Category Archives: Tech News

Need a Ride? Tap your iPhone

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Soon you may no longer need to stick out your thumb to catch a ride. Instead, you may get one by tapping your fingers on your iPhone.

Avego, based in Kinsale, Ireland, is demonstrating an iPhone application intended to let drivers and prospective passengers connect and share rides.

Avego

Avego

When the program is available, drivers who want to offer rides will first download the application, then record their preffered route, said Sean O’Sullivan, MD of Avego and Executive Chairman of Mapflow, Avego’s parent company, based in Dublin. “You put the iPhone on the dashboard, and records the entire trip and sends the route to our network,” he said. The system stores the route, adding it to it’s menu of paths and pick-up points and offering them and offering them autometically to interested riders.

Drivers must have an iPhone in order to use the service, but if passengers don’t, they still will be able to look for a ride in Avego’s website or call or send a text message, O’Sullival said. Drivers and riders can identify one another by photographs displayed on their iPhones, as well as by PINs that verify identities and authorize the transaction.

Avego will charge 30 cents a mile, he said, with 85% going to the driver to recover some of the commuting costs and 15% to the company. All payments will be handled by automated online accounting. It will take a while to establish the critical mass of drivers and passengers, O’Sullivan acknowledged. But he hopes that the chance to defray expenses will change the entrenched habits of many drivers who tresure their solitude.

“It will require behaviour changes on the part of drivers and riders,” he said.

Originated From NYT

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Hackers using Antivirus to sneak into computers

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Computer Hacker

Computer Hacker

If you are using AVG, F-Secure (F-Prot), Sophos, ClamAV, Bit Defender, Avast, NOD32 or any such easy to download antivirus software for your PC, its time you sat up and took notice. An information security company setup by IIT Kharagpur engineers has found hackers using antivirus to break into the system.

“An attacker first crafts an email with malicious payload and sends it to the target user. When the email is scanned by the vulnerable anitivirus, it either crashes the antivirus software or executes arbitrary code resulting in complete security bypass and remote system compromise,” said iViZ Vice President Bala Girisaballa.

Home PCs apart, companies and business in banking, finance and insurance, IT/ITES and consulting, online retail, ecommerce, manufacturing, telecommunications and R&D are highly susceptible to such risks. If the antivirus crashes it can even cause remote system compromise. Attackers can steal information or cause ‘Denial of Service’ condition.

The company’s vulnerability research team that conducts extensive research on attack techniques and checks robustness of applications and networks by trying to penetrate them periodically discovered that several popular commercial and open source antivirus software were vulnerable to attacks. Incidentally, iViZ’s Green Cloud Security is the world’s only on-demand penetration testing for vulnerability.
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Gmail introduced SMS Chat

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One of the most wanted Gmail feature is here. You can now SMS your friend right from your Gmail Account. Though this service is already available in Yahoo! Messenger, i was highly needed in in Gmail or Google Talk.

You have to turn on the SMS Chat first. To do that, click on Settings, and go to the Labs tab. Scroll down until you see “Text Messaging (SMS) in Chat” and select Enable and Save Changes and then go to your Gmail account and click on the search bar. You can now enter the Mobile Number of your friend and start chatting. The recipient will receive the chat as a SMS in their mobile and can reply to that message to start chatting.


Unlike Yahoo!, where this facility available for lots of countries, Google has limited it only for US. That means, the recipients number has to be a US mobile number.

So, if you like to send free SMS from your computer, use Yahoo Messanger.

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