Twitter facing phishing attack

The trust factor is lacking amidst the fast moving technological world and online users should be careful about their security.

According to the expert at security firm Sophos, the Twitter followers needs to be cautious now to face a new challenge, as from now onwards if you click on the links in the tweets, you might become the victim of the fraud.

The most popular networking site of US has been affected by the Phishing attack leaving the users in a dilemma.

However to play on the safer side, if the users find a URL, having a message "This you???", then just avoid that. Reason? When you click on the link, a login page will appear where the hackers are all set to take away your credentials.

Also they can automatically send the pishing message from the users account after you have been duped.

The word for caution to all Twitter users, when in doubt don't even trust your friends as they could be the hackers in disguise, ready to invade your account and mutilate your privacy.

35 percent despised of high speed internet

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broadband data states that the thirty - five percent of Americans are devoid of high speed netentrée at their residence. This piece of evidence was corroborated by the Federal Communications Commission who tallied the list which summed up to 80 million people.

The FCC has been allotted the task for delivering a national broadband plan to Congress by March 17. FCC has also provided a rough draft of its studies.

The basic cause behind non-usage of high speed internet is due to three major factors; affordability, absence of digital competency and the lack of association or the relevance factor. It was shockingly observed that the maximum percentage 15 percent was composed of those who either were least interested for internet or thought it to be an unnecessary luxury.

Rest percentage comprised of a mixture of 'unmanageable to pay - lots' and 'the ignorant ones'. With this data, which was analyzed for the broadband connection which cost a meager $41, people have turned their backs to the bestowing hands of technology. This is a point to be pondered upon.

New smut censor introduced for You Tube by Google

A "safety mode" has been introduced by Google for You Tube watchers. This will filter out smut and other objectionable material, the company announced.

Customers can opt in to the "safety mode", which also automatically hides comments on any videos. If the user decides to view the comments, all objectionable words are censored by Google's

smut filter.

Pornography, gratuitous violence and animal abuse have been banned for long on the web's top video-sharing site. But the new filter will target such images even if they occur within a

legitimate context such as a news report, the company said in its blog Thursday.

Jamie Davidson, the product manager, said,"An example of this type of content might be a newsworthy video that contains graphic violence, such as a political protest or war coverage. While no

filter is 100 percent perfect, 'safety mode' is another step in our ongoing desire to give you greater control over the content you see on the site."

Football World Cup to be broadcasted on smartphones by BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has said it will launch new sports and news applications to satisfy mobile phone user and football fan demand with smartphone sales in UK predicted to skyrocket this year because of the FIFA World Cup,.

BBC plans to launch this year a string of free video-on-demand applications one of them is Live Sport.

The decision means that football fans will be able to watch every England game live on their smartphone, as well as clips of every goal scored in this summer's tournament in South Africa.

The Telegraph quoted Erik Huggers, BBC's director of future technology, as saying," It''s been 12 years since the launch of BBC Online, but as media converges and technology accelerates, licence fee payers are increasingly using sophisticated handheld devices to access information."

He further added," They tell us that they want to access the digital services that they have paid for at a time and place that suits them." 

Attacks on Google, other US firms traced to two Chinese schools

Computers located in two Chinese schools, including one with close ties to the Chinese military have been traced for the series of online attacks on Google and dozens of other American corporations.

According to several people with knowledge of the investigation who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the inquiry, the Chinese schools involved are Shanghai Jiaotong University and the Lanxiang Vocational School.

The attacks, aimed at stealing trade secrets and computer codes and capturing e-mail of Chinese human rights activists, may have begun as early as April, months earlier than previously believed, the New York Times quoted people involved in the investigation, as saying.

On January 12, Google had announced that it and other companies had been subjected to sophisticated attacks that probably came from China.

Evidence acquired by a United States military contractor that faced the same attacks as Google has even led investigators to suspect a link to a specific computer science class, taught by a Ukrainian professor at the vocational school.

Just a few weeks ago its students of Jiaotong, which has one of China's top computer science programs, has won an international computer programming competition, "Battle of the Brains", organized by I. B. M. the beating out Stanford and other top-flight universities.

Lanxiang is a huge vocational school that was established with military support and trains some computer scientists for the military in east China's Shandong Province. (With Input from Agencies)

YouTube now supports parental control!

With the growing rage of children getting addicted and hooked to net for fun these days, setting agitated and complaining parents on the access ofinappropriate contents access, you tube has evolved the security standards for children below 18, to set the YouTube's new parental controls and safe search features, leaving the parents tension free.

Google has taken an initiative in collaboration with YouTube, in discovering a new parental control feature in its video sharing site, YouTube to help filter the unwanted sexual content from the children. The most popular video sharing site came under the parental scanning and anger, as the site provided open access to inappropriatecontent, not suggested for children.

Thus Google stood up to provide moral support to the concerned parents, enabling the feature from today onwards which supports the feature to lock the inappropriate material and videos from viewing. So from now onwards, if the children try to be naughty and type in the word sex on YouTube site, the same shall not be supported. To which earlier, the same hit on the word sex, throngs out innumerable provocative and violent videos.

The president of Internet safety advocacy group iKeepSafe.org, was amongst the many parents who shared similar concern and did make a complaint to YouTube two years back, forcing the company to do make it a clean and learning experience on the site for children.

However, to filter the appropriate content amongst the million of videos is not a easy nut to crack as with 20 hours of video uploading done every minute to YouTube.

The Safety Mode is the feature that prevents children from browsing sexual or inappropriatecontent. Further, it has 3 features which limits the content on videos containing nudity, pornography, narcotics, graphic violence, and news events containing graphic violence; secondly it locks Safety Mode for all users, even if the user has logged out, so that the kids can’t turn off Safety mode.

So from now onwards for every single browsing you do, you would have to turn the safety mode. Also it is account-specific, in case you have different accounts on a system, you have to turn on Safety Mode for all the accounts you want to filter.

However this feature is not supported in private browsing mode.

Google plans to develop software for real time language conversion

Google has planned to tap the future market of real time language conversion applications for the advanced telecommunication gadgets. Under its strategy, the search giant has been developing newtranslation software for mobile phones which will enable two people from different sides of the world to talk in real time, while one won't need to speak the same language.

Although, this technology is yet in concept phase, Google has already launched its online text-to-text translation service and its Google Voice technology which will be soon launched for the mobile phones.

In a conversation with Times online, Google's head of translation services, Mr. Franz Och said, "We think speech-to-speech translation should be possible and work reasonably well in a few years' time."

But like Google, there are some other players too which have the similar vision about the application. Working in the similar sector is the company Sahr, which made an announcement in June 2009, that it was pioneering and developing "the World's richest knowledge base for Arabic natural language processing."

Moreover, many high profile organizations including the US Departments of defence, Homeland Security and justice has started to test Sahr's instant translation service on the blackberry and iPhone mobile platforms

Hillary Clinton to Call for Uncensored Global Internet

Tomorrow, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is all prepared to send out a call for an uncensoredglobal Internet, wherein individuals and businesses can operate without any fears of repression or cyber attacks like those which Google Inc. has said it experienced in China.

With the call, Secretary Clinton will be outlining the Obama Administration’s vision of encouraging Internet freedom and security, while also highlighting how America is offering support to organizations across the globe to develop and use tools to "circumvent firewalls and promote democracy and economic growth", as has been shared by officials.

“Do we want to live in a world where there is one Internet, one knowledge commons from which we can all draw or where the knowledge you have access to is based on what country you live in and the whim of the censors?”, said Ms. Clinton's adviser on technology, Alec Ross, while sharing that the Secretary's upcoming speech would pose the issue as a strong threat to the "the free flow of information and resources".

The call from the Secretary seems to be a direct result of news shared by Google, according to which, the company had stressed on January 12 that it might be putting an end to its operations across China. The announcement was a result of a cyber attack which was targeted at Google, and seemed to be looking to steal information from Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.