Name Servers (DNS). The high attack bandwidth is made possible because attackers are using misconfigured domain-name service (DNS) servers known as open recursive resolvers or open recursors to amplify a much smaller attack into a larger data flood.

Known as DNS reflection, the technique uses requests for a relatively large zone file that appear to be sent from the intended victim's network. According to CloudFlare, it initially recorded over 30,000 DNS resolvers that were tricked into participating in the attack. There are as many as 25 million of these open recursive resolvers at the disposal of attackers

"In the Spamhaus case, the attacker was sending requests for the DNS zone file for ripe.net to open DNS resolvers. The attacker spoofed the CloudFlare IPs we'd issued for Spamhaus as the source in their DNS requests. The open resolvers responded with DNS zone file, generating collectively approximately 75Gbps of attack traffic. The requests were likely approximately 36 bytes long (e.g. dig ANY ripe.net @X.X.X.X +edns=0 +bufsize=4096, where X.X.X.X is replaced with the IP address of an open DNS resolver) and the response was approximately 3,000 bytes, translating to a 100x amplification factor."

It now seems that the attack is being orchestrated by a Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker. As long as it's not child porn and anything related to terrorism, CyberBunker will host it, including sending spam.  Spamhaus blacklisted CyberBunker earlier in the month.

However, the DDoS attacks have raised concerns that further escalations of the retaliatory attacks could affect banking and email systems. DDoS attacks are typically carried out to extort money from targeted organisations or as a weapon to disrupt organisations or companies in pursuit of ideological, political or personal interests.

Twitter hacked, data of 250,000 users exposed

Twitter said Friday that hackers, in the latest online attack, may have gained access to information on a quarter of a million of its more than 200 million active users.

The social media giant said in a blog posting that earlier this week it detected attempts to gain access to its user data. It shut down one attack moments after it was detected.

But it discovered that the attackers may have gained access to usernames, email addresses and encrypted passwords belonging to 250,000 users. Twitter has reset the pilfered passwords and sent emails advising users that they'll have to create a new one.

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident. The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organizations have also been recently similarly attacked," the blog said. "For that reason we felt that it was important to publicize this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the Internet safer for all users."

The hack is the latest high-profile cyber-attack on US media and technology companies recently. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal reported this week that their computer systems had been infiltrated by China-based hackers.

One expert said that the Twitter hack probably happened after an employee's home or work computer was compromised through a vulnerability in Java, a commonly-used computing language whose weaknesses have been well publicized.

Ashkan Soltani, an independent privacy and security researcher, said such a move would give attackers "a toehold" in Twitter's internal network, potentially allowing them either to sniff out user information as it traveled across the company's system or break into specific areas, such as the authentication servers that process users' passwords.

In a telephone interview Friday, Soltani said that the relatively limited number of users affected suggested either that attackers weren't on the network long or that they were only able to compromise a subset of the company's servers.

Twitter is generally used to broadcast messages to the public, so the hacking might not immediately have yielded any important secrets. But the stolen credentials could be used to eavesdrop on private messages or track which Internet address a user is posting from.

That might be useful, for example, for an authoritarian regime trying to keep tabs on a journalist's movements.

"More realistically, someone could use that as an entry point into another service," Soltani said, noting that since few people bother using different passwords for different services, a password stolen from Twitter might be just as handy for reading a journalist's emails.

Top Ten: Free Cloud Services

Cloud Providers

Cloud computing is being pushed heavily by today's software vendors. However, cloud computing and Iinternet-based services really aren't new. In fact, there are many different cloud services and web applications available today that are completely free. In this column, I'll tell you about ten free cloud services that you can begin using right away.

1. Amazon Web Services—To prompt you to get started using its web services, Amazon offers a free version of its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service, which is good for one year. This free service is the EC2 Micro Instance, which includes 750 hours of EC2, 10GB of Amazon Elastic Block Storage, 5GB of Amazon S3 storage, 30GB of Internet data transfer, and 25 Amazon SimpleDB hours. You can find out more about Amazon's free web services usage tier at aws.amazon.com/free.

2. Google Apps—One of the most well-known set of cloud-based applications is Google Apps. The free version of Google Apps includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Sites, and Google Docs. As its name suggests, Google Calendar is a shared online calendar that lets you schedule and share appointments. Google Docs is a Microsoft Office competitor that lets you create documents, spreadsheets, drawings, and presentations, and Google Sites lets you build websites and wikis. You can find Google Apps at www.google.com/apps.

3. Windows Live SkyDrive—Without a doubt, the cloud service I use most often is Microsoft's SkyDrive. SkyDrive is a super handy cloud-based storage service that lets you store up to 25GB of data for free. SkyDrive provides an easy-to-use web interface that lets you create folders for storage as well as providing drag-and-drop file uploading. The only requirement for using SkyDrive is that you have a Windows Live account. You can find SkyDrive at www.skydrive.com. I should note that there are other free web storage sites, but I've been perfectly happy with SkyDrive

4. Sysinternals—It seems I can't write a guide to free tools without mentioning Sysinternals. Sysinternals is well-known for its locally installed administrative tools. However, the majority of the Sysinternals tools can be run directly off the Sysinternals website as cloud services: There's no need to install them locally. These tools provide all sorts of useful file, disk, networking, and system process utilities. You can find the cloud-based versions of the Sysinternals suite atlive.sysinternals.com.

5. icloud—icloud is a different type of cloud service than any of the other products mentioned here. It essentially offers a free online computer with a virtual desktop. The desktop gives you online storage and a variety of utility applications, including a word processor, calendar, web browser, and an application development environment. You can learn more about icloud at www.icloud.com.

6. Windows Live Sync—Windows Live Sync enables you to synchronize directories between multiple computer systems. This service is especially useful for syncing your desktop and laptop when you travel. Unlike most of the other services mentioned in this column, Windows Live Sync requires you to install a component on your desktop. You can take advantage of Windows Live Sync by going to www.foldershare.com.

7. LastPass—Trying to keep track of all your online passwords is a daunting task. LastPass is a web application that securely stores your various Internet passwords and can automatically enter them on website logon forms. You can find LastPass at lastpass.com.

8.YouSendIt—YouSendIt is a website that lets you send files that are too big to send as email attachments. The free Lite version lets you send files as large as 100MB. The recipient gets an email notification with a link when the file is available for download. If you need to send larger files, there's a Pro edition that allows files up to 2GB. You can find YouSendIt at www.yousendit.com.

9. Windows Live Messenger—A part of Microsoft's Windows Live suite, Windows Live Messenger lets you perform both text-based chatting through IM as well as one-to-one video chats if your computer has an attached webcam. You can get it at from the Microsoft Download Center. Windows Live Messenger requires a Windows Live account.

10. Hotmail and Gmail—Who doesn't take advantage of one of these super useful services? Both Microsoft's Hotmail and Google's Gmail accomplish essentially the same thing: They provide free web-based email. Hotmail allows up to 10GB attachments; Gmail allows up to 20GB attachments. You can sign up for Hotmail at www.hotmail.com, or you can pick Gmail at www.gmail.com.

What is DNS :An Introduction

You type a web address – say www.facebook.com – in the web browser, your computer queries a DNS server to find the corresponding IP address where that site is located and once it has that information, it routes your browser to the correct website.

That is a simplified definition of DNS but, behind the scenes, several parties could get involved as soon as your computer asks for the IP address of a domain name. There’s the Resolving Name Server, the Root Name Server, the TLD Name Server and finally the Authoritative Name Server.

Confused? You don’t have to be as here’s an informative short video that explains the entire DNS workflow in simple English.



Even if you know the basics of DNS, do watch this video and you might end up learning a couple of new concepts around DNS and how it works. The video is courtesy learnDNS.com.

Speaking of DNS, do check our previous tutorials on setting up OpenDNS, Google DNS, learn how to compare two DNS services and know about scenarios when you should not change your DNS server and let it point to your ISP’s default DNS server.

Tip: Find the Name Servers of a Web Domain
If you would like to know about the Authoritative Name Server of any web domain, the one that will most definitely know the location of the IP address of that domain, follow these steps.

Open the command prompt windows by typing CMD in the Windows Run box.
On the command prompt, type NSLOOKUP and hit Enter.
Now type set querytype=soa without the quotes and hit Enter. Sentence case matters and there should be no extra spaces.
Finally type any domain name and in the results, the primary name server is the authoritative name server of that domain.

What is HTML5 :An introduction

HTML5 is a language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web, and is a core technology of the Internet originally proposed by Opera Software.It is the fifth revision of the HTML standard (created in 1990 and standardized as HTML4 as of 1997)and as of March 2012 is still under development. Its core aims have been to improve the language with support for the latest multimedia while keeping it easily readable by humans and consistently understood by computers and devices (web browsers, parsers, etc.). HTML5 is intended to subsume not only HTML 4, but XHTML 1 and DOM Level 2 HTML as well.
The remaining doubts can be cleared by this image what new things HTML5 has to offer.

LastPass easy to use Password Manager

Many of you might be registered on many websites and remembering their passwords of the sites be a tedious task.For all internet users here is solution is LASTPASS available for Firefox, Internet Explorer,chrome and Safari.It is a very easy to use password manager as well as form filler for all those lazy outta here who doesn't remember the passwords of their various accounts.