Madoff gets 150 years for biggest financial fraud

Bernard Madoff, the mastermind of biggest financial fraud in American history, was sentenced Monday to 150 years in prison, the maximum sentence possible.

New York Judge Denny Chin said the 71-year-old Madoff's $65-billion financial fraud that affected hundreds investors around the world was "unprecedented in this century".

His victims, nine of whom testified in the New York court ahead of the sentencing, called him a "beast" and "monster" and demanded the maximum punishment. His attorneys had asked for 12 years due to his advanced age.

Madoff in his own testimony said he would "live in a tormented state" for his crime, which cost more than 1,000 investors their life savings or considerable chunk of them.

"I left a legacy of shame for my family and I will live with that for the rest of my life," Madoff told the court.

Turning directly to face the victims present in the court, he said: "I apologize to you, my victims. I'm sorry."

The sentencing, while providing some closure to victims, will still leave many fighting to recover some of their lost money.

That recovery came one step closer Friday when the New York court ruled that Madoff's wife Ruth must give up the bulk of the family's estate.

The family will have to surrender numerous villas, yachts and cars worth $80 million, Judge Denny Chin ruled. She can keep about $2.5 million.

Madoff ran a pyramid "Ponzi" scheme for years, faking earnings by continuously drawing in new investors. The system collapsed late last year when investors began to withdraw funds amid the financial crisis.

Madoff was first arrested in December and pleaded guilty to the crime in March.

Michael Jackson Death Stops the Web, Causes Wikipedia Editing Chaos

Music icon Michael Jackson died Thursday in a Los Angeles hospital, causing millions of fans to overwhelm traffic servers and dominate the conversation of the most popular applications online, including Twitter.

Early news reports had reveled the so-called ‘King of Pop’ had suffered a cardiac arrest in his home prior to being rushed to the hospital. This caused many sites to announce the singer’s death hours before the hospital or the family had made any official statements. One of the biggest problems facing publishers online is enforcing strict source-based quality control over the news, especially when anyone is a simple blog sign-up away from spreading lies.

This is especially true when not-sourced allegations get into increasingly legitimate information resources, such as Wikipedia. As news of the singer’s stroke came in without true, a few volunteer editors of the web encyclopedia overrode protocol and kept changing Michael Jackson’s page to include his date of death. As CNet noted, opposing editors tried to keep the page lie-free, noting they were “premature edits,” and some pleaded for responsible web behavior: “ONCE AGAIN, HE IS NOT DEAD, JUST STOP.”

Once Jackson was rushed to the hospital and passed away, most of the comments were gone and his final date on the site was established.

But many blogs around the net didn’t wait for the official word, either. TMZ.com was the first site to publish the singer’s death, about 3 hours before any major site. It received so much traffic that it went down a few times throughout the day.

Jumping off from TMZ.com’s lead, people logged on to social networks en masse and crashed several sites. Within three hours of the heart attack news, nine out of ten terms on the trending topics on Twitter were about Michael Jackson. Most tweets expressed sadness and grief over the news, while many used the service to publish links sending out users to other Jackson-related news around the net. In a statement to the New York Times Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said the site saw “double the normal tweets per second the moment the news broke—the biggest increase since the US presidential election.” According to many users, the site crashed many times throughout the day.

News aggregators also reached very high levels of participation. On Digg, news of the singer’s death reached over 12,000 diggs within four hours.

PC World reported that instant messaging service AIM appeared to have more problems than most dealing with influx of traffic. Around 2:30PM PST, the service was blocked and failed to work for a long period of time.

In addition, Google noted earlier this morning that there were so many searches for ‘Michael Jackson’ that the site’s crawling robot believed it was under attack by a malignant bug. The company said that when the site receives a large volume of similar requests, CAPTCHA and malware-protection programs are automatically launched. This led to many people landing on a user-alert search page, instead of the news they were seeking.

And of course, video and music sites saw a huge spike in Jackson-related content. By the end of the day yesterday, Jackson’s Thriller album was the top album on iTunes and his videos on YouTube (including coverage from TV feeds) led the site on page views.

Michael Jackson was a child prodigy who became famous along with his brothers as part of the R&B group The Jackson Five. Later on as a solo-artist, he recorded Thriller, the best-selling album of all time with sales of more than 100 million. He was 50 years old at the time of his passing.

Experts Call Out Google Over E-mail Security

'Critics say Google isn’t doing enough to protect its Gmail users.’ -

Google is under fire from critics questioning why the No. 1 search engine in the world doesn’t make its e-mail service even more secure.

The letter was drafted by Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University student Christopher Soghoian, and was signed by security experts and professors from Purdue University, SRI International, Harvard University, BT Group, among others.

Security experts, lawyers and privacy advocates recently wrote an open letter to Google’s Eric Schmidt, questioning why Gmail users “needlessly” face security risks.

“As more of us end up using insecure Internet access — such as Wi-Fi in coffee shops, libraries, and so fort — there’s a real risk of session hijacking,” according to Ben Edleman, Harvard Business School assistant professor and letter signatory.

Gmail already uses Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS), but Google has it disabled by default with very few users aware of how to turn it on, the letter claims.

Google responded by saying it will test several different security methods in the future, including HTTPS, but didn’t say when users can expect the increased security features to become permanent.

Gmail users interested in enabling HTTPS before Google can do so by logging into their Gmail account, then click on the “Settings” tab, scroll to “Browser connection,” and then click on “Always use HTTPS” so the security feature will be enabled.

Yahoo Mail, Microsoft Hotmail, Facebook and MySpace also use HTTPS when logging a user into the service, but don’t have the security feature available once a user is logged in, according to security experts. Normally only sites such as banks and credit card web sites have permanent HTTPS connections, but there is growing pressure for e-mail services and other sites to support HTTPS at other times besides log in.

Free Microsoft AV Suite Beta to be Released Tuesday

Priced at free, this one should be a hot seller.’ -

Microsoft is putting consumer antivirus makers on notice Tuesday, when it will release the beta of its Microsoft Security Essentials, a new anti-malware suite. Unlike its predecessor, Live OneCare suite, a subscription service which is being phased out, the new software will be offered for free to consumers.

Like traditional antivirus software, the new software detects changes to the file system resulting from operations such as copies, installs, or downloads. If the file signature matches a known threat, the operation is blocked and the user is warned. The new service features dynamic communication with Microsoft’s Dynamic Signature Service, which update the malware signature list regularly. It also request copies of code that it suspects may be a new piece of malware. Alan Packer, general manager of Microsoft’s Anti-Malware team says the service publishes new signatures three times daily.

He describes, “The hope is that people who install Security Essentials and enable auto updates in their Windows configuration will be protected. We don’t see Security Essentials as a direct competitor to other free products and suites. We’re targeting people who aren’t protected (already).”

The service is also designed for efficiency, running major scans when the computer is idle and saving memory during times of active use. Mr. Packer suggests users with an antivirus program skip the new software, which could interfere with the third party AV software. Unlike its non-free competitors and the former OneCare suite, the new service will not provide managed firewalls, performance-tuning, backup and restore, printer-sharing and multi-PC management.


Screenshot from the new Microsoft Security Essentials, a free software suite which will be released in beta form Tuesday on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, shows the software’s output when it detects threats. (Source: Microsoft)
AVG, maker of the current most widespread antivirus freeware, also does not offer these features, but says its software is still better than Microsoft’s. It says that its products can work on a variety of OS’s, not just Windows, and that unlike Microsoft it was founded as a dedicated security company.

The new Microsoft software will run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 computers. It currently supports English and Portuguese (in support of a deployment in Brazil). A Simplified Chinese language version will be released later in the year.

According to a discussion with CNET, Microsoft doesn’t have big plans to offer similar services for its upcoming Windows Mobile 7, for smart phones. States Mr. Packer, “In general, the way we look at mobile from a security standpoint is that you are better off preventing the malware from getting on a mobile device rather than trying to run anti-malware or antivirus software. We haven’t targeted mobile antivirus software because we felt that’s not the right approach.”

Windows 7 Upgrade Tool Released

New tool is intended to help businesses and customers quickly assess which systems are ready for Windows 7.’ -

With every OS launch a certain number of customers with older hardware will inevitably be left behind. For novice users, or for professionals administering large deployments, the confusion of figuring out which hardware will meet the upgrade requirements can be a headache. With Microsoft’s hot new OS, Windows 7, set to release on October 22, Microsoft is looking to remove any such obstacles that might put a damper on the launch.

Microsoft has released the beta version of a toolkit which will help users determine whether their computers are Windows 7 worthy. The tool, the Microsoft Assessment and Planning (MAP) Toolkit, version 4.0, will also look at your machine’s compatibility with Windows Server 2008, and other software products, including Microsoft Office 2007. The tool also provides advice about virtualization, power saving opportunities, and security vulnerabilities.

Baldwin Ng, senior product manager at Microsoft elaborates, “It performs key functions that include hardware and device inventory, hardware compatibility analysis, and generation of actionable, environment-specific IT proposals for migration to most major Microsoft technologies.”

MAP is available via the TechNet website. Limitations include only being available for a limited set of newer Windows OS’s — Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows Vista Service Pack 1; Windows XP Professional Edition (if you don’t have one of these on a bootable partition, you can’t run the tool). The tool provides reports in English, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

Currently, users can also check their compatibility by downloading the Windows 7 Release Candidate and installing it for free. The RC build will work until June 1, 2010.

Windows 7 sports an improved interface, new features, more speed at many common tasks, and a smaller memory and disk footprint. Microsoft is hoping the slick new OS will wash away the critical attitude the public developed for Windows Vista. DailyTech has detailed many of the hardware and software changes showcased in the Release Candidate build.

Google Wave Blends Video, Facebook, and More

‘Google wants to build communication and collaboration.’ -

Google is previewing a new web application to developers that may eventually supplant Gmail. Google Wave goes beyond the basic capabilities of email in order to let people communicate and work collaboratively in real-time with text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets, and social networking feeds from other sources on the internet.

A “wave” is equal parts conversation and document. A user starts off by creating a wave and adding people to it. Everyone on a wave can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It is being billed as concurrent, collaborative rich text editing, where you can see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is well suited for quick messages as well as for persistent content. A “playback” function is also available to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.

The project is being headed up by Software Engineering Manager Lars Rasmussen, who joined Google with his brother Jens after their tiny mapping startup named “Where 2 Tech” was bought by Google. Technologies from that company eventually became a part of Google Maps.

“Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. You see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave,” stated Rasmussen in a blog post.

The code for Google Wave will be open source, with developers given freedom to modify it as they wish. Google Wave can be thought of as being comprised of three layers: the product, the platform, and the protocol.

The Google Wave product is now available as a developer preview, and is the web application portion that people will use to access and edit waves. It is a HTML 5 application built on Google’s Web Toolkit, and includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop, which will enable users to drag a set of photos into a wave.

11216_large_google_wave_snapshots_inbox_max200w

Google’s first preview shot of Wave

Google Wave can also be considered as a platform. It is being developed with a set of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that will allow developers to build new extensions that work inside waves. Developers will also be able to embed waves in other web services.

The underlying format is the Google Wave protocol, used as the means of sharing and storing waves. It includes the live concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services.

“Developers are going to see the potential of Google Wave as a platform; we hope they’ll leap on it,” said Wave engineer Adam Schuck. “They’ll be able to integrate it with existing systems they use today, or produce new tools that allow people to improve and manage their communications.”

The ideas behind Google Wave came from a project by Jens Rasmussen codenamed “Walkabout”. His basic idea was that the two most successful forms of digital communication were originally designed in the 1960’s to imitate analog formats. Email was designed to mimicked snail mail, and instant messaging mimicked phone calls. However, many different forms of communication had been invented since then, such as blogs, wikis, and real-time collaborative documents. Walkabout was proposed as a new communications model that used all these advances as a starting point. Greater capacity on the internet and fast internet connections make this new paradigm possible, along with computers that have lots of memory and capable of playing several concurrent video streams.

Google Wave’s prototyping started with a five-person team in Google’s offices in Sydney. An expanded team has been working on bringing about a public release for the last two years.

No launch date for a public product has been set. “We’re inviting developers to add all kinds of cool stuff before our public launch,” wrote Rasmussen.

New Study Gives Blackberrys High Scores on Security

‘iPhone, WinMo phones not quite as secure, says the study.’ -

The chic iPhone may have snatched Research In Motion’s smartphone sales crown in 2008, but RIM charged back with its Blackberries topping sales charts this year, thanks in part to Verizon’s “Buy one get one” promotion. Both phones are vying for business customers, as are a plethora of Windows Mobile (WinMo) phones. So how do all these phones stack up in security, one of the most critical considerations in business tech adoption?

A new study by Lopez Research, founded by President Maribel Lopez, a former Forrester Research analyst tackles this question, looking at these three top competitors in the smart phone arena. The study was broken down into three categories — device, network, and transmission. It gives a score of 0 to 4 (highest) to each competitor for each category.

Its results may surprise some. It blasts Apple’s iPhone with an overall score of 1 out of 4. Apple’s worst performance came in the device category in which it earned a zero. Ms. Lopez notes that the underlying OS X build is easily compromised, that the system lacks over the air security updates, and that its encryption options are lacking.

Networking was Apple’s strongest category. The reason why it performed well, according to Ms. Lopez, was that the iPhone “uses the same active directory based on authentication methods as Windows Mobile.”

As this quote might imply, Windows Mobile 6.5 scored quite well, earning an overall 3 out of 4. Ms. Lopez praises, “Microsoft’s solution leverages the existing infrastructure, such as Active Directory, to manage Windows Mobile capable devices, meaning IT can manage the system with familiar tools and capabilities. It also recently achieved common criteria certification EAL 2+ for Windows Mobile 6.1 in August of 2008. The combination of MDM and a VPN provides a reasonable security solution for firms that would like to use Windows Mobile devices.”

Microsoft earned a lower mark — 2/4 — on devices as its encryption was lacking, despite having over-the-air updates.

Sales leader RIM, though, took the cake, earning a perfect mark. States Ms. Lopez, “RIM offers strong security protection across the device, transmission and the network domains through tight control of the device, its software and its application control policies. While other vendors have stepped up security efforts in the past year, RIM offers the most robust security solution.”

Ms. Lopez points out that it’s important for all of these companies to continue their efforts as large corporate deployments will likely see a mix of handset makers and OS’s. For those worried about bias against Apple, given its poor mark, it can be noted that the Lopez Research site, which the report is available on, was built on a Mac.

Computer Virus Strikes US Marshals, FBI Affected

WASHINGTON – Law enforcement computers were struck by a mystery computer virus Thursday, forcing the FBI and the U.S. Marshals to shut down part of their networks as a precaution.

The U.S. Marshals confirmed it disconnected from the Justice Department’s computers as a protective measure after being hit by the virus; an FBI official said only that that agency was experiencing similar issues and was working on the problem.

“We too are evaluating a network issue on our external, unclassified network that’s affecting several government agencies,” said FBI spokesman Mike Kortan. He did not elaborate or identify the other agencies.

Marshals spokeswoman Nikki Credic said the agency’s computer problem began Thursday morning. The FBI began experiencing similar problems earlier.

“At no time was data compromised,” said Credic. The type of virus and its origin were not determined.

In addition to their external networks, most federal law enforcement agencies have an internal-only network to prevent cyber-snoopers from sensitive data.

In Thursday’s incident, the Marshals Service shut down its Internet access and some e-mail while staff worked on the problem. The FBI made similar moves to protect its system.

Nokia to Unveil App Store, E75 Next Week

The world's top cellphone maker Nokia will unveil its new application store next week, hoping to follow the runaway success of Apple's App Store, two industry sources told Reuters on Friday.

One of the sources also said Nokia would unveil a new E75 cellphone model at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. The phone, already on sale on the Web site of online retailer Expansys, will be available next month in Britain.

The smartphone, with a sideways slide-out full keyboard, will sell for 390 pounds ($563.6), while with an operator contract it will be free in Britain.

Nokia promised in early December to launch 'soon' its own download store, as the Finnish firm merges its current software Download! store with free media sharing site Mosh and widget service WidSets. "This will provide consumers an easy way to get mobile media for their device," Nokia said in December.

Simple Firefox Tips And Tweaks

It is perhaps ironic that after having been quiet for a few years, the browser war has reignited with a passion over the last couple of years as Google
, the Mozilla foundation, Apple and market leader Microsoft all have released new versions of their browsers that promised significant improvements for windows users. The newest entrants were of course Apple that ported its Safari browser to Windows in the middle of last year and Google that announced its maiden browser effort in September this year.

While all the new browsers out there offer some great features, none of them come close to Firefox 3.0 when it comes to speed, customization and 3rd party add-on support. In such a light, we here at Tech2 to simply pick some of the most common tips and tweaks that would help you achieve some subtle customization of the browser, which would improve its performance and your surfing experience

Adjust the new searchable Bar.

Firefox 3 significantly revamped its address bar, making it far more interactive and introduced searchable URLs based on a person’s browsing/search history. While this is a great feature and was welcomed by many users, it has not gone down well with everyone. We received quite a few emails querying if it was possible to revert it to the Firefox 2.0 behavior.

While this question did leave us perplexed as the new bar is truly awesome, we did look around and found a couple of ways of reverting it back to the “old-skool” style. The first one is ‘OldBar’; an addon which works on the fly and modifies the search bar’s appearance to make it look exactly like the version Firefox 2 had. It can be downloaded here.


The second method is a little more complex. For this one need to access the browser’s advanced options. To do this goto the address bar and type “About:Config”. This will bring up a warning window. Accept the warning and move past that. You are now in the advanced section. As you can see on top, there is a filter option similar to Firefox search. In that box type this “browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped”. Once the option comes up, set its value to true by right clicking on it and using the toggle option to change it to true. Restart the browser for it to take effect.


For those of you who do like the bar, there is another useful tweak that can be performed to improve the performance of the address bar, in regards to the number of results it shows up. As you know this can be problem as the bar can throw up totally random results and list out too many results leading it to lag. To improve its performance, follow the same steps as above, search for “browser.urlbar.maxRichResults” and change the number to a more manageable 6 or 8 as per your choice.

Trojan For Mac OS X 10.4, 10.5 Found

SecureMac is reporting that it has discovered multiple variants of a new Trojan horse in the wild that affects Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5.

The Trojan horse is currently being distributed from a hacker website, where discussion has taken place on distributing the Trojan horse through iChat and Limewire.

The Trojan horse runs hidden on the system, and allows complete remote access to the system. It can also transmit system and user passwords, and can avoid detection by opening ports in the firewall and turning off system logging.

The Trojan horse, named AppleScript.THT, can log keystrokes, take pictures with the built-in Apple iSight camera, take screenshots, and turn on file sharing. The Trojan horse exploits a recently discovered vulnerability with the Apple Remote Desktop Agent, which allows it to run as root.

Access Gmail Offline

The folks at Gmail Labs have been busy and they're now dishing out offline access to Gmail.


On enabling offline access, Gmail will load in your browser even if you don't have an Internet connection. You can read messages, star, label and archive them, compose new mail and messages ready to be sent will wait in your Outbox until you're online again.

It's built on the Gears platform, which has already been used to offline-enable Google Docs, Google Reader, and other third-party web applications.

To get started with offline Gmail -

- Sign in to Gmail and click 'Settings'.
- Click the 'Labs' tab and select 'Enable' next to 'Offline Gmail'.
- Click 'Save Changes.'
- In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new 'Offline' link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.

Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain admins to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel.

AOL Launches New Version of Web Mail

AOL has launched an enhanced version of AOL Web Mail that offers users one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and a variety of third-party sites and destinations directly from the AOL Web Mail page, http://mail.aol.com.


Over the past year, AOL has added more than 30 new features and a variety of new functionality to Web Mail in an effort to make it more open to third-party content and to offer more monetization opportunities to advertisers. The new version is being released globally, making it available in more than 38 countries and locales around the world.

"Web Mail is an integral part of the AOL experience and at the heart of our product offerings," said Ted Cahall, President, AOL Products and Technologies. "With this new release, we can showcase the important role AOL products continue to play in the company. Enhancing products that already attract a large, engaged audience is a key goal for our organization."

Key features of AOL's new Web Mail product include:

- Access to Third-Party E-mail Accounts: The third-party mail plug-ins allow users to preview Yahoo! Mail and Gmail within the AOL Web Mail experience, as well as take advantage of one-click access to Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.
- Faster performance: Using updated technologies, AOL has increased the speed and performance of its Web Mail experience, and enhanced the user interface to make it more intuitive.
- Themed Skins: More than 45 new "skins" or themes let users personalize their page, and offer advertisers the ability to work with AOL to create themes that will appeal to key audiences.
- Plug-in Gallery: Users can customize their Web Mail page by choosing from a variety of new plug-ins offering one-click access to favorite sites, content, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. The Gallery also offers access to all of the AOL gadgets currently stored in the myAOL Gallery. In addition, AOL is inviting third-party developers to create new gadgets for Web Mail via http://dev.aol.com.
- AOL Sync: Users can make real-time updates to AOL Calendar and Address Book from their desktop or a variety of wireless devices, including the Blackberry and iPhone. In addition, users around the globe can enjoy a completely mobile AOL Mail experience from virtually any device.

AOL Launches New Version of Web Mail

AOL has launched an enhanced version of AOL Web Mail that offers users one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and a variety of third-party sites and destinations directly from the AOL Web Mail page, http://mail.aol.com.


Over the past year, AOL has added more than 30 new features and a variety of new functionality to Web Mail in an effort to make it more open to third-party content and to offer more monetization opportunities to advertisers. The new version is being released globally, making it available in more than 38 countries and locales around the world.

"Web Mail is an integral part of the AOL experience and at the heart of our product offerings," said Ted Cahall, President, AOL Products and Technologies. "With this new release, we can showcase the important role AOL products continue to play in the company. Enhancing products that already attract a large, engaged audience is a key goal for our organization."

Key features of AOL's new Web Mail product include:

- Access to Third-Party E-mail Accounts: The third-party mail plug-ins allow users to preview Yahoo! Mail and Gmail within the AOL Web Mail experience, as well as take advantage of one-click access to Yahoo! Mail and Gmail.
- Faster performance: Using updated technologies, AOL has increased the speed and performance of its Web Mail experience, and enhanced the user interface to make it more intuitive.
- Themed Skins: More than 45 new "skins" or themes let users personalize their page, and offer advertisers the ability to work with AOL to create themes that will appeal to key audiences.
- Plug-in Gallery: Users can customize their Web Mail page by choosing from a variety of new plug-ins offering one-click access to favorite sites, content, Gmail and Yahoo! Mail. The Gallery also offers access to all of the AOL gadgets currently stored in the myAOL Gallery. In addition, AOL is inviting third-party developers to create new gadgets for Web Mail via http://dev.aol.com.
- AOL Sync: Users can make real-time updates to AOL Calendar and Address Book from their desktop or a variety of wireless devices, including the Blackberry and iPhone. In addition, users around the globe can enjoy a completely mobile AOL Mail experience from virtually any device.

Gadget of the Year 08 - Multimedia Handsets

We've already showcased our choices of the year's best Business and Touchscreen handsets. In this final segment for mobiles we're showcasing our selections for the best multimedia handsets that are well equipped for those who love their music, videos and of course are avid shutterbugs as well.

Here's what we've picked for the Best multimedia mobile of 2008

Mutimedia Phone of the Year - Nokia N82


The N82 gets top billing simply because it’s one of the most fully functional devices in this range. With a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and Xenon flash, images look really good. It’s also equipped with a 2.4-inch display that sports a 240 x 320 pixel resolution with a built in accelerometer for auto-screen rotation. Other features include microSD card support, 3G (HSDPA), Stereo Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and internal GPS. It offers a 3.56mm standard earphones socket that doubles up as a TV Out slot as well. The Symbian OS with a Series 60 UI is smooth and ‘lag-free’ and all thanks to the 3D Dual ARM 11 332 MHz CPU and with the assistance of a 3D Graphics HW Accelerator, videos, games and the net experience also enhanced.

Runner up – Samsung INNOV8
Let’s leave the INNOV8’s outrageous pricing out of the picture and talk about just the handset and it’s features. Yes it does have a few bugs but it still fares quite well altogether. The handset may seem a bit bulky but is very well designed with a very responsive slide operation with a large 2.8 inch TFT LCD, an optical navigation pad and an accelerometer. It runs on a Symbian OS with an S60 UI on an ARM 11 330 MHz CPU so it’s provides quick and painless navigation and smooth functioning of applications. It’s loaded with connectivity options – Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (A2DP), 3G, EDGE/GPRS, GPS and of course USB. The INNOV8 comes in 2 capacities 8/16GB and Samsung is providing a 16GB microSD card as part of the packaging. That’s a total of up to 32GB of storage. The 8 megapixel camera (LED flash) features Face and Smile detection technology as well as an image stabilizer. All of this is very enticing but one does need to consider the hefty price.

Best Value – Sony Ericsson F305


One of the better value mobiles we had the opportunity to test is Sony Ericsson’s F305 gaming mobile. It features ‘x’ and ‘o’ dedicated gaming keys and Sony has included quite a few games that have been specifically designed for this handset. It also incorporates a few motion sensor games like bowling and fishing that enable the handset to be used like a Nintendo Wii controller to simulate the actions for the games. Other than it’s gaming capabilities the F305 is smooth slider with a 2.0-inch display with a 176 x 220 pixel resolution. It supports external memory via M2 cards, Bluetooth with A2DP and GPRS. It also has media players for videos and music, an integrated FM radio and a 2 megapixel camera with image editing and uploading to blogs. It even manages a very decent battery life.

Gadget of the Year 08 - Touchscreen Mobiles

In this edition of GOTY (Gadget of the Year) we're showcasing Tech2.0's selections of 2008's best Touchscreen mobile handsets. Just to be crystal clear, these choices are strictly handsets that we’ve tested and won’t include handsets yet to be launched.

Here are our selections for the best Totally Touchscreen mobiles of 2008 -

Touchscreen Phone of the Year - iPhone 3G


It’s not really something to think about. When you’re discussing touchscreen mobiles the first name to pop into your head is the Apple iPhone. What it lacks in features, it more than makes up in functionality. The truly remarkable feature is its touch screen, from the smooth accelerometer to the multi-touch feature for pinching in and out of pages and images for zooming, to an intuitive ambient light sensor to save battery power, the iPhone is a technological marvel. The large 3.5 inch display sports a 320 x 480 pixel resolution and makes watching videos a real treat. The iPod like audio player is also one of its better features as well as the addition of internal GPS receiver and of course Wi-Fi capabilities that was prevalent in the first gen model too. It’s still has a few bugs that hopefully will be ironed out over time, but this is definitely still our choice for the years best touchscreen mobile handset.

Runner Up - Samsung F480


The F480 TouchWiz is equipped with a 2.8 inch TFT touch screen display sporting a 240 x 320 pixel resolution. The typical Samsung OS is accentuated by the total touchscreen UI so using a stylus would a rare occurrence. Not unlike the iPhone the F480 also makes use of what I like to call ‘flip’ technology for scrolling though the gallery or viewing one image at a time. You need but to swipe your hand across the screen to move from one image to the next. To add to its appeal it also has a 5 megapixel camera with features like anti-shake and face detection. Support for Stereo Bluetooth and microSD cards for external memory are also available.

Value - LG KP500


The KP500 Cookie is one of the cheapest if not the cheapest totally touchscreen handset available on the market. It employs a lot of functionality with good looks, just like the iPhone. With the choice of a decently designed on screen QWERTY keypad for typing or a normal mobile keypad and handwriting recognition tossed in, the Cookie is even more enticing. The 3 megapixel camera is loaded with is non-autofocus but that doesn’t really matter. This handset is designed for multimedia with plenty of editors for video and images. It also uses ‘flip’ technology for browsing through images or even for switching between the two unique desktops. You’ll again hardly ever require the use of the stylus, so this is our choice of the best value totally touchscreen handset. With price tag of just Rs 13,990 you can’t go wrong.

You’re probably wondering why isn’t the Xperia or the new Nokia 5800 or even the HTC touch HD included? The reason is because the 5800 and HD haven’t hit the shelves yet and we haven’t finished reviewing the Xperia hence we can’t really justify it as a years best. But stay tuned for more on the Gadget of the Year – Mobiles when we cover the best all round handset.

Happy New Year Mobile maniacs, have a great year ahead!

Gadget of the Year 08 - Laptops

In this final list in Gadget of the Year series, we pick out the very best laptops, from among the many that we have the pleasure of reviewing over the past year. To compile this list, we have cut across segments and pricing and simply decided to go with machines that were impeccable performers overall. So here is our list.

Laptop of the Year: Apple Macbook 13.3

2008 was a very good year for laptop aficionados, as there were multiple releases which were simply delightful to work with in every respect of the term. While we were drawing our list however, there was only one laptop that actually leapt out at us for its impeccable design and feature-set overall – the Macbook 13.3.

Now people may argue what is so special about this entry-level Mac? Well the answer is very simple. Apple who has often been accused of not being generous with its entry-level machines, simply rebooted the segment with the introduction of a spanking classy new design, that allowed Apple to manufacture the laptop and its entire range of components using a new process simply called 'Unibody'. The body was carved from a solid block of aluminum and this allowed it to shed its dowdy, plastic finish in favor of a sexy sleek aluminum finish.

Apart from just making it look good, Apple also upgraded the new 13.3-inch machine to a backlit LED panel that offered brilliant performance, a great keyboard/touchpad combo and powerful specifications that allowed it to sail through all kinds of performance tests without any issues. When you consider its price of Rs. 79,700 and the segment it’s placed in (13.3 inch ultra-portables), its combination of great looks, amazing performance and unique styling rightfully allows it to claim the tag of "Laptop of the year".

Runner-Up: Dell XPS M1730

The inclusion of a Dell in this lineup should hardly come as a surprise. The XPS M1730 that we have selected as runner-up here was easily the most powerful machine we have reviewed this year and this showed in both its design and performance. The M1730's design was a radical departure from the slim lines of its younger brothers. It was a behemoth of a laptop, with its measurements of 406 x 302.6 x 50.7 mm and its weight of 4.81 kg. Its sense of styling and finish were top-notch too, with a beautiful dull-gloss black finish which was accentuated by a series of LEDs housed on the lid.

Since it is a gaming machine, it came loaded to the hilt with an incredible set of specifications which included an Intel Core 2 Extreme 9000 CPU clocked at 2.8 GHz (overclockable to 3.4 GHz), 4 GB of DDR2-667 RAM, a pair of Nvidia 8800M GTX cards in SLI, a 17-inch full-HD LED panel, and a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy HD audio chipset. This kind of specification allowed it to achieve segment leading scores.

The Dell XPS M1730 costs Rs 1.71 lakh. At this price it’s a brilliant purchase as it scores over other laptops in this range, as it's the only one that's SLI-Ready and offers playable frame rates at very high resolutions (HD/Full HD). This kind of performance and styling is what allows it to easily claim the title of being our runner-up of the year, in laptops.

Best Value: Dell Inspiron 1525

This segment was perhaps the most competitive, when it came to making a selection. There were several excellent choices from virtually everyone here including Acer Gemstone series, HP’s DV series, Lenovo with its Y series and ultimately Dell with its Inspiron Range. If that was not daunting enough, Dell decided to further complicate matters by introducing a new range called Studio that stood between the higher end XPS line up and the entry-level Inspiron range. Ultimately after a lot of brainstorming, arguments with colleagues and taking price into factor, we decided to declare the Dell 1525 as the winner of the title “Value laptop of the year”.

Even though as we have mentioned there were several excellent value laptops, the Dell 1525 ultimately emerged as the winner purely because of the number of positives that came attached with it. Firstly Dell re-invented the Inspiron range by giving it a more tapered streamlined look, with an improved finish that gave it a touch of class and style only found in the more expensive XPS range. Dell also worked on user complaints that the LCD panel of the Inspiron range was a little too bland and fixed this problem by offering its tru-life screens in the new Inspiron 1525. Furthermore the company retained the strong points of previous Inspiron models such as the sturdy build quality, excellent keyboard /mouse duo and enhanced it by introducing a huge variety of hardware options as its specifications.

As we had said in our review earlier this year
“The Inspiron 1525 is a true VFM notebook
. It offers solid build, plenty of features, good connectivity options, and great battery life, and is matched by what can easily be termed as the industry’s best after-sales/support network and a very competitive price. A glance at Dell’s website showed our test configuration to cost around Rs 41,000 + taxes. To sum up, the 1525 offers so much value in its price range that other manufacturers can only watch and hope to emulate the feat. “

That was an undeniable fact then and the passage of time has done nothing much to change this.

Technology-Tiny motors may be big in surgery

Surgical procedures could soon be helped along with tiny robots, according to researchers.

Miniaturisation of motors has not kept pace with that of electronics, leaving such tiny robots with no means to get around in the body.

Now, research reported in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering has demonstrated a motor about twice the size of a human hair.

The motors could be used to power mini robots to fly around inside the body.

Some surgical procedures are hindered by the size or inflexibility of current instruments. For example, the labyrinthine network of blood vessels in the brain prevents the use of catheters threaded through larger blood vessels.

Researchers have long envisioned that trends of miniaturisation would lead to tiny robots that could get around easily in the body.

The problem until now has been powering them.

Conventional electric motors do not perform as well as they are scaled down in size; as they approach millimetre dimensions, they barely have the power to overcome the resistance in their bearings.

This has been the significant bottleneck in the development of microtechnology such as tiny surgical robots, according to James Friend at the University of Monash in Australia.

"If you pick up an electronics catalogue, you'll find all sorts of sensors, LEDs, memory chips etc that represent the latest in technology and miniaturisation," he says.


All the other concepts to do this are very complex
Mettin Sitti
Carnegie Mellon University

"Take a look however at the motors, and there are few changes from the motors available in the 1950s."

Push to turn

To address that, research in recent years has seen the use of so-called piezoelectric materials. These are typically crystals that expand and contract when a voltage is applied to them.

That makes "linear motors" - which simply move back and forth at high frequency - easy to produce, and Professor Friend published work last year about a motor the size of a grain of salt.

But for real motion within the body, the micro-motors need to be able to rotate.

Many kinds of bacteria, for instance, have tail-like structures called flagella. Rotating the flagella at their base whips them into a helical structure that propels them through fluid.

The new research leverages this same approach, by transforming the linear motion of tiny piezoelectric motors into rotation.

That is accomplished by coupling the motors to a structure with a helix-shaped cut in it. Because the structure is held in place along the helical groove, a push at one end is turned into a rotation.
Light bulb (BBC)
The reverse case: rotation of a helical thread drives a bulb into a socket

The researchers' prototype measures is a quarter of a millimetre wide - not much more than a couple of hairs side-by-side, and 70% smaller than the previous record holder.

And the fact that it is a conceptually simple, self-contained approach is promising for future applications, says Metin Settl, who heads the NanoRobotics Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University.

"All the other concepts to do this are very complex," he says.

"We can already use electromagnetics and external coils to spin them inside a liquid, but then you need all these off-board coils.

"The advantage of this concept is having an on-board rotary actuation," he says. "This could make for a mobile robot with no other equipment."

However, experts in such microelectromechanical systems from QinetiQ told BBC News that while the prototype provides impressive performance in a lab, its efficiency in moving through fluids is yet to be demonstrated.

If it proves successful, however, the approach could be used in applications outside the body, according to Professor Setti.

"These are high-frequency, lightweight motors, and those are specifications that would be advantageous for flying robots too.

Technology-Mozilla Firefox Download Day June 17th

Mozilla Firefox is a one of best free to download internet browsers available for the internet users. Mozilla Corporation always targets towards the development and marketing of open source products. Their technology is aimed to improve the online experience for net savvy people anywhere in the world. Recently, Mozilla has set a world record for largest number of software downloads in 24 hours, as per Guinness World Record

Technology-Nokia and Samsung up for the Challenge

The Apple iPhone 3G launch has taken the Indian mobile phone industry by storm. Now we are hearing noises from the Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola camp that they are planning to launch cheaper full touchscreen phones in competition to the iPhone.

They plan to launch similar Multi-touch interface phones and that too at a lower price. There is also word from top managements that the companies are working on an online store for music to compete with the prevailing iTunes from Apple Inc.

A study done shows that over 40% of the phones will be touchscreen phones by the start of the year 2012. This has put every mobile manufacturer on their toes and they are all out to outdo each other.

Currently Nokia has a 70% market share in the Indian mobile phone industry and the company are looking to keep the figures that way.

Technology-Windows worm numbers 'skyrocket'

Infections of a worm that spreads through low security networks, memory sticks, and PCs without the latest security updates is "skyrocketing".

The malicious program, known as Conficker, Downadup, or Kido was first discovered in October 2008.

Anti-virus firm F-Secure estimates there are now 8.9m machines infected.

Experts warn this figure could be far higher and say users should have up-to-date anti-virus software and install Microsoft's MS08-067 patch.

In its security blog, F-Secure said that the number of infections based on its calculations was "skyrocketing" and that the situation was "getting worse".

Even having the Windows patch won't keep you safe.
Graham Cluley
Sophos

Speaking to the BBC, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant with anti-virus firm Sophos, said the outbreak was of a scale they had not seen for some time.

"Microsoft did a good job of updating people's home computers, but the virus continues to infect business who have ignored the patch update.

"A shortage of IT staff during the holiday break didn't help and rolling out a patch over a large number of computers isn't easy.

"What's more, if your users are using weak passwords - 12345, QWERTY, etc - then the virus can crack them in short order," he added.

"But as the virus can be spread with USB memory sticks, even having the Windows patch won't keep you safe. You need anti-virus software for that."

Method

According to Microsoft, the worm works by searching for a Windows executable file called "services.exe" and then becomes part of that code.

It then copies itself into the Windows system folder as a random file of a type known as a "dll". It gives itself a 5-8 character name, such as piftoc.dll, and then modifies the Registry, which lists key Windows settings, to run the infected dll file as a service.

Once the worm is up and running, it creates an HTTP server, resets a machine's System Restore point (making it far harder to recover the infected system) and then downloads files from the hacker's web site.

Most malware uses one of a handful of sites to download files from, making them fairly easy to locate, target, and shut down.

But Conficker does things differently.

Right now, we're seeing hundreds of thousands of [infected] unique IP addresses
Toni Koivunen, F-Secure

Anti-virus firm F-Secure says that the worm uses a complicated algorithm to generate hundreds of different domain names every day, such as mphtfrxs.net, imctaef.cc, and hcweu.org. Only one of these will actually be the site used to download the hackers' files. On the face of it, tracing this one site is almost impossible.

Variant

Speaking to the BBC, Kaspersky Lab's security analyst, Eddy Willems, said that a new strain of the worm was complicating matters.

"There was a new variant released less than two weeks ago and that's the one causing most of the problems," said Mr Willems

"The replication methods are quite good. It's using multiple mechanisms, including USB sticks, so if someone got an infection from one company and then takes his USB stick to another firm, it could infect that network too. It also downloads lots of content and creating new variants though this mechanism."

"Of course, the real problem is that people haven't patched their software," he added.

Technicians have reverse engineered the worm so they can predict one of the possible domain names. This does not help them pinpoint those who created Downadup, but it does give them the ability to see how many machines are infected.

"Right now, we're seeing hundreds of thousands of unique IP addresses connecting to the domains we've registered," F-Secure's Toni Kovunen said in a statement.

"We can see them, but we can't disinfect them - that would be seen as unauthorised use."

Microsoft says that the malware has infected computers in many different parts of the world, with machines in China, Brazil, Russia, and India having the highest number of victims.