News – Page 21 – Michalis Nicolaides

Mac and Trojan Horses

You do know the story about the Trojan Horse, don’t you? Here is the summary of the story. During the Troy war and after a long and unsuccessful siege, Greeks found this clever plan. They left a big wooden horse outside the Troy walls as a victory trophy and they got into their ships and they pretended to sail away. That nasty horse had Greek men inside and Trojans pulled it inside the city walls. During the night Greeks sailed back and the men that were inside the horse opened the gates and you can imagine (if you don’t already know) the result.

Google Encrypted Searching

As you might already know, all information that is passed over the Internet and it is not encrypted can be viewed by anyone (with the knowledge). The only way to secure your data and your privacy is with SSL encryption, also known as HTTPS. Google will force logged in users to use secured searching by redirecting to https://www.google.com and then back to http://www.google.com after logging out. One letter can make the difference, the extra ‘s’ means privacy and secured searching. Google was testing this feature for a while through https://encrypted.google.com which is still in beta.

Quantum Levitation – Quantum Trapping

I couldn’t have a category science (even in news) and not posting this one. Quantum Levitation, it is amazing. The video is from Association of Science – Technology Centers (ASTC) 2011. The group that shows this is the superconductivity group from Tel-Aviv university (school of physics and astronomy). It shows a superconductor locked in a magnetic field. I have watched this video three times and then I searched more and I have found the next video which is even cooler.

New Hacker Group – Team SwaStika

There are many hacktivists and several hacker groups out there and new ones are added almost daily. A new (to me) group with the name “Team SwaStika” have released the details of 10000 facebook accounts. The details were released to Pastebin but now are not there, at least not to their original post as Pastebin removed both parts. Team Swastika claims to be the most powerful hacking group of Nepal and their next target is Nepal Government website. Their slogan is “Fight for justice. Justice to freedom. Never give up. Never back down”. Their logo is a swastika but it is the result of a combination of 4 ‘L’s, “(Good) Luck”, “Love”, “Light” and “Life”.

Google Translate now supports conversation

If you have an Android phone you probably have Google Translate app. If you don’t, you can download it from the market, it is free and very useful app. The newest version supports conversations, you can speak in English and your friend listen to you in Spanish and then respond to you in Spanish but hear him in English. It started looking a lot like the Babel fish from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. Google Translate support 16 languages in Conversation Mode so far, English, Spanish, Brazilian, Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Czech, Polish, Russian and Turkish.

Android apps on Windows platform

Bluestacks app player can run Android apps on Windows platform. It is in alpha version but it looks very nice and it runs Android apps very fast in full screen mode. It comes with 10 preloaded apps and you can add up to 26 more. This means that you can have your favorite Android apps to your PC and play your favorite Android games like angry birds and alchemy without worrying about your battery. This is good for both windows users and Android app developers.

Dart – JavaScript alternative

Google introduced Dart, a structured web programming language to be used instead of JavaScript. Dart was introduced as an easy-to-learn language for high-performance applications. You can execute your Dart apps on a native virtual machine, this is the way to gain the high performance. There is an alternative way to run Dart apps, you can use a compiler to translate Dart code to JavaScript and then use it as a javascript app.

Earthquakes alter earth’s gravity

According to scientists, big earthquakes can (slightly) change the gravity under the affected area. This is happening because powerful earthquakes alter the mass distribution of the Earth. Japan’s earthquake, with 9 magnitude, is one of them since it is the 5th strongest ever recorded. Don’t worry, the change from that one is about 2 millionth of a gal when the average earth gravity is about 980 galileos. Over the last few years we had many strong earthquakes and some of them are in the top 10 of all times.

URKontinent – The Google’s Beer

We have all tested at least once Google’s search but who will test Google’s beer? No, this is not a name in some service, it is a real beer. Google is working with Dogfish Head (brewer company) to create a Belgian Dubbel beer. Google gave a list to Dogfish Head with the must-have ingredients from all over the world. The ingredients also include honey from Google’s Californian beehives. URKontinent’s availability will be limited and only as a draft. I should also mention that URKontinent has almost double alcohol content from an average beer.

Firefox 7 – The best web browser of today

Tom’s Hardware perform a test called “Web Browser Grand Prix” every time there are new releases of web browsers. In this test, the top five web browsers (FireFox, Chrome, Opera, Internet Explorer and Safari) are tested in almost any aspect that we can think of. The test includes startup times (one tab and eight tabs) and page loading times of most popular pages (Sample: Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, craiglist and The Huffington Post). They are also tested for their HTML5 hardware acceleration, WebGL performance, Java, Javascript, memory management and efficiency and more.