All New Gadgets Updates

Airfone has a big announcement today, the company has launched two 'affordable' mobile phones. The AF222VD, a Dual SIM phone, along with video calling capabilities is priced at Rs.2,750, while the AF212 which boasts of a 75-day battery life is priced at Rs.2,899.

The AF222VD sports a 2.2-inch QCIF resolution display capable of displaying 262K colors. The Dual SIM phone supports Java applications and comes pre-loaded with Opera Mini, along with stereo Bluetooth, GPRS, 2MP camera (0.3 mp front facing camera), FM Radio, MP3 support, etc. The phones do not support 3G however, so we aren't quite sure how the video chat feature will work with other phones and networks other than their own 2G mobile broadband network.

The second major announcement is the AF212 which according to Airphone is capable of a 75 day battery life thanks to its rather large 3300mAh battery. Of course, take that number with a pinch of salt. Other features include a 2MP camera,Bluetooth, support for Java applications and Dual SIM support amongst others.

What can one expect to find in the hidden stash of someone who was once the most feared face of terror on the globe?

Post the Sunday showdown that killed the Al – Qaeda chief, Osama bin Laden, soldiers of the US Navy SEAL managed to lay hands on what they nicknamed ‘the mother lode of intelligence’. A bunch of computer drives and disks that were recovered might unlock the mystery on Al – Qaeda’s operations and provide other clinching evidences. However, at the moment this seems to be a far – fetched thought since, the information at hand might just be encrypted. The US officials fear the usage of the AES-256, an encryption method which, if used correctly, would make it potentially impossible to crack any sooner, at least not till the age of the universe. These fears aren’t baseless, and are most likely a possibility.

Last year, in an edition of Al – Qaeda’s magazine, Inspire an article appeared that explained in detail the methodology of using a piece of encryption software known as Asrar al-Mujahideen 2.0, which uses AES-256 along with other encryption methods. Usually, the officials would force the person in question to blurt out the password, but, with Osama having exited the picture completely, the lane of options seems to have grown frighteningly narrower for US in particular, and the world, in general.

A known alternative would be the ‘backdoor’ to the encryption scheme. However, now, its only the NSA that could reveal further.

The PDF (Portable Document Format) now has competition in the making. Conrad Wolfram plans to unveil the CDF, soon. The CDF or the Computable Document Format is under a developing process now. But, at the technology conference in London, Inspire; Wolfram shared his game plan.

At the conference, Wolfram spoke at length on the creation of, what he calls ‘better tools to illustrate information and let the reader discover new information’. The CDF format, unlike the PDF would allow users to play around with not only the text on the documents, but also the graphics which Wolfram claims, will give them the power to create something better. Their text files will be compatible enough with graphs and other figures and also leave room for editing, if need be – a feature absent in the PDF by Adobe. The CDF also aims at aiding students in educational institutions with the creation of digital textbooks or other innovations.

The major benefit that the CDF would bring to the table, and helps it separate itself from the PDF is the freedom to make changes to the existing document. Wolfram cited multi-usability of the CDF format by media professionals, students, and regular users. However, much cannot be stated before the CDF makes a final appearance. But, does this mean the end of the road for the PDF?

Child Pornography is one of the worst things to happen since the birth of the internet.  The battle against the victimization of children is one that is being fought by agencies worldwide, and it now has over 500 million friends to help them out.

According the Microsoft Blog, Facebook is joining Microsoft in the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s PhotoDNA program to combat child pornography.  For those who are unaware of what the PhotoDNA program is all about. It was developed by Microsoft, working with digital imaging expert Dr. Hany Farid of Dartmouth College (North Hampshire) and it can identifies certain images irrespective of changes made to the image like resizing or cropping.

Microsoft began implementing PhotoDNA technology in Bing and SkyDrive, including images posted to SkyDrive through Hotmail. In over two years the PhotoDNA software was able to identify over 1,500 matches on SkyDrive and 1,500 matches through Bing’s image search index .Facebook is the first online service provider to join Microsoft and use the PhotoDNA software. To stay in perspective, Facebook services host more than 30 billion pieces of shared content, including photos, Web links, news stories, blog posts and more. Searching through them for child pornography will be a tough task, but not impossible thanks to PhotoDNA.

Google’s own email services have become so popular that we rarely might actually be using our Hotmail accounts anymore, forget about making a new one. But maybe this feature, Hotmail Aliases, might make you want to head back to your old faithful Hotmail account.

If you already have a Hotmail account, you can now add a few extensions to show off your alter ego. An id like “bytehead” wouldn’t make it romantic enough if you want to chat up that new gal you met at the pub. For that matter, “cooldude4u” is an absolute no-no for sharing reports and pictures at your science club. So, Hotmail’s new concept lets you create up to five alternate ids and access all of them from your original Hotmail ID. For e.g. if my id is ashish@hotmail.com, I can choose the “Create a Hotmail alias” option and then put up any random name that I want to create. Now if technoblabber@hotmail.com is my alias, all mails sent to this address will actually come to my original email id, i.e. ashish@hotmail.com.

Similarly you can get mails from different email ids that you’ve created, all in the same mailbox. Alternately, you can also create special folders for receiving mails on any one particular alias. The feature looks cool enough to give it a shot, so try it out from here and tell us whether you liked the feature.

There's people who love their friends, and then there are people who REALLY love their friends. Here's a lady who loved her 152 friends on Facebook so much that she tattooed all their profile pictures in the form of thumbnails on her arm. It definitely looks cool, but what if she has a falling out with one of them? It's almost the same rule as never tattoo your significant other's name on yourself.

Watch the video below which shows the process of how she got 152 thumbnails tattooed on her arm. It seems bizarre enough to be a publicity stunt and she wouldn't be the first to get tattoos as a publicity stunt. However, imagine how much your heart would melt if you were one of of her friends and the next time you saw her, your face was on her arm (hopefully not on the underside because that would just be a diss).