4G in India , trials at Navi Mumbai

 

 After the acquisition of Infotel Broadband Ltd by Mukesh Ambani?s Reliance (RIL), the rumour was there in market that Mukesh?s Reliance will come up with the most speedy Internet connection in India. As Indian market is still waiting for proper implementation of 3G network by major players, Reliance has started testing 4G connections. RIL team at Navi Mumbai started trials of 4G connection and got download speed of 80 Mbps and upload speed of 20 Mbps. It is way ahead than current 3G connection of 3.1 Mbps or 7.2 Mbps. Tata Indicom (Docomo) and Reliance Communication (Anil Ambani?s ) also started giving 21 Mbps download speed on supported devices. Reliance is using Ericsson equipment to test this 4G network. As the above testing results are in ideal scenario, that may drop to 40 to 50 Mbps depending on the system load and distance from the nearest tower etc.

As wireless Internet is at boom in India and other parts of world but still we are way behind most of the western countries. We are still waiting for the proper coverage of 3G network when Smartphone makers started selling 4G phones in countries like US and UK. But finally we are getting good news on Wireless Internet connectivity, as Reliance is expected come up with good plans in future for such fast Internet connections

Oh wow ! WikiLeaks data stored in Cold War-era bunker in Sweden !

Confidential files of the website WikiLeaks have been stored into a nuclear bunker in Stockholm, Sweden early this week. In particular, WikiLeaks servers are moved to the “Pionen” White Mountains data center, 30 meters below the ground after being dumped by Amazon. According to the Norwegian news site VG Nett, the “Pionen” White Mountains data center is owned by Bahnhof - a Swedish broadband provider. This is the home to WikiLeaks\' sever and confidential national data called "James Bond" styled bunker, or Cold-War-era nuclear bunker. Let\'s take a tour around the nuclear bunker of WikiLeaks in the “Pionen” White Mountains data center in Stockholm, Sweden.

 
There are two WikiLeaks’ servers at least hosted by Bahnhof, a Swedish broadband provider under the granite-housed World-War-II era bunker.

WikiLeaks moved into Bahnhof’s “Pionen” White Mountains data center for the fist time in August 2010 utilizing servers owned by the Swedish Pirate Party. However, WikiLeaks has currently had a direct contract with Bahnhof in order to have servers hosted

the nuclear bunker in Bahnhof’s “Pionen” White Mountains data center featuring with the "floating" conference room  and backup generators remind the scenes from "James Bond" film.

The move of Wikileads to Bahnhof’s “Pionen” White Mountains data center in Stockholm, Sweden is the result of debate last month of the launch of thousands of confidential documents about the Afghanistan war

 About 15,000 secret documents related to the Afghanistan war will be released soon.

mobile number portability (MNP) is finally launched in India

The mobile number portability (MNP) is finally launched in India today. Rohtak in Haryana is the place where the entire buzz is. Rohtak is witnessing a telecom revolution today. MNP is the procedure that allows consumers to switch from their existing operators to another while retaining the same number.



With Idea Cellular's TVCs on air for few days now, other operators are also coming up with their own promotions of MNP through various media. On the occasion of the MNP launch in India, we share with you the process and other facts of MNP.First the procedure. To change your operator all you need to do is send a SMS to 1900 with the message (PORTMobile number) from the number you want to be ported. On sending the message you will receive a SMS from your current operator giving you the Unique Porting Code (UPC). The UPC acts a reference when you fill an application prescribed by your chosen new network provider. The porting of number has to be completed in a span of seven working days, as per TRAI directives. The charge for porting your number to another operator is  19, payable to the new service provider. Post-paid subscribers need to ensure their billing dues are cleared before applying for number porting. Failing this, the request to the new porter will be rejected. For pre-paid users, the balance amount left does not get carried forward to the new operator after porting. So both kinds of subscribers start from a clean slate with the new operator.A point to note here is once you have switched your operators, you need to wait for a period of 90 days before you can change the operator again.
Let us give you a brief idea about how the MNP works. When a subscriber makes a request to port his number to a new operator, the porting can be done in two ways. One is called the donor-led porting and the other is recipient-led porting. In India the latter method is in usage.

In the recipient-led porting, the new operator (recipient) takes the appropriate steps to register the user to its network. The process is completed once the mobile number of the user and the chosen operator's network ID are paired and updated in the central database. The country is divided onto two geographical sectors for ease of implementing the MNP. These two zones are then divided into 11 service areas.
The master database will be managed by a third party firm. For zone I, Syniverse has been appointed with the MNP and related issues while for zone II, it is Telcordia. With this set of information, we hope the MNP will be a good thing for the nation that is heralding its gears to the new technologies and embracing them with open arms.

Facebook messaging may soon doom you

Computer security firm Sophos warned the Facebook users on their usage of online messaging services. It is being found that such uses of the social networking site are now more vulnerable to identity theft by cybercriminals. 

A serious vulnerability in Facebook's security allows anybody who has your mobile phone number to not only change status messages, but also add or delete friends, send out private messages to other users and upload or change profile pictures. However, the security flaw only affects those who have activated Facebook Mobile, a facility that allows the user to send updates on the social networking site through text messages from a mobile phone."Users need to realize that these new features increase the attack surface on the Facebook platform, and make personal accounts all the more alluring for cybercriminals to break into," said Sophos senior technology consultant Graham Cluley.
Facebook's new messaging system was launched on Monday and includes facebook.com email addresses. Approximately 350 million of Facebook's more than 500 million members fire off messages using its existing service, with more than four billion digital missives sent daily.
Sophos noted that fraudsters are increasingly using hacked Facebook accounts to send spam messages compared with traditional emails because they are more likely to be opened by recipients lured to think the messages came from friends. Sophos also urged the users to be aware of the security risks before signing up for Facebook's next-generation online messaging service that blends online chat, text messages and other real-time conversation tools with traditional email.

SMS Blocker

There are more than 650 million mobile phone users in India. While these devices help us connect to our family and friends, they also are culprit of many unwanted messages from spammers. Don't you get annoyed and irritated when you are expecting an important message, your phone buzzes, you check the phone and realize that it's a spam message? Sparing you the agony of spam messages is smsBlocker, an application that gives the user freedom from annoying spam and unwanted SMS.Developed by Optinno Mobitech, a Pune-based startup, smsBlocker identifies and blocks spam SMS on its own. It blocks over 95 percent of spam SMS automatically. 

Sagar Bedmutha, a mechanical engineer by qualification, was leading a comfortable life with a swish job in HSBC Bank. He, like many others, was irritated with the constant spam messages. He quit his job in HSBC, and set out to address the problem of spam SMS. He founded the company Optinno Mobitech which was responsible for the innovation of smsBlocker. "The messages were analyzed on the basis of content, sender and language to decide on the pattern of spam messages like Hinglish and others," he says.The application is easy to set-up and integrates easily with your inbox and phonebook. It is fully customizable to suit your needs and preferences of who you want to block and not. There is a 'Daily Block Counter' on the phone homescreen that lets the user know how many spams were blocked in a particular day. The user can specify his 'Block list' and filter the messages based on the content and sender. A detailed log of all blocked SMSes is maintained which the user can review and also restore if need arises. 

A global app, smsBlocker can be used in any country. All one has to do is key in the country code to activate it. The app size is less than 100KB and is available in Nokia Ovi stores and Aircel Pocket apps store at a onetime payment of  199 (about $4.50). The app, which has witnessed 24,000 plus downloads since July 2010, currently runs on the Symbian platform covering more than 100 models of Nokia phones. Porting of the app with other platforms like Android is on and may soon be launched.Optinno also has another product called Mobiwatchman which blocks calls and SMS as per your settings. With these two innovative products, the company sure is doing a lot good to rid mobile users of unwanted messages and give them a spam free mobile experience.

IIMs want more girls, non-engineering students

The Indian Institutes of Management are now looking to rope in more girl students and those with non-engineering background to get a more diversified variety on their rolls.

Directors of five IIMs from across the country Monday held a conference and felt the need to change the quantitative bias in the Common Admission Test (CAT) to draw in more students in their classrooms from diverse academic backgrounds.Giving a wrap-up of the discussion, Indian Institute of Management-Calcutta director Sekhar Chowdhury said the issues would be dealt with seriously though it was not yet certain that the changes could take place from next year's CAT.

"In many cases, despite efforts to get in students from other backgrounds, the number of engineering students has increased. The blame is on our admission process. We need to change how we admit students and how CAT is organised," said IIM-Lucknow director Devi Singh.

Singh said though a large section of the faculty would not have been favourably disposed to the idea of having a greater diversity in students, "now the realisation has dawned on them and in the next few years we may see a change in the system".IIM-Bangalore director Pankaj Chandra felt girl students found the CAT examination with its stress on mathematics a deterrent.

"That's the reason many girl students do not sit for the entrance test".

Statistics show that about 2 lakh students take the annual CAT examination for admission to 2,000 seats in the country's ten IIMs. Of them, the percentage of engineers gaining entry into the premier B-Schools is over 90 per cent, while the percentage of female students is only 10-15 percent taking all the IIMs together.Chowdhury said while the world has a nearly 50:50 ratio of men and women, "why cannot we have a similar or more or less equal representation in the classroom? After all, the class should represent life."He said on the contrary, private management institutes had a 40-45 percent girl students

China builds world's fastest supercomputer

China has built the world's fastest supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A, which is capable of 2.57 quadrillion computing operations per second, pulling ahead of the United States in the global supercomputing race.The lead of the China-made system was confirmed by the 36th edition of TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, which was released Monday on the TOP500 list website.Tianhe-1A was followed by the former No. 1 system, the U.S.-made Cray XT5 "Jaguar" at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in Tennessee.The Jaguar system performs at 1.75 quadrillion per second, 92 percent slower than Tianhe-1A, running Linpack, the benchmark used to officially determine the speed of supercomputers.The Tianhe-1A is installed at the National Supercomputing Center (NSCC) in the north China port city of Tianjin, which specializes in super computing outsourcing services for complex work like the surveying of mines, the forecasting of weather, the design of high-end machinery, bioinformatics and large-data animation design.Tianhe-1A's chief designer, Yang Xuejun, said in an exclusive interview with Xinhua, "The interconnect between CPUs and GPUs is key to the system's high performance."

"As there has been rare precedent to integrate GPUs into a system for high-performance computing, we made much effort to improve the performance and efficiency of those GPUs," Mr. Yang said.

Besides Tianhe-1A, another China-made supercomputer, Nebulae, which is a 1.27 petaflop-per second system, holds the third place on the TOP500 list.Nebulae, developed by Dawning Information Industry Co., is equipped in a Shenzhen NSCC.Jack Dongarra, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and supervisor of the TOP500 list, said in an email interview with Xinhua, "It's more of a sign that China is serious in pursuing high performance computing to aid the growth of science, engineering and economic competitiveness."

"The long-term implication for the U.S. is that China is seriously interested in high performance computing, and is developing and deploying computing resources," said Mr. Dongarra, who leads research at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Li Nan, the project manager for Tianhe-1A, told Xinhua, "We managed to upgrade key technologies, such as large-scale integrated chips, node computers and cutting-edge circuit boards. We also made a few breakthroughs in hybrid architecture and high-speed interconnection."

Among the world's most powerful 100, China holds five seats while the United States takes up 42 percent. Out of the 500 list, China-made systems occupy at least 40 slots.

Tianhe-1A, is estimated to have cost 600 million yuan (90.4 million U.S. dollars) and was developed by the Changsha-based National University of Defence Technology. It employs 14,336 Intel Xeon X5670 CPU and 7,168 NVidia Tesla M2050 GPU, as well as 2,048 home-grown Feiteng 8-core CPUs.Zhang Yunquan, a lead computing scientist at the Chinese Academy of Science, told Xinhua, "The international supercomputing competition is extremely fierce and it's very difficult for China to hold the top position for more than one year."

Zhang Zhe, a researcher who works at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, said, "Although the computing power of Tianhe-1A has surpassed Jaguar, its storage is not keeping the pace."Jaguar adopts an external file system with 10 petabytes, or 10 quadrillion bytes, of information storage capacity, while Tianhe-1A is only two petabytes.The U.S. National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is now developing the IBM latest chip-powered Blue Waters system, which is widely believed to take over again the world's No. 1 by 2012.