shows over 30 years glimpse of the planet,Google Earth updated

Google has rolled out an update to its Google Earth Timelapse feature that was introduced back in 2013. The update brings "four additional years of imagery, petabytes of new data, and a sharper view of the Earth from 1984 to 2016," according to Google.

The Google Earth Engine Programme Manager Chris Herwig added in the official blog post that Google collaborated with the Time.com website to show the updates made on the Earth's surface over the years.

The update brings sharper view using the same techniques Google used for its Maps service. "Using Google Earth Engine, we sifted through about three quadrillion pixels—that's 3 followed by 15 zeroes—from more than 5,000,000 satellite images," added Herwig.

It has been mentioned that Google created 33 images of the entire planet, one for each year and encoded these 3.95 terapixel global images in to 25,000,000 and more overlapping multi-resolution video tiles.

On a related note, Google Maps recently got the ability to monitor live status of crowd at a given place. There's also a Time Management feature that gives users information on how long people stay at a given location.

There's also a new section which shows the work hours for different departments and special services. For instance, the feature will display the exact time a department opened/closed for work instead of just the main opening/closing time of the complete building.

Several other additions have been made by the company in its Maps application such as offline availability, showing parking status, multi-stop support and more. 

Nokia challenges Apple, Samsung again

Nokia smartphones are poised for a comeback after former managers at the Finnish company licensed the handset brand from Microsoft and struck up partnerships with Google and phone manufacturer Foxconn.

Nokia was once the world's dominant cellphone maker but missed the shift to smartphones and then chose Microsoft's unpopular Windows operating system for its "Lumia" range.

Nokia quit smartphones in 2014 by selling its handset activities to Microsoft to focus on mobile network equipment. Microsoft continued selling Lumia smartphones under its own name but this year largely abandoned that business, too.

HMD Global, led by Nokia veteran Arto Nummela, wants to launch its first Nokia smartphone in the early part of next year using Google's (GOOGL.O) Android operating system.

Success will require a dash for scale by stealing business from Apple (AAPL.O), Samsung (005930.KS) and dozens of other players in a cut-throat industry.

"Consumers may be carrying different smartphones now, but are they really in love and loyal to those brands?" said Nummela in an interview.

The Nokia consumer brand lives on as the badge on cheaper, entry-level "feature phones" sold mainly in Asia, India and Eastern Europe, though Microsoft invested little to market the name in recent years. Smartphones typically cost anywhere from ten to 30 times as much as these basic phones, which sell for as little as Rs3,090.06.

"For a new entrant, having an established brand provides it with an instant on-ramp," said mobile phone analyst Ben Wood of CCS Insight, who suggested that phone vendors with weaker brands should not take the new challenge lightly.

"The barriers to entry for the Android phone space are low," said Wood. "What HMD has is the Nokia brand and management experience. The key to its success will be driving scale."

CEO Nummela, who was once responsible for Nokia's sales and product development, does not lack ambition.

"We want to be one of the key competitive players in the smartphone business," he told Reuters.

HMD President Florian Seiche previously worked at Siemens (SIEGn.DE), Orange, HTC and Nokia. Chief Marketing Officer Pekka Rantala is a former CEO of Rovio, the maker of the Angry Birds game, as well as a Nokia veteran.

"We are not going to skip any markets in the long term," Seiche said, adding that HMD had already set up offices in 40 locations around the world.

NO FUNDING FROM NOKIA CORP

HMD is owned by Smart Connect LP, a private equity fund run by Jean-Francois Baril, who was once in charge of Nokia's world-leading supply chain management system. Other HMD managers have put in money of their own.

HMD on Thursday took over the feature phone business that Nokia Corp (NOKIA.HE) sold to Microsoft. It has a licensing deal with Nokia giving it sole use of the brand on mobile phones and tablets for the next decade. It will pay Nokia royalties for the brand and patents, but Nokia has no direct investment in HMD.

HMD is building its smartphone operating system in partnership with Google and all its Nokia devices will be manufactured by Foxconn (2354.TW) of Taiwan, the world's largest contract manufacturer.

Nummela says his team's enduring relationships with phone service providers and retailers could help HMD quickly convince owners of Nokia feature phones to upgrade in markets like India, Indonesia and Russia.

The Nokia name is still on a tenth of the feature phones sold around the world, though in recent years it ceded ground to Samsung and TCL (000100.SZ), maker of Alcatel-brand phones, as well as smaller players, according to market research firm Strategy Analytics.

Shipments of Nokia feature phones plunged 40 percent in fiscal year 2015 and HMD must reverse that decline while trying to break back into the smartphone market, where hundreds of vendors compete by selling phones that can be hard to distinguish.

"The feature phone is the essence of the business," Wood said. "Don't be under any illusions that this market is over."

ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE WORK

One of the most important and essential pieces of software on Windows computers nowadays is antivirus software to protect you against malware, exploits and hackers. With new advanced malware being released every day used to compromise privacy, blackmail the owners of infected machines and send spam, antivirus software is more important than ever. Most malware is designed and spread with a financial motive, ransom ware for instance which encrypts all files on your computer and demands a payment in Bitcoin for the decryption key.

Malware is often spread through infected websites that contain malicious software, phishing e-mails and online downloads. In many occasions users are infected by their own actions, for example opening a malicious attachment in the mail or downloading a file from the internet. But sometimes there isn’t a single thing you can do to prevent infection, for example by visiting a mainstream news website which is infected with malicious software. On these occasions your antivirus software becomes really important. Antivirus protects your privacy, your precious and priceless files and business processes for a price from Rs1,551.3,- to Rs6,205.21. But how does Antivirus work? What does a full system scan and a quick scan do? How does antivirus detect a virus? Why does it update all the time? In this article we will be answering these questions and more.

HOW DOES ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE SEARCH FOR MALWARE?

Antivirus software uses multiple ways to detect malicious software. Antivirus scan uses full system scans, quick scans and on-access scans to search for malware. We will have a look at the different scans available, what they do and how to use them.

FULL SYSTEM SCAN

The full systems can may run for a long time and scans all the files on your hard drive, network, system memory and other storage devices for malicious software. Modern systems often contain a lot of files and therefore a full system scan may run for a very long time. A full system scan is very useful when you’ve just installed antivirus software and you want to check if your computer contains any malicious software. Another reason to run a full system scan is when you suspect an infection which has gone unnoticed until than or if you want to check the system for dormant malware with the latest virus definitions. For the purpose of dormant virus detection most antivirus software schedule a full system scan weekly after the virus definitions have been updated.

QUICK SCAN

Most antivirus software offers a function called a quick scan to check the start-up items, system memory and boot sectors for malware. Depending on the used antivirus software the quick scan also checks for malware on locations which are often used by malware, for persistence mechanisms for example. The quick scan uses only a fraction of the time and resources a full system scan uses. Therefor you can run a quick scan anytime you like without having the anti malware software slowing down your computer.

ON-ACCESS SCANNING

The on-access scan or real time protection is probably the most important scanning mechanism used by antivirus software. An on-access scan is run every time an executable is executed and a file is opened or downloaded, regardless of the file type. The antivirus software will run the on-access scan before the application interface or file is presented to the user. A great benefit of on-access scans is that security flaws in applications are also being caught by the antivirus software. For example it will detect malicious flash files when vulnerabilities in flash are being exploited. For this reason it is advised to never turn off on-access scanning on your antivirus even if it impacts your computer performance. A lot of malware infections have great impact on your system and it might cost a lot of time, effort and sometimes money to remove the malware and make sure it has been completely removed.

HOW DOES ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE DETECT VIRUSES?

But what mechanisms does antivirus software uses to detect a virus and distinct them from non-malicious files? This is done by using virus definitions for known viruses and by employing heuristics to detect new or modified viruses. Read on to know what virus definitions are, how antivirus uses them to detect malware and how antivirus employs heuristics.

VIRUS DEFINITIONS

Antivirus software relies heavily on virus definitions to detect malware on your system and this is the most traditional way of detecting malware on your system. Virus definitions contain signatures which are used to determine the kind of malware. New malware is released every day and so are virus definitions. The bigger antivirus software vendors have dedicated antivirus labs where new malware is researched to develop new definitions and signatures for them. This is a costly process because millions of new malicious software is released every year. Without the latest virus definitions it may be impossible for your antivirus software to detect the latest malware. Most antivirus software vendors update malware definitions multiple times a day for this reason. Another method for antivirus software is heuristic based detection which we will explain in more detail.

HEURISTICS

Heuristic bases detection is used in combination with virus definitions to detect malware which is based on known and modified malware. Even without virus definitions for the modified malware the antivirus software is able to recognize variations of malware and put it in quarantine. Antivirus uses generic signature detection for this purpose and can be explained as malware with different fingerprints but exactly the same malicious code. Another method for antivirus software is file analysis for example to see if an executable has instructions to alter or delete certain files. Regular software does not try to modify or delete important system software and therefore this action could be considered malicious behavior and should therefore be considered malware.

FALSE-POSITIVES

One big downside of heuristic based virus detection are false positives. False positives is when antivirus flags files or programs as malicious or marks them as a threat when they are not, it is just a false alarm. In normal daily use of your computer you should rarely encounter false positives. But with so much software around it may be possible to run into a false positive. In general it is advised that if your antivirus software claims a file to be malicious, consider it malicious too. If you want to be 100% sure if you’re facing a false positive, you can upload the file to Virus Total for analysis. Virus Total will scan the file for you and show you how other antivirus software think about its contents.

WHICH ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE SHOULD I BUY?

There are a lot of antivirus software vendors who offer even more antivirus software. It is advised to go with proprietary antivirus software instead of free software. The paid antivirus software offers better protection to infections, exploits and hackers than free virus scanners. Currently the award winning antivirus vendors are Bit defender, ESET, Norton, F-Secure and Kaspersky.

Facebook buys Pittsburgh-based facial analysis

Facebook has bought a facial analysis software firm linked to Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, a move that will help the social media giant boost its artificial intelligence-powered facial recognition technology.

Details of the deal weren't revealed by Menlo Park, California-based Facebook or FacioMetrics, the Carnegie Mellon spinoff.

Facebook says FacioMetrics's software can be used to monitor the emotions of medical patients, assess audience reaction to a public speaker, or even detect drowsy drivers.

It also will enable Facebook users to express themselves through special effects that can manipulate photos and videos with facial images. This is something rival Snapchat already does to some extent—it has special filters users can add on to selfie "snaps" they take of themselves. The filters change depending on your facial expressions. For example, a dog filter will not just add on dog ears but show a giant panting tongue instead of your own when you stick out your tongue.

FacioMetrics has developed software called IntraFace, which can be downloaded onto mobile phones and enables users to do real-time facial image analysis. The company's CEO is Fernando De la Torre, an associate research professor at the school's Robotics Institute.

Microsoft joins the Linux Foundation

Fifteen years ago, Steve Ballmer memorably declared Linux was a cancer. Now, Microsoft announced it was joining the Linux Foundation. That’s not a completely unprecedented move, given that Microsoft has been getting steadily chummier with open source software over the last few years. There’s a Linux Bash shell integrated into Windows 10’s Anniversary Update, after all. But joining the organization responsible for maintaining Linux and for funding various open source projects? That’s a true 180 from where the company used to be.

Microsoft also launched a beta of SQL Server for Linux, while Google just joined the .NET Foundation, PC World reports. Microsoft is releasing a version of Visual Studio for the Mac, although this is based on Xamarin, not a straight port of Visual Studio. Samsung has a preview version of Visual Studio for Tizen, which will allow .NET applications to be built for Samsung’s non-Android hardware. If you wanted to blow someone’s mind from 2010, try telling them that Microsoft will help build Linux, Samsung wants VS support for Tizen, and Google has added .NET after spending so much time and effort investing in Java.

Microsoft’s move to embrace Linux is undoubtedly driven by changing macroeconomic conditions around the PC business. For decades, as the dominant server and consumer operating system, Microsoft had very little reason to play nice with others or work to emphasize invulnerability. The explosion of the mobile market and the company’s complete failure to penetrate it has left it little option but to seek other types of collaboration and cross-platform support. Building products that work seamlessly across both Linux and Windows is one way for Redmond to ensure it remains relevant across the data center and server markets.

“Microsoft is hitting all the right notes in terms of aligning its developer business with an ecosystem much broader than Windows,” IDC Program Director Al Hilwa told PC World. “Joining the Linux Foundation is a natural progression of this strategy and one that might still generate a double take if it wasn’t for all the actions the company has already taken in terms of supporting Linux in Azure and with SQL Server.”

SQL Server should be available on Linux by the middle of next year. Those of you hoping for a suite of consumer-friendly cross-platform announcements may need to wait a little longer — there’s no indication that general application compatibility at the consumer level is coming to either operating system, and certainly no known plans to make APIs like DirectX 11 or 12 cross-compatible. Of course, some would argue that Vulkan supersedes the need for such support in any case, but we’ve heard similar arguments about OpenGL versus DirectX (pre-DX12) for over a decade. Even after Valve’s work to bring Steam to Linux, Linux gaming lags behind its Windows counterpart.

Hide Your Ip Address And Protect Yourself Against Spyware And Hackers

Your computer's Ip is it's unique identification online. Once your computer conveys with another computer it shares it's Ip. Frequently your pc maintains exactly the same Ip next day of day, for several weeks at any given time. A large amount of your activity becomes simple for other computer systems to log and monitor.

Identity thieves may use your Ip to watch that which you do on the internet. They even intercept financial information, including logon IDs and passwords. Since id theft is among the quickest growing crimes, it is just prudent to do something to avoid online monitoring of the activities. Hiding your Ip is an excellent method to thwart identity thieves, spy ware and cyber-terrorist.

The normal method to hide your Ip using their company sites is by using proxy servers. Proxy servers are, basically, intermediate servers which exist involving the computer and also the computer in the receiving finish individuals message. That computer in the receiving finish of the message sees your message from the proxy server, not your pc. Thus, your computer's Ip is hidden.

In addition to assisting to thwart identity thieves, proxy servers also hide your real Ip from forums, blogs or any other services that track your Ip. If you've been blocked by one of these simple services, hiding your Ip using a proxy server may be the only method for you to restore access.

You will find free proxy servers and along with compensated proxy servers. You will find several software packages will search free of charge proxy servers. These programs will test the proxy servers to find out if they're presently functioning and just how rapidly they are able to retransmit your communications. However, you need to know that some free proxy servers might be run by identity thieves who're really monitoring your activities while pretending to become carrying out a helpful service.

It is almost always far better to choose a recognized and reliable service that's been running a business for several years. A few of these services will help you to see the Internet free of charge, while some charge for browsing.

The majority of the free websites may have difficulty dealing with some or many software. So, should you communicate for your bank or any other lender with an application that runs on your computer or use every other computer software that accesses the web, you might want to make use of a compensated service. These types of services usually charge a regular monthly fee to assist support numerous fast servers rich in bandwidth connections to the web.

Most compensated services permit you improve your Ip periodically. Some permit you to log out and log in for their service to modify your Ip. Other services supply you just one Ip for a whole day.

Regardless of the preferred method you utilize to cover your Ip, you'll be online more safely with less anxiety about identity thieves, spy ware and cyber-terrorist. Happy, safe and sound surfing