Athul.NET

My interests include web designing, computer programing, browsing the net and listening to music. Have a look at StarElephants.Com the social networking website for elephant lovers co-founded by me. Bringing ideas to life is my passion.

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Don't read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success.

Dr. A.P.J.Abdul Kalam

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Paramekkavu Sree Padmanabhan

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Mega Star Rocks!

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Neram Movie Song - Vaathil Melle

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Creative!

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Malayalam film actor Jayaram with his elephant Kannan at Paravoor.

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Setup Java plugin for Chrome in Ubuntu 12.04 64-bits

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Follow these instructions, NOT these. Beware that the path for “libnpjp2.so” is different if you installed the JDK instead of the JRE (included in the JDK). I did that, at this location:

/opt/java-6-oracle/jdk1.6.0_37/

Now run:

$ sudo mkdir /opt/google/chrome/plugins $ cd /opt/google/chrome/plugins $ sudo ln -s /opt/java-6-oracle/jdk1.6.0_37/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so

Restart the browser and test the plugin here.

[crossconnectmag]

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Berlin’s Festival of Llights

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Folder protection program in C

#include stdio.h #include string.h #include process.h

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Hacking experts find new ways to attack Android phones

Hacking experts on Wednesday demonstrated ways to attack Android smartphones using methods they said work on virtually all such devices in use today, despite recent efforts by search engine giant Google to boost protection. Experts showed off their prowess at the Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, where some 6,500 corporate and government security technology workers gathered to learn about emerging threats to their networks.

"Google is making progress, but the authors of malicious software are moving forward," said Sean Schulte of Trustwave's SpiderLabs.

Near field communications allow users to share photos with friends, make payments or exchange other data by bringing Android phones within a few centimeters of similarly equipped devices such as another phone or a payment terminal. Miller said he figured out how to create a device the size of a postage stamp that could be stuck in an inconspicuous place such as near a cash register at a restaurant. When an Android user walks by, the phone would get infected, said Miller. He spent five years as a global network exploit analyst at the U.S. National Security Agency, where his tasks included breaking into foreign computer systems.

"WILD WEST"

Miller and another hacking expert, Georg Wicherski of CrowdStrike, have also infected an Android phone with a piece of malicious code that Wicherski unveiled in February. That piece of software exploits a security flaw in the Android browser that was publicly disclosed by Google's Chrome browser development team, according to Wicherski. Google has fixed the flaw in Chrome, which is frequently updated, so that most users are now protected, he said. But Wicherski said Android users are still vulnerable because carriers and device manufacturers have not pushed those fixes or patches out to users. Marc Maiffret, chief technology officer of the security firm BeyondTrust, said: "Google has added some great security features, but nobody has them."

Experts say iPhones and iPads don't face the same problem because Apple has been able to get carriers to push out security updates fairly quickly after they are released. Two Trustwave researchers told attendees about a technique they discovered for evading Google's "Bouncer" technology for identifying malicious programs in its Google Play Store. They created a text-message blocking application that uses a legitimate programming tool known as java script bridge. Java script bridge lets developers remotely add new features to a program without using the normal Android update process.

Companies including Facebook and LinkedIn use java script bridge for legitimate purposes, according to Trustwave, but it could also be exploited maliciously. To prove their point, they loaded malicious code onto one of their phones and remotely gained control of the browser. Once they did that, they could force it to download more code and grant them total control. "Hopefully Google can solve the problem quickly," said Nicholas Percoco, senior vice president of Trustwave's SpiderLabs. "For now, Android is the Wild West."

-- Reuters

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Cloud Computing.

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Higher you live, faster you age!

The true nature of Albert Einstein's theory that time is a relative concept and the higher you live above sea level, the faster you should age, has been demonstrated with the world's most accurate clock for the first time.

Experts found that time really does run more quickly the higher you are - just as Einstein predicted, The Independent reported Tuesday. They monitored two atomic clocks positioned just a foot apart in height above sea level. Einstein had proposed 100 years ago in his theory of relativity that time and space are not as constant as everyday life would suggest. He suggested that the only true constant, the speed of light, meant that time can run faster or slower depending on how high you are, and how fast you are travelling.

James Chin-Wen Chou and his colleagues from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, conducted the study. "These precise clocks reveal the effects of gravitational pull, so if we position one clock closer to a planet, you also increase the gravitational pull and time actually runs slower than for another, similar clock positioned higher up," Chou said. "No one has seen such effects before with clocks which is why we wanted to see if these effects are there. We would say our results agree with Einstein's theory - we weren't expecting any discrepancies and we didn't find any," the newspaper quoted him as saying.

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Nature Singers!

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Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.

Robert Louis Stevenson

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Ganesha!

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EA believes that the future of gaming is in the PC

The head of Electronic Arts John Riccitiello believes that the future of gaming is in the PC. In an interview with CNBC, he addresses “a perception among investors that the game industry is tough to invest in right now” by questioning the validity of NPD reports that only count boxed retail sales in the US.

Riccitiello used PC gaming as the biggest example of how the gaming industry is changing. “Just five years ago people said that the PC game business was in a radical state of decline because NPD said it was down 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent, year-in year-out,” he said. He further added, “The fastest growing platform for video games today is the PC, but it’s going through subscriptions, through micro transactions and through downloads.”

PC gaming has the advantage of convenience over other gaming platforms. You can buy and download a PC game, start playing an MMO, buy DLC and expansion packs, all without ever leaving your computer. More and more players who don’t usually buy or play games are using the PC to do things that are also possible on the PlayStation3 or the Xbox360. Premium DLC and subscription fees are making PC games profitable, though this business model remains unproven for the consoles yet. This was described by Riccitiello as, “the culture of building something like a Broadway play where you go on every night instead of a canned television performance that’s done once and it’s done.”

EA are shifting from a packaged goods company to a “service business”, according to Riccitiello, and he uses the FIFA games as an example. The previous titles in the series gained large audiences that dropped off after a month or so. With FIFA 12, supported regularly with new updates, “we had five million players that first week and now it’s July, and we’ve had no fewer than four and a half million players since then.” Riccitiello also suggests that the free-to-play offerings by EA are on the grow, and hints that The Old Republic’s move to make the first 15 levels of the game free has proved successful. The PC gaming platform was said to be on the decline during the heyday of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Many publishers and developers blamed the platform for low sales due to piracy. The truth was that these developers and publishers would rush out a straight and horrible port to the PC. Mostly, these ports were poorly optimized and locked at a framerate of 30 frames per second, whereas most computers would be capable of running at 60 frames per second and make the animations smoother. Recently though, companies such as Valve, Blizzard and RIOT Games have proven that the PC is a very strong platform.

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Friends!