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Thursday, July 29, 2010

Samsung's Cheapest Touchscreen Phone Out in India

Samsung's Cheapest Touchscreen Phone Out in India
Samsung Champ costs Rs. 4,100

Samsung has quietly launched its smallest and cheapest touchscreen handset in India. The Samsung Champ (C3300), as the phone is known, is a very tiny touchscreen handset.

It features a 2.4-inch resistive touchscreen that has a QVGA resolution. It has a 1.3 megaixel camera at the rear and also boasts of various connectivity options including Bluetooth and USB.





The phone, as expected, doesn't support 3G but is good enough for GPRS/EDGE based Internet usage. It has a 3.5 mm music jack as well and packs in an FM radio.

Like other Samsung feature phones, this one too is social networking friendly and comes with a load of social networking tools. Memory is expandable using microSD cards and with a 1000 mAH battery, the phone should offer decent battery life as well.

The phone costs Rs. 4,100 only, making it arguably the cheapest touchscreen you can buy from one of the mainstream phone makers out there.

World's cheapest Laptop; just Rs 1,500

Sakshat

It is a touchscreen device and supports Wi-Fi for internet access.

It has been developed by a group of engineers at the IITs. Sources say that it is powered with a 2 watt system and it can run on solar power.

The display is seven inches in size. It can connect to an external keyboard. It comes with 2GB of internal storage. External storage can be added. It would be powered with Linux based operating system.


NEW DELHI: You may not be able to buy Apple's iPad, but you may easily get a made in India 'Sakshat' computing device at a throwaway rate. The Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled a low cost computing-cum-access device yesterday, touted as the world's cheapest laptop.

The low-cost computer for students has all the elementary features, including Internet browsing. The indigenously made computer is expected to be available to the students by next year.

Bring it down
HRD Minister Kapil Sibal, unveiling the device, said the ultimate objective would be to bring down the price to Rs 470 ($10). Several teams comprising experts, students and professors from IITs and IIS Bangalore were working with the HRD Ministry to bring out the low-cost computing device.

"We have come out with the device at Rs 1,500 ($35) and now we invite individuals, entrepreneurs, firms and industries to produce the device at cheaper rates than this," he said. Sibal said the manufacturer as well as the distribution pattern has not been finalised as yet but the price tag of Rs 1,500 ($35) has been computed after taking all aspects into consideration.

The low-cost computer fulfils a key mandate of the government, to provide high quality E-content free of cost to all learners in the country under the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology. The computing device will support functionalities like video web conferencing facility, and multimedia content viewing.

Ingenious
The ministry started its efforts, subsequent to the lukewarm response from corporates, by holding discussions on the concept with a group of professors of IIT Bangalore. The B Tech and M Tech students were guided to produce the motherboard for such low cost device with ample flexibility to change the components.

The minister said that one motherboard design was generated by a students of VIT Vellore under his B Tech project which had worked out to Rs 2,209 ($47). The motherboard was fabricated at IIT Kanpur. Thereafter, through various processes of customisation as per the needs of the learners, it was possible to reduce the price of the computing device.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Horrific photo forced photographer to kill himself? Don't be too quick to click

After a week full of click-jacking attacks, we're seeing other dodgy links being spread widely between Facebook users who should perhaps know better.

One that I have seen crop up a lot, is appearing in the status updates of Facebook users with phrases like:

This horrific photo forced photographer to kill himself! http://tinyurl.com/VerySadPhoto

This horrific photo forced photographer to kill himself!

and

This horrific photo forced photographer to kill himself! http://tinyurl.com/HorriblePic

This horrific photo forced photographer to kill himself!

Clicking on links like these can take you to Facebook pages which names such as "Man Commits Suicide 3 Days After Taking This Photo".

Man Commits Suicide 3 Days after Taking This Photo

These Facebook pages force you to first "Like" them and then republish the link on your own Facebook page (advertising it to your online friends) before you eventually get to see the photograph.

The Facebook page forces you to pass on the message

Just ask yourself this - do you really want to recommend a page to your friends, before you know what lies behind it? For all you know, you could be passing on a link which will ultimately take your online pals to a phishing page or malware.

As it happens, the pages are lying in any case.

The photograph - of an emaciated young girl in Sudan - was taken in March 1993 by prize-winning South African photo-journalist Kevin Carter. Carter did kill himself - but it was over a year later in South Africa, not three days after the photo was taken as claimed by the Facebook links.

You can probably imagine, however, that people would easily agree to publish the link to all their friends - in their morbid interest to see the photo - and thus help it spread quickly.

In fact, it's no surprise that links like these are spreading so quickly and virally across Facebook, when popular pages such as "I like your makeup...LOL JK, it looks like you got gangbanged by Crayola" (currently 1.7 million fans and counting) have republished it to all of their followers.

I like your makeup...LOL JK, it looks like you got gangbanged by Crayola

Sigh.. If only you had to take the equivalent of a driving test before you were allowed to run a Facebook page with that many followers. Just imagine the harm they could do by posting a stupid or malicious link..

So, what's the purpose of these pages about the horrific photograph? Well, if we want to give the creators of these pages the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that they have created them out of curiousity - to see how many people they could trick into "Like"ing their page.

But I suspect there's more to it than that. My feeling is that once a page like this has managed to gather a large enough following, it could be abused for the purposes of spamming, spreading malware and stealing identities.

So you really should take much more care over which pages you agree to "Like" on Facebook. Remember, you should never be bullied into publicising a Facebook page before they have shown you the content you are interested in. After all, if you like what you see, you'll only be too happy to share it with your friends, right?

If you have been unfortunate enough to have been ensnared by this latest nuisance, do the following:

  • Remove the update from your newsfeed (so your friends will no longer click on it)
  • Enter Edit profile/Likes and interests and remove the "Man Commits Suicide 3 Days After Taking This Photo" page from your list of Pages you like (you may have to click on "Show other Pages")
  • Go to "Privacy Settings" and edit your settings for "Applications and websites" in order to check that you have not inadvertently added any unwanted applications.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Facebook Gives 20 Free Game Credits


Free Credits for Facebook Apps

Open a game application in Facebook today and you might notice a pop-up that says “Facebook Gave You 20 Free Credits”. Gamers can use these free credits to buy premium items in your favorite games.

The 20 credits are valued at $2.00 USD. Is this a marketing strategy to keep users happy and keep them away from the upcoming Google Games? I’m not sure but whatever it is, thank you Facebook. Enjoy gamers!


Facebook Gave You 20 Free Credits

You received 20 free Facebook Credits (a $2.00 USD value). Use them to buy premium items in your favorite games on Facebook. Go play!

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Indian Rupee finally gets its symbol

Original

Finally, the Rupee will have a symbol like the Dollar ($) or the Euro (€) or the Pound (£). The Cabinet today finalised the design for the Rupee.

IIT post-graduate Uday Kumar's entry has been selected out of five shortlisted designs as the new symbol for the Indian Rupee.

The government had organised a symbol design competition with a prize money of Rs 2.5 lakh. Five designs were shortlisted from a competition and all new notes will bear the design finally approved.

The growing influence of the Indian economy in the global space is said to have prompted this move that will result in the Indian rupee joining the select club of global currencies like the US dollar, the British Pound, European Euro and Japanese Yen that have unique symbols.

The abbreviation for the Indian Rupee, 'Re' or 'Rs' is used by India's neighbours Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka.

New Profile Spy Spam Spreading on Facebook

Profile Spy scams back on Facebook
Enlarge  picture
A new Facebook scam lures users into signing up for premium mobile services and spamming their friends by promising to show a list of profile visitors. It even instructs users to disable ad-blocking programs.


It all starts with a spam message received from one of the victims, which reads “OMG OMG OMG... I can't believe this actually works! Now you really can see who views your profile!!! WOAH ? --> [URL]” Following the included link takes users to a site on an external domain called ilikefacebook.in.

The site displays fake Facebook-style notifications claiming to be example of alerts users will receive when someone views their profile. The logo for a well-known rogue Facebook app called Profile Spy is also shown on the page.

[IMG=2]Users are also told that in order to sign-up for the Profile Spy application they need to like and share the page. At the time of writing this article around 29,000 users clicked the “Like” button and 27,000 the “Share” one. Posting the spam message manually in five different places on Facebook is also allegedly required.

Finally, after the victims have heavily spammed their profile with messages promoting this scam, they are taken to a window claiming that they also need to take a survey. “Then the 'verification' launches you into one of those endless surveys (you get a choice of six) the point of which is to collect your cell phone number so you can be billed $9.99 per month,” Tom Kelchner, a security researcher at Sunbelt Software, who analyzed the attack, warns.

People should be aware that there is no feature on Facebook which allows viewing profile visitors; and considering the privacy implications of such functionality, it will probably never be allowed. Therefore, any message or application that claims otherwise is most definitely a scam.