PS3 hacked, Again !!

Just before new year, hackers such as Geo Hotz and fail0verflow were successful in hacking the PS3. They were able to find keys which are very private to any ps3. These keys were really essential component of the security layer of the PS3. Hence, revealing those meant PS3 being hacked completely. However, these guys did not finish the job completely. I mean the hack was not complete-everyone had their priorities. Fail0verflow wants the Linux functionality back-nothing more- while Geo Hotz is tired of hacking and would like to work on the other side. But they were generous enough to put all they knew on the internet so that another hacker could use the keys in a better way.
This ‘another hacker’ happened to be “KaKaRoToKS”. Yes, he is the one who released the custom firmware for version 3.55 and 3.41. You can use the custom firmware version if you have not yet updated to version 3.56. 

As always Sony was quick enough to release an update to annul the custom firmware functionality. The new update is mandatory to login to PSN. Hence firmware had t be updated if needed to go online. Smart move don’t you think? Guess who got smarter? Within a day of the update being released it was hacked again by KaKaRoToKS. He also published the application keys which were extra security introduced by version 3.56. However, KaKaRoToKS assures that the new version can be hacked to allow homebrew applications. But, sadly he is not interested in that. He tweets that he is currently concentrating on giving more functionality to his custom firmware rather than hacking the new firmware. This is indeed bad news but not to worry because the world is full of hackers who are eager to hack the PS3 once in for all.

Revealing the application keys were the first steps to “jailbreak” PS3 without any dongles or circuit boards. So get ready to Jailbreak your PS3 using a USB drive-as easy as you update your firmware.
Whatever the case we are watching!

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Ready for (Open)Leaks ?

Back in last November, many members of the Wikileaks group left due to disagreements  with Julian Assange. Openleaks is what happened because of these members. The website claims to be different from Wikileaks, really?

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Tiranga

Take a look at that flag. Designing that  sure took a lot of trouble. It had to please everyone. And by that I mean everyone. Those 3 bands are to courage and sacrifice, peace and truth, and faith and chivalry respectively. Now lets examine how these hold in the view of recent political developments(Lal Chowk flag hoisting incident).

Courage and Sacrifice: None have the courage to stand up and put an end to all this. The state government was scared of the separatists. The separatists scared of the their militant handlers. The militants really are non-state actors. We must have had the courage to vaporise them long ago. 

Peace and truth: Peace in the Valley is an oft repeated statement at across all the media channels. Its akin to Stop Corruption . Both never seems to happen. Both are fodder for running  'debates' and 'discussions' at Prime time. The media has got to change its attitude. Truth is often circumvented for TRP. 

Faith and Chivalry: First up is faith.None have the faith that the people of J&K are true blue Indians. J&K was, is and will continue to be an Indian state. We should not even argue about that. Chivalry has indeed become a medieval idea ... at least in India. The political parties rant about one another in a manner which is detrimental to the idea of democracy. Whatever happened to settling matters via dialogue? It isn't as if India has any dearth of external enemies. At-least our leaders must show an united front to the rest of the world.

Opportunism seems to be the theme of our political parties. Even allied parties like to go against one another to gain political ground. 

Where do you see this taking us? Can we afford to be in such political turmoil ? Will we ever change? 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Too much spam in Google search results ? Google agrees!

Off late if you are using Google for almost everything you search then you would have realized that Google search results are no more free from spam. 5 years before you could rely on Google to find the accurate results ,however, nowadays we can find lot of web sites escaping the spam filters. Google too acknowledges this. But they promise that Google is always improving it's technique to block the spam content on the internet. They blame the increase in the spamming sites and also spammers resorting to illegal methods to promote themselves in the search results.
They also quash the concept that Google search results favor websites which show Google Ads. However you still can find that some results are promoted by Google. For example when you search for a local business then the results you first encounter are the ones which are enrolled in Google Places.

source: Google Blog

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Got Identity ? HTML5 got it today!

After almost every major internet companies from Google to Apple rallying behind the techonology of HTML5, W3C has released the HTML5 logo giving it a unique identity. Though this is not the official logo from the W3C yet, it might get finalized in the next 3 months.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Wikipedia turns 10 !

On the 15th of January, 2011,Wikipedia celebrated its 10th Anniversary. *applauds*.
Has Wikipedia changed the web content? Is it the best source to look at? These are questions which might have to be left unanswered for now.
No one is questioning the amount of work Wikipedia is reducing for us. We all agree that without Wikipedia many of our projects might be incomplete or even spent more time Googling to find an answer or just let go of the question thinking -it may not exist on the web. Wikipedia has certainly proved to be a very good source for information. Saying that I certainly believe specific information may have to be checked twice with a secondary source. 

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Top 5 eye catchers at CES 2011

1) Motorola Xoom/ Android Honeycomb

Oh yes... They had built up using that video.
This beauty is expected to hit the stores during April. That's in the US. In India and given Moto's track record... giving a date would be equivalent of suicide.(literary suicide). Its a 10.1 incher and sports that 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 (everyone seems to have it onboard thesedays). The star is obviously Android 3.0 OS a.k.a Honeycomb a.k.a the one for the tablets. We are watching for this one with bated breath.


2) Motorola Atrix


Why Motorola? Why? 
Why is it that this company struggling in India when it is coming up with mind blowing stuff abroad? 
This one has that Tegra 2 chip. A 1930 mAH battery, Android 2.2 and wait for it... 1 Gb of RAM. 
Talking of 1Gb of RAM. It must be sufficient of running a laptop? Ain't it? 

It does just that.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The age of “CLUBS”

(I know cricket and football well, so I am using these sports as examples)

After the start of IPL, club cricket is becoming popular. Club football is more popular than football played between countries. In cricket, it’s exactly the opposite. Every aspiring cricketer’s aim will be to represent his nation where as in football; representing Real Madrid or Barcelona etc… will be their dream.

Let me start from the basic. A kid who wishes to play football joins a club’s academy. Thereby he will pursue his career there only. The competition is open he gets a chance to the main team of the club if he performs well. Else he will move on to another club looking for a chance to play.

If he wishes to play cricket, he joins an academy (not club) for training. First he has to play in zonal level then state level n finally national. The selection process is carried out by state n national cricket board members. In all these, he doesn’t represent any club. He has to perform very well to get into the national side.

Cricket unites the nation!

Even if club cricket is emerging, international cricket has not lost its charm. Number of international matches is much more than these “leagues”. People don’t hate anyone in other teams when they represent the nation. He gets the support from everyone irrespective of the club he represents.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

The Kingdom

The name of the movie goes the name ” The Kingdom”. Its got nothing to do with the middle ages or any of that stuff, in fact its about a modern kingdom.. Saudi Arabia to be precise. It stars Jamie Foxx, Chris Cooper, Jennifer Garner, Ashraf Barhom. Its about a group of FBI agents going to Saudi Arabia  to invetigate the bombings of American citizens in their oil company’s housing compound, Ashraf Barhom as Colonel Faris Al-Ghazi of  Saudi State Police does an extremely good job and the rest put up good performances.

The portrayal of the initial distrust, then the mutual respect makes it very interesting. There is almost non stop action and the pace is very high. Definitely worth a watch.

However the clincher for this movie is its ending from which we all must draw conclusions on where the world is heading… Don’t miss it.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

TiGER M@TE

Apparently this is the name of hacker(s) who are defacing a lot of Bangladeshi sites. It's latest victim is Google. Yes, the bangladeshi unit of google - www.google.com.bd has been defaced to show an animation instead of the usual Google home page. However it is reported that some of the users are able to use the website without any problem. 



Here is another video where TiGER M@TE owned the website of Airtel.

source:Techcrunch

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Quora API in alpha stage!

We wrote about the amazing real-time Q&A site Quora  before. The people at Quora have decided to release the Quora Extension API which helps developers to make extensions which work with Quora. This move come after the release of the Chrome and Firefox extensions for Quora. But the API is still in its alpha stages and has asked the Developers to be flexible to imbibe any changes in the future. Anyways this is a huge step forward for Quora which is growing a steady pace. Read below the actual excerpt regarding the API-

To support these extension-building efforts, we've released a json-based data API exposing information about the currently logged-in user at: http://api.quora.com/api/logged_... .

To request particular fields about the currently logged in user, add a 

fields

 query parameter with a comma-separated listed of desired fields.  Currently supported fields include 

inbox

, 

followers

, 

following

, and 

notifs

.  For example, to request inbox and notifications data, go to:

http://api.quora.com/api/logged_...

This call returns a json-encoded result about the user:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

while(1); { "name": "Edmond Lau",  "link": "http://www.quora.com/Edmond-Lau/",  "inbox":  {"unread_count": 0},  "notifs": {   "unseen_count": 1,  "unseen": ["<a href=\"http://www.quora.com/Lyle-Johnson\">Lyle Johnson</a> voted up your answer to <a href=\"What are some of the most useful extensions for Emacs?\">What are some of the most useful extensions for Emacs?</a>"], "unseen_aggregated_count": 1} }

The API is still in its alpha phases, and there's no guarantee that as we evolve the site that we'll be able to maintain the same interface, as certain fields may no longer be relevant or have the same semantics.  We'll try our best to work with developers to ease any necessary migrations.

source:techcrunch

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Top 10 Technologies of the Last Decade!

We have completed the first decade in the second millennium of the Gregorian calendar. So it is time to look back at technologies which shaped the first decade. IEEE has listed out the following as the 10 best technologies in the first decade-

1. Smartphones :
   
   Though at the begining of the decade the idea of a poketable PC was new everyone knew this was going to get big. Initially Blackberry and Nokia made up the almost the entire market of smartphones. These were the phones which had physical buttons and Microsoft was the only one which had gone completely touch. This was all going change come 2007. The think was that no one really expected Apple to make the first move. In 2007 Apple Inc. released the iPhone which introduced a phone without many buttons and most of it was the touch screen. This marked the rise of iOS. Then came the Android,Symbian^3 and now the Windows 7 for phones. Surely, there is every chance that at the end of the second decade(or even earlier than that) Desktops might get scarce.
   
   
2. Social Networking :
   
   At the beginning of the millennium internet itself was a growing business. in 2000 if anyone were to ask who is the "boss" of the internet , many would would answer it as AOL and the rest would ask what is internet. Now you see the trend is different , many cant live without the internet. One kind which is drawing a lot of people to the web is Social Networking Sites. It is not a Surprise that Facebook is the most visited site this year. Twitter is another popular website which has being adopted rapidly these days. No wonder Social Networking is second on the list.
3. Voice over IP :
   
   By 2000, a mobile phone was placed in the hands of many, in the next 2 years efforts were made to put internet on the phone. Now everyone wondered why the hell were they paying so much for a call being made. So some brainy guy showed the world VOIP. Now everyone has one or the other VOIP apps on their phone to save that extra penny. Example of VOIP apps-Skype,fring etc. and VOIP enabled phones are like Vonage etc...
4. LED Lighting :
   
   As technological advances were made , mankind understood that it is high time to become more greener. LED lighting are said to be more easy to dispose and last 25 times better than the Edison/Incandescent  bulbs. The LEDs have become 20% brighter and 90% cheaper through the last decade. They are going to replace those incandescent lights, you light in your house, in the coming years.
5. Multicore CPUs:
   
   Every CPU has a core(processor core). How did computer shrink from the size of a room to a small box? because we were able to pack the numerous transistors onto a small core. As new technologies were developed we started to increase the number of transistors on the core. But eventually we reached a stage when we could no more add transistors onto a core. So what we did was put more number of cores in the area of one. Thus improving the performance at same time conserving area. Now a days we don't get single core processors. Even if we manage to , we end up paying more for it than a processor with 2 or 4 cores.
6. Cloud Computing:
   
   As the dependence on the internet grew we realised that we needed to do everything a little faster on the web. When we actually visit a website what happens is that the browser fetches data from the server of the website and display the data in a neat manner. As the inter grew larger we started using hundreds of servers to support the ever increasing websites. So at the strat of the decade Salesforce started a new concept of "Cloud computing" i.e storing the files on a common server thus reducing the effort to fetch it when required. The popular example of cloud computing is Google's Gmail email service. Also, the idea which is now becoming every popular is Cloud Storage. You can store data onto the cloud server and access it anywhere through the internet. Everyone is running out of space these days and there are many adopters of this new concept.
7. Drone Aircraft:
   
   What are these ? they are unmanned aerial vehicles. Controlled by experts ,who are positioned far from the action , they unleash hell on the enemy land. Though unmanned vehicular operation is not a new technology but in the last decade it has been used extensively in war by USA and its allies (like anyone else is at war in the last decade ...duh! ). The first idea of 'drone' technology was made in 1898 by Nikola Tesla by showing remotely controlled boat through radio-telautomaton. Also in the same year Tesla wrote a paper showing how an aircraft can be used as an aerial torpedo - Of course the paper was rejected since it was too fanciful !
8. Planetary Rovers:
    
   The human is nevertheless very curious about our existence on this beautiful planet. This has made mankind to make every effort to cross the earth's atmosphere to find whether we are escapists from another planet. So far we have been successful in putting a man on our own moon only, we have achieved the feat of sending "Planet Rovers" to scour the planet's terrain to obtain invaluable data. Many believe that to sustain population there must be water. So we are basically looking for water in any form. And these rovers capture data in the form of soil samples which are researched to find any water to confirm presence of life forms. 
9. AC Transmission:
   
   The main system backing this technology is the FACT- Flexible AC Transmission systems. These systems enables us to send current (or rather power) to places where the conventional devices cannot be sent. These systems act like switches between the AC lines thus can redirect current to the place where it is required the most. The technology was invented in 1970s but started widespread implementation in the 2000s. Emerging economies such as India and China are using FACT based lines rather than the conventional ones because use of FACT systems reduces 1 transmission line for every 3 lines required. Thus being more economical. The FACT systems use the switching nature of solid state devices. Due to the technological advancement,FACT systems have an effciency of 94%. The efficiency can be further increased by using silicon carbide for switching which is supposed to happen in the coming years. Basically what this FACT system does is to create a smarter grid which manages power more efficiently.
10. Digital Photography:
    
    If we imagine ourselves thinking about photographs in the year 2000,it would remind us of Camera Rolls,cleaning the photos,printing them and storing (occasionally framing) them. Come back to the present , when was the last time you framed a photo? or at-least worried about getting the photos printed? Camera rolls? now? still in stone age ,eh? The past decade has just shown how our lifestyle can be changed in just 10years. Cameras no more use rolls everything is digital.As you take a snap you can see the shot. Think it is not so good? take it again, delete the previous one ,no problemo. We don't settle for that small resolution pictures anymore we need those big bright high resolution media. We need everything HD. Now we can videos at a clarity(resolutions) which we could not achieve through still cameras a decade ago. The technology is so good now that they are mounting these pieces of media on our mobile phones(yup, #2 tech). And it is true that we love to share our pictures. It is to be noted that a whopping 750 million photos were uploaded to Facebook over the new year day!!

From the year 2000, we have come a long way in terms of technological advancement and we do hope this brings remarkable achievements in the coming to solve the problems faced by mankind.

source:IEEE

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Dirt 2 Game Review (I know its really late)

The Dirt game series is developed by Codemasters also the creators of the
games series Grid. This being the second installment of a series of games
was dedicated to the late Colin McRae, a legend in rallying. Dirt 2 pretty
much attains legendary status among those gamers who swear by rallying.
The game’s layout is simple yet entertaining. Your main menu happens to
be inside your RV. You begin with none other than Colin McRae’s Subaru .
there is a tour map which lets you select the races from places like London ,
California, Morocco, Japan , Croatia and many more . As you win races ,
you earn more experience points and newer venues and race events are
unlocked. The races feature rally car drivers such as Ken Block and Travis
Pastrana.
Casual gamers better watch out as ‘ casual mode’ in this game still means
serious business especially rally rounds. The tag line(s) of the game are Push
it and get dirty. You need to do both if you want o win in the higher levels.

Coming to my favorite part : The gameplay . Representing reality in games
comes naturally to Codemasters. The cars look great. So also the damage on
them !! The driving is very realistic. Put a wheel on the loose gravel at the
edges of the track and you begin to lose control of the car. The tracks and
the environments are beautifully detailed. There are two damage modes :
Visual and ON mode. The visual mode you get err…. A visual treat. Leave
it in ON mode and you pay for every dent you make on the race track. Bend
a bumper and it will drag along and slow down the car. Get hit on the front
wheels and you can say good bye to your steering responsiveness. Pure bliss
for Hard core gamers, not so for casual.
There are various events like Gate Crasher, 2 lap race, good old rallying ,
and events which involve vehicles like SUV’s , dune buggies and trophy

trucks. In a career mode there are around 100 races. Total fun! What is a
respite for first timers is that you get a mode called flash-back in the race ,
where you can re-wind from a fatal crash i.e. a race ending crash and resume
a few seconds before the crash.

All said and done GRiD 2 is an amazing game which all simulation racing
gamers cannot afford to miss. R.I.P NFS.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Got a question?

Well have got a question, ? A technical one lets say.Where do you go for help? Logically speaking you might ask your friends or people around you to fix the problem. Not solved it yet? Okay, in comes the Web. There is a new site just to help you- Quora . 


Time for a short history lesson.Quora was founded in 2009 but was in private beta stage until June 1 2010 when it was opened for the public. Still you need an invite to experience this new platform.

Basically Quora is a Q&A site - you ask a question and another user replies to the question. We have had sites like these before - Ask , Yahoo Answers et al. But what sets Quora apart from its predecessors is that the users are asked to answer in full detail such that the question is answered to the point and clarifies all majority of the doubt. Moreover the platform is more social. You get  to follow other users,questions and vote the answers if you feel they are good. You also get to share a question on other popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and solve the question posed. The questions asked are all answered in real time so it is more like a twitter feed but with Q&A. The questions too can be categorized by the community.This is where a lot of spam is going to be truncated. Quora also asks users their favourite topics about which they are interested to answer questions.


What Quora is doing is that it is creating a database of all the problems that users face. In future if any person faces a similar problem or doubt then all he needs to do is to head to Quora. Maybe the aim of creating a invite-only system is to reduce the spam and increase the content to sizeable level such that once it opens to the public completely then Quora can be viewed as an alternative to Wikipedia itself. At this point ,thinking into the future it is a possibility that Quora is the next Wikipedia. Right Now Wikipedia has content which is very formal and can be used maybe to read history or way a company functions but it doesn't give the way a product of the company works. People who are right now contributing at Quora are of (high) reputation ranging from a Yahoo engineer to a tech blogger-everyone extending their helping hand to answer a question.

Now coming to the actual website itself. On the top there is a bar to navigate between home,your profile, settings or logout. The main layout is split into 2 columns. Tthe left wider column which is filled with questions with the users favorite topics. Notifications if any appear on the left column. The right column which is a comparatively narrow can be used to toggle between your favorite topics,questions you follow or new uncategorized questions (for which you can categorize) and also you see the activity from people you follow.

The website is simple to look ,work and admire. Quora might not be the right place to look for solved questions right away but we can comfortably say in around 6 months the database might be ready to satisfy the needs of certain part of the audience who need help. 
As noted above,Quora right now is invite-only. Luckily, we do have invites to give away ,if anyone is interested please leave a note in the comment section.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Swype

Firstly thank you samdroid. Without those brilliant forums, I wouldn't be typing, swyping this. A replacement for the standard android keyboard, which even in its Ginger bread avatar is  above average at best, this one will really change the way you go about typing.

Now in beta stage, once you download their beta installer, you will be asked to download their apk  and you will be taken through a tutorial, which gives useful tips.
. You slide around yours finger over various characters and wait magically for the software to form the word. Simple and intuitive, it takes no longer than a couple of "swypes" to get used to it. Tapping is still allowed but as the tag line goes, why tap? while you can swype...
The focus here is on speed than swyping accuracy. The keyboard software learns your choices and becomes better and better with time.
And the most brilliant part is that it makes typing out a fun activity. Rare. :)

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I'm CEO BITCh!

Sorry for the language but this what the Kenyan police website header reads. Apparently the site was hacked and he has put a note on the homepage explaining why he put up the header-

Got in and all i could think about was zuckerberg!!! This' for you Mark!

Also the rest of the website is working fine.
Talk about starting the year on the Right Note.


source:TechCrunch

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

How to play Rise of Nations online through Hamachi!

Rise of Nations if you never have heard is one of the best Real Time Strategy (RTS) games released ever. You are given control over a Nation ,you must build cities gather food,metal and timber and build a strong Nation to destroy your enemies. It is the same genre as Age of Empires but the game-play and the graphics are more advanced. Check more about the game and the expansion . The single player is itself very nice and enough to hold you for a long time. But everyone gets bored with the computer AI. So if you are want to test your skills against a human then you can play the multiplayer mode. GameSpy removed the official servers in January 2010. However there are ways to workaround that but here I am going to tell you how to play using Hamachi.

1. Download the Hamachi setup file and install it.
2. Join an existing network or create a new network. Everyone who intends to join you in the multiplayer game must be added to the same network.
3. Once all the players are in one network ,decide who is going to play host. Only one player needs to act as the host.
4. All players except the host need to note down the IP address of the host given by Hamachi  (it will be something like 5.xx.xxx.xxx ).
5. All the players start to run the game ‘Rise of Nations’ (RoN). In the main menu, move to the ‘Multiplayer Game’ menu.
   
6. Then move onto ‘Local Area Network or Direct Internet’ tab. 
7. Here there is the difference between the host and others.
8. First the Host has to click 'Create' tab when the game lobby will be shown.Once this is done,the host must tell other players to join.
9. Players other than the host must click 'Join IP' tab and enter the IP address of the host noted down in step 4. If the correct IP address is entered and if the host is indeed hosting a game ,then the player is allowed into the game lobby created by the host.
   
10. Once all the players are ready ,they must check the box next to their names. Then the host can start the game by clicking the 'Start' button.

Happy Gaming  :)
You may want to check out our website : Tech Tikka where we cover all the latest tech events.

Things to keep in mind:

• Hamachi application must be running in the background on every player's system at all times during the game.
• The game versions of both the players must match else you can't play by any method. I recommend every player patch to the latest version.
• A player running the expansion pack Thrones and Patriots or the original RoN cannot play with a player running RoN Gold Edition.

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•