Kim Dotcom is launching an Email Service

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Kim Dotcom is planning to unleash an email service with ensured protection against third party spies invading emails.

The New Zealand based internet entrepreneur has had major success with his latest cloud storage service, Mega, which was unveiled this past January. Three million users have joined the site and in just its first month users have stored 125m of files. Commenting on his triumph, Dotcom stated "It took Dropbox two years to achieve that." Discussing the high security of his new email service through the website Mega, he stated "we're going to extend this [Mega] to secure email which is fully encrypted so that you won't have to worry that a government or internet service provider will be looking at your email."

The U.S. government charged Kim Dotcom in January of 2012 with criminal copyright infringement via his site called Megaupload in which users could upload, stream and share files. He is currently battling the U.S government, which is trying to export him from under New Zealand and drag him onto U.S. soil to face his accusations in the court of law. Dotcom claims Megaupload complied with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act if files downloaded were copyrighted, saying "the DMCA was supposed to protect us and give us safe harbour but they went after that and took us down." Since Dotcom has established residency in New Zealand, immigration officers feel he can contribute wealth amongst their society and are keeping him safe from outside allegations as of now. Retweet this story

HTC Unveils new LTE Smartphone

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The highly anticipated HTC One was showcased across the globe today, creating fierce competition for Samsung, Apple.
The new HTC One was launched at events London and New York today following anticipation and internet leaks and speculations. The 4.7-inch phone seemed to have been received well, flaunting many new attractive features and utilities. Unlike competitor Google Nexus, the Android Jellybean phone has full LTE capabilities. Because of the seamless construction, the battery is not removable. The device can be purchased in either silver or black varieties. Using completely aluminum construction, HTC seems to be making a stab at the iPhone's build.
The 32 GB or 64 GB phone's large bright screen is full 1080p. Another new feature of the device is a program called "Zoe" which takes photos using a few seconds of HD video and then allowing the user to pick the best frame from the capture. Audio has also been revamped with HTC BoomSound with front-facing speakers. Other perks include a news feed called BlinkFeed which compiles thousands of media outlets right on the home screen without obscuring the app icons. There is even an IR program that allows the phone to be used as a TV remote control. All of these apps are powered by a powerful brand new 1.7GHz processor by Qualcomm. While the price of the device has not yet been announced, carriers across the US such as Sprint and AT&T will be picking up the phone.

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Play station 4 released

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In Sony's highly anticipated event yesterday, the PlayStation 4 was confirmed and its features revealed, however no actual console was shown.
"Today we will give you a glimpse into the future of play," stated Sony Computer Entertainment President Andrew House. The system's features and sneak-peeks of graphics were demonstrated, but no physical hardware made an appearance. Still, fans were mostly more than satisfied. The stunning graphics demonstrations reflected the console's capability to display even "microscopic metallic flakes of paint." Aside from the graphics, another point of focus was the new DualShock 4 controller, now equipped with a "share" button for social media uses, and a sensor to communicate with a new camera that will be added to the console. Indeed the rumors of this camera to be incorporated into gameplay were confirmed, however PlayStation was a little quieter on this subject. It is still a mystery as to how this Kinect-like experience will play out.
Some rumors of the device were confirmed, and some dissipated. Video and screen captures allow the console to expand far into the social media realms. According to the official PlayStation blog, users will be able to "instantly share images and videos" on Facebook. Connection with mobile devices and the handheld PlayStation Vita gadget were also confirmed, removing the focus of the system from just one room. One rumor was dispelled, although this was to the relief of many gamers. The web had begun buzzing about the potential for PlayStation to have an electronic activation code for games, making it impossible to play second hand games. But Sony Worldwide Studios executive Shuhei Yoshida said that this was not to be. "Used games can play on PS4," he stated. Sony has promised that the system will be available at retailers by the 2013 holiday season. Retweet this story

Samsung Launched New TV Service

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The new "TV Discovery" service will operate on Samsung's Smart TV series and allow viewers to experience a new way of watching television.
After being unveiled at the Consumer Electronics show last month, Samsung has been boosting PR for its new TV Discovery service for Smart TV's and tablet computers. The service, which the company will launch within this quarter, will allow viewers to browse through programs such as Blockbuster or Netflix as well as a personalized category based on their previous viewing activity. Samsung's Smart TV line hasn't received a great deal of hype lately, possibly due to its complicated nature. Users have reported that navigation can be complicated and difficult, but in the 2013 line of TV's Samsung has promised a more streamlined experience. The TV is capable of running games and other apps such as Skype and YouTube, however hovers over $2000 in price, making it quite a fiscal commitment for many.
If successful, TV Discovery could place itself as a competitor for Tivo and other similar services. Overall, Samsung has seen a positive start to 2013 with the extremely popular Galaxy S smartphones as well as its line of tablet computers. Samsung Media Solution Center President Won-Pyo Hong believes that simplicity is the key to success with all of the company's new gadgets, and Smart TVs are no exception. The new television service will also learn from the users' behavior. For TV Discovery, he stated "the more you engage with the service, the more relevant the returned recommendations for TV, movies, and other on-demand entertainment."
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How to Use Your Phone Remotely to Restart or Shut Down your PC

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So, you want to head to bed… time to power down the PC and call it a night. But wait… that download hasn’t finished yet. You could stay up and wait for it to finish, but then you will miss out on sleep. You could leave it running, but that’s a waste of electricity. Or you could do is turn to Shutter, which gives you a couple of alternative options.
This is a free tool that may not look like anything special, but it has a few tricks up its sleeve that make it well worth checking out. Used at its most basic Shutter could be configured to automatically shut down your computer in an hour’s time, or however long you think it’s going to take for your download to complete.
This in itself is useful, but there’s much more the app. Grab yourself a copy from the website and get it installed.

Launch the app and prepare to be distinctly underwhelmed by its appearance – but looks can be, and in fact are, deceptive.

Click the Event drop down menu and you will find that there are a number of triggers for you to choose from. These include a simple countdown timer or an alarm-style time trigger, but there are also more interesting options such as low battery and the closing of a window or the termination of a particular process.

Depending on what you choose from this first menu, you will then have to configure additional settings. If you have opted for a timer, this involves little more than specifying how long the timer should run, but you may also choose which windows Shutter should monitor, the battery level to watch out for, or the processor activity level that should act as the trigger.
The Action menu is where you can select what should happen when your chosen trigger occurs. We are interested in using the Shutdown option for now, but restarting, hibernating, sleeping, sound muting and more are also available.

Hit the Start button and you can walk away from your machine safe in the knowledge that the shutdown or other action will happen in your absence. If you have opted for an alarm or sound muting/unmuting instead, you can use the Now button to have a dry run and ensure that it is going to work as expected.
You might well be wondering why you would want to take the time to configure Shutter to do something that could be achieved by setting up Windows’ task scheduler instead. Shutter is far more flexible than Windows’ scheduling tool in terms of the different events that can be used as triggers, and it is also able to trigger a wider range of events. But it does not end there.
We recently looked at how you can re-enable the hibernation feature in Windows 8, but if you right click the Shutter icon in the notification area of the taskbar it’s possible to access the various power down states from the Now sub-menu.

But arguably the most useful element of Shutter is its remote access option. Click the Options button in the main program window, or select this from the system tray menu. While you are here, you might want to select the autorun option so that the program starts with Windows.
This is important if you want to ensure that your computer always shuts down on a schedule or you want to have the remote access option available at all times.

Moving to the Web Interface tab, you can turn on a very useful option.  Tick the Enable box, select your computer’s IP address from the Listen IP menu and then choose the port you’d like to use.
You are required to secure your remote session, so enter a username and password before clicking Save.

Assuming you have a firewall in place, you will need to grant Shutter permission to make use of your network before you can continue with this feature of the program.

Returning to our scenario in which a lengthy download is getting in the way of going to bed, the remote access option is particularly useful. You could head off to bed with your laptop, watch a movie or catch up on emails beneath the sheets and log into your other machine via Shutter.
Fire up your web browser, enter the IP address of your computer into the address bar followed by a colon and then the port number you have specified – e.g. 192.168.1.67:802.

At first it may seem as though you have just been presented with a list of shut down options, and it’s certainly true that you can jump right in and remotely sleep your PC if you want. However, you may first want to check just what’s happening on the machine.

You can click the ‘Information on Computer’ link to view details of processes that are running – which may help you to determine whether a particular task has safely completed – but the ‘Screenshot of a Desktop’ link gives you a quick snapshot so you can see exactly what’s going on before you decide what to do.
And because this is all web-based, you can even use your phone to control your PC from bed.

This is a wonderfully useful little utility that can also be controlled from the command line, which opens up additional possibilities.

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Creating a Bootable DOS USB Drive

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DOS isn’t widely used anymore, but you wouldn’t know if from reading instructions written by manufacturers for BIOS updates, firmware-updating utilities, and other low-level system tools. They will often require you to boot into DOS and run the utility.
We once formatted our floppy disks with MS-DOS using the format utility built into Windows, but most computers don’t have floppy disk drives anymore. They may not even have optical disc drives!

Use Rufus

Windows won’t allow you to select the “Create an MS-DOS startup disk” option when formatting a USB drive – it’s grayed out. We will be using Rufus instead. It’s a fast, lightweight application that includes FreeDOS.
Download Rufus and launch it. Rufus doesn’t require any installation – you will see the Rufus application as soon as you launch the downloaded .exe file.
Creating a bootable USB drive with DOS is simple:

1. Connect your USB drive to the computer and select it in the Device box.
2. Ensure the “Create a bootable disk using” checkbox is enabled and ensure FreeDOS is selected. (Rufus includes FreeDOS, so you won’t have to download anything else.)
3. Click the Start button. This will erase the contents of your USB drive! Back up any important files on the USB drive first.

These should be the default options, so you may not even have to configure Rufus at all. The process should be extremely quick – it took five seconds on our system.

Copy Your Files Over

You have probably created this boot drive because you have a DOS-based program to run, such as a BIOS update utility or another low-level system program. To actually run these files from DOS, you will need to copy them over to your USB drive. For example, you may have a BIOS.BIN and FLASHBIOS.BAT file you need to run in DOS. Copy these files into the root directory of the USB drive after formatting it.
 

Boot Into DOS

You can now boot into DOS by restarting your computer. If your computer does not automatically boot from the USB drive, you may need to change your boot order or use a boot menu to select the device you want to boot from.
Once you are in DOS, you can run the program you copied to your USB drive by typing its name at the DOS prompt. Follow any instructions provided in the manufacturer’s documentation to run the application.

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These utilities still use DOS to ensure they have low-level access to the hardware without any other programs interfering or Windows getting in the way. This helps ensure BIOS updates and other low-level operations work properly.
You could use a bootable USB drive to run old DOS applications, but you would be better off using DOSBOX to run old DOS games and other applications.

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Google+ Airs Live Chat With President Obama : Valentines Day

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President Barack Obama will be live on Google+ to answer questions from the American people tomorrow, February 14th.
In order to deliver questions to the President, they need to be sent in the form of text or video to the White House YouTube Channel by 11:59 tonight. At this website, questions will be put up for a vote among other users to be chosen to be asked to the President tomorrow at 4:50 p.m. EST. Various site's will be offering access to the President's live chat including WhiteHouse.gov and the White House Google+ page.
The virtual chat or also referred to as the "Fireside Hangouts," with President Obama, will consist of selected individuals who periodically discuss imperative political topics, to ask America's questions to the Commander in Chief as well as their own. Google+ will be the second time President Obama has used the social networking service to communicate with the American people. Vice President Joe Biden also used Google to interact with the public recently to discuss issues regarding gun control and Cecilia Munoz, director of Domestic Policy in the White House, operated through Google+ as well to discuss issues pertaining to immigration reform. The Presidents live interaction is happening just a few days after his State of the Union Address which should conjure up good questions for him to answer. Retweet this story

10 Most Expensive Houses in The World

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10.  Rybolovlev Estate – $95 Million

This house is the most expensive single family home in the country and, since it was owned by Donald Trump, it’s obviously the most expensive home ever fought over in a divorce case.  The 33,000 square foot oceanfront mansion has become a key part of the proceedings since Trump’s ex-wife Elena Rybolovlev demanded jurisdiction due to infidelity.
This home has 18 bedrooms, 22 bathrooms, and retails for $95 million, making it the most expensive single-family house in the nation…weird, we’re pretty sure we found nine more for this list.  Unless we’re suddenly on TopOnez.Net
Originally on sale for $125 million, it ended up being haggled down to a mere 95.  We guess the economy is hurting everyone these days.

9.  Silicon Valley Mansion — $100 Million

As the most expensive single-family home in the US, this house… wait, didn’t we just say that the Rybolovlev Estate was the most expensive single-family house ever?  Well, okay, this one went for 100 million so I guess it wins.
With 5 bedrooms and 9 bathrooms, and an indoor and outdoor pool (in case it rains, we guess), it’s all-in-all a pretty fancy house.

8.  Fleur De Lys — 125 Million

Despite being marketed as the world’s most expensive house, the Fleur De Lys somehow only falls on number 8 on our list.  Wow, that’s weird, huh?  It’s almost like people on the Internet are wrong.
Fleur De Lys has 41,000 square feet and 15 bedrooms, but apparently no bathrooms, which we think is a huge oversight either by the architect or the person writing the articles we’re using as sources.

7.  The Manor — $150 Million

Here we are, finally, the most expensive residential real estate listing in the US, according to Wiki-freakin’-pedia.  $150 million.  Feels pretty good to put that part to rest, doesn’t it?  Thanks, Aaron Spelling, for having the (7th) most expensive house in the world.
This house features 56,000 square feet, 123 rooms, a bowling alley, an ice rink and allegedly an entire wing devoted to Spelling’s wife’s wardrobe.

6.  The Pinnacle — $155 Million

Owned by Tim Blixseth, in Montana, this house is unique for two reasons: it has a private chair lift directly from the house to a nearby ski-resort (which Blixseth owns), and is the only house on this list so far named that doesn’t claim to be the most expensive in the world.

Also, we’re gonna call it right now: best back yard.  Because it’s a ski resort.

5.  Franchuk Villa — $161 Million

This five-story, freestanding 10-bedroom Victorian Villa also features an underground indoor swimming pool, panic room, and private movie theatre.  It’s also the world’s most expensive home (yeah, sure it is), at $161 million.
How fancy is this place?  Allegedly, during some remodeling, the noise made the Mayor of Moscow angry.  The house is located in London.  That’s right: the house is so fancy it doesn’t make sense.

4.  The Hearst Mansion — $165 Million

Top Three Facts about the Fourth Most Expensive House in the World: it was used in The Godfather, JFK spent his honeymoon there, and (holy crap, get this): it’s the most expensive home in the US!
It features three swimming pools, 29 bedrooms (you have to supply your own horse heads har har har), movie theater and, for some reason, a disco.

3.  Fairfield Pond — $198 Million

Currently valued that way due to its property taxes, this 66,000 square-foot main house has a basketball court, bowling alley, and a $150,000 hot tub. The most valuable home in the US (again, according to Wikipedia).

2.  Villa Leopolda — $736 Million

Wow, that’s a big jump in price.  Built by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1902 and located on the French Riviera, this home was purchased by Russian billionaire Prokhorov, who is so rich he lost billions to the latest economic collapse and still had enough fun money to buy himself a three-quarter-billion-dollar summer home.  It has 27 stories, 19 bedrooms, and a rumored 50 full-time gardeners.

1.  Antilla – $1,000,000,000

This is it. The one you’ve been waiting for. The grand finale. The one billion dollar home. We give you…Antilla, the actual most expensive house in the world…finally.
Located in Mumbai, Antilla challenges pretty much everything you’d expect about “what is possible in a home” and “what is possible for architecture.”  The 27-story house features six floors of parking, a health level with a jacuzzi, gym, and “ice room,” a ballroom level (for dancing?) several floors of bedrooms and bathrooms and even a four-story garden — because, yeah, we guess that’s possible.
The architecture is based on an Indian tradition called Vastu Shastra, which is supposed to be conducive to the movement of positive energy.  In keeping with this, each floor has not only a unique design, but an entirely unique set of materials and aesthetic design — meaning each room is meant to look like it’s from a different house.
Basically, this house has everything — things you can imagine, things you can’t imagine, and things you never thought to imagine but are now imagining because they sound like the greatest thing you’ve ever heard of.

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Creating a VPN Server on Your Windows Computer Without Installing Any Software

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Windows has the built-in ability to function as VPN server, although this option is hidden. This trick works on both Windows 7 and Windows 8. The server uses the point-to-point tunneling protocol (PPTP.)
This could be useful for connecting to your home network on the road, playing LAN games with someone, or securing your web browsing on a public Wi-Fi connection – a few of the many reasons you might want to use a VPN.

Limitations

While this is a pretty interesting feature, it may not be the ideal way to allow VPN connections to your local network. It has some limitations:

• You will need the ability to forward ports from your router.
• You have to expose Windows and a port for the PPTP VPN server directly to the Internet, which is not ideal from a security standpoint. You should use a strong password and consider using a port that isn’t the default port.
• This isn’t as easy to set up and use as software like LogMeIn Hamachi and TeamViewer. Most people will probably be better off with a more complete software package like those two.

Creating a VPN Server

First, you’ll need to open the Network Connections window. The quickest way to open it is to press the Windows key, type ncpa.cpl, and press Enter.

 
Press the Alt key, click the File menu that appears, and select New Incoming Connection.
 

You can now select the user accounts that can connect remotely. To increase security, you may want to create a new, limited user account rather than allow VPN logins from your primary user account. (Click Add someone to create a new user account.) Ensure the user you allow has a very strong password, as a weak password could be cracked by a dictionary attack.

 
Select the Through the Internet option to allow VPN connections over the Internet. You can also allow incoming connections over a dial-up modem, if you have the dial-up hardware.
 
You can then select the networking protocols that should be enabled for incoming connections. For example, if you don’t want people connected to the VPN to have access to shared files and printers on your local network, you can uncheck the File and Printer Sharing option.
 
Click the Allow access button and Windows will set up a VPN server.
 
If you want to disable the VPN server in the future, you can delete the Incoming Connections item from your Network Connections window.

 

Router Setup

You will now need to log into your router’s setup page and forward port 1723 to the IP address of the computer where you set up the VPN server. For more instructions, read How to Forward Ports on Your Router.
For maximum security, you may want to create a port forwarding rule that forwards a random “external port” – such as 23243 – to “internal port” 1723 on your computer. This will allow you to connect to the VPN server using port 23243, and will protect you from malicious programs that scan and attempt to automatically connect to VPN servers running on the default port.
You can also consider using a router or firewall to only allow incoming connections from specific IP addresses.
To ensure you can always connect to the VPN server, you may want to set up a dynamic DNS service like DynDNS on your router.

Connecting to Your VPN Server

To connect to the VPN server, you will need your computer’s public IP address (its IP address on the Internet) or its dynamic DNS address, if you set up a dynamic DNS service above.
Use the Connect to a network option in Windows and enter your computer’s public IP address. Provide the username and password you created to log in.

 
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Updating Your Graphics Drivers for Maximum Gaming Performance

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A graphics driver is the software that allow your operating system and programs to use your computer’s graphics hardware. If you play PC games, you should keep your computer’s graphics drivers updated to get the best performance out of your hardware.
We have previously advised you to not compulsively update your drivers – most hardware drivers that come with your computer or through Windows Update are fine. However, graphics drivers for your NVIDIA, AMD, or even Intel graphics hardware are a big exception.

Why You Should Update Your Graphics Drivers Updates to your computer’s motherboard, sound card, and network drivers don’t generally give speed improvements. They will often fix rare bugs – and maybe even introduce new bugs.
However, this is not the case with updated drivers for your graphics card, also known as a GPU or video card. NVIDIA and AMD both frequently release new graphics drivers that often give major performance improvements, particularly for newer games. With Intel getting serious about integrated graphics performance with their upcoming Haswell graphics architecture, they are now starting to release more frequent video driver updates, too.
Here is a snapshot of the changelog from NVIDIA’s most recent graphics driver package, released on January 5, 2013:


These sorts of performance increases in updated graphics drivers are not uncommon. While newer games like Far Cry 3 saw significant improvements (up to 38% on some hardware), even older games like Skyrim and Starcraft II saw a significant increase in performance.
NVIDIA may be overstating the performance increases you will get, and it probably won’t be as pronounced on older graphics cards. Even so, these are still significant improvements. Some newer games may refuse to run with old, unoptimized graphics drivers installed.
Of course, if you never play PC games on your computer and don’t care about 3D graphics performance, you don’t really need to update your graphics drivers at all.

Identifying Your Graphics Card

There is a variety of ways to identify your computer’s graphics hardware, including third-party system information utilities like Speccy. However, you can get this information right from the Windows Device Manager.
To open the Device Manager, press the Windows key to open your Start menu, type Device Manager into the Start menu, and click the Device Manager shortcut. (If you are using Windows 8, press the Windows key, type Device Manager at the Start screen, select the Settings category, and click the Device Manager shortcut.)
 

Expand the Display adapters section to see the manufacturer and model of your computer’s graphics card.
 

If you see both Intel and NVIDIA hardware on a laptop, your laptop is using NVIDIA’s Optimus technology to intelligently switch between its better-for-battery-life Intel graphics and better-for-gaming-performance NVIDIA graphics. In this case, you will want to update your NVIDIA drivers to boost your gaming performance.

Getting the Latest Updates

For some types of graphics hardware integrated into laptops (also known as notebook GPUs), you may not be able to get drivers straight from the manufacturer. You may have to get updated drivers from your laptop manufacturer, and they may not regularly release updates.
However, you can generally get updated graphics drivers from your graphics hardware manufacturer’s website:

• Download NVIDIA Graphics Drivers
• Download AMD Graphics Drivers
• Download Intel Graphics Drivers

You will have to select the exact model of your computer’s graphics card, which is displayed in the Device Manager window.
Some manufacturers may have update-checking utilities that automatically check for new graphics driver versions and alert you to them, such as the NVIDIA Update utility, which you can access from the NVIDIA Control Panel application (select Help > Updates) if you have NVIDIA graphics hardware.

 
If you have older graphics hardware, bear in mind that it won’t be supported forever. Manufacturers eventually move older hardware to a stable driver release that they stop optimizing and updating. If your graphics hardware is five years old, it’s very likely that optimized drivers for it are not longer being released. How long your hardware is supported is up to its manufacturer.

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Nokia receives $1.35 billion grant from European Union

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Nokia has been awarded a $1.35 billion, 10 year grant from the European Union to continue reading clickhere Retweet this story

Dropbox new photos sharing

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Dropbox is introducing a new way to share photos without using a social networking site in the next few weeks.
Drew Houston, the CEO of Dropbox, is working on a system where people can share their photos without giving them to Facebook or other social networking sites. This way a person has more control over their images. Rather than being limited to sharing particular folders, the new feature allows users to see all their stored photos and create albums to be shared on public sites as a private link to an online album. While still entrusting one's content to cloud storage, Dropbox receives funding through storage fees rather than advertisements such as Google+ or Facebook, giving the service no reason to publicize a users photo. The new upgrade also makes deleting or cleaning up photos easier than on other popular sites by having user accounts directly connect to their file browsers on their PC.
Although numerous users are not too worried about online privacy, Dropbox will probably still host many accounts with its mobile and online interface. This feature is created like a file browser, so photos can be directly integrated into Dropbox, allowing the user the option of controlling where the photo is to be sent instead of an application seizing it the moment the shutter releases. Facebook collaborated with Dropbox last year because of the social networking's interest with cloud storage, and this website is likely to gain more attention in the coming month. Retweet this story

Windows 8 makes a Strong Gains

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Windows 8 has made some headway in stats since November.
Throughout the month of January, a web tracker called Net Applications recorded and compared the market share of various operating systems. Although low in comparison to its OS competitors, much can be said for gains surrounding Windows 8. Correlating to 1.09 percent in November and 1.72 percent in December, Windows 8 has come a long way. Within the numerous scores, this operating system ranks in fifth place, a small amount behind Mac OS X 10.8, which had a 2.44 percent share.
Since its release in October 2012, Windows 8 has not fared very well. Windows 7, which was launched in October 2009, happened to be in first place with a market share of 44.48 percent. Why would a new and improved OS be inching along as Windows 8 is? The answer lies in the public's newfound love for convenient tablets over PCs and the heightened price tag of this newly released option.
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Twitter has be Hacked

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A quarter of a million Twitter users have had their accounts hacked in the latest of a string of high-profile internet security breaches.

Twitter's information security director Bob Lord said about 250,000 users' passwords had been stolen, as well as usernames, emails and other data.
Affected users have had passwords invalidated and have been sent emails informing them.
Mr Lord said the attack "was not the work of amateurs".
He said it appeared similar to recent attacks on the New York Times and others.
The US newspaper reported this week that their computer systems had been breached by China-based hackers
'Not isolated' Mr Lord said in a blog post Twitter had discovered unauthorised attempts to access data held by the website, including one attack that was identified and stopped moments after it was detected.

"This attack was not the work of amateurs, and we do not believe it was an isolated incident," he wrote.

Mr Lord did not say who had carried out the attack, but added: "The attackers were extremely sophisticated, and we believe other companies and organisations have also been recently similarly attacked."
"For that reason we felt that it was important to publicise this attack while we still gather information, and we are helping government and federal law enforcement in their effort to find and prosecute these attackers to make the internet safer for all users."
Internet security specialist Graham Cluley warned Twitter's announcement that emails would be sent to users may prompt a spate of spam emails "phishing" for sensitive information.
He says people should be cautious about opening emails which appear to be from Twitter.
"You have to be careful if you get hold of one of these emails because, of course, it could equally be a phishing attack - it could be someone pretending to be Twitter.
"So, log into the Twitter site as normal and try and log in to your account and, if there's a problem, that's when you actually have to try and reset your password."
On Thursday the New York Times linked the attack to a story it published alleging relatives of former Premier Wen Jiabao controlled assets worth billions of dollars.
China's foreign ministry dismissed the New York Times' accusations as "groundless" and "totally irresponsible".Tw Retweet this story

Ukrainian-Russian rocket: plunged into the Pacific

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A Ukrainian-Russian rocket carrying a US-made telecommunications satellite has plunged into the Pacific Ocean shortly after launch.

The Zenit-3SL rocket, which was being operated from a floating pad south of the Hawaiian islands, failed 40 seconds after the lift-off at 06:56 GMT.
The Intelsat-27 satellite was due to be positioned over the Atlantic to provide services to the Americas and Europe.
Officials say no-one was hurt as a result of the incident.
Staff from the Sea Launch company, which organised the launch, direct all missions from a support vessel that sits at a safe distance of about 6.5km uprange of the platform.
The firm said it would establish a review board to determine what went wrong.
"We are very disappointed with the outcome of the launch and offer our sincere regrets to our customer, Intelsat, and their spacecraft provider, Boeing," Kjell Karlsen, president of Sea Launch AG, said in a statement.
"The cause of the failure is unknown, but we are evaluating it and working closely with Intelsat, Boeing, Energia Logistics Ltd and our Zenit-3SL suppliers. We will do everything reasonably possible to recover from this unexpected and unfortunate event."
Sea Launch had not long returned from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
A spectacular rocket failure on its converted oil rig in 2007 forced the firm to restructure its finances as orders slowed and debts mounted.
It re-emerged in 2011 and had lofted four satellites successfully from the Odyssey platform before Friday's loss.
The rig-cum-pad and its command ship are based at Long Beach, California.
For a mission, the pair move south to the equator at 154 degrees West Longitude.

The 2007 failure ultimately led to the company seeking Chapter 11 protection

An equatorial launch location gives a rocket a boost from the Earth's rotation, meaning it can lift heavier payloads into orbit.
Sea Launch is owned now by a Russian-led consortium headed by Energia Overseas Ltd, and is headquartered in Bern, Switzerland.
The commercial market for launching large geostationary telecommunications satellites is intensively competitive.
It has been dominated for several years by the European Ariane rocket, operated by Arianespace, and the Russian Proton vehicle, which is sold by International Launch Services (although the latter has experienced a number of failures of its own recently).
Once the cause of Friday's loss is identified and any necessary corrective action taken, Sea Launch will need to re-instil confidence in the market that its product is a good one.
The Ukrainian-Russian Zenit-3SL vehicle has a generally good reliability record.
A modified version, the Zenit-3SLB, is operated from land, flying out of the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The most recent of these launches was at the end of 2011.
Launch contracts from the Luxembourg-based Intelsat company had been integral to Sea Launch's return to business after bankruptcy protection.
Intelsat-27, which weighed some 6.2 tonnes at launch, was to have provided direct-to-home TV services and mobile broadband connections. Retweet this story