All about Amazon’s Echo

       The Amazon’s Echo is a smart home appliance which acts as a portable speaker. It’s a 9.25 inch tall cylindrical speaker with 7 piece microphone array. The device comes up with Wi-Fi and can stream music from certain music services such as Spotify, Pandora from your smartphone.

       Echo is connected to Alexa, a cloud based voice service that could help out all sorts of useful information, more specifically it is pre-installed personal virtual assistant, which listen and responds to commands. Its listens with wake word Alexa. Alexa can help you in various aspects such as adding shopping list, providing news, setting timers and alarms, reading pdf’s, providing weather forecast, answering trivia, etc.

    Alexa can also interact with various smart home devices such as Philips Hue bulbs. It’s possible to turn off, on or dim the lights in room. The device always keeps listening so you would able to ask any questions at any time. Echo has ever growing list of thousands of skills and counting.

    With a product like Echo you’ll find yourself using mobile phone less frequently when you’re at phone. There are some privacy concerns regarding the fact that Alexa always keeps listening our conversations and still has lot to do. But ultimately the product can really help you in many ways.

  And the pathetic thing is Echo is yet to be officially launched in India. Though few services like setting alarm, streaming music may work, however location based services such as weather updates, maps,nearest restaurants won't work unless it's launched.

check out this video

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Li-Fi Technology

Li-Fi

    Li-Fi (Light Fidelity) technology was coined by professor Harold Hass. Li-Fi technology is a high speed and fully networked wireless communication technology. The concept of using light as a medium to transfer internet data is coined as Li-Fi. Li-Fi can provide data transmission which is 100 times faster than Wi-Fi.

Li-Fi

Advantages of Li-Fi

        Li-Fi is cheap, safe, plentiful, robust for data transfer. Wi-Fi uses radio signals to transmit data whereas Li-Fi uses visible light rays to transmit data. Light rays has more capacity to transmit most amount of data in a less time compared to radio waves. 

       Li-Fi Researchers have recorded a speed of 10GBPS in laboratory.  The researchers of Oxford University have reached 224 gigabytes per second using the Li-Fi technology. Technically it would allow you to download 18 movies of 1.5 GB in 1second.

     Normally your Wi-Fi signals penetrate through walls and can be easily picked by malicious user that means data flows out of your living room. In Li-Fi technology signals can’t penetrate through the walls offering a high degree of privacy from the malicious user who wants to snoop on your PC. 

     Then your next question might be do the lights need to be turned on every time? Probably the answer is Yes, the light has to be turned on whenever you want to use data, but the lights the can be dimmed down that the human eye cannot detect whether it’s on, but still the receiver receives the data.

Working of Li-Fi

   

      Wi-Fi uses radio signals to transmit data but Li-Fi is a visible light communication system. Ceiling LED fixture encodes data from internet and decodes into light. The LED light bulbs are semi conducting light source that electricity supplied can be dipped and dimmed down at higher rates which is invisible to human eyes.

          The data is fed into LED bulbs it then sends data at rapid speed to photo detector. Light received by photon detector which converts the variation of intensity of light into electrical charges. These electrical charges are then converted into binary data and then they are sent to Computer, mobile phones, etc. For more explanation watch this video.

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Privacy and its need

Privacy and its need 

                Privacy is a state where a person is disturbed or not observed by other people. Generally people opt for privacy for storing their important information and sharing those information in a safe way.

Privacy issues

• When it comes to privacy and security there are some real threats. Many of us have lost many of their precious digital information such as passwords, photographs, emails, etc. All these happen because of social engineering.

•  Now what is social engineering? It is process by which the hacker must go through various personal and other information of a particular person to guess his/her passwords for the social media profiles. Once the hacker collects all information about you, he puts that in program that generates hundreds and thousands of possible combination, until they find a correct one.

•  Documents submitted by Washington post indicates that National Security Agency (NSA) collects billions of information of billions of users everyday. NSA compiles all those information in a vast database, they process all those data to find the targeted information.

• Formally speaking, there is no individual person on your phone or personal computer is reading your text messages or monitoring you but all your information are collected.

Famous encryption devices in history

Enigma

• One of the most famous and well known encryption device in history is Enigma. This device was used by Germans to pass messages during Second World War.  The military Enigma has 158,962,555,217,826,360,000 (nearly 159 quintillion) different settings. Famous mathematician Alan Turing worked for 9 months for breaking its settings.
• Americans used an encryption device known as Sigaba to pass the message to during World War. It was considered as the USA’s highest cipher machine during the Second World War. The Sigaba was not deciphered by the enemy nations during war.
•  British’s used an encryption device known as Typex during World War. This device was mainly used by the British armed force. Typex has been attributed as having good security, the historic record on this device is much lesser.

Privacy tools

         

            Everyone in this world are concerned with privacy issues. Let’s see some private search engines and browsers

Private search engine

        

                  Most commonly used search engines by people are Google, Yahoo and Bing. But all these search engines do make a note on our search results. All those curated data are put into a big machine to figure out what are legit and bad. That’s why google provides you best search results. Here are some alternative search engines which has some added features regarding privacy.

·       DuckDuckGo is the most famous private search engine. The searches in the internet would be assumed anonymous. DuckDuckGo indicated that it had significant traffic increase in late 2014, hitting more than 4 million searches per day. link : https://duckduckgo.com/

·       Blekko is another private search engine that has less privacy than DuckDuckGo but it is still an alternative to google and bing. It provides better search results by collecting the search results, but collected search results are deleted within 48 hours.

·       Ixquick is yet another private search engine that is similar to DuckDuckGo as it doesn’t keep any informations, cookies or IP address details. Normally it returns the search results through google and it provides and identical google search.

·       Startpage is similar to DuckDuckGo in privacy settings. The special feature is they have changed the algorithm and search results display.

Private browsers

• The onion router (TOR) is a good private browser. It will create a unique proxy IP address. It encrypts the IP address multiple times and provides reliable features for privacy. When browsing it will be hard to pin point the user’s location and it stores no history. Download link : https://www.torproject.org/download/download
•  Epic browser provides an extreme private browser. It doesn’t keep histories, passwords, DNS prefetching, instance cookies. The browser also has an integrated Ad-Blocker.
• The next private browser is Peer Block. When in connection with the internet there are opportunities to bounce into PC and see what information are stored. It blocks all those sites that might do those activities.
• Mozilla Firefox is browser that provides easy navigation, great performance, advanced security and personalization. Download link : https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Encryption Software

             When you’re concerned with privacy and security of details present within your PC, here are some software that might help you.

• Vera crypt is free encryption software based on true crypt. It was developed by IDRIX a French IT security firm. When encrypting a partition Vera Crypt uses around 30 times more iteration of encryption algorithm. Entire Hard drive or file containers can be encrypted with Vera Crypt.
•  Disk Cryptor is another free encryption software where you can encrypt an entire hard drive. External devices like pendrive can also be encrypted by using this software. It supports AES, Twofish encryption algorithms.
• AES encrypt is open source file encryption software. Using AES we can encrypt only particular files and not folders or hard drives. It uses powerful 256-bit encryption algorithm. It’s a reliable software.

How to protect passwords

·       The password shouldn’t be simple and more importantly they shouldn’t be socially engineered like nickname, pet name

·       Use alphanumeric case sensitive combinations.

Eg. &win78*lose%

·       Change your password atleast once in 4 months.

·       Never share your passwords with your fellows.

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A quick review on some amazing products of CES2017

                                                            

What is CES?

              The international CES is a world’s largest consumer electronics and consumer technology trade show that takes every January at Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. This show attracts huge amount of audience all over the world. Many MNCs take this a stage for introducing their new products.

And one important note almost all products at CES are bit pricey. Let me tell you about two amazing products in CES2017 which I personally liked a lot.

Asus Zenfone AR

Here is the coolest mobile phone which I have seen in CES2017.

·       The massive zenfone AR comes up with 5.7 inch screen a super AMOLED display.

·        Under the hood it has snapdragon821 which delivers high power and performance. This mobile just takes few minutes to get charged.

·       This mobile phone has a 23megapixel camera for making perfect photographs. And the front facing camera with 8megapixels. With the rear camera you can make 3840x2160 (4K) video recording.

·       The system is built with 8GB of RAM, which would allow you to run lots of application simultaneously.  

·       The mobile has got a huge storage space of 256GB almost a size of a computer. You can download number of applications and store a big collection of TV series too.

·       Another amazing thing is that this the first mobile phone that is google tango enabled. The tango mainly focuses on indoor navigation, 3D mapping and augmented reality. It enables us to see world around it without relying on GPS.

Now let’s come to most important thing of the product, that’s the budget. Though the features in the mobile were pretty amazing, the price of the mobile too amazed its viewers. This mobile phone is priced 59999INR. As I mentioned earlier all the products in CES are bit pricey.

Dell XPS13

         Lets see about the impressive dell xps13. These laptops are available in 13 and 15 inch display.

• ·       The laptops are well built with the great design and keyboard. This lightweight yet robust laptop weighs only 1.29 kgs making it the perfect companion at work and play.
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• ·       The laptop has got an infinity edge touch display with 3200*1800(3k) resolution. Boasting 5.7 million pixels which is 276 pixels per inch, even macbook’s retina display has 226 pixels per inch.
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• ·       It has 2 USB 3.0 ports one with power share and it also has USB C port that’s thunderbolt three.
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• ·        It is a touch screen laptop with scratch resistant gorilla glass. They also have a matte finish for non touch-screen laptops. The keyboard is really amazing. It has a backlit chiclet style keys which gives an amazing look to your laptop.
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• ·       It has a 56 watt power battery which would last for almost 12 hours while using it with minimum brightness and browsing the files normally.
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• ·       Though the laptop has a less storage capacity of 256GB it comes up Solid State Drive (SSD) which is 100 times faster than the hard drive (HDD).
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• ·       On the performance side of things, with Intel 6th Gen core i7 skylake processor and 16DD3 RAM, it handles nearly any day to day tasks.

  

Most of the American reported it as a worthy CES pick. Though this laptop costs 130000INR I would say its really worth for money dude dell xps.

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Windows and Linux Operating Systems

Operating system

                         Operating system is a layer of software that provides abstraction and arbitration. In simple words it is a chief program that enables the computer hardware to communicate with computer software. In early systems, user interacted with the computer using command line interface but nowadays all the computers use Graphical User Interface (GUI).

Example: windows, linux, unix, mac os x

Windows operating system

                     Windows is one of the most popular operating system, when it comes to personal computers. It is one of the most profitable products ever made attracting millions and millions of users. It was the first to introduce Graphical User Interface (GUI). Even the first version of windows was pretty revolutionary. Windows made the general public realize that each and every household could have a computer and it wasn't just a machine that was used by big corporates.

Pros of windows

• Windows take more than 90-80% share when it comes to personal computers and desktops as it is the most user friendly operating system. Windows helps us to get millions of applications and provide support for all those application.
• One common thing that everyone love is gaming. In that case, windows is the best operating system for gaming, there is no OS which has support for better gaming and no OS that runs similar as windows. 
• Software compatibility is another advantage of windows operating system. Many useful applications like AutoCad architecture, Autodesk, Bandicam, Coreldraw, etc support only on windows OS. 
• Windows can nearly run on any processor like Intel, AMD. Hence it is compatible to any hardware.

Cons of windows

•  Windows is not an open source software it is proprietary owned. An original windows 10 OS would cost around 7600INR. 
• Most of the products in windows operating system like MS office, adobe photoshop, adobe aftereffects, etc are not free. 
• Windows is unstable and insecure. Microsoft has made great improvements over the years with security on their Operating System, their Operating System still continues to be the most vulnerable to viruses and other attacks. 
• Windows operating system is a resource hog as it uses too much Random Access Memory (RAM). 
• Windows operating system won’t provide the source code for their users as it is owned by Microsoft.

Linux operating system

                             Linux operating system was developed by Linus Torvalds. Linux was originally developed for personal computers. It was the model of free open source software which knocked down all the proprietary giants like Microsoft in order to maintain the development and distribution of computer program.

Pros of Linux

•  Linux is completely customizable as it is an open source software and provides the source code to the users who use them. It lets you dive deep into your system and mess with everything including the kernel. 
•  Developers and users more or less like to work within a relatively closed environment that places restriction on what can you do. 
•  Google developed the most popular mobile operating system Android with the help of Linux OS. As it was created from Linux, android was declared open source OS. 
•  Linux operating system is provides a safe environment as it doesn’t get affected by viruses. Relatively in windows security is a major concern, multiple firewalls need to be installed to protect from viruses. 
•  Linux has various distributions like mint, Ubuntu, elementary OS which is mainly based on kernel and packet management system.

Cons of Linux

•  Linux OS is not a user friendly operating system as it takes some time to get familiar with OS and its components. 
•  Linux operating system lacks hardware compatibility. These systems can only run only on Intel processor. 
•  Linux provides lots of free applications but those applications lack features when it is compared with proprietary applications. 
• Linux doesn’t support many applications and games as windows does. Most of the company make products which is compatible with windows as it is widely used. 
•  Many Linux distros have been developed for ease of use, but still windows is much easier.

Conclusion

           Both the operating system has advantages and disadvantages. Windows is the most user friendly operating system for new computer users. Though Linux takes bit time to master provides a safe environment than windows. My suggestion would be Linux operating system as it is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Instead of spending lot of money on operating system and applications we can spend those money in buying new hardware devices which would be more worthy for future.

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