Google

Recently, Google announced its two new initiatives in company statement; Cloud Services and Google Apps and it is expected that these tow services aims to help the start-ups and enterprises by fueling its momentum in India.  Google will cover the fees of Google Apps, if any company or business will be locked into an EA (Enterprise Agreement) with another provider till the end of contract. Apart from that Google will also add some of the deployment cost with an aim to help the companies in their success with any one of the Google for Work Partners. Once Enterprise Agreement will up, Google will provide a simple contract without any additional traps. According to experts, it will help the business with basic enterprise agreements and apart from that there will be no dependencies to unlock the savings of up to 70 percent by switching works to Google Apps. This tech major also announced its plan to provide the help of $20,000 in 1,000 Indian start-ups as free credits for Google Cloud services, which will be start from year 2016,it is expected that this Google Cloud Platform will bring new zeal and power in Indian start-up communities because still there are many Indian start-ups which are held back due to lack of computing power or build and deploy scale capability to become next big innovation in cyber space. At the launch ceremony of these initiatives Amit Singh¸ President of Google For Work, stated that “India have the second largest developer population and this country is poised to be the home of next generation start-ups and global software firms. As a world’s leading tech giant we are committed to help these next gen companies and enterprises as a trusted and affordable cloud computing tools service provider to help them succeed”. He more he added that “In past few years, we have gained tremendous momentum while helping the start-ups and new business organizations and at this point of time we are pretty much confident with these new initiatives. At this point of time we are trying to bring down the barriers for companies and start-ups to make the switch to Google Apps”. In present, Google is powering up the IT and Cloud Computing in range of Indian companies such as; Indian-born multinationals; Hero MotoCorp and Bombay Dyeing and Welspun Group. According to Mohit Pande, Country Head of Google for Work India, “We are excited to work on this new initiative and to work with our current and soon-to-be customers, however; with the EA we will offer Cloud Platform credits for startups with an aim to start new chapter in success of Indian start-ups”.

Microsoft

Recently, Microsoft announced its major updates for its DevOps tools and its services at the Connect Conference in New York. These updates will range from new free program for developers to new subscription service in the marketplace of updates to .NET, extensions and the renaming of Visual Studio Online. This is one the major dev tools update at Microsoft its developer S. ‘Soma’ Somasegar, Head of Developer Division left the company, however; currently Julia Liuson is the Head of Developer Division. According to Liuson, “There are few more updates because overall theme is that Microsoft wants to make sure that it has great offerings for those developers who want to build code”.

To help the developers, company announced both free as well as paid Visual Studio Dev Essentials Program, which bundles most of the Microsoft’s free tools and services in single package (with the addition of free Azure credits next year). As a part of Dev Essentials Program, all developers will get access to the Visual Studio Community, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Code and training services from a number of partners including; Xamarin, Pluralsight and Wintellect.  Howevver; there is little controversy about free program of Microsoft, but it is expected that there will be some discussion regarding Microsoft’s decision to start Monthly and Annual Subscriptions for Visual Studio’s Enterprise and Professional Editions. As per the statement of Liuson, “The idea behind this concept is to provide an opportunity to freelancers, consultants and others developers to access the development environment because they don’t need long-term commitment. Microsoft will continue to sell its perpetual licenses for Visual Studio, but many are wondering that this isn’t just a first step and company’s overall plan is completely different for Visual Studio subscription model.

Pricing and Subscriptions:

In present, pricing for Visual Studio Professional is $45/month (or $539/year) and for Enterprise edition it will be $250/month (or $2,999/year), however; the annual plans will include monthly Azure credits as well as access to dev/test software.

One of the first extensions to be featured in the Marketplace is Hockey App, which is for mobile beta testing and crash analytics service. Apart from that Microsoft is also introducing a free tier which will be the developers to manage up to two apps. These subscriptions will be available in the newly launched Visual Studio Marketplace and this marketplace is now in the preview to become main hub to get access for both free and paid Visual Studio extensions from third-party vendors to Microsoft.

“Update 1”:

However; in the same conference Microsoft also announced the next update for Visual Studio 2015 named as “Update 1” will get launch on November 30 with other additional tools for building a pull requests hub, Universal Windows app, support for TypeScript 1.7 and ability to debug Java source code in the IDE.

Apart from tat company is also planning to launch its few more updates for Team Services, which will include IntelliJ support and a task-based Build service to improve dashboards for tracking a team’s progress. Other new tools and features are; Microsoft’s Android emulator for Mac OS X and beta of its free Visual Studio Code text editor for different platforms such as; Windows, Mac and Linux. Apart from updates and tools, company also announced new stats to show the momentum of growth, as Visual Studio 2015 has been downloaded for five million times, Visual Studio Online has 3.6 million registered users and the Visual Studio Code editor has been downloaded for more than one million times.

Liuson added that work culture at Microsoft has changed and now company want to be open by design and for that company is given opportunity to developers to target other platforms as well. The free Visual Studio Code editor for Windows, Linux and Mac and Microsoft’s Android emulator is great example.

robots, you can build your house

According to reports, an Australian engineer has built advanced robot, which can complete the home construction work in almost two hours by working whole day to build house for people. However; in traditional method humans needs to work six to eight hours daily for four to six weeks to construct the same building, besides availing holidays and holidays, the robot can work in much faster and accurate way without any breaks.
Mark Pivac, an Australian engineer stated that the reason behind its development is that due to lack of workers, the average age of construction in industry is getting much higher and in an effort to help the industry our robots will be help to fill the game till some level. Worker have been laying the bricks for building from ancient time (6,000 years) and even after the industrial revolution, now we are trying to help the industry with automate the bricklaying process, stated Pivac. But after a lot of technological advancement we are still laying the brick by hand.
Work capacity of Robot:
Hadrian is able to complete the work by laying 1,000 bricks in one hour, and with this equation he will be able to put it up for 150 houses in a year. In overall process, first it needs a design of house and then it works out where all of the bricks need to go, before cutting and laying each of them. This robot has an arm of 28-foot, which is used o set and mortar the brick in all the process of laying the bricks robot doesn’t need to move.

What next?

Now Pivac is working on the commercialize the robot, which will one of its first kinds globally.

China is leading suspect in cyber hack

As per the statement of James Clapper, who is US Spy Chief China is the leading suspect in the massive hack of the US government agency, which holds personal and professional records of millions of American citizens.
After the news of data breach, he is the highest ranking US official, who is publicly implicating Beijing, but from starting China is always dismissed suggestions and claims that it was behind any data breach or cyber hacking. However; the statement comes after the discussion of three days where high level ranking officers was involved about the China and US agreed for the implementation of “code of conduct”.
In a conference at Washington DC, Mr Clapper stated that China is still our primary suspects, but we are still investigating the issue of data breach. In the Washington conference cyber security was the top most priority, said John Kerry, who is US Secretary of State. The more he added that “Now it’s time to work with China to develop the code of conduct on the countries behavior in the cyber space.” And the good news is that China is agreed with these suggestions.
Background details of massive hack:
On June, the US OPM (Office of Personnel Management) stated that 4 million contractors, employees, retirees, and job applicants may have had their personal data compromised.
First time in April, OPM noticed the breach.
Some reports have put the number at 14 million or higher this remains unconfirmed.
It is expected that hackers are from China, said members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Previously, in March 2014, hackers breached OPM networks, an intrusion blamed on China, but the attempt was blocked.
According to the statement of John Kirby, who is spokesperson of State Department, “This issue is something which need to be addressed and hopefully it can be addressed soon”. On the conclusion, that China is behind the hack, officials of China stated that reports are irresponsible and unscientific.

Online_accounts_safety

In present if you are person who is spending more than three hours online, so definitely you will fed up with so many online accounts and different passwords. No wonder, its good opportunity for those software’s and apps who are providing password storage service. But these passwords managers are not less than gaming tool for hackers as they can easily access them. If hackers will get your master password, so they will have an opportunity to access your all accounts. However; recently, LastPass, which is one of the premium password service manager detected suspicious activity last month. Here are some tips to avoid these issues;

All accounts are not equal and easy to crack:

Instead of remembering dozens passwords, maybe there is way to remember only half-dozen. Focus on only those accounts which are important.

Always remember the passwords and details of Bank accounts, credit card information for shopping services and never forget to remember the email info. E-mail accounts are very important, because after losing the passwords with e-mail you can reset the passwords on other services such as; social media, shopping sites and more. Try to remember the information for social media accounts because you need to use them regularly however; you can avoid the discussion forums information because they have less important. May be you will not mid if someone will post on behalf of you in discussion forums, but if someone will do it on your social media platform, so it can make harm for you in professional or personal life. Try to prioritize online accounts.

For highly sensitive accounts, use unique password and remember then or keep it on the hard copy and place that paper on safe place. Never use auto-generated or electronically generated passwords.

Lower priority:

For rest of the accounts which are not important for them you can use password manager, but in certain cases it could not necessary.

Web browsers of Apple and Google have in-built mechanisms to store the passwords for different accounts and they also update your passwords when you update your password on those sites. Even you have to sync all those to use them on multiple devices. However; in this domain the Google’s new Smart Lock feature for Android apps are very much useful if you are not limited to the web browsing. Most of the other services allow you to sign-in with Facebook ID and other social networking IDs, so instead of generating the new passwords you can use them.

Mobile phones and Fingerprints:

If you are not protecting your phone with pass-code, so someone can easily swipe your phone to get into your social media accounts and email accounts. Whereas; some of the latest iPhones, Samsung Galaxy and other high segment phones making it easier to use the phones by offering fingerprint option as the pass-code instead of four digit passwords or pattern lock. Now Apple is allowing the other app developers to use that fingerprint ID and through that you can unlock the banking apps by just tapping your figure. In upcoming Android update which is known as the M, Google is planning to make it easier for app makers to use fingerprint ID. However; Microsoft also planning to include the biometrics such as; fingerprint or iris scan in upcoming Windows 10 system.

Double layer of security:

Major service provider such as; Apple, Dropbox Google, Microsoft and Facebook are offering the second layer of security in cyber space by authentication in the form of numeric code, which send as the text messages on mobile phones. After entering the regular password you can type in the received code to verify it’s you not the hacker. To avail this service you need to go into the settings of your account where you need to activate the two-step verificationauthentication.

If there is way to sign-in through mobile number instead of e-mail address, so use mobile number for sign-in process. But you have to trust the service provider that they are not going to use them for marketing purpose.

1. Set your profile in private mode:

This is the best and most important security feature which everyone can access in secure way. It can prevent your personal information if anyone will try to peep into your profile. In the simple words Facebook and other leading social media networks will provide you enough option to get into invisible mode from those to whom you want to be invisible. You can update and hide each detail of your profile as per your comfort level. You can choose to whom you want to share your personal and professional details such as; your posts, friends list, events, your pictures, your shared content and more with different options such as; with friends, friends of friends and everyone. Ideally you should set it to your friends’ option. Of course, you will be visible on the social media platforms, but after privacy settings they will be not able to access any of your personal information.

2. Experiment with your own profile name:

IF someone has your name and other details so simple he will type it into the search box and he will get the direct link of your profile, so first of all try to hide all of your personal and professional details such as; email address, phone number, work information, address and more from everyone else. Once you will cover this area, so you need to do some experiments with your profile like; you can add some symbols or font or other language in your name because these things will make it difficult to find you on social media networks.

3. Use smaller pics in your profile and make your photo album private:

All the photos which you are sharing on online should have limitation from the visibility of everyone; it means it should only visible to your friends. It is advisable to upload smaller pictures and images, for that you can use some online tolls of you can crop them. There are cases when strangers will randomly click on your profile and download your picture for further use. If you will use the small pic, then people will avoid using it.

4. Avoid tagging and linking of the profile:

Tagging photos is one of the privacy loopholes as it will divert the stranger to your profile as the people who you have tagged can be the friends of stalkers, so better to be carefully with your privacy settings. It is highly recommended to avoid the unnecessary tagging of photos. Whenever you will tag someone, the other people will get the notification as if you want to tag, so click on yes and share it on your timeline.  Most of the time whenever you will visit on websites, so they ask you to log in through the Facebook or other social media platforms, it is advisable to avoid doing that because this process will provide them your email for such purposes.