Peter Stack
Amazon.com is jumped into the crowded Smartphone market with its own phone called Fire Phone, directly confronting with Apple and Samsung.
The introduction continues Amazon's evolution from online book seller to global technology titan.
The phone, like the other Amazon’s electronic devices, including readers and tablets, is tightly integrated to Amazon online shopping and presents some very interesting technologies and points of difference.
- Fire uses a four dedicated front facing cameras and a infrared technology to recognize and track where your face is both in the day light and in the dark. The reason for this id to enable a feature called “dynamic perspective”: the tech will dynamically change your viewing experience depending upon your perspective, as well as how you hold and move the phone.
- Amazon’s Fire Phone won’t have Google’s services. In fact the phone will have its own applications and its own App Store.
- Firefly feature will make your shopping in Amazon even easier. It can identify songs and products via microphone and camera, then is Amazon the products will automatically queued for you to buy. Firefly also utilises the phone’s camera to recognise phones numbers of local businesses.
- Fire users will get unlimited cloud storage for their pictures
- Fire phone is built with Corning durable Gorilla Glass 3 panels on both the front and the rear, but the glass isn’t shatterproof so if you have a habit of breaking phone displays, this presents twice the risk.
How many times we hear about people saying “I spend lots of money every month for my website and I don’t get the desired traffic of results”. There are so many things that can go wrong with a website and doesn’t matter how much money you spent to make it, because is all about how you design your website, and how you manage your website.
To achieve a successful website is a good rule to follow these essential tips and you will see that the results will not take long to show.
- Before you start to build your website, consider what purpose it serves in your business? A website can be used to sell a product or service exclusively, to give information, as a brochure to attract more business or showcase projects, or even a combination of things.Each purpose needs to develop with a different technique.
For example if you are an author selling a book, a very simple website can do the job. You just need to describe your book, write down some testimonials and obviously bring to the action of Buy NOW.
- Understand your target market. What’s worse of not getting traffic is getting the wrong traffic. Meaning people who are not interested in buying your product or services, but rather someone trying to sell YOU something. Therefore is important to deeply understand who we are talking to.
- Male or Female?
- What level of education do they have?
- Do they have children?
- What’s their level of income?
- What do they enjoy to read?
- What are their problems to be solved?
- Lead visitors to action. Don’t make the mistake of throwing all your content in the front page, this makes your visitors confused and willing to leave as soon as they get there. Is better to focus each page on a particular content and decide what you want your visitors to do. Don’t be shy, make it clear and easy to understand and you’ll see the results.
- Link your Website to Social Media. There is no doubt that the explosion of social media has been huge over the past few years.. Social media is an essential marketing channel to build relationships with potential and existing customers.Especially Google plus is an extraordinary tool. In fact activity in Google plus can influence search engine rankings, sometimes quite significantly. Google has also indicated that social media interactions are a factor in their search engine ranking algorithm.
- Upgrade your website. Think about your website as a constant work in progress rather then something static. Both your business and technology change over time and in this changes have to be reflected on your website. Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) is quoted as saying that successful businesses must "change often and change quickly" to survive in the modern world.
If you want to get more information on how to build a successful website contact us or visit our website.
A research conducted by the anti-virus firm Avast has revealed that hackers use weak passwords just like everyone else. In fact after analysing a sample of nearly 40,000 passwords collected from years, Avast’s Antonín Hýža found that only 10 percent of passwords were "beyond normal capabilities of guessing or cracking." The researcher provided then some interesting statistics around hackers password choices.
"I looked at 40,000 samples of hackers’ passwords and found that nearly 2,000 were unique and 1,255 of those were in plain text. Another 346 passwords were easily cracked from MD5 hashes, because they were shorter than 9 characters. That gave me a total of 1,601 passwords and 300 hashes," Avast's Antonin Hyza said in a blog post.
Almost none of the unique passwords from the samples contained uppercase characters, despite regular warnings by security experts to use a mix of upper- and lowercase characters for passwords, furthermore the researcher discovered that the average hackers’ password has a maximum six characters, contain lower case letters and numbers and it’s derived from the English language.
Here below some chart from the Avast blog explain better how the hackers passwords usually are: (Source: Antonín Hýža, Avast Blog, https://blog.avast.com/2014/06/09/are-hackers-passwords-stronger-than-regular-passwords/)
“On the table below the occurrence of lower-case alpha characters used in passwords is displayed. The most used character is letter aand letters f, j, v, w, y, z are used very seldom. This is the largest set of characters so 38 occurrences of lower-case letter q is still more frequently used than the upper-case character set where S has 28 occurrences. In the special character set, lower-case q is used almost the same as most frequently used “.” with count of 42.”
Upper case lettersand their occurrence is displayed on the next table. They are all very rarely used and when they are, it is either the first letter in the password, or the entire word is written with upper case letters. Only a few passwords actually uses a combination of both upper and lower case.
The next table shows which special characters are preferred by hackers and how much they use them to improve passwords. The first character in this table is a space and it revealed one interesting thing: One or five spaces could be a pretty clever password, but not very secure as it gets tested right from the beginning. Not all special characters are listed below because” , = ~ | [ ] “ were not used at all.
Source: Antonín Hýža, Avast Blog, https://blog.avast.com/2014/06/09/are-hackers-passwords-stronger-than-regular-passwords/
Attending the World Cup in person can be very expensive considering hotels, flights, and stadium ticket prices. So in order to make all soccer fans happy, Google released a Maps Street View package on Thursday specifically for the World Cup. The feature lets people explore all 12 of the World Cup stadiums, along with scenes captured on roads painted in festive tribute to the major global sporting event.
While these maps could be insightful to people who are far from Brazil, Google has also rolled out a few features for those fans who actually travelled down south to see some live goals, indeed the mapping application includes tools for finding the most efficient ways to get to games using buses or trains.
Google has released a test version of a software called “End to End” aimed to provide a secure method for transmitting data between users.
The move comes after the tech giant announced its support for Reset the Net, a coordinated day of action set for Thursday to oppose mass surveillance online. To the action day other well-known companies will participate including Reddit, Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future and Greenpeace.
“End-to-end” encryption plugin allows data leaving your browser to be encrypted until the recipient decrypts it, and vice versa.
In reality the encryption services have been available for years, but were often too difficult for most people on the Internet to use
In a blogpost, Google said its data showed that approximately 40-50% of emails sent between Gmail and other email providers are not encrypted.
However, the End-to-End extension is not available at the Chrome Web Store quite yet; the alpha development status is been released yesterday so that the community can test and evaluate it, helping Google to make it as secure as it needs to be before people start relying on it.
"We recognize that this sort of encryption will probably only be used for very sensitive messages or by those who need added protection. But we hope that the "End-to-end" extension will make it quicker and easier for people to get that extra layer of security should they need it".
Facebook mission of connecting people in under-developed countries goes one step forward after partnering with wireless operators in certain countries to offer free access to its social network and building drones and satellites that will beam Internet access to remote regions of the world.
Pryte said the tie-up would "make an even greater impact by advancing the work we are doing in collaboration with Facebook's great team, working to further Internet.org's goal of making affordable internet access available to everyone in the world."
So far Facebook has acquired 10 companies with its largest acquisition being the purchase of WhatsApp, paying more than $40 per WhatsApp user. Most of the Facebook acquisitions have boon “Talent acquisitions”, in fact its CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that "We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get excellent people...”
Iphone/Ipad and Ipod touch's battery problems have become particularly noticeable with IOS 7.1, in fact battery technology has not advanced as the other features, rather its overall performance is even worsened,.
So let’s have a look to a couple of tips to keep our battery running for as long as possible.Many of these tips are going to be common sense but still valid for the less technology savvy people.
- Deselect Airdrop. The application allows you to share files and photos with other people in close proximity. Unfortunately this tool can suck a big part of your battery so is better to go to the CONTROL CENTER, Select AIRDROP and then OFF.
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- Restore your device as new. Is usually the best way to fix any battery issue, even though is a pain.. You will need to reinstall everything, and all your saved will be lost, but in most cases your battery life will be better than ever.
- Keep you device out of sun. In fact the sun rays kill battery faster than any other factor.
- Disable location services. When you don’t really need it, and you are running out of battery is better to disable this function.
- Eliminate Push Notification. You can turn these off one-by-one, or turn off Push entirely by heading into Settings -> Notifications, and save a bit of extra battery life since your device won’t be pulling in data for those applications anymore.
- Reduce the brightness. Keepingthe screen constantly at maximum brightness consumes a lot of battery life, is better to keep the screen at 30% of their brightness most of time.
Since Satya Nadella took the reins of Microsoft in February, he is leaving his mark by demonstrating his ability to make the software giant as relevant today as it was back when it promised to put a personal computer on every desk and in every home.
Nadella effort now is focused on re-energizing the 40-year-old Microsoft's corporate culture that has missed the biggest waves in the industry including search and mobile.
After a hard work finally on Tuesday, Nadella brought his Skype team onto the stage and presented a terrific new technology that emulate the Start Trek universal communicator: Skype translation.
Essentially you can speak to someone who speaks a different language and be understood. Skype adds the other person's translations for you in subtitle format at the bottom of the screen. Although it's not an immediate translation as you need to wait until the other person is done speaking before the service starts whirring away.
Microsoft isn't sure how many languages will be included initially. The company will release new languages as they meet the bar for translation quality.
This technology if well implemented has the potential to revolutionize the business world.
It will be made available for all Skype users apparently within the end of the year.
Yesterday morning a number of people across Australia woke up with an unpleasant message on their Iphones.
The typical message read like this: “Device hacked by Oleg Pliss. For unlock device, you need send voucher code by 100 usd/eur (Moneypack/Ukash/PaySafeCard) to email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for unlock.”
The hacker who calls himself "Oleg Pliss" systematically froze iPhone, iPad and Mac users out of their own devices, holding them hostage until payments of between $50 and $100 were received.
The hack was conducted by exploiting a weakness in Apple’s “Find My iPhone” feature. In fact the victims who had set a password on their device were able to unlock them without paying the ransom. However, most people without passwords set up prior to the attack were not able to regain access to their device.
As if that was not enough PayPal told the Sydney Morning Herald that the email address in the message is not linked to any account and so anyone who had paid the ransom can be refunded.
To keep your devices from being attacked is simple and involves two steps.
- Step 1. Change you Apple ID password
- Step 2. Make sure that you have a two factor authentication enabled.
In this way even if the hacker discovers you password he cannot do any changes without having in his hands your Apple device to access your account.
Large number of users switched to the latest versions of Windows since Microsoft officially ended to support Windows XP the 8th of April 2014.
Despite there are still many users that rely on the old operating system, especially some companies and organizations that were unable to migrate to the new systems before the support phase ended, and that are paying Microsoft to get security patches and updates.
Now a registry hack that allows Windows XP to continue receiving update has emerged. In fact the discovered hack will allow receiving security updates until April 2019 and… for FREE.
By making a few changes in the registry of XP, the hack basically tricks the automatic update servers at Microsoft into thinking the OS is Windows Embedded POSReady 2009. The OS is based on Windows XP Service Pack 3 and it will continue to get security updates from Microsoft until April 2019.
For 32-bit versions of Windows XP SP3, tweak the registry by opening Notepad, and pasting in:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\WPA\PosReady]
"Installed"=dword:00000001
Then Save As xp.reg. Note, the ".reg" file extension, not the default .txt.
For 64-bit versions of XP, there is a workaround on Sebijk.
However is worth to say that is still better to migrate from XP as this operative system is less secure than the other more modern versions. Moreover is likely that Microsoft will find the way to block any updates that use this hack.
For the moment, we like to know that the good old Widows XP is not yet dead.
For more information on how to migrate your operating system Contact us or visit our Service Page.
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