The 'Creepy' app

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The name of this app is 'Creepy'..! Don't think it as a foolish name for an app, because this one is really creepy..!!

In today's world, we live more in the digital world than in the real world. For us, our 'avatar' is more important than our real selves. Its a harsh fact but we have to admit it.

So living in this digital world, we leave out loads n loads of our personal information accessible to anyone on the internet. We do not think it as a 'no biggie', but you would be amazed or horrified to be more precise, to know how these small 'no biggie' details can be used against you...!

This app for desktop computers called 'Creepy' is a “geo-location information aggregator”. i.e, using a this a person can know where all the places you had been and can hence easily find out the place where you would likely to be..!

Now, you might be going "oh shit..!!"..:) How does it do that..??


Well, we constantly upload pictures and share them with the world. From these pics, its possible to extract geo-location information .......

• tweets have geolocations. ....
• Coordinates when tweet was posted from mobile device
• Place (geographical name) derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface. Place gets translated into coordinates using geonames.com
• Bounding Box derived from users ip when posting on twitter's web interface.The less accurate source , a corner of the bounding box is selected randomly.
• Geolocation information accessible through image hosting services API
• EXIF tags from the photos posted.

• So 'Creepy' sniffs all these and much more details from the web and presents it in a map marking all the locations your target has been hence making it easy to find out the places you frequently visit, the places you likely to be found..!

If you are stalking somebody, then its a must have app..:p You can download it here.. http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/



To prevent 'creepy' from stalk you, some simple tips...

• better not to reveal too much of your personal details.
• do not post anything that you dont want others to know.
• Don't try to be in a 'limbo' when there is so much on the real world.

Cool 'Dynamic Views' for blogger..!!

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There was a time when many would think blogger blogs do not look good and it was true too to a certain extent. but then, Blogger provided the bloggers with a large variety of customizable templates to make those blogs look pretty. Now Blogger has gone another step forward and has introduced 'Dynamic views'....!!

Before I tell you much about it, Its better to just experience it..!! So Click this link ....
http://sci-tech-update.blogspot.com/view

I know you liked it...:) So to enable it on your blog,

• Your blog should be public. i.e, people do not need to sign in to view your blog.
• Blog should have feeds fully enabled. Then, in the settings > site feed tab , you have enabled either Full or Jump Break for your Post Feed.
• Then in settings > formatting tab, set the option for Enable Dynamic Views is set to Yes.

With all the above settings done, you are ready to roll. What the visitors of your blog have to do is to just add a "/view" (without quotes) to the blog URL and they can enjoy browsing your blog too..:)

Also FYI, for this feature to be enabled you should have a newer browser like firefox 3.5+, Internet Explorer 8 etc.

Ex: [blog url]/view



Have fun...!!!

Microsoft's vision of 'Future of Gaming'

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The video which am going to share you with is a recently leaked video on microsoft's vision of future of gaming. Microsoft is showing the world how it the future of its Windows Gaming Experience platform implemented with Xbox Live.

Now, for those who don't know what Windows Gaming Experience or WGX is, it's an internal group name for all of Microsoft's PC gaming efforts, including Games For Windows,MSN, windows live messenger. Let me clear you some things in the first place, before you watch the video......

• Whatever you are going to see is still purely conceptual for the time being.
• It mainly focuses on 4 experiences of gaming.

1) Social : This deals with enhancing the social gaming experience. Especially the facebook games such as Farmville. You may be thinking, why they are trying to enhance such small games, when there are games like Call of duty or Halo...! Well, you may not be knowing, how big is this 'small' game business...:) Did you know that the 'Farmville' on facebook is worth $10 billion....?!?!? How could microsoft ignore millions of casual gamers..??

2) Avatar : Deals with customizing your 'Avatar' with a virtual wardrobe.

3) Search : It eases finding the games n apps through bing.

4) Transaction : It focuses on delivering the digital content with simplicity irrespective of its size and price.

Now lets watch the video.......

Google Body Browser

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Do you like Google Earth ? then you will love Google Body browser. For all those who are into medical and anatomy, I think its a dream come true.

Google Body browser is a very interesting Google earth styled WebGl application which lets you navigate through out the human body making you know and learn every inch of it.

To experience Google Body browser, you DO NOT require Flash, Java, or any other plugins..!! All you need is a WebGl enabled browser. following browsers have WebGl enabled...
Chrome 9 Beta, Firefox 4 beta, Webkit Nighty

Its a great tool for all those medical students out there and also to every other human being as I think everybody should know about our own body. Google has made it easy, interactive and interesting like never before. Enjoy the app HERE

Know more about it in the video below........

10 most dangerous computer viruses in history

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A computer virus is a computer program which can copy itself and infect a computer. and it can scare the hell out of a computer user..:) We try so harder in this digital world to keep our computer healthy than ourselves...yet some geek can write some lines of codes sitting at his home and piss us off...:p There were some legendary viruses which are considered as the most dangerous viruses in the history. Today we are going to know which they are......

• Jerusalem 1987

This virus struck the world when people had hardly known the existence of computer viruses. This is the first MS-DOS virus that hat caused enormous destructions, affecting many countries, universities and companies worldwide.On Friday 13, 1988 it manged to infect no. of institutions in Europe, America and the Middle East.
You may be wondering, why the name 'Jerusalem'.That's because, 1st place to get affected by this virus was Jerusalem University.

• Morris (Internet Worm) - November 1988

This virus infected more than 6000 computers is US including NASA..!! It also manged to send millions of copies of itself to different network computers, being able to entirely paralyze all network resources.It used the errors in the operating systems to able to spread.It could also pick user passwords.
Believe it or not, the damages it caused were estimated to be $96 million..!!

• Solar Sunrise - 1998

This virus was worse than the last one. Hackers, using this virus, took over more than 500 computers which belonged to army, government and private sector of the United States..! Initially it was believed that the hackers were from Iraq, but later it was found that the hackers were two teenagers from California. The virus 'Solar Sunrise' was named after he popular vulnerabilities in computers that run on the operating system called Sun Solaris.

• Melissa - 1999

The name of the virus 'Melissa' comes from a lap dancer from Florida..! Confused..?... She was not the programmer but the programmer, David L. Smith from New Jersey was got acknowledged with the dancer.
Melisa virus also known as “Mailissa”, “Simpsons”, “Kwyjibo”, or “Kwejeebo”, is a mass-mailing macro virus. World came to know about Melissa,On March 26, 1999, when the virus shut down the internet mail system..!Melissa was hidden within a file called "List.DiC", which featured passwords that served as keys to unlocking 80 pornographic websites. The original form of the virus was sent through e-mail to different users.
It didn't end well for the creator of the virus, he was sentenced to 20 months in federal prison and ordered to pay a fine of $5,000.

• I Love You - May 2000

This virus was similar to Melissa. It too sent usernames and passwords to users, just like Melissa.It managed to infect millions of computers around the world overnight.The virus started to spread when a user received an email with the subject “ILOVEYOU” and an attachment “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs”. As soon as the file was opened, the virus managed to send its copy to every address present in the Windows Address Book.
Officials tracked the virus and found a young Philippino student was the hacker behind the virus. But he didn't face any charges as Philippines did not have any law that would prevent hacking and spreading malware. This lead to the creation of European Union's Global Cybercrime Treaty.

• The Code Red worm - July 2001
  

The 21st century virus caused damages worth $2 billion.....! Code Red was actually developed to use the power of all computers it infected against the official website of the White House at a predetermined date. However, White House managed to decode the code Red and stop it from happening.
The Code Red worm was first discovered and researched by eEye Digital Security employees Marc Maiffret and Ryan Permeh. The worm was named the .ida “Code Red” worm because Code Red Mountain Dew was what they were drinking at the time, and because of the phrase “Hacked by Chinese!” with which the worm defaced websites.

• Nimda - 2001

It affected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide shortly after the 9/11 tragedy. Due to its 5 different methods of infecting computers systems and being able to duplicate itself, it is considered as one of the most complicated computer viruses.

• Downadup - 2009

Its the most dangerous virus till now, Downadup Worm . Its also called "Conficker". It has affected more than 6 millions of computers worldwidein just 3 days...!!.This malicious program was able to spread using a patched Windows flaw. Downadup was so "successful" in spreading across the Web, because it used a flaw that Microsoft patched in October in order to distantly compromise computers that ran unpatched versions of Microsoft's operating system.But the real power of the virus is, it makes the computer to download the destructive code from random drop point. According to the internet Security Company, F-Secure, the most affected countries are China, Russia and Brazil.

How much information is there in the World..?

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"Hey .. I have 500Gb of movies in my pc..!", "Hey I have a collection of more than 1000 books at my home..!" .....so now, a single person has 5ooGb of information only of movies...! Just hold that thought and think how much information would be there in the whole world...?!? Don't tell me its impossible to calculate, because a study appearing on Feb 10 in Science Express calculates the World's total technological capacity.How much information humankind is able to store,communicate and compute.

So lets find out what's the study say.... Prepare yourself for some mind blowing facts ..!!

• Looking at both digital memory and analog devices, the researchers calculate that humankind is able to store at least 295 exabytes of information. And FYI, exabyte is the number with 20 zeros in it..!!

In other words, if a single star is a bit of information, that's a galaxy of information for every person in the world. That's 315 times the number of grains of sand in the world. But it's still less than one percent of the information that is stored in all the DNA molecules of a human being.

• 2002 could be considered the beginning of the digital age, the first year worldwide digital storage capacity overtook total analog capacity. As of 2007, almost 94 percent of our memory is in digital form.
• In 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. That's equivalent to every person in the world reading 174 newspapers every day.
• On two-way communications technology, such as cell phones, humankind shared 65 exabytes of information through telecommunications in 2007, the equivalent of every person in the world communicating the contents of six newspapers every day.
• In 2007, all the general-purpose computers in the world computed 6.4 x 10^18 instructions per second, in the same general order of magnitude as the number of nerve impulses executed by a single human brain. Doing these instructions by hand would take 2,200 times the period since the Big Bang.
• From 1986 to 2007, the period of time examined in the study, worldwide computing capacity grew 58 percent a year, ten times faster than the United States' GDP.
• Telecommunications grew 28 percent annually, and storage capacity grew 23 percent a year.

The lead author Martin Hilbert of the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism says, "These numbers are impressive, but still miniscule compared to the order of magnitude at which nature handles information.Compared to nature, we are but humble apprentices. However, while the natural world is mind-boggling in its size, it remains fairly constant. In contrast, the world's technological information processing capacities are growing at exponential rates."

Facebook will be shut down on 15th march - Truth or Hoax...??

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I bet you have heard the news that facebook will end on march 15 as it is spreading like wildfire on the internet especially on facebook. Is this news true...?? rather than answering that question directly , let me give you some stats about facebook....

• Facebook is officially worth $50 Billion.
• DST invested $50 million while Goldman Sachs invested $450 million. The remaining investment came from overseas shareholders participating in Goldman Sach’s Facebook investment vehicle.
• It has More than 500 million active users
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.
• Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform
• More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites

I can go on giving such stats but the above few clearly show what a giant facebook is.....! So now if I ask the same above question, if facebook shuts down on march 15..... the answer is obvious, "NO, its impossible".

Yes guys, its hoax....! Facebook will NOT end on march 15. So where did this news originate..? The news was published by Weekly World News. Its shown below.

As you can see, any man with little bit of common sense, will say its not true. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg never said things like "managing [Facebook] has ruined my life. I need to put an end to all the madness."

But unfortunately its not stopping many many facebook users to spread this hoax. More than a million users have already fallen for this hoax..!

just visit this website 'Weekly World News' and you will see. The whole website is full of nonsense news and hoaxes such as, 'alien spacecrafts will attack earth in 2011','Megan Fox is a Man','Micheal Jackson faked his own death' etc. This proves how 'reliable' their news is.

So don't believe everything you read on the internet, and think twice before you pass a story on to your friends.

Most influential Tweeter....???

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Who do you think is the most influential tweeter of all....??
Lady Gaga with 6,178,524 followers...?? britneyspears with 5,895,661 followers...?? Kimkaradarshian with 4,749,614 follower...?? Sachin Tendulkar..?? Oprah..?? If you think they are the most influential tweeters, sorry to disappoint you but you are wrong...!!


Just because all these celebrities have millions of followers, doesn't mean they are the most influential people on twitter.According to researchers it depends on the topic on which, one tweets about.


Most of the people may be unaware ( even I didn't know till I came across this website) that there is a website which gives you the information regarding the most influential people tweeting on the hottest topics of the day. I know its very interesting......so here is the link..
http://pulseofthetweeters.com/

The website was created in the laboratory of Alok Choudhary, John G. Searle Professor and chair of electrical engineering and computer science at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.Actually the mother of this website is a thesis project of Ph.D. candidate Ramanathan Narayanan.

Question may arise, how does the website work...? A special algorithm created for the website does the job of ranking the most influential tweeters of the day.The algorithm for the website combines dynamic data mining, sentiment analysis and network analysis in real time.Not only that, researchers have made this algorithm a bit intelligent....!! The algorithm can also tell you whether their tweets are positive, negative or neutral. It also offers related topics to explore.

Let me explain it with a simple example..... Suppose you like cricket, the website will list out the most influential twitter users who constantly tweet about cricket and also have a following of cricket fans who tweet about the same.

Narayan tries to explain the same with an another example ""If someone from BP is tweeting about the oil spill, for example, his opinions are likely to carry much more weight and be of much greater interest than those of Ashton Kutcher, who has a legion of followers."

Some of really good things about this system or algorithm are....

• It can also filter out spam
• It is almost completely automated and requires a very minimal amount of human work
• It has been very successful in providing really useful choices for the people who are interested in twitter

well finally.... its not some website which provides some info about the twitter users...but it has more applications ...!!! According to the researchers

• The website could be used by companies who want to know what people are saying about their product
• They could find out if top influencers are saying positive, negative or neutral things about their product, and that may have a lot of implications.
• In the future, the website could track many more topics, including those that are not trending on Twitter.

So if you want to be a highly influential twitter user, then keep in mind... "its not the no. of followers that matter but the topic you tweet about..!!"