Microsoft about the Infections and attacks.

Conficker, a worm that started spreading among enterprise desktop systems in 2008, continues to wriggle through corporate networks. But the total number of infected systems shrank during 2012, according to the latest Security Intelligence Report released by Microsoft on April 17.

In the last half of 2012, the average number of infections by the two major wormlike programs, Conficker and Autorun, declined by more than a third compared with the total in 2011, the company said. Worms are programs that spread from computer to computer by exploiting vulnerabilities to automatically compromise networks.Conficker typically spreads by guessing users' password, and Autorun jumps between bootable drives.

While companies are slowly tackling the threat of worms, Web-based attacks especially those that redirect a victim's browser to a site hosting malicious code have taken off, accounting for seven of the 10 top threats encountered by corporate users.

"In the last quarter of 2012, a person in the enterprise was more likely to encounter attacks through the Web than any of the network worms," says Holly Stewart, senior program manager with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center.

A distinct difference exists between enterprise users and consumers in Microsoft's data, because the company can tell if the infected computer belongs to an Active Directory Domain Services domain, typically only used in business networks. Consumers were more likely to encounter adware and other potentially unwanted software than viruses and worms, Microsoft's report found.

The Security Intelligence Report also measured the effect of host-based security software on the rate of infection, finding that computers that had no anti-malware protection were 5.5 times more likely on average to be infected with malicious code.

Attackers appear to be focusing on Windows 7 systems, as unprotected computers running the original Windows 7 operating system not the more recent Service Pack 1 version had the highest infection rate, which is 2 percent. In contrast, an average of 4.2 Windows XP systems per 1,000 protected systems showed signs of infection, almost four times higher than Windows 7 Service Pack 1 systems protected by anti-malware.

Microsoft recommended that companies use anti-malware software and other security systems, regularly patch software, and ask vendors about their security development life cycle, which is a method of developing software that takes security into account. In addition, businesses should consider restricting Web sites on their networks to those known to be good and regularly check their own site for security vulnerabilities.

"The security issues posed by the Web are an interesting mix of social engineering and being able to affect servers that are not necessarily under corporate control," Stewart said. "You can lock down end users' systems, but you may not be able to control were they go."

Reports of vulnerabilities declined by 8 percent in the second half of 2012, mainly due to a drop in application vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities reported in Microsoft products shrank by more than a quarter in the second half of 2012, their lowest level since 2005.

The Blackhole exploit kit, which Microsoft refers to as Blacole, accounted for a large proportion of the exploited vulnerabilities in the latter half of 2012, the Microsoft report stated. Six of the top 10 exploits detected in 2012 were components of this cyber-crime kit, Microsoft stated.

source:eweek

The First Indian Satellite Aryabhatta was Launched in 1975.

             Aryabhata was India's first satellite, named after the great Indian astronomer Aryaabhatta. It was launched by the Soviet Union on 19 April 1975 from Kapustin Yar using a Cosmos-3M launch vehicle. It was built by the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) to gain experience in building and operating a satellite in space.

              It was built to conduct experiments in X-ray astronomy, aeronomics, and solar physics. The spacecraft was a 26-sided polygon 1.4 m in diameter. All faces (except the top and bottom) were covered with solar cells. A power failure halted experiments after 4 days in orbit. All signals from the spacecraft were lost after 5 days of operation. The satellite reentered the Earth's atmosphere on 11 February 1992. The satellite's image appeared on the reverse of Indian 2 rupee banknotes between 1976 and 1997.

 Source: Wikipedia.

Yahoo launches Mail app for iPad, Android tablets.

 

Yahoo today released a Mail app for iOS and Android tablet users and a Weather app for iPhone owners.
A Yahoo Mail app has already been in play for the iPhone and Android smartphones, but the new version takes advantage of the larger screen size of tablets. A full-screen reading mode lets you flip through your e-mail messages as if you were reading a magazine.
While in that full-screen reading mode, tapping on your tablet displays a toolbar from which you can rely to or forward the current message, send it to the trash, move it to a folder, or add a star to flag it as important. All your "starred" messages are sent to a specific folder where you can review them all in one shot.
The Yahoo Mail app now supports more languages, including Romanian, Thai, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Dutch, Swedish, Greek. The app can be downloaded from Apple's App store and Google Play.
Available for the iPhone, Yahoo's new Weather app kicks off by displaying the present temperature of your current location, with a picturesque photo in the background.
Swiping up displays the full week's forecast followed by full details on your local weather and a map of your area. Swiping to the left reveals the weather in other locations already set up in the default iOS weather app. You can easily edit this list to add or remove locations from around the world.

 Source: CNET news

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Voice activated Vaccumig Robot from LG.

 LG announced Roboking vacuuming robot for the Korean market.
The new Roboking pretty much looks like its predecessors, but it's got more going on under the hood.It takes voice commands and can recognize which direction a person's voice is coming from. That means you could stand at the site of a particularly heinous dirt pile and call it over to come clean it up.

If just talking to your robot vacuum minion isn't enough, it also has a feature that puts it on pause when you clap twice. Yep, that's pretty much just like a Clapper.
The new Robokings can handle up to 100 minutes of cleaning on a charge, and they keep the noise down to only 48 decibels.

Google Glass: Specifications Revealed.

 

 Google has officially announced the complete specifications of Google Glasses. The most important element of the glasses is the ‘glass’ or the screen covering the eye. Google has said that the Glasses will come with a high resolution display. The display is supposed to be so powerful that Google quoted it will be "equivalent to a 25-inch high definition screen from eight feet away."
The initial editions will have features similar to a medium-budget smartphone. The glasses will come with front-facing 5 MP cameras. The video-recorder does not support HD recording. So while the videos recorded will not be of high quality, the 720p resolution will ensure decent frames.

While the device will come with an internal memory of 16 GB, just 12 GB will be user-available. We think that’s pretty generous considering they’re glasses and not normal phones. Further, storage will be via Google’s cloud computing as the glasses will be synced with cloud. So space shouldn’t really be an issue.

Google Glass supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. While connectivity options are regular, it means that the Glasses will be pretty useless in areas of no connectivity or with low connectivity. Also, with most countries still awaiting Wi-Fi hubs, the Glasses might be targeted at specific regions initially.

 

 The Glasses will support audio via bone conduction. According to the report: The technique essentially turns the wearer's head into an amplifier and it is a sensation that will be familiar to anyone who uses a waterproof MP3 player.

There’s no word on the battery but Google stated that charging once a day would be essential meaning the battery will last for about a day. However, with heavy video recording and conferences, the lasting power might not be the same.

The device can be synced with Android smartphones running the MyGlass app which has already been released by Google in the Google Play store. Google is confident that the glasses have been designed in a way that one-size-fits-all. However, the glasses will come with special nose-pads in case of need for adjustments.

Google has already begun shipping the first edition or ‘Explorer’ edition of the glasses. The glasses are priced at 1500 dollars tentatively for the developer version.

Source:indiatimes.

Tiny ear implant could replace costly surgery, hearing aids.

People afflicted with severe hearing loss often cannot benefit from garden-variety hearing aids, necessitating complex surgery to install a special implant. But new technology from the Fraunhofer Institute could provide the best of both worlds: Huge improvements and simple installation.

The new electro-acoustic transducer from Fraunhofer.

Fraunhofer's device is also an implant, but one that is so small and comparatively efficient that it can be put in quickly and easily — making it a possibility for the extremely elderly or disabled, for whom major surgery is not an option.
The big advance is the German institute's new "electro-acoustic transducer," which translates electrical signals into vibrations. A microphone and relay outside the ear send audio and power over a wireless optical link to the inner ear, where the transducer picks it up and passes it on.Existing implants work in a similar way, but use bulkier and less-efficient hardware that requires wires and potentially hours-long surgery. In contrast, Fraunhofer's device could be implanted in just a few minutes, with one incision.
There's still work to be done on the assembly and optimization of the parts; Hearing aids, like most implants, must be robust and last for a long time without maintenance and replacement.
Fraunhofer engineer Dominik Kaltenbacher is confident it will be a major improvement in the lives of people who suffer hearing loss. "This high performance is necessary for very good speech comprehension," he says in a release describing the technology, "Particularly for high-pitched sounds, which people who are severely hard of hearing find especially difficult to pick up."
Testing is scheduled for 2014, after which it will have to be approved by the necessary authorities before being available for general issue.

Source: nbcnews

Tiny Chiplets: A New Level of Micro Manufacturing.

 

        The technology, on display at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, is part of a new system for making electronics, one that takes advantage of a Xerox invention from the 1970s: the laser printer.

If perfected, it could lead to desktop manufacturing plants that “print” the circuitry for a wide array of electronic devices — flexible smartphones that won’t break when you sit on them; a supple, pressure-sensitive skin for a new breed of robot hands; smart-sensing medical bandages that could capture health data and then be thrown away. 

          The chiplets can be both microprocessors and computer memory as well as the other circuits needed to create complete computers. They can also be analog devices known as microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, that perform tasks like sensing heat, pressure or motion.

          The new manufacturing system the PARC researchers envision could be used to build custom computers one at a time, or as part of a 3-D printing system that makes smart objects with computing woven right into them.

          The technology is still in the future. The researchers are years from simultaneously placing tens or hundreds of thousands of circuits accurately in a fraction of a second. And they acknowledge that this would be only the first step in designing a commercially viable system. 

          The emerging printing technology poses a heretical idea: Rather than squeezing more transistors into the same small space, why not smear the transistors across a much larger surface?

            Moreover, the research could have tremendous economic consequences — feeding the emergence of a new digital era in manufacturing, much as laser printing transformed publishing three decades ago.

By replacing the circuit boards now assembled in factories, the technology would vastly compress a supply chain that spans the globe and employs hundreds of thousands of workers.

            It is one of a variety of technologies related to 3-D printers, which have captured the public’s imagination, raising the specter of homemade manufacturing of everything from tools to guns.

          “Digital fabrication will allow individuals to design and produce tangible objects on demand, wherever and whenever they need them,” Neil Gershenfeld, a physicist who directs the Center for Bits and Atoms at M.I.T., wrote in December in the journal Foreign Affairs.

            While there has already been an explosion in 3-D printing of solid and mechanical objects both for prototyping and increasingly for small production runs, PARC’s scientists believe that there will also ultimately be an ensemble of manufacturing technologies that seamlessly blend microelectronics with mechanical components.

            “You can print mechanical objects, but a lot of things in the world today are more than mechanical,” said Stephen Hoover, PARC’s chief executive. “A lot of the opportunities we’re going to find in the ‘Internet of things’ are going to be about how to embed intelligence at very low cost in a distributed way into the world.”

Source: NYtimes.