If you have been following the news recently you may have heard a lot about reporters allegedly hacking into mobile phones to listen in on conversations. It seems that some tabloid papers have been so desperate for the most sensational story that they have resorted to eavesdropping on private conversations. When celebrities were the target most people turned a blind eye and suggesting that this was just part of what celebrity life is all about. Since the reports that victims of crimes and tragedies have also been spied on by reporters people are starting to take these allegations much more seriously.

At the moment the phone hacking scandals has resulted in one major newspaper, The News Of The World, being closed down. Its owners must have felt that it would never recover its reputation after the allegations of phone hacking. The worse story so far has been that of the British girl Milly Dowler who went missing in 2002.

It is thought that somebody gained access to her mobile phone after she went missing and not only listened to the messages people were leaving on the her phone but also deleted some messages to allow more messages to be left. At the time of the incident the police were monitoring her phone and believed that she was still alive and well because they could see that her messages were being opened and deleted. Although there has not been a statement to this effect, it is very likely that her parents would have left a plea to their daughter to come home in the belief that she was listening to the messages. Unfortunately it emerged that Milly was already dead, having already been abducted and murdered.

Milly Dowler is just one person on a long list innocent victims of crime, celebrities, politicians and other people who have had their phones “hacked” by reporters looking for a story.

How to become a phone hacker

So, the big question now is, how come so many phones have been hacked? How are people hacking into mobile networks on such a major scale? Well, in truth no real hacking has taken place at all. Nobody has forced an entry into the major mobile networks to enable them to listen in on conversations. It is actually much simper than that.

Hacking is really not the right word for what the reported have allegedly been doing. All they have actually done is obtained a mobile phone number, then dialed the mobile service provider to gain access to the voice mail of that mobile number and guessed the 4 digit code to gain access. In many cases the security code was still set to the default number, so this means that if you knew the mobile number of a person and the mobile service provider that they use then you could easily gain access to their messages.

Gaining access to messages is all that the reporters could do. They were not able to listen to telephone calls or read text messages. But they could administer the voice mail account, i.e. listen to and delete messages.

There are actually some more advanced methods of accessing a phone’s voice mail which can be considered hacking. Some people have created a system whereby they trick the mobile network into thinking that they are calling the voice mail system from the victims phone. Generally when you phone voicemail from your own phone you are not asked for a password, so gain access immediately. However, it appears that in a majority of cases reporters have just guessed the voice mail password. Often the default password is 1234.

Tips To Avoid Phone Hacking

The easiest way to avoid having your private messages listened to is to change your voicemail code. Mobile network providers are starting to change the system and no longer setting a default voicemail code. For example, if you call Orange voicemail now they will inform you that you do not have a PIN set up. Previously and with other networks it would just ask you to input the PIN, which would often be 1234.

There are campaigns already underway to both improve the security of all mobile phone networks by disabling default PINs and also to have a full enquiry into the phone hacking scandals. Various celebrities are backing the inquiry, such as Hugh Grant who also managed to get a record a reporter admitting to hacking mobile phones over a pint in a pub one evening.

Ben Daniels is a consultant specialising in remote working and utilising technology to further small business.  He is currently working with a leading Satellite Internet Service Provider to raise awareness of Satellite Internet for rural business.

When someone finds his way to glory, everyone tries to copy him. Some succeed and flourish statistically but others backslide. Same is the case with Facebook and Google+. Facebook is an incumbent power in the social networking and almost every 4th person uses it, while Google has a widely spread network , large brand name and many services for which people sign up. But Google lacks a “strong” social networking site. For this purpose, Google has introduced “Google+” but it isn’t as splendid as Facebook.

Although Google provides different services like private chat, news streams accommodating with our preferences and selective content post feature but still Google+ lacks some features without which it can’t be compelling hegemony. Here are some features which Google should make it’s first choices.

1- Augment “Circles”:

Google+ has introduced the idea of circles which is absolutely brilliant. On Facebook, obviously your specific information and messages can only be seen by the group of friends you have selected but still your general profile can  be seen by your “all” friends. However, on Google+ your information can only be seen by whom you have selected but none other than that. But the circles are a little bit simple. All of us would love to see the improvement in the structure of circles so that we may select users, especially from a whole account, more properly.

2- Conclusive Analysis:

If you are doing something practical, you’d like to maintain a record. For a social networking site, you must be aware that how many users are newly added or lost, everyday, even how many people clicked on your links so that you may know about the progress of your site. Both Google+ and Facebook lack this feature. So, if Google+ develops this feature, it can go ahead of Facebook at least in something.

3- Search by Field and Interests:

There are some common ways of searching people like by user names or by location etc. Google+ is also using the same technique. But the problem is that most of the people haven’t seen their friends or classmates for years. So, people can’t find them because they don’t know about their whereabouts. In this case, people would love to see an option that will enable them to search their friends by their interests and field. If Google+ makes such a service available for people then it will be a revolutionary step.

4- Direct Import from Facebook to Google+:

Most of the people want to import their data from Facebook to Google+ but can’t do that. The reason is that the Facebook Contact Exporting tool, which was used for this purpose, has been blocked by Facebook. To overcome this problem, people have to import all their data to Yahoo mail and then again import that data from Yahoo to Google+. This is all very irritating. So, people wish to see an option which would enable them to directly import their data from Facebook to Google+.

5- Check Posting of Improper Content:

On Facebook, there is a proper system which blocks the inappropriate stuff. On the contrary, Google+ doesn’t pays enough attention to the stuff which is inappropriate and offensive. This is really a negative point. Google+ should also use the same technique as Google search i.e. pictures appear on Google Search after being filtered.

6- Better Privacy Options:

The index of Google+ can be searched from Google search and all people can see that. There must be a better option because mostly people do not want this to happen. They want  their posts to be unexposed for some business reasons. On the whole, privacy of Google+ is a bit weak so Google+ should work that out to go ahead of Facebook.

Facebook has been doing its best to block the tools which has been giving access to people to extract contact information of their friends.

“Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove e-mails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people,” admonished Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter tool (a device that controls data extracting process).

According to Google, it’s not abominable to extract information of their friends. On the contrary, Facebook provides only a device to let people extract self-put information into the network but not more than that.

Facebook’s commotions to restrict data extraction were impressive because most Facebook Friend Exporter tool users declared that the tool didn’t work. It didn’t extract any information except the Facebook names and pages. Furthermore, Facebook had already started exposing addresses in graffics instead of text. So, it was tricky to extract more information but Mansour sidestepped this obstacle by using mobile version of Facebook’s site and extracted information what he needed.

Mansour isn’t the only one who is violating Facebook’s regulations. Rafael Laguna (chief executive of e-mail and collaboration software maker Open-Xchange) declared that his organization is also working on a collateral tool.

“If it works we will release it on our test server immediately,” said Laguna and acknowledged that it might be tricky but once installed, the software will check blocking efforts.

Google is fighting for social network

Google is another issue. It has already got a great network and services that most of the people sign up for. It’s got a strong brand name, mature advertising technology, plenty of experienced programmers and a cumbersome global network to operate at large scale. The thing that Google lacks is “social network” like Facebook and the tumult of rebuilding a person’s social connections at Google+ is a extensive hurdle to Google achieving that success. So Facebook is rightful about being dubious of letting this data out of hands.

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“Facebook in particular is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented,” Assange said in the interview. “Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations and the communications with each other, their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence.”

It’s not about that Facebook is running by US intelligence, it’s about giving our personal information to US intelligence who knows our names, locations, family and even phone numbers and this is all stored by us through these social networking sites and they give it to US intelligence.

“Everyone should understand that when they add their friends to Facebook, they are doing free work for United States intelligence agencies in building this database for them,” Assange said.

After launching Galaxy Tab, Samsung brings 2 more Honeycomb-based tablets with 10.1 and 8.9 inch screen. The company’s goal is to offer a range of tablets for different needs, said Samsung’s mobile division president JK Shin. She also described the people point of view regarding the different screens. She said, “People expect different user experiences for different screen sizes.”

Samsung’s new 8.9 and 10.1 inch tablets are just 8.6mm thin which are absolutely thinner than the 10.1 Galaxy Tab. Both of new tablets have 1,280-by-800 and PLS displays. The 10.1-inch model has a 6800 mAh battery and the 8.9-inch model has a 600 mAh battery with 10 hours backup. Both of devices will have 3-megapixel rear camera with 720p video recording and 2-megapixel front cameras.

The 10.1-inch tablet will be available June 8, and the other model will be available early this summer. 4G versions of the tablets will follow, and pricing will be “very competitive”, Samsung chief strategy officer Omar Khan said.

According to facebook, it will take few weeks to give the phone number and address gathering option back to users but for now they are suspending this option due to security issue.

Facebook wrote in its developer blog, “Over the weekend, we got some useful feedback that we could make people more clearly aware of when they are granting access to this data. We agree, and we are making changes to help ensure you only share this information when you intend to do so.”

“We’ll be working to launch these updates as soon as possible, and will be temporarily disabling this feature until those changes are ready. We look forward to re-enabling this improved feature in the next few weeks.”

Optimus 2X’s have world’s brightest Nova screen with 4 inch display which proves the LG’s Promise to their clients. Optimus 2X’s is launching with Android 2.2 but LG committed to give updates of Gingerboard updates. The smartphone allows 8GB data storage internally and upto 32GB with external  SD card.

“Dual-core technology is the next leap forward in mobile technology so this is no small achievement to be the first to offer a smartphone utilizing this technology,” Jong-seok Park, CEO LG Electronics Mobile, said in a statement. “With unique features such as HDMI mirroring and exceptional graphics performance, the LG Optimus 2X is proof of LG’s commitment to high-end smartphones in 2011.”

Features:

• 1Ghz Dual-core Processor (NVIDIA Tegra 2)
• 1080p MPEG-4/H.264 playback and recording
• 3G connectivity
• 4-inch WVGA screen
• 8 megapixel rear camera and 1.3 megapixel front camera
• 8GB Internal memory
• 8GB memory (up to 32GB via microSD)
• Bluetooth
• GPS with A-GPS
• HDMI mirroring
• Music Player
• Up to 32GB expandable memory

LG told in a press conference that tomorrow they will announce its TABLET as well.

Source: newtechnotebook

According to Toshiba, “Satellite machines enable users to effortlessly create and experience content such as high definition video and 3D content, as well as run power-hungry applications including photo and video editing software with even greater ease.”

New Laptops contains USB 3.0 which is the great news for all downloaders because now they can move their data to flash drives or portable hard drives 10 times faster than USB 2.0. Also Qosmio X500′s HDMI port makes you enables to play games or watch 3d movies in your 3D-capable TV.

Prices of all these great laptops, Satellite A660, Satellite A665 and Qosmio X500, still not confirmed but these new machines are hitting the market later in this month.