FACEBOOK – an important message to all my Facebook contacts.

ATTENTION!!!

Important: … All those who use Facebook either for business or entertainment, Here’s how to properly configure your Facebook to your advantage:

Status:

1. Have you noticed that the updates and recent news that will appear on Facebook arealways the same people, no matter how great your friends list?
2. Have you noticed that when you post a message, photo or link, the comments alwayscome from the same circle of friends?
3. Will the rest of your friends do not use more than Facebook?

The Problem:

Due to new updates, a large part of your contact list can not see anything you post on Facebook. From now Facebook has a configuration in which it only show your posts to people who have recently interacted with you in the last 2 weeks.

So for a person to be visible to all your friends, you should leave a comment directly to each of them and vice versa! This is impossible for most people and especially for those who have huge lists of friends.

The Solution:

1. One the initial page, click on ”Most Recent” then click the arrow to the right and select “Edit Options”.
2. Click on ”Show publications” and change the setting to “All his friends and pages”.

Result: Made this change in the configuration, you can see the publications of all your friendsagain, but they can not see yet!

Note:
INVISIBLE still ongoing for most of your list!
To re-establish contact and becoming visible again have to pass these instructions to all your contacts.

Greetings!

Beware! Your PC is not safe. Even a routine Internet search, especially for a hot topic, might lead your computer into the hands of hackers.

Not just dubious online advertisements and leading or attractive download offers, experts feel that usual search queries could expose your system to cyber criminals.

According to experts, in a testimony to the rising threat posed by cyber criminals, many Internet search results on latest skirmishes in the Korean peninsula led the users to links of malwares and fake anti-virus software.

Trend Micro, a leading network antivirus and internet content security software and services provider, in the wake of exchange of fire between North and South Koreas, found that some internet search results on the topic itself were hacked.

”…Within several hours of the cross-border incident, search results related to the subject of the clash, had been poisoned by scammers. Hijacks were detected for both English and Korean languages,” Trend Micro said.

The firm noted that the hijacked search results routed users to fake URLs, that directed users to download fake anti-virus applications which were infected by viruses.

Fake ActiveX control or a Flash Player update, were used to convince internet users that their computers have been infected by viruses.

Last week, North Korea fired dozens of artillery shells on a South Korean island, killing four persons and triggering an exchange of fire, as southern armed forces went on their highest state of alert.

The fake antivirus variant seen in this attack is detected as TROJ_FAKEAV.SMRY, and that the company was already blocking the sites hosting the malicious files.

The shelling, one of the worst incidents between the two countries in years, is being used by cybercriminals behind fake antivirus malware.

According to research reports, the increase of internet users globally, the spam is also increasing and it continued to grow between January and June 2010, with a brief lull during April.

According to reports, malicious URLs increased from 1.5 billion in January to over 3.5 billion in June.

North America sourced the most malicious URLs, while Asia-Pacific had the most victims of malware infections. The top URLs blocked by Trend Micro were adult websites, as well as sites that hosted malicious variants such as IFRAME code, TROJ_AGENT, and JS_DLOADR.ATF.

Christmas, the season of gifts and travelling has people shopping over the internet day and night. Along with them are also the cybercriminals working hard to hack consumer information, their money and identities.

McAfee, the anti-virus software solution for home and business users warns of the scams that could sadden your holiday season.

It is called the “Eleven Scams of Christmas“…

1) iPad Offer Scams - Apple iPad is one of the most sought after gadget of the year and is one of top products on a shopper’s list. Taking advantage of this, scammers are announcing offers of free iPads. The consumers are asked to purchase different products and then provide their credit card number for the free iPad. Another scam is that it will make users take up a quiz to win a free iPad for which the consumers need to provide their cell phone number to receive the results. In actuality they are signed up for a cell phone scam that costs $10 a week.

2) Distress message scam - This is a travel scam which sends out SOS messages to phones of family and friends requests them to transfer some money as they are lost in an unfamiliar place and want to get back home. According McAfee labs the scam will rise in the travel season.

3) Fake Gift Cards - The recent Facebook scam is one such example of fake gift card scam. It offered free $1,000 Best Buy gift card to the first 20,000 people who signed up for a Best Buy fan page which helped cybercrooks to gain personal information of the users . They then used it to sell it to the marketers or use it as Id theft.

4) High-paying or Work-at-home jobs - These holiday job offer links promise you jobs by taking your personal information, such as your email address, home address and Social Security number to apply for a fake job.

5) Phishing SMS texts - This is also called as “smishing” where SMS messages appear to be sent from your bank or an online retailer saying that there is something wrong with your account and you have to call a number to verify your account information. Cybercrooks know that people are more vulnerable to this scam during the holiday season as consumers are doing more online shopping and checking bank balances frequently.

6) Suspicious Holiday Rentals - During peak travel times when consumers often look online for affordable holiday rentals, cybercrooks post fake holiday rental sites that ask for down payments on properties by credit card or wire transfer.

7) Recession scams - McAfee Labs has seen a significant number of spam emails advertising pre-qualified, low-interest loans and credit cards if the recipient pays a processing fee, which goes directly into the scammer’s pocket.

E-card scams - E-cards are a convenient and earth-friendly way to send greetings to friends and family, but cybercriminals load fake versions with links to computer viruses and other malware instead of cheer. According to McAfee Labs, computers may start displaying obscene images, pop-up ads, or even start sending cards to contacts that appear to come from you.

9) Low Price traps - Shoppers should be cautious of products offered at prices far below competitors. Cyber scammers use auction sites and fake websites to offer too-good-to-be-true deals with the goal of stealing your money and information.

10) Charity scams - The holidays have historically been a prime time for charity scams since it’s a traditional time for giving, and McAfee Labs predicts that this year is no exception. Common ploys include phone calls and spam e-mails asking you to donate to veterans? charities, children’s causes and relief funds for the latest catastrophe.

11) Dangerous Holiday Downloads - Holiday-themed screensavers, jingles and animations are an easy way for scammers to spread viruses and other computer threats especially when links come from an email or IM that appears to be from a friend.

What’s common among 26/11, the Jaipur blasts and a threatening e-mail sent to Karnataka Chief Minister B.S. Yeddyurappa some months ago?

In all three cases, mail was generated from cybercafes.

In many such instances, the police might have ended up tracing the cafes rather than the criminals what with the cloak of anonymity they operate under.

In a bid to prevent such anonymity, a Mumbai-based firm has developed software and is offering it free of cost to cybercafe owners and the police.

Cybercafes, defined as intermediaries in the amended Information Technology Act, 2008, are being misused for terror crimes, fraudulent withdrawal of money and sending obscene mail, among others. This was mainly because the cafe owners failed to maintain proper user data, according to M. Krishnaswami, retail sales manager of the company.

Following the mail to the Karnataka Chief Minister, the police traced the internet protocol address and the café, but could not find out further details because the cafe owner did not maintain data, Mr. Krishnaswami said.

Similarly, an e-mail sent to a Hindi television channel before the Mumbai terror attack was traced to a cafe in Rajkot.

In a bid to help curb increasing cybercrime and supplement police efforts, Ideacts Innovations, a solutions provider, launched ‘CLINCK Cyber Cafe Manager‘, which enables internet cafes to capture the relevant visitor data in a digital form.

Once the software gets installed, the visitors would be required to register digitally, providing details of name, gender, age, address, photo, photo identification and contact number for accessing a terminal. All data then gets encrypted and stored in the company’s CLINCK servers in Mumbai, and only law enforcement authorities would have access to it.

According to Mr. Krishnaswami, 15,000 cybercafes in different parts of the country have installed the application, including 1,400 in Hyderabad, 1,000 in Bangalore, 900 in Mumbai and 850 each in Chennai and Delhi. The software was also installed in cybercafes in Vijayawada (190), Visakhapatnam (150), Nellore (85), Prodattur (70) and Kadapa (65).

The company installed modules in the central crime station here and the zonal DCP’s offices of the central and west zones to enable the police to quickly trace an IP address and the identity of the user in the event of a cybercrime.

Praveen Kumar, Joint Commissioner City Police (Special Branch), said cafe owners could install the software voluntarily.

Many of you may have noticed the special doodle on search engine giant Google’s India home page on Children’s Day this year.

Guess who was the creator?

Akshay Raj, a class IX student of St. Aloysius High School, Mangalore, is the winner for this year’s ‘Doodle 4 Google‘ competition, a release issued by the company said.

His doodle ‘Technically and Naturally Growing India‘ was chosen from over 1,08,000 sketches submitted by students from across the country and was selected on the basis of artistic merit, creativity, and expression of the theme.

The winning doodle was live on the Google India homepage on this year’s Children’s Day (14th November 2010), which is also the birth anniversary of the country’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Raj will also receive a Technology Starter Package and 2 lakh technology grant for his school, the release said.

It took 90 days and over 1 lakh entries for the country to get its second ‘made in India’ doodle.

Dennis Hwang

Jennifer Hom

Dennis Hwang - the Master Doodler – and Jennifer Hom – the creative force behind the Google Gandhi doodle – chose the winning doodle for India out of the 41 semi-finalists.

The ‘Doodle 4 Google’ competition was open to all students from I to X standard. This year participants were challenged to imagine their own version of the Google logo based on the theme ‘My Dream for India‘.

Besides the national winner, three group winners were also chosen. These were picked through an online voting system where the Indians voted for their favourite doodle from the finalists.

Google ‘doodles’ are creative logos that appear on some special days, to commemorate scientific and artistic achievements, historic or seasonal events, and other local occasions. For over a decade, Google has been designing innovative logos called ’doodles’ for its homepage.

Click here to see Google’s ‘doodles’ through the years…

All the committees and working groups forming part of the IPv6 Task Force that will oversee the country’s transition to a ‘new’ global web-address protocol are expected to be in place by this month-end.

Deadlines have been set for different stakeholders to prepare themselves for the major change, and a road map spelling out the details of the migration from Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) was officially released in July.

Version 4 of the protocol, which has so far been dominantly used on the Internet, is made up of a set of numbers that help to identify web addresses, besides facilitating communication from one point to the other.

As the Internet grew phenomenally, the sets of numbers that could be used as digital addresses started getting exhausted, making it imperative that a new and expanded system with the potential for a tremendously larger number of unique addresses be deployed to keep it going.

The world will run out of IPv4 addresses in a matter of months, experts say. (See Hurricane Electric IPv4 Exhaustion Counters)

It is, however, not as if the IPv4 system would be shut down to make way for the new one. Both systems will co-exist; the future will however belong to the IPv6 system which has slowly been gaining global acceptance in recent years. Meanwhile, various techniques will be used to facilitate communication between the two. Isolated IPv6 networks will also have to communicate with each other using the IPv4 networks till they gain ground.

The National IPv6 Deployment Roadmap detailed the creation of the Task Force which was to have several committees and working groups to pave the way for this transition, a major technical challenge for infrastructure and service providers in the country besides the government itself. It will be very difficult, “if not impossible,” to acquire new IPv4 addresses after mid-2012.

The Task Force was to be made up of officials from the Departments of Telecommunications and Information Technology, organisations such as the National Internet Exchange of India, the Education and Research Network and the National Informatics Centre, as well as various other Central and State government departments and agencies, and representatives of telecom and Internet service providers, educational institutions, industry associations, equipment vendors and content providers, software vendors and cable TV industry representatives, apart from the IPv6 Forum.

Though the extent of progress achieved by the big Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to get themselves ready for the transition seemed to vary, R.M. Agarwal, Deputy Director-General, Telecommunication Engineering Centre, expressed confidence in their being able to meet the December, 2011 deadline.

He told The Hindu that preparatory to the change, the ISPs were also ‘taking care’ of issues like acquiring enough IPv6 address blocks, resources that are apportioned internationally to networks in different regions of the world.

While some of the big ISPs were already in a position to offer IPv6 connectivity, the small and medium ISPs were not prepared for transition “because they are dependent on their upstream larger service providers in the chain,” the report had said. They would follow suit once the large service providers migrated to IPv6. All important Central government Ministries appointed nodal officers to get set for the transition, Mr. Agarwal said. All Central and State government Ministries and Departments, including its public sector units, are expected to switch over to IPv6 by March 2012.

The road map had suggested that a national center of excellence, ‘Indian IPv6 Centre for Innovation,’ be created to take over the activities of the Task Force in the long run. A separate ‘Transition Pipe,’ which will channel traffic from one IPv6 network to another, has been suggested, especially by the ISPs. “The working group concerned will take up this issue with all stakeholders,” Mr. Agarwal said.

For those of us who didn’t grow up with the Internet, the technology can be exasperating.

Working on a PowerPoint is like trying to paint a masterpiece in a carnival setting where every keystroke is followed by a jack-in-the-box bursting out of its container, yelling ‘boo’ and scattering confetti everywhere — someone is pinging you, someone else is sending you his tenth email for the day (marked urgent so you can’t flag it for later) and older forms of communication (like the landline and cell phone) continue to buzz away like they always have.

And then there are those life-changing features that we love. Online radio can stream 80s pop into your workstation while you wade through to-do lists and you can group chat with your boisterous college buddies while faking interest in a conference call.

In short, it’s complicated!

Ever since the Internet invaded office spaces, baffled bosses have wondered how to respond to the effect it has on their teams. Analysts estimate that the loss of productivity resulting from Internet access runs into billions of dollars’ worth. Every modern-day manager has walked by to find their subordinates sheepishly minimising cricket score tickers or movie reviews.

What follows is usually disciplinary action. The web is treated like the kid next door who’s a distraction and a bad influence. Punishment could range from limited (and Websense-supervised) visits to a total ban.

Predictably enough, regulations are followed by rebellion. There are countless sites with titles like “How to bypass Websense” and “Ten ways to access blocked sites from work”. It becomes the forbidden fruit that is suddenly even more appealing than legitimate web access.

Also, thanks to the 24/7 culture that has developed in the workplace, it becomes harder for professionals to draw the line between work time and personal time. It’s common to find people cramming chores into their workday, like wolfing down a sandwich while shopping online for gadgets or making a net banking transaction while they wait for an email.

When a restrictive Internet usage policy is announced abruptly in a mass mailer, there’s often resentment among cubicle-dwellers who feel cut off from the outside world during those long hours spent at the office. Feeling like the lead character in “Castaway”, they often seek out secret passages to email accounts and end up compromising their own security, as well as the company’s. Passwords and other sensitive information are enteredinto proxy sites that have no connection to the blocked websites. Some take the news badly when chat is banned and try to circumvent the rule using bizarre methods like opening GoogleDocs files and modifying the text line by line to simulate the act of chatting.

In workplaces where guidelines for Internet usage are not spelt out clearly, there is scope for much speculation and worry. Employees end up agonising over whether or not their casual banter over office email is being tracked by an eagle-eyed IT department that will later hold them accountable for what was said. Some take to using homophones in the place of ‘dangerous’ words like résumé, to pre-empt a keyword search from throwing the spotlight on their conversation thread.

Sample this: “I’m thinking of taking a Man Edge Meant course and improving my prospects”. “Ditto. I’m working on my Sea We tonight so I can get out of this hole”.

Companies are obsessed with quantifying the damage done by online loitering but a related question needs to be asked — how much is the corporate world losing in terms of employee attrition, preoccupation with web usage policies and serious security risks from proxy sites? The number is in all likelihood, frighteningly large.

Also, the spirited tug-of-war between IT and employees may be redundant in the era of wi-fi and android phones, and when the difference between social and professional networking blurs or disappears altogether.

Perhaps it’s impossible to keep out the viruses, the data thieves and casual chitchat. And those who dislike the forced multitasking that the Internet entails have to find ways to adapt since there’s no keeping that grinning jack-in-the-box down.

An e-mail virus has launched a “phishing attack” on servers across the globe, including those at ABC, NASA, Comcast, and Google and possibly US Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The virus, called “Here You Have” or VBMania, is a Trojan Horse that arrives through e-mail in your inbox with the suggestive subject line “here you have,” and the body message “This is The Document I told you about, you can find it Here” or “This is The Free Download Sex Movies, you can find it Here,” reports Fox News.

Leading virus monitors such as McAfee Labs and Symantec are investigating the virus threat, which launches a program on selecting the link in the message, and spams the virus out to everyone in the address book.

“It’s a phishing attack — when you click on the link in an e-mail it goes into the address book. It was clogging a bunch of e-mail and that’s it….It’s too early to say how sophisticated it was, but a number of companies and agencies were affected,” officials said.

It was especially challenging to monitor this particular virus, as it appeared to be replicating in several forms, noted McAfee’s experts.

Indian Government has instructed the Department of Telcommunication to send notices to RIM, Skype, and Google to grant access to all communications that take place over their networks. Within 15 days, each of these companies will be required  to open all the data, so that it can be read by the security and intelligence agencies.

It looks like we might join the Chinese and lay traditional marigold garlands on Google India Headquarters as the Government might ban these companies if they fail to comply. Although, taking into account the recent terrorist attacks, the Government’s stance is justified to an extent. However, we feel that such negotiations must take place in the background. On the other hand, once in hands of Government officials, it wouldn’t be surprising if one can get all your mail and data for a bunch of green notes. None of these companies has responded to the notices as of yet.

The number of high-speed Internet users is likely to touch 275 million from nine million by 2015, as telecom firms roll out Broadband Wireless Acess (BWA) air waves that were auctioned in June, a study said.

“Recent broadband wireless auctions, in which operators were allocated spectrum, come as a much-needed respite for the future of broadband adoption in India,” the study by Assocham and Frost & Sullivan said. The two institutions expect the deployment of BWA to begin in this fiscal itself.

Considering that around 43 per cent Internet subscribers were still using conventional dial-up connections at the end of 2009, there is a lot of potential to migrate existing subscribers to high-speed services, it added.

BWA spectrum enables high-speed Internet access as well as Internet telephony and TV services. It can also be used for voice and high-speed data services. In BWA, the government auctioned two slots of 20 MHz each.

Internet Service Provider Infotel emerged as the only pan-India winner for BWA spectrum.

On the current low level of broadband penetration (nine million), the study said it was due to factors such as insufficient wire line infrastructure, fragmented local cable operators network and usage rates, and delays in awarding spectrum.

The study further said that mobile handset manufacturers stand to gain from the roll-out of 3G services by private operators.