Bangalore, first Indian city to get free Wi-Fi hotspots...

BANGALORE: Free wireless internet services are expected to commence in the commercial heart of India's technology capital starting next month. Mahatma Gandhi Road and Brigade Road, two of the best-known shopping destinations, will have free Wi-Fi access as part of a plan to make Bangalore the first city to have such a service available at public spots.
The idea is the brainchild of a government-appointed panel headed by Mohandas Pai, a former director at Infosys. The pilot service will be available for at least six months, after which the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) panel will evaluate the network and announce possible expansion plans.
"A smartphone revolution is happening in India, but connectivity is still an issue here. We wanted to provide seamless internet access to people," said Pai, who is also the chairman of the Manipal Global Education.
Access to broadband internet free of charge at public spots will benefit hundreds of thousands of people who browse the web through mobile phones, laptops and tablets. The Internet and Mobile Association of India expects the country to have about 165 million mobile internet users by 2015.


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Bangalore-first-Indian-city-to-get-free-Wi-Fi-hotspots/articleshow/19061224.cms

ATTITUDE...

The greatest part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances.

-- Martha Washington

Adobe will try to stymie some Flash attacks with new pop-up....

Flash 11.6 to block automatic play of content in docs created with Office 2007 and older
Adobe last week announced it would add a new security feature to Flash Player in an attempt to block some of the exploits hackers are hiding inside older Microsoft Office documents.
The new feature -- a pop-up warning -- will be triggered when Flash Player detects Flash content inside documents created with Office 2007 and earlier versions.
"Since...November 2010, the most common Flash Player zero-day attack vector has been malicious Flash content embedded in Microsoft Office documents and delivered via email," said Peleus Uhley
Uhley also noted that the latest round of zero-day vulnerabilities in Flash -- ones criminals are already using by the time bugs are patched -- were being exploited with that tactic.
To make Office document-based attacks more difficult, documents generated with Office 2007, 2003 and XP -- Microsoft dropped the latter from its support list in mid-2011 -- will no longer auto-execute Flash content. Instead, when documents created with those suites are opened, Flash will display a dialog recommending the user not let the content play.
Users can select a second option and play the Flash content if they're certain the document came from a trusted source.
Flash won't bother showing the pop-up for documents generated with newer versions of Office, including Office 2010 and the just-released Office 2013, because those suites sport a sandbox that prevents automatic play of Flash content.
Microsoft calls its Office sandbox "Protected View," a feature introduced in Office 2010 and continued in Office 2013. In both suites, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files are opened in a sandboxed, or isolated, instance of the application when the file was downloaded from the Internet or opened as an Outlook email attachment.
Microsoft did not back-port the Protected View sandbox to older editions of Office.

source :
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9236668/Adobe_will_try_to_stymie_some_Flash_attacks_with_new_pop_up

Look, who is ruling the phablet market...

Phablets, a cross between a smartphone and a tablet, are gaining popularity globally as consumers opt for bigger screens to perform multimedia functions.
Here are some companies that will likely benefit or feel the impact of the fast-growing phablet market, which analysts expect to quadruple in value to $135 billion in about three years:
Winners -
Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, Lenovo Group, Asustek Computer, Google (Android software runs on most of these devices), Nuance Communications(develops Swype software for keypads, enabling easier text entry on larger screens), Nvidia (CPU), Qualcomm (CPU)
Potential winners -
HTC, Huawei, Panasonic, Sony, ZTE

source :
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/enterprise-it/strategy/Look-who-is-ruling-the-phablet-market/articleshow/17995723.cms

Facing federal charges, Internet innovator and activist Aaron Swartz commits suicide...

If convicted of allegations he hacked into an MIT network and stole millions of scholarly articles, he faced up to 35 years in jail
Aaron Swartz, the brilliant Internet pioneer, passionate political activist and computer programming prodigy, committed suicide on Friday as he faced hacking-related charges that could have landed him in jail for decades, according to published reports.
Swartz, who was 26, killed himself in his New York City apartment, according to The Tech, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) newspaper that first reported his passing on Saturday.
Swartz played key roles in the development of the RSS online content syndication technology, in the creation of the Creative Commons licenses, in a campaign against the SOPA and PIPA bills and in the success of the Reddit news sharing site.
If convicted, Swartz, whose intentions allegedly were to make the articles and documents freely available, could have been hit with a 35-year jail sentence and a US$1 million fine. Swartz had been involved in previous efforts to "liberate" government documents whose access require fees, such as those in the PACER database of court filings.
"Stealing is stealing whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars," Carmen Ortiz, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said in a statement when the indictment was unsealed in July 2011. "It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away."

source :
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9235677/Facing_federal_charges_Internet_innovator_and_activist_Aaron_Swartz_commits_suicide

Watch it out...

Vibha Rao, the chairperson of Chhattisgarh State Women Commission, sparked off a controversy by saying that women are equally responsible for the sexual offences committed against them.
Switch on to the following link to know:

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/Women-equally-responsible-for-crimes-against-them-Vibha-Rao/videoshow/17899279.cms

Make teachings of sages part of school syllabus, Advani says...

Senior BJP leader L K Advani has rued that contributions of sages and seers have been ignored in history teaching in schools on the pretext that anything to do with religion was a taboo in a secular state.
He found fault with the teaching of history in schools entirely focusing on kings and dynasties largely ignoring the contributions of sages and seers to the nation.
"It is indeed unfortunate that in Indian schools, the teaching of history is almost entirely focused on kings, their dynasties, their wars and exploits," he said.
"The remarkable contributions of our sages and seers are generally kept away from the children, and often on the plea that in a secular state anything to do with religion is taboo," he said in his latest blogpost.
Advani patted Kerala chief minister Oommen Chandy for assuring that the teachings of the Guru, the 20th century reformer who preached the message of "one caste, one religion and one God for man", would be included in school syllabus."

source :

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Make-teachings-of-sages-part-of-school-syllabus-Advani-says/articleshow/17899424.cms