Technology – Page 30

What Is Hacking? How To Not Be A Victim?

August 25, 2009 by Raj Agrawal 5 Comments

A guide to keep away from online thieves

First of all, what is hacking? In computer language, hacking is the art of detecting the loop hole in the security system of a computer and exploiting that loop hole to intrude in the main system. The intention may be evil or may even be a step to find and fix the vulnerabilities.

A computer system is designed to have a strong security mechanism but due to limitations of human intelligence, the security mechanism is not a perfect one. It is next to impossible to actually produce a software which is non-hackable. If you compare the computers with us humans, you will be astounded that every detailed functioning in a computer is very similar to what humans work like. After all it is our imagination and our way of life style that led us to make computers real. The important difference is that, the the digital world possess intelligence with no emotions and humans possess both! And so, it’s ‘our vulnerabilities’ that make us design a strong but, a vulnerable computer system. Computers are our legacy!

There are some simple ways to protect your computer system from many types of network intrusions and data thefts.

Never open e-mails from unknown/untrusted senders. Some bad e-mails contain malicious codes that are crafted to install on your computer to damage and/ or steal your personal information.
Avoid clicking on unknown links sent to you on social networking sites as they bear the same reason as the first one.
Buy a copy of Bit defender Internet Security Suite for greater security. Avoid using AntiVir, Dr.WEB, NOD, Macffee and Norton. They are totally unreliable. Use Comodo Firewall.
If you are a Windows user and you don’t use the LAN sharing feature, tweak the services and turn off the NET BIOS option for better security and speed.
For online transactions, make sure that the websites where you are performing the transactions are https enabled. For example, you should use https://paypal.com and not http://paypal.com. The ‘https‘ is preferred for enhanced security and is always used by legitimate websites concerned with e-commerce.
If the firewall alerts you regarding an incoming connection, if you are unsure of who and why it is, never accept it.
While registering on any website, always prefer setting pass-phrases that exceed 14 characters.
If you are an advanced user, effectively enhance your computer security with Harden IT and Secure IT.

These recommendations are not all the things to keep away every hacker but, some simple steps to perform on a system that will protect the user from most of the online thieves and their hacking attempts.

A Newer and Safer Approach to Healing Wounds

August 20, 2009 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Silver is capable of killing pathogens and so silver treated bandages are widely preferred in hospitals around the world. An accurate amount of silver is required to be applied on the wound to help speed up the healing process safely. The silver treated bandages that are currently being used are great with killing bacteria but they also damage the necessary cells called fibroblasts which speed up the healing of the wound.

For a long time researchers have been working on to eliminate this side effect and recently a post doctoral researcher at University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM), Ankit Agarwal has come up with an experimental idea to heal the wounds faster by killing the bacteria without damaging the necessary cells on he patient’ skin.
Silver is widely used to prevent bacterial contamination in wound dressings, says Agarwal, “but these dressings deliver a very large load of silver, and that can kill a lot of cells in the wound.”

new silver treated — Precisely targeted silver molecules can kill almost all bacteria in a wound, but spare the essential fibroblast repair cells

On 19th August 2009 Ankit Agarwal presented the new idea at the American Chemical Society meeting. He has crafted an ultra-thin material carrying a precise dose of silver. One square inch contains just 0.4 percent of the silver that is found in the silver-treated antibacterial bandages now used in medicine.

Lab test results show that a low concentration of silver killed 99.9999 % of the bacteria without damaging the fibroblast cells. “This architecture is very easily tuned to different applications,” Agarwal says, because it allows exact control of such factors as thickness, porosity and silver content. The final sandwich may range from a few nanometers to several hundred nanometers in thickness. (One nanometer is one-billionth of a meter; a human hair is about 60,000 nanometers in diameter.) As mentioned by e! Science News.

The Yahoo-Bing Vs Google Story

August 15, 2009 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

A new chapter in the Search Engine – Online Advertising Story

Some time ago, Microsoft unveiled it’s new search engine – Bing, which created a big buzz on the web world. Now, Google is working on a revamped version of it’s search engine, code named “Caffeine”. While Google has no plans to change the user interface like what Microsoft has done with Bing, it is said that Caffeine will change the way Google search indexes, crawls and ranks the search results, making it much better than it is now. Even though Google search enjoys a “virtual monopoly” in the world of search engines, it plans to maintain the fact by building the next version of Google search.

Bing is a lot better then Microsoft’s live search and easily comparable to Google. Bing features better & faster results, blocks explicit content (to a very good extent) and has an appealing UI. All this is OK. But, what does the 10 year Yahoo-Bing deal involve? Well, Yahoo will halt it’s own search engine for 10 years and which will be replaced by Bing. This means that the strategy will involve Microsoft to use Yahoo traffic to divert ad sales from Google. Microsoft will give Yahoo 88 percent of the search ad sales made on its Web site, above the usual commission of 70 to 80 percent. Yahoo will sit back and focus on generating more traffic and more money.