Earthquake hits Los Angeles : Twitter Celebs to the rescue.

Today morning, somtime after 5 AM, i was browsing the internet. I had twitter open, and some new tweets showed up. As usual I clicked the '2 new tweets', and there was Alyssa Milano's tweet "Earthquake.".
 
I suddenly checked out google news for any report of such an event, to find out where it had happened. But i could not find any information about such an earthquake. It was only about an hour later, news reports of the 5.9 scaled earthquake at Los Angeles started coming out.

Once again twitter has proved it strength by its quickness and wide reach. People from all over the world had known about the earthquake within minutes of the actual event. Thanks to the celebreties Alyssa Milano, Jordin Sparks, Wil Wheaton, Khloe Kardashian and Larry King and many others who thought of quickly sharing it with the people. With the twitter retweet feature, you couldnt even imagine the speed at which news is being spread.

This is not the first time twitter has come to the rescue in such situations. On 27th February this year, an 8.8 earthquake hit Chile (near Santiago). All means of direct contact, phone lines, power were all cut off. A woman (Sheryl Breuker) , who was trying to locate her sister-in-law, who was living in the quake affected area finally resorted to social media to locate her sister-in-law after all attempts of direct contact failed. Using twitter she sent messages to people in Chile using hashtags, and after a lot of retweeting, she was able to find out that her sister-in-law was safe in just 2 hours.
Read the first person account of Sheryl Breuker in her blog : Twitter – As powerful as an earthquake.
She will be ever grateful to twitter and social media.

A similar story occured on the 15th of April, when a meteor shower hit Wisconson, USA. News channels, took advantage of twitter asking people living in the locality for photos of the meteor shower.

These and many other stories tell us how valuable social media is in todays life. I hope this post will make people who think 'Internet and social media are such a waste of time' to think otherwise.

All hail TWITTER.  All hail Social Media.

Mi-Fone launches cheap dual SIM handsets in India

Mi-Fone, Africa's fastest growing mobile phone manufacturer, which launched their market in India at the start of this year, has now revealed a new cheap dual SIM handset.

The Mi-2010, as the new phone is known, is being launched in conjunction with the FIFA World Cup in South Africa

 

Let s now take a look at what the Mi2010 has inside. To begin with, this is a GSM+GSM dual SIM handset boasting of a 2.5 hour talk time and support for GPRS, WAP and MMS. It has a 1.8-inch, 65K colour, 128 x 160 LCD display and a very basic camera at the rear. Other features include a torch light and support for 64 midi / mp3 ringtones. The phone supports MP3 playback and well as FM radio. Although it is a low-end handset, there is support for memory expansion.

The MI-2010 is now available across India and has been priced at Rs. 1,999. It looks to be quite a value for money device. It should be pretty great for those who are looking for a decent secondary phone.

Mi-Fone has already launched some pretty good phones, some of them having QWERTY keyboards or analog TV and all.

[ALERT] Any USB device can be a potential threat!

Researchers have confirmed that any USB device can be used to steal your data. Even a USB Coffe warmer, or a USB vacuum cleaner.


This is owing to the Plug-and-Play feature of the USB ports. The computer trusts the USB devices highly. Whatever device is plugged in to the port, it is trusted by the computer. Moreover, it cannot detect what device has been plugged in on its own. It needs the device to tell it, and trusts whatever it tells it. If the USB webcam says that it is a keyboard, the computer will trust it.

Due to this trusting nature of USB, once the devices have been plugged in, it can perform any kind of data transfer, without raising an alarm. It can transfer viruses into your computer or it may steal your data.

For those of you who may be wondering how a USB Coffee warmer could be harmful, even devices that rely on computers only for power supply have got data lines along with power lines in their cables. These data lines are used for power negotiation.When a device is plugged in, it is at first provided with a power of 100mA, which is increased to 500mA after negotiation. If you ever wondered why your music player takes long to charge when the computer is turned off, this is the reason. Some low cost, local devices might eliminate the negotiation process, or even the data lines.

Using these data lines, any device, if programmed appropriately, can be used to steal data from your computer, or to inject harmful programs such as viruses or trojans into your computer. Data stolen from your computer maybe stored in the device itself or may be wirelessly transmitted to a remote attacker.

So the next time you plugin a USB device make sure it comes from a trusted person. You can disable your USB ports when not in use to prevent someone to plug in some USB device without your knowledge. To disable your USB port simply go to Device Manager, select the USB port from the list, right click on it and selsct 'Disable'. To re-enable, follow the same steps, only this time select the 'Enable' option.

Wiki is Down : And back up soon

The American Independence day has not been an as much enjoyable day for the people on the internet.

Hackers all round the world have been active lately. After active attacks on iTunes accounts and later on Youtube, Wikipedia has been down this morning, for a few hours.

Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia, with entries on almost anything. This morning Wikipedia users eager to gather knowledge, just got an error message : "Sorry! This site is experiencing technical difficulties."

Wikipedia acknowledged the trouble soon on their twitter account, saying : "Hi, everyone. We're aware that the site isnt working as usual and we're figuring out the problem now. We'll let you know more soon!"

An hour later they gave out another tweet saying that they found out the problem, which was a power failure at their Florida Data Centre.

Was this a simple power failure, or a hacker attack, we may never know for sure.

Anyway the site came back up about half an hour after the tweet.

Checkout the Wiki twitter page here.

Earler this morning, iTunes was hacked, followed by the internet's most viewed video store, Youtube.

In the Youtube hack, some videos failed to play, while some others redirected to other pages.
But most of the attack was concentrated on Justin Beiber, whom some of us are not much pleased of.

InstaLoad : Now insert batteries however you like

If you are the kind of person who finds trouble inserting batteries the wrong way? Then the solution to your troubles have been created by Microsoft.

Microsoft has developed a new battery technology, that will never allow you to insert a battery the wrong way. Simply because it works fine whichever way you insert it. This new technology has been named InstaLoad.

With InstaLoad technology, those batteries will power your devices irrespective of the direction in which you insert it. Now no need to check twice where which end of the batteries go. No searching for the '+' and '-' ends. Just insert the battery and it will work.

Pretty cool. eh?

The technology is in the new contact design. Here each side of the battery has bot positive and negative terminals, rather than a single positive or negative terminal.  If the fat, flat end of the battery is pressing against them, it touches the outside contact. If it is the pointy positive end then it makes contact with a slightly recessed inner contact. This, combined with some simple circuitry, makes sure the current is always running the right way.

This technology can be used with any type of battery, rechargeable or not. There is nothing to change in the battery. Only the contacts in the device need be changed.


 Pretty cool. eh?

Well, personally I cant understand where Microsoft is going with this. They have this far played a major role role in making people lazy. And now they are making us more lazy. Whats the big trouble in finding the ends of a battery?

I assure you, I'll spend time finding the correct ends of the battery rather than pay huge for this technology. What have I to lode anyway? A few seconds? I wouldn't care.

What would you do?

What FIFA cost the world economy.

After reading about the effects this years FIFA tournament has caused on the world economy and productivity, I could not not share it with you.

Productivity really took a deep plunge during the last month. The FIFA championship which started on June 11th and which will continue till July 11th, has cost world nations a lot in productivity. Statistics show that FIFA is the most watched sporting event in the world, followed by the Olympic games. About 80% of the worlds population watches the game, with an average of 95 Million viewers per match.

Since the start of the games, football fans and supporters have been sneaking out of work to get a glimpse of the game. Lunch breaks became longer and the number of sick leaves become larger.

Check out this image for some interesting statistics.

(Click to enlarge)

This would not have caused much in Asia due to its timing. Anyway, it has not reduced my productivity. Not because I don't watch the matches, but because there isn't much productive things I've been doing lately.

Google Chrome Fastball : The new game on Youtube

Google is popularising their new version of the Chrome web browser with a new You Tube game.

The new Chrome browser comes with integrated Adobe Flash player. You Tube, being Google's own and one of the major websites using the Flash Player plugin became the natural choice for show off.

  

The name of this new 'Video' game is Fastball - A Race Across the Internet . The objective of the game is simple. Get the shiny ball to the end of an obstacle course. Though the objectives may seem simple, let me warn you, the obstacles aren't so. Those newbies on the internet might find it a bit confusing.

The game is set in 5 stages or obstacles - Map Lap, Tour de Twitter, Translate Time Trial, The Last.fm 500 and Search Grand Prix. These stages features (of course ) Google Maps, Twitter, Google Translate, Last fm and Google Search respectively.

The games stages are actually a set of 6 You Tube video players that slide by as the game progresses. At the interval between the players, a gap appears where the obstacle question comes up. Complete the task soon to continue with the video. At the you get the ball to the winners podium and the ball turns round to reveal the Chrome logo.

Here is the finishing Video:



Even though this game is meant to highlight the speed of You Tube in Chrome, it works well all browsers. I myself played it in Opera.

So guys check out the game here. Lets see if anyone can break my record, that is 02:57. Heres how I did it.

Get the new Chrome here.