Confirmed: April Is the Cruelest Month - Time Magazine

• Jessica Roy @JessicaKRoy
 

2:24 PM ET

Anybody wanna hibernate until May?

 “APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain.”

That’s a quote from a T.S. Eliot poem, but according to everybody’s favorite astrologer Susan Miller, April 2014 is going to be an absolutely horrific month for almost all of us. Of course, that’s only if you believe in astrology.

New York Magazine points out that in an interview given to theGuardian in January, Miller noted that two “angry eclipses” destined for us in April will cause some intense emotional upheaval, particularly for anyone born between April 15 and 29. From NY Mag:

Eclipses have a mission to expose truths, Miller writes, and thereby sweep away elements that are no longer relevant in your life. You might think they are relevant or important, she notes, when they are taken from you on April 15 or April 29, but they’re not.

And it gets worse. From the Guardian story:

“Look at 29 April!” I look. “Some people feel the stock market is…” She pauses for such a long beat that I offer to complete her sentence: “…going to crash?” She shakes her head. “This is even worse – we’ve not had this since the American Revolution.”

Miller also said that April looks so scary she’s “giving classes on it.” 

At least Mercury won’t be in retrograde?

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Google Public DNS Server Traffic Hijacked

The Internet is becoming a dangerous place day-by-day and especially for those innocent web users who rely on 3rd party services. The latest bad news is that the World's largest and most widely used Google's free public DNS (Domain name system) resolvers raised security red flags yesterday.
DNS is the master address list for the Internet, which translates IP addresses into human readable form and vice versa. According to Internet monitoring firm BGPmon, Google's DNS server 8.8.8.8/32 was hijacked yesterday for 22 minutes.

The Google's DNS server handles around 150 billion queries a day and during the 22 minutes of hijacking, millions of Internet users, including Financial institutions, Governments were redirected to BT’s (British multinational telecommunications services company) Latin America division in Venezuela and Brazil.Hackers exploited a well-known vulnerability in the so-called Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which is used to exchange data between large service providers, and hijacking could allow the attackers to simply re-route the traffic to a router they controlled. 

BGP attack is the man-in-the-middle attack at large scale and harder to detect, as the traffic still reaches its legitimate destination and which was first demonstrated in 2008 by two security researchers - Tony Kapela and Alex Pilosov.

It's not the first time when Google Public DNS service has been hijacked. In 2010, DNS server traffic was hijacked and redirected to Romania and Austria.

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Nokia X launched in India for Rs 8,599: Nokia’s first Android phone

Nokia has launched its first Android device for India at an event in Mumbai. The Nokia X will be available from today for Rs 8,599. That price is slightly higher than the Rs 8,500 tag it was expected to sport, and could be the major factor in the final equation, Nokia is positioning the X series below its Lumia line, but above the Asha range, so it is expected to bridge the gap between the two price points. It must be noted that the price announced is the MOP (Market Operative Price) of the phone, so the box price (or MRP) is higher.

While the Nokia X has been launched, the company didn’t launch the X+ or the XL in India. Both are expected to launch in the next couple of months. The Nokia X run Android, but the login and app data is tied to Microsoft’s cloud services, and not Google as in any other Android phone. The phones run a version of Android Open Source Project, with access to sideloading of apps, third-party app stores and Nokia’s own store. You will find Microsoft essentials instead of Google services. Indian buyers will not get free Skype calls to mobiles and landlines when they purchase the Nokia X, due to regulatory hurdles.

The Nokia X features a 4-inch display with a 800×480 pixel resolution. It sports a low-powered Snapdragon S4 SoC with dual-core processor, which given the other specs should be enough for most use cases. The dual-core processor is clocked at 1GHz. There’s 512MB of RAM on the Nokia X, and it has 4GB internal storage and the ability to take in microSD cards up to 32GB in capacity. 

The Finnish company has decided to go with a 3-megapixel primary shooter, and there’s no front-facing camera. That’s a bit of a disappointment for the selfie-obssessed and Skype users, though you can still use Skype on the phone. The Nokia X gets a 1500 mAh battery, rated for around 13 hours of talk time on 2G and 17 days standby time. In terms of connectivity, the X and X+ have dual SIM slots, 3G cellular data, Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 3.0.

view more at :-  ezivera

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$25 Smartphone by FireFox OS

Mozilla is aiming squarely at the dominance of Google Android in the smartphone field by introducing the cheap smartphone with the FireFox OS on it. Mozilla unveiled the phone at a press event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Mozilla partnered with chipmaker Spreadtrum to develop the smartphone that has a $25 suggested retail price. Even if it comes with a low price tag, the device still has some respectable specs. TechRadar got shipping unit of the device and reported that it has a single-core ARM Cortex-A5 chip clocked at 1 GHz backed by 256 MB of RAM. It also has a 2GB flash memory and a 3.5 inch display, along with a 2 megapixel camera.

The $25 smartphone from Mozilla is the ideal first smartphone for people who have not been able to afford other smartphone models according to Jay Sullivan, the chief operating officer of Mozilla. Sullivan was quoted by Bloomberg as saying,“we are about bringing people online.”

A cheap smartphone will be perfect for developing markets where internet penetration rates are not high yet. Smartphones can help people in these markets leapfrog the progression to getting access to the Internet and avoid purchasing personal computers or laptops just to connect to the Internet.

The cheap smartphone also appears to be Mozilla’s first push to stake its claim in the smartphone OS market which is dominated by Google’s Android OS. Q2 2013 data from IDC shows that Android had a smartphone market share of 79.3% while iOS had market share of 13.2%. Mozilla will most likely aim at breaking Linux’s market share, at least for the initial phase. Mozilla only needs to capture more than 0.8% which is Linux’s share in the smartphone OS market.

Smartphones Reduce the Digital Divide

One of the projections from

Ericsson’s ConsumerLab’s 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2014 is that smartphones will reduce the digital divide. The study found that people in Indonesia and India already primarily use smartphones for instant messaging and online banking. That is a big contrast to the U.S. and the U.K. where people are more likely to use their laptop for online banking. People also believe that mobile phones are the most important tool for carrying out daily activities. Ericsson’s study shows that 51% of people think about mobile phones this way.

Aside from offering cheap phones, there is also a need to address the other side of the equation and that means the infrastructure for connecting smartphones to the Internet. Telecommunication firms are doing their best to offer the 

<a href="http://www.moneyhero.com.hk/en/broadband">best broadband plans</a> 

to mobile consumers but there is more work that needs to be done. Facebook, for example, has the Internet.org project where they try to connect more people to the Internet and they are doing this by trying to bring down the cost to access the Internet. The Internet.org is aiming to connect 5 billion more people to the Internet.

Mozilla is not alone in trying to offer lower-priced smartphones to the market. Nokia, for example, has also introduced a new line of phones that run on the Google Android system that costs around $120. BlackBerry also unveiled the Z3 and the Canadian smartphone maker will sell the phone in Indonesia before selling it to other Southeast Asian countries.

There are also smaller handset makers that are making cheaper smartphones. ZTE from China is not as well-known as Nokia or Blackberry but they have been making cheap smartphones. In the Philippines, there is also Cherry Mobile that sells affordable smartphones. The race to offer cheaper smartphones is a good development for breaking down the digital divide in the world. These devices can help bring all of the benefits of having information at the tip of your hands to the rest of the world’s population that still do not have access to the Internet.

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Change Your IP in Less Then 1 Minute

1. Click on “Start” in the bottom left hand corner of screen

2. Click on “Run”

3. Type in “command” and hit OK

 You should now be at an MSDOS prompt screen.

4. Type “ipconfig /release” just like that, and hit “enter”

5. Type “exit” and leave the prompt

6. Right-click on “Network Places” or “My Network Places” on your desktop.

7. Click on “properties”

You should now be on a screen with something titled “Local Area Connection”, or something close to that, and, if you have a network hooked up, all of your other networks.

8. Right click on “Local Area Connection” and click “properties”

9. Double-click on the “Internet Protocol (TCP/IP)” from the list under the “General” tab.

10. Click on “Use the following IP address” under the “General” tab.

11. Create an IP address (It doesn’t matter what it is. I just type 1 and 2 until i fill the area up).

12. Press “Tab” and it should automatically fill in the “Subnet Mask” section with default numbers.

13. Hit the “Ok” button here.

14. Hit the “Ok” button again.

You should now be back to the “Local Area Connection” screen.

15. Right-click back on “Local Area Connection” and go to properties again.

16. Go back to the “TCP/IP” settings.

17. This time, select “Obtain an IP address automatically” tongue.gif

18. Hit “Ok”

19. Hit “Ok” again

20. You now have a new IP address

With a little practice, you can easily get this process down to 15 seconds.

NOTE:- This only changes your dynamic IP address, not your ISP/IP address. If you plan on hacking a website with this trick be extremely careful, because if they try a little, they can trace it back.

more info- Ezivera 

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